Nobody enjoys a stranger in their house. Especially when there is the very real possibility of being scolded for poor apartment maintenance by a large man in coveralls. 

The intruder was a man as intruders often are, except this intruder was necessary. One does not generally pay intruders to be in one’s space, and I suppose this was no exception— she had not paid the intruder, though someone had. This was the beauty of renting, and what made the impracticality of her dream to own a house or an apartment or land less biting. It was bad enough having the intruder in her home, she couldn’t imagine the process of finding the right intruder, checking the intruder’s prices against those of others, understanding the basics of your problem as to deter the intruder from overcharging you for their intrusion. She found the worst part about the intrusion was the “window.” The window was from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., which was inconvenient for her, as she found it entirely impossible to focus on any task at all until the intruder had arrived. She was wearing a large t-shirt and sweatpants tied together with a shoestring. These are her painting clothes, only she can’t paint with all the anxiety about the impending intruder. She got dressed properly and sat on the couch, unable, even, to watch her usual sitcoms.

 This intruder is a plumber and he is very necessary as she fucked up her bathtub with off-brand Drain-o. For some unfathomable reason, her toilet was now flushing into her bathtub. She had explained the situation to the plumber, but felt obligated to clean before he arrived. It felt entirely too intimate for him to be rifling through her shit.  She can imagine him holding up a pair of rubber gloves covered in her waste, saying this is why you don’t use Drain-o in old buildings, while she nodded along like a bad little puppy.

And what if we lose? What if we still try & still lose? There is an old man somewhere with a dog on a porch. His dog is shaggy & the plants surrounding the walkway are shaggy & he is shaggy…

No! Somewhere there is an old lady who has no teeth growing from her gums. She wears rouge on her cheeks & sleeps each night with curlers in her powder blue hair. She wears brooches & feels beautiful, but the only teeth she has were purchased & are easily removable. Without the dentures, she gums her food ferociously & can still masticate the softer things like overcooked pasta & matzo balls. When she leaves her house, faux teeth replaced in her soft mouth, she wonders how old people think she is-- much younger, she thinks, with her teeth affixed. After years of their company, the woman has forgotten the telling creases across her face, particularly concentrated on the rims of her eyes & above her upper lip. People think, truly, she is old, even older than she is, ancient, antique, very fragile. She’s inside now, toothless, & only wants an apple. Not applesauce, a real apple, & she wants to bite it & hear the crunch as the skin rips apart, lodging itself in the slight gaps of her dentures. She wants the apple to squirt juice in her eyes & on her face as she takes the first chomp. She affixes her teeth with Poligrip & leaves her house & goes to the market & picks out a green apple. When she checks out, she flashes a fake-toothy smile at the young Mexican woman who is weighing her apple and asking for 55 cents. The woman pays in nickels, not wanting to break a one. She preens her hair as she walks out the door. The cashier can see her scalp through thinning curls. The cashier is careful not to let her eyes dawdle, out of politeness or revulsion, so the woman doesn’t know about the baldness & the noticing. She only knows her apple & her desire for it. She walks down the block & feels heat from the sun warming her shawl. She feels a bead of sweat fall from her armpit onto her breast underneath her blouse. She hurries back home, worried that sweat might materialize on her face & the rouge might drip from her cheeks. There is no one on the street, but she doesn’t even want no one to see.

In her haste and wanton apple desire, she’s forgotten her keys, so she follows the broken cobblestones & overgrown dandelions to her back door. She wants to bite the apple, but knows she must wash it first. She first peels the sticker from its skin with two careful fingers, but much to her horror, the sticker pulls back the green apple skin, leaving an imperfect oval of exposed white flesh. She curses, she bangs her hand on the counter, she lives alone so only god can see &, knowing him, she is not embarrassed. She continues.

She runs the faucet ice cold & begins massaging the skin of the apple with vinegar and water to cleanse whatever waxy chemical had polished her fruit to deter whatever pests. Little pieces of green skin flush, unnoticed, down the drain. She turns the apple around so she can’t see any exposed flesh & takes her long-awaited skin-snapping bite. The teeth she had purchased puncture the apple perfectly, even spitting some sour juice in the old woman’s eyes, on her cheeks. Bliss. But upon trying to chew, she notices her teeth are more attached to the apple than to her gums. She removes the apple from her mouth and the teeth come with it. She feels her gums rubbing together, still tastes tart apple on her tongue, but as she looks at the apple & the teeth lodged in them, she sees veins popping out of her hands like little purple hoses. She remembers, as a little girl, pressing her grandmother’s veins. Sitting on her lap while she read the newspaper, she would always check to make sure she wasn’t causing her dear granny any pain. She wasn’t & she’d only get shushed for asking. Now she lets the apple & the teeth drop to the floor & starts playing with her own veins. She loves the way they always bounce back, still so elastic. Perfect little purple snakes & she can’t remember when they appeared.

I tried slicing gills into my throat.  I felt like some un-human thing so I went into the bathroom with a kitchen knife and lifted the blade to my neck, right at the jugular, ready to cut myself & die & become something else, although I was only a kid; I truly didn’t know what could kill me. I pressed the blade into my skin, but it was dull; it didn’t cut; I pressed down harder, but my skin was elastic so it bent & didn’t tear.  I wasn’t often watched, but my mother needed a shower and so she walked in on me & looked all horrified and forcefully lowered the blade from the distinct gill-angle of my neck which also hid the tunnel that pumped blood incessantly into my vena cava. She slapped the knife from my hand onto the floor so it almost cut up my toes, but didn’t. She looked at me sideways & hollered something & ran her shower hot. I didn’t try making gills again— somehow I knew it wouldn’t work ‘cause it pissed my mother off, and she is very annoyed by stupid shit. I cleaned the knife off with boiling water and used it to slice chicken breasts to make cutlets for my sister and. I was a kid so the cutlets were overcooked & undercooked & smothered in red pepper flakes & lemon juice that made the breadcrumbs soggy, an acidic sponge. 

Unwatched, I sliced a mole off of my forehead. This mole starred in my nightmares: it would grow so big it spread over my face so I couldn’t speak or eat or breathe or anything. I was, in essence, just a mole. I had to get rid of it, but the gill-incident scared the shit out of me because my mother usually didn’t knock knives out of my hand so that they almost cut my toes. I knew to do this in secret. The mole had to be removed with sheer force, so I took the bread knife to the bathroom while my mother was sleeping and gnawed hard at the brown flesh right next to my hairline that I feared would render me mute or blind or turn me into a mole entirely. It bled a lot & got in my eyeball and dispersed red in the aqueous humour so that I even terrified myself with sanguine eyes. I took the detached piece of flesh and stuck it on my tongue like a sacred entity— all salt & iron & something disgusting that sticks to the backs of your teeth. It tasted like metal, or someone's fingers after holding a newspaper for too long. It healed up all tight pale flesh for a while, but years later, long after I’d forgotten the mole & the fear of it swallowing me whole, another mole appeared. It was a different mole in the same place although it had the same personality and vibrations so I thought it had the same soul as the first mole, though I couldn’t prove it. The nightmares came back & I knew what to do & how to do it with the bread knife. Again, I gnawed it off with the knife’s teeth. I made sure, afterwards, to scrub the serrated edge good so there would be no trace of the mole. It’s never reappeared (yet).

In the shower, I was excavating blood from my body with an index finger. I stood on one leg, propped the other on the tile wall so the water could run easily through. Little red clumps and viscous drops of blood slid easily into the drain. I stayed in the shower til my fingers were prunes and still I bled, staining the water that dribbled on my toes. I knew a person who smeared their blood on their face and body in tribal patterns when they menstruated. They would lounge on the couch, cook rice in the kitchen, leaving little trails of blood droplets wherever they went like macabre breadcrumbs. When confronted, they replied calmly, it’s my body, leaking red onto someone’s afghan. And it’s my fucking afghan, the lease-holder wailed, but they sat there, naked body striped with red, cackling till their breasts shook cracking the dried blood triangles around their nipples. There exists a natural desire to mark yourself with yourself. I always wanted to make the blood visible, tangible, but I am a neatnik, so all of my blood rituals take place in the bathroom, where the tiles and my body can be cleaned easily. I started bleeding when I was still too little, and my mother ran me too-hot baths with lavender and orange rinds to ease the pain that gripped my little bloated midsection like a mean claw. I thought I would turn the water red immediately, that little red clumps of me would float to the top of the bathtub, covering the orange peels and dried flowers with biohazardous material that was not precious even to me then. To my disappointment, the water remained unsullied. I wanted a visible sign of the thing that tore me in half and half and half and half so I plunged my little fingers into myself until little clouds of red puffed into the bathwater from between my legs. I was never able to turn my bathwater into borscht but I left a little ring of rust red on the bathtub that my mother had me clean with vinegar and a toothbrush the following day.

Today, I woke up with a nosebleed. I lapped up the blood with my tongue like an animal, like the cat who somehow has a perpetually runny nose like a leaky faucet she’s constantly maintaining with her rough little tongue. Years ago, I left a little stain of brown discharge from an ending period on a man’s white sheets the first time we slept together, but we didn’t run it under the water with soap so the stain wouldn’t set. Now I see the little brown splotch periodically, usually two weeks after a laundromat visit & I see the sweat stains on top of it— some art my body made while I was still sleeping. He told me he smells the sheet sometimes when I’m not around, but the scent of me has been sanitized and erased with fabric softener, so I leave my used panties at the foot of his bed when I go to work the next morning.

The raindrops look like bugs cause they crawl across the tracks lengthwise & some reflection makes them black & it really looks like they’re crawling till they’re done & they drip & then you know they’re water instead. It’s a visual trick though so that once you see it, even after knowing it’s not bugs, your eyes are tricked again, but it’s not bad & actually funny every bug.