Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

Every time I found a woman I was really interested in, I started thinking about her in terms of how I might disassemble her. It was unnerving.

That I could look at an incredibly lovely woman and picture her mounted like a dead animal made me wonder what was wrong with my brain. I

She was all teenage summer smells: fruity lip balm, body spray, and the strong aroma of chlorine.

“Why does she even need to do art?” “She likes it. You know she did it in school before she married Dad.

My mother waiting at home for my father, nobody waiting for me. He never asked about my dating life. Never once questioned why I was always alone; why I’d never brought anyone to dinner or to meet the family.

Mostly we retold the same old stories, nostalgia over things we’d rehashed a thousand times before, varnishing the memories so they shone and hiding all the bad parts.

“My entire adult life that man told me what to do. What I could like, what was acceptable to talk about. It was like living inside a clenched fist.”

There were titles like Women in Shadows and Queer Pulp. I turned toward the doorway. It felt safest to look there.

Home and safety weren’t synonymous.

I’m too much for one person, she whispered to me once, biting the shell of my ear.

Work. Always, there was work. If I could focus on that, I’d know where I was. I’d be safe.

I could focus on the happy little deaths we inflicted on each other.

the woman I continued to sleep with, even though she was enabling my mother’s descent into a pornographic void.

“We need money, right?” We always needed money. Was there ever a time in anyone’s life when they finally decided they didn’t?

Brynn had loved shitty beer. She’d loved sugar cookies and sweet tea and those little red strawberry candies that elderly women always kept in their purse. Shitty candies, for sure. Brynn had been shitty. My brother had been shitty. My parents were shitty. I was the worst one of all, the shittiest one.

when going outside and staying out was our best option. Away from our families.

an island of gore.

“Nobody can ever know another person.” There were times I’d thought I knew people.

“Dad always made us work,” I said. “He thought it was good for us. Built character.”