Sleeveless by Natasha Stagg

Author:Natasha Stagg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

Aspiration

If only Krystal were awaiting a prisoner of war, a letter from a sailor, news of the survivors of a natural disaster. If only she could see him clearly, hovering like nebulous clouds on the planetarium’s domed ceiling, everything except for his face, which would be a blank flesh color compared to his clothing, his stance, and his uncalculated movements. If only she were waiting for him, watching him walking in slow motion, and suspended in hanging shadows, a person except for that unrecognizable face, because, she’d heard, if you can’t remember what a person’s face looks like, it means you feel something for them.

Poor little rich girl could not aptly describe her. Her parents probably had a lot of money, but she didn’t know where they put it. Stuck in suburbia wouldn’t aptly describe her situation. She didn’t live directly downtown, but she wasn’t that far away. She was not living on a farm, tumbling down hills of Lawrencian temptations, throwing herself at the land for desperation of escaping it. She was not holed up in her parents’ apartment, awaiting cease-fire or a tin can phone call. She was not even in an apartment at all, and neither one of her parents were dead; they weren’t even divorced. She went to a school, not private, not in a ghetto, not even specializing in music or technology or airplane flying.

She had friends, and some of them were mean, but others were not, and they all slept over at her house because her parents had good snacks and a bedroom far away from the TV in the family room. The family room was lower in elevation than the rest of the house; it had a carpeted step leading down to it. When the sleeping bags were laid out on the ground, her mother said they looked like a bunch of noodles in a bowl; she called them “girl soup.”

She didn’t live in a modern condo or a “loft space” or an oceanfront house that could be blown away or vandalized by surfers that were jealous of their property. She didn’t even live by an ocean. No great expanse of water crashed into itself anywhere near her; she could not go throwing herself at that, either. She couldn’t even ride her bike out to look at a big lake and wonder about its bottom, or fish for hours and days until someone came by to teach her what she was doing wrong. She didn’t even have a bike. And that was because they lived on an incline, and her father was worried she would break something even learning how to ride with training wheels. So she didn’t know how to ride a bike, or fish, or even swim, and yet she was not one of those hopeless, soft girls who could fall easily into pockets of school that offered solace for hopelessness and softness: witchcraft, recreational prescription drugs and other types of mutual masturbation. She played a few sports. She was not the best and not the worst.

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