A Touch of Jen

by Beth Morgan

After a few moments of silence, he says, “The only problem with the parrot is that you have to put newspaper in the cage…for the poop. And I don’t even know the last time I saw a newspaper.”

Cassie isn’t pretty, but aspires to perfect skin as if it’s the same thing. Cassie offers her a hundred dollars and Alicia says, “No really. I wouldn’t charge a friend.” The word friend hangs in the air between them, menacingly.

At the time, it felt like she was clearing away a mess in order to reveal a more perfect self. This idea persists, even if she doesn’t vomit anymore, since it reminds her so viscerally of childhood. She still believes in reaching an essential part of herself through discipline: If she does everything right, she’ll find her way to some mystical nugget…a form in which her beauty is self-evident, her destiny clear, her neuroses shriveled and fallen away.

If Alicia’s death were real, it should alter everything else. After seeing his bloody and disfigured girlfriend on a stretcher, he should have taken a bloody and disfigured train home to a bloody and disfigured apartment. He should have entered their bedroom and discovered a pit spewing dark ash instead of Alicia’s unmatched socks in the same place they’d been that morning.

He looks at the baggy. It was this tiny package of material to which most of his text messages were addressed, to whom he complained about work, this package of material that used to wear all the makeup sitting at home in their apartment, who used to make him late to movies, who hogged the bathroom sink, who gave him blowjobs.

Remy is struck by the hypersaturated quality of her Jen-ness. When she turns her head, she occasionally catches an angle much covered on her Instagram, animating those holy photos that have become part of Remy’s private experience. It feels indecent to look at Jen in this bar, in front of everyone, when he’s used to looking at her in private.

This euphoria is strangely like pain in its urgency. Also like pain, it feels eternal; it’s impossible to remember what his life was like before.