The Return

by Rachel Harrison

She’s emaciated. She smiles and her skin pools like melted wax. Her teeth are chipped and discolored. Her eyes are bloodshot, and the green of her irises skews yellow. Her hair is stringy, simultaneously greasy and dry.

Her breath is awful. So awful I gag. I play it off like a sob but have to turn my head away.

I can’t get over how small she is. Skeletal. She wears black leggings that hang loose and an oversized gray sweater. Her shoulders jut out underneath the sweater, and the way the fabric moves over her bones is upsetting. Julie has never been this thin before.

I notice she keeps messing with her lips. She was wiping them on her sleeve; now she’s licking them. They’re pink, on the verge of breaking. I want to offer her ChapStick, but I don’t want to be rude. Like, hey, you look like you need this.

Julie is a vegetarian. She found a piece of gristle in a chicken nugget when she was nine, and she was so traumatized, she refused to eat meat from then on out.

Julie says, smiling. There’s something about her teeth. Aside from being chipped, not white anymore, they’ve shifted. Her canines have come forward. And her lips.

They’re so chapped, shriveled thin, even in this dark room from across the table I can see the flakes of dead skin. And one of her dimples is missing. Did it fall off?

Julie asks, and licks her lips. I think they’ve split. I think I see blood. I try not to stare.

Julie lurches forward, her neck slack, head rolling down. She hits the table and our glasses dance. “Jules?” I reach out for her hand. One is on the table, the other underneath.

She holds her steak knife in a closed fist, sawing at the meat. Pink juice floods her plate. She forks a chunk into her mouth, and her eyes flutter as she chews. I can hear it from here, the click of her jaw, her back molars grinding. She gulps, and I can see the food travel down her throat, the expansion of her skin as it goes. Molly kicks me under the table again, but she’s not looking at Julie. She’s looking at me. I don’t know what she’s trying to tell me. I ignore her.

There are drippings on her chin, and she’s barely chewing before swallowing. Her head bobs. No. It’s jerking. There’s a physicality to the way she’s eating. An aggression.

It’s profoundly awkward for everyone at the table. For close friends, the closest friends any of us have, we don’t often talk about our life struggles or our emotions. We don’t share our feelings, at least not in depth. Only when we’re hammered or desperate. We’re all repressed, and that’s how we like it. That’s part of why we’re close. We have a mutual understanding.

“I won’t come hot out of the gate,” Molly says. “But I’m not leaving here without getting some honest answers out of her. We can’t help her if we’re gonna handle her with kid gloves or whatever. I’m not going to bullshit to spare her feelings. That’s not being a friend. Yeah?”

The feeling of safety I expected to greet me isn’t here. Instead, I’m met with uncertainty. I’m sure the room isn’t how I left it. The chairs and the couch have switched positions. The mirror is farther along on the wall, not across from the TV anymore. There are different pillows on the couch. The headboard is taller. I don’t remember the pattern on the carpet, but I don’t know how I missed it. Flowers, of course. Turquoise with little pink flowers.

I didn’t put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob. It’s possible Patsy or the cleaning staff

came in. But why would they move the furniture? And they couldn’t have changed the carpet. I’m sure, though. This I’m sure about. This isn’t me being crazy or having drunk too much whi...

It hit me later, as I sat in some yellowy lecture hall. I had this swell of memory. Julie slept in my bed last night.

There’s a shape in the shadows. Not the bed. Over the bed. On the other side of the bed, crouching in the corner. Knees and elbows up, sharp, at strange angles, like a tortured crab, head down, over something. Something dark and limp and dripping.

And there are noises. Bad noises. Eating. Sloppy eating. Not eating. Feeding. The thing looks up at me, and it’s Julie, but it’s not Julie. Hideous mouth open, red, red, red, red. Even in the dim light, I can see the red. Pointed teeth. Rows of them, like a shark’s, things hanging between. I’ve never seen a mouth so wide. Only it’s not the mouth;

That’s what intimacy is, I think. That’s love. Knowing the smell of someone else’s head. I get whiffs of it sometimes, randomly. What a funny kind of ghost. A phantom scent.