If You Lived Here You'd Already be Home by John Jodzio

Author:John Jodzio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2017-03-10T05:00:00+00:00

THE BARNACLE

My brother’s girlfriend came home with a barnacle stuck to her butt cheek.

“Rory,” Jill said to me, pointing to her butt. “It happened again.”

Jill was my age. My brother, Phillip, was older. We all lived together in Phillip’s place across the highway from the ocean.

“Again?” I said.

Jill said she’d fallen asleep at the beach and then it was there under her bikini bottom, the barnacle, all misshapen and hard and about the size of a fist.

Jill was at the beach getting tan for a bikini contest. She’d won one at a local hot rod show, which qualified her for the state meet. The state meet was tomorrow. Jill was taking it all serious, even though everyone kept telling her she wasn’t curvy enough to win.

“Again,” she said to me.

Yes, this had happened before. One other time. Right when Jill had started going out with Phillip. Right at the beginning, when everything was still new and exciting for them. It was all a joke then. Something funny they told people at their beach parties.

A barnacle.

Can you believe it?

I was still in broadcasting school the first time it happened. I had just broken up with Corrine. I was ready to quit everything. Corrine was telling me that she didn’t love me anymore, that we weren’t meant to be together. Everyone else was telling me that my voice was too nasally, that I’d never make it in radio.

Not even in public radio, my teachers said.

I was in my dorm room when I got Phillip’s phone call about the first barnacle. We hardly ever talked on the phone. The only other time he’d called me at school he’d told me that our mother had died. I was sitting there, waiting for him to tell me some other horrible news, but instead he told me about Jill.

“Other than the barnacle, she’s great,” Phillip said. “I can’t keep my hands off her.”

Now though, two times, it was way less funny, maybe even ominous. Maybe there was something about Jill that just attracted things from the briny deep.

Last time it was on her calf. She’d forgotten about high tide that time too, woke up to water skidding up her legs. This one on her butt cheek was way bigger. It looked medieval, looked like it had seen a lot of shit in its day.

“Just get the damn salt,” Jill told me. “I can feel it really attaching itself, thinking this is its new home.”

Salt worked the last time. Even though Jill told Phillip that was what you did for leeches, not barnacles, for some reason it worked, the barnacle slid right off her leg.

I walked into the pantry now, lifted up the salt container. It was empty.

“We’re out,” I yelled back to her.

- - - - - - - -

We lived in a tiny house across the highway from the ocean. You could yell anywhere in there and be heard from anywhere else. And that is what Jill and I usually did. In different rooms, yelling through the walls—back and forth at each other.

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.