Glass
She arrives in red. In a dull blouse, maroon slacks, and grim lipstick. As she walks into my kitchen, her stilettos stab my floor.
I wear black. My house wears black, too. The curtains are closed, the lights are dim, and the urn sits on the kitchen table, watching.
She walks to the urn and traces its graphic. “Mum never liked flowers,” she says.
“You want a drink?”
She looks at me, lips like a zipper. I open my cabinet to grab a glass, and thin light touches the shelves.
I am here, in the dark, in this dark, when my dark breaks open, when light sneaks onto me, sneaks onto the dust, and illuminates my form.
He takes the glass from his cabinet, then waddles to his fridge. He walks like he is renting his body for the day. His face is still puggish; his eyes still do not fit his skull. He is determined
to grow uglier with age.
Holding the glass, he wipes his nose with the back of his hand. Snot globs.
“I got water, milk, uh, OJ,” he says.
“Have you seen the will?” I ask.
He rests the glass on his counter.
I am on an edge, and if I tip, tip off this edge, then I will go
all the way to the ground.
“Nah,” I wipe my hand on my thigh. “I’m not a lawyer.”
She shakes her head. When she does that, I see her at every age, like projections layered on top of each other until she is all of herself. Her incisors sharpen.
I turn away, pick up my OJ, and pour.
“She left it all to you,” she says.
In me, something rises, something gurgles, and nothing is clear, no, it is all cloudy orange with little bits of shrapnel swirling, and it swirls, and it swirls.
“I want to—” I pause. Twenty years ago, near my brother’s cricket set, I poured too much sodium bicarbonate into my papier mâché volcano. Now, I am careful with anything reactive. “—to talk with you about contesting it,” I say.
“Contest…course you do,” he says.Then, something about how I am disagreeable,
or how I have always been competitive,
or how I am.
“Pass the glass,” I half-ask.
I am moving, and what’s inside is almost spilling, spilling over, spilling out, and when I am placed down, pulp falls onto already stained wood.
Her hand waits semi-open below my glass. She picks it up — no, she picks the skin beside her thumbnail. “You can talk to them,” she says, “say it’s unfair, and that you’ll give me half.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Well, under the Succession Act—” She sits up straight, starts up the jargon. All I hear is I’m better than you. Her words clang onto the table like the long, plastic sides of darts thrown aimlessly at a board. Where she thinks she is sharp-minded, she is only sharp-toothed.
I fuzz my eyes, turning her into a blur. She is using too many words; she is using too much Latin. Then, she says she loves me.
“You’re speaking a dead language,” I spit.
I am forming, and pulp settles, debris settles, debris builds a base, and
this base is all that’s solid, that is, debris is all that’s real.
“If you listened to—” I say.
He frowns.
I start again. “But you just won't—”
His features recede into his flesh.
“You always—”
His brow and chin protrude. The space between us closes in, expands, warps.
I continue — or try to. “And you never—”
He leans forward, big and ugly. I tear a strip off my cuticle, then push my thumbnail into the table’s edge. The wood gives way. It can all change, if one presses. “You’re just so—!”
Then, he stands. Bumps the table. Grips it with his fat, calloused fingers. The glass cup wobbles. Spills sideways. Juice vomits out.
He stares me down.
“Christ you’re useless,” I half-shout, reaching to pick up the glass.
I am between two, and they are gripping me, and tugging me, and testing how far this can go until I break, and learning that my insides, sweet as the sun, feel sticky
like blood on their hands.
“I don’t want to take it from you, Jake.”
“Well I don’t wanna give it to you.”
They tug a final time. I shatter on the hard tile floor.
Designed by Sophie Wishart