Canned Drowning

Lilly brings the nozzle of the spray can to her mouth and takes in a long rip from the can of computer duster.  The sky shatters into fractals and she sees the summer sun as a kaleidoscope.  Nothing matters on afternoons like this.

Dad built the treehouse for her tenth birthday.  It was painted pink and spotted with lines of Christmas lights.  The paint had mostly chipped off by now and none of the bulbs still lit up.  Childhood had been magical, afternoons spent in search of faeries and refusing to walk through rings of mushrooms that popped up on the lawn after a hot rain.  It had been a pink-painted life.

There was no great tragedy that prompted her to huff.  She did it because she liked it.  She liked the acrid taste of the bittergent that the manufacturer put in the can to make it unappealing to teenagers.  The liked how a lungful made the heavy world lighten until it threatened to pull her into the sky.  She liked the feeling of un-gravity, that floating.

In this treehouse, they’d grown up playing choking games.  Breathe in fast ten times and then wrap grubby little hands around the base and squeeze until everything turns the color of milk.  Wake up with another startled child standing over like her own hovering ghost.  They would stress their little knuckles and leave faint bruises that nobody knew how to explain to their mothers.

“It looks like something strangled you.”

Duster doesn’t leave bruises.  Maybe it did on the surface of the brain, the inside of the lung, but within vision she was innocent.  There is no telltale stench like the stoners, no strawberry fields of pin pricks like the dope heads.  Only the grey mist that surrounds her, smothers her, becomes her.  The silver taste coats the back of her throat and one nostril begins to bleed.  She catches a drop on her finger, rubbing it under her eye like war paint.  It dries and flakes, so she goes over it, and adds another to her opposite eye.  Blood pools in her cupped hand.  She gives it a satisfying clap with her dry hand and is spattered with mist.

An ant begins to make its way through her dark, downy leg hair.  She notices the small tickle but doesn't have the motor control to brush it away without crushing it, and so she lets him explore her skin like she allowed her last boyfriend to do in this very treehouse the summer before.  It had already been rotting, then, swelling with every passing rain and moving the boards farther and farther apart.  Everything distanced itself when the swelling went down.  

When she was two, on a day just like today, she’d nearly drowned in a neighbor’s pool.  She was chasing after a butterfly, didn’t realize how close she had gotten to the edge of the deep end.  Her mother was distracted talking to the man she would eventually leave her father for, fake flirty smiles making her lipstick gather waxy in the creases.  Her long fake fingernails hid the yellow reality underneath and she had barely looked up from her cigarette at the sound of the splashing.

It was terror, but it was bliss.  She’d opened her eyes against the sting of chlorine and was surrounded by the soothing blue reflected off the pool liner.  She was so at peace that she didnt even remember to try to breathe.  And then to be lifted from the pool amid screams and chaos and doted on for the rest of the day- it was the beginning of a long addiction to drowning.

That’s what the computer keyboard duster is like, canned drowning.  It is like laying on her back on the sweltering shores of a tropical beach while wave after wave pummeled her.  It is watching the surf swell, watching the tide come in and doing nothing to move yourself.  It is to be moved by some greater nature.

She takes another bitter breath and sunk against the flimsy wooden wall, which creaked threateningly with her slight weight.  The inside of her mouth tastes like burning plastic.  She is sure that her exhales were colder than her inhales.  Her lips give static feedback of specter kisses.  Her face is blue and numb and has taken the form of its own deathmask.  Laying still she pretends to be Lilly The Dead Girl, who will get a speech made about her at graduation and a full page in the year book.  Everybody loves a pretty dead girl.  

With another inhale she imagines her own funeral.  She sees herself as she is now, colorless and still, but laying in a little pine box lined with velvet.  She hates the texture of velvet and wonders if that horrible sensation will carry over into the afterlife or if you need a body to feel the bad feelings.  She imagines her classmates congregating like they do in the lunch room, together without her like they always are.  Only now she will have more friends than anybody else in the whole school, because everybody wants to have been your friend once you are dead.  She imagines her mother with that same waxy lipstick blotted onto a cloth handkerchief comforted by the lover she abandoned her family for.  And won’t she feel bad, then.  Won’t she wish she’d stayed.  Because of course that’s what all this is really about, the boyfriend and the solvents, it is about getting back at mommy.

She exhales and looks up at the clouds and wonders if gravity has ever failed.  She sees herself lifted up, up, up into the clouds where they will stop her with a texture like cotton candy at the fair and she can see the little sky-colored threads that keep her tethered to her body.  That cumbersome, heavy body.  She wished she was sharp enough to sever the strings.

Instead, she keeps taking hit after hit of canned drowning. 

 She wants to see how far under she can go before her feet touch a bottom.