Circling the Drain by Amanda Davis

Author:Amanda Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061853463
Publisher: HarperCollins

3. Exit

But Dingo and I lived a smooth little life.

Until.

Until I found out about Dingo’s trips to Buckeye’s Shoe Emporium. Until I found the mail-order catalogs and noticed the phone bill. Until I figured out where our missing socks had gone. Until I heard about Five and a Half who worked in produce at the SaveLots and Six Narrow over at the Goochee Cinema, and Eight Triple E who sold makeup door to door.

We unraveled like acrylic yarn: all static and flammability, everything soft undermined by the cheap scratchiness of what we were made of. There were long stretchy silences punctuated by spitty bursts of anger. There were tears and hollow, empty spaces. Then one day Six Narrow phoned our apartment and I answered. That blew the roof right off it all. I said things to Dingo that I’d promised myself never to say and everything tumbled to pieces.

Then Dingo walked out. My heart swallowed itself and I hurled words at him that fell to the earth with flat, final sounds. He didn’t look back but I felt the red of his ears run all through me like a shiver. He slammed the door of his battered green truck and I finished my shouts with a leave, why don’t you, so red hot and mean I couldn’t believe it hadn’t burned my mouth.

Words lost meaning the second day he was gone. I woke wondering at language. What could alone mean? I said it out loud: Alone, alone, alone, alone. I tried other words—abstract, testify, exacerbate, tuna fish—but it might as well have been peas I was spitting, or beans. They were just little round things flying out of my mouth and not landing anywhere useful. Even my own name, Charity, meant nothing at all.

I sat in our sunny kitchen, propped my feet up on one of the chairs, and took a deep whiff. The world smelled like honeysuckle, like spring. Outside, birds flitted this way and that. Rabbits hopped across the lawn, their furry little bottoms disappearing under bushes and felled trees. I saw bees seducing tulips and in the distance the swoop and dip of a shiny green kite in the cloudless sky.

But all of it made me carsick.

Much as I wanted to pretend otherwise, Dingo’s absence was a hole in me, a place I came back to like a troubled tooth. By the fourth day the mirror revealed dark bags under my eyes and a grayish quality of the skin. My red hair hung limp. My cheeks itched. I splashed cold water on my face and sat down on the floor with my knees to my chest, feet braced against the yellow linoleum, head pressed against the crumbling wall.

Everything was in need of repair. Clearly, there were debts to pay, apologies to draft, but the very idea made me incredibly tired. I stretched out and admired the crumbs by the base of the sink, the dust that blew gently along the linoleum. I hadn’t been to work in five days, hadn’t seen Dingo in four.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.