Telephone Lines and Earthquakes

The windows are starting to fog, and you can’t remember where you told the cab driver to take you.

You trace someone’s name in the condensation, but you can’t read it so you can’t remember who they were either so you wipe it away with the edge of your sleeve. You watch the cotton of your shirt grow fat and dark against your skin, and it’s an ugly sort of thing so you press your forehead against the window and watch telephone poles zip by.

You wonder who’s calling or if anyone even does that anymore, and the grass at the base of each pole is starting to creep up the splintered wood, intertwined like vines, a choking membrane cut short by concrete sidewalks, and you must be somewhere suburban.

“Terrible weather,” your driver says, and there’s something familiar in his voice, something that feels like trust and blind youth, but also like rope burn, and you look up and he’s looking back at you, he’s grinning with too much teeth, split lips, wide eyes and pockmarked skin, and you want to scream, you’re shaking your head, and he’s still driving.

The vein in his neck is a popping, pulsing obscenity, and you can feel sweat beading at your hairline, and you’re not sure how he can drive with his neck twisted like that.

You’re not sure how he can smile that long either, that long and hard, and his teeth are cracking from the strain.

They’re cracking, and so is the cab, the cab and the seats and your skin, and you're still in the car, but you're not, and you’re not sure how you ended up outside of it all, but you are. You’re watching from somewhere far away, and the cab is on fire, but you’re far away, you're far away and you tangle yourself in crabgrass and telephone lines.

You’re not anywhere really, no cars and no houses, just telephone poles and cracked sidewalks bent like an old woman who’s had too many children, and you pull yourself through the slog of freshly showered grass and mud, but you’re being sucked into the ground, up to your ankles and up to your calves.

The jagged rock sidewalk seems so close, and you don’t want to panic, but you’re covered up to your hip bones. You pretend not to notice, not sure who you’re pretending for, but you can’t stop the gasping for breath, the mud-up-to-your-chest induced dread, and your fingernails are bloodied and falling off from trying to hang on to the edge. It’s swallowed you whole.

You’re younger now, and you’re in a kitchen with pale green tile floors. The tea kettle is whistling, and you’re sitting at a worn table with a pen in your hands. A pen or a knife, and you're praying, and your mother is in the next room. She’s screaming, or maybe she’s crying, and you’re carving letters into the table to distract yourself.

You can’t make out what the letters say so you probably didn’t write anything at all, but you’re still pressing down. There’s pressure everywhere, on splintering wood, in the cavity of your chest between your heart and your lungs, and there is prayer, and there is pressure, and there is your mother with hard eyes and a broken body. She’s screaming or she’s crying, and you cover your ears and stare. You stare and open your mouth wide, split your lips, cake your tongue and your throat with sand and salt and want. You are a giant, silent scream, and you’re begging her to stop, please stop, and there are blurred edges on her face.

She is a quaking catastrophe, she is bent in all the wrong ways, and you can’t help but think there is inevitability or resignation, that you’re destined to become just that.

Split down the middle, a human earthquake that tears down walls and tells you to hide under beds, but he would always pull you out by the ankles and you were just a casualty of nature. Of cracked earth and drought.

She’s standing in the kitchen now, she’s not saying a thing, and you turn around and press down harder. The table is shaking and the ground is shaking, and she’s boring a hole in the back of your head. You pray to God this isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real, fuck this can’t be real --

You told the cab driver to take you to your friend’s house, but you’re groaning, and there’s blood on the window and on your sleeves, hairline fractures on the glass and your skull.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he’s saying, and he’s trying to unstrap you, but his hand is also running up your thigh, and you’re praying, good God make it stop, but there’s nowhere to go, and you’re shaking, and he’s holding you down on the backseat, and there’s a smile on his face, all smiles and blurred edges, and something grotesque that looks vaguely like your Uncle Jack, and he’s saying, “Please let me help you, please, please, I’m sorry,” and you can’t, you’re screaming, you’re shaking, you’re the earthquake now, and no no no no no no no no no no

“I’m sorry.”

Your mother is holding you, and she’s crying, she’s apologizing, and everyone is so fucking sorry, and you don’t know what to say because there’s still blood on your face and down your arms and between your legs, and you are aching but also not feeling much at all so maybe you didn’t go anywhere, but she’s still holding you. She is tremors and aftershocks and the comfort of familiarity.

“It’s okay,” you say, and your voice sounds foreign and far away. Maybe you’re still cracking, maybe the cab is still driving and there’s never really an end, but you say it again to make it sound less hollow and more like it’s true, and you are suffocating in mud and blood and your mother’s hair. You are suffocating, but you hold on tighter because despite the instability, you still crave to be grounded.

“It’s okay,” you say.

It’s okay.