The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods by Maria Dahvana Headley

Author:Maria Dahvana Headley
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

And the Winners Will Be Swept Out to Sea

I'm in your house, wearing one of your shirts. I'm sitting on your floor, with all the drawers of every desk and dresser open. I have them poured out and I'm looking at what you've kept. Your old laptops and love letters, your hard drives full of photos and emails, your string and wire tangled into little knots, hard and tiny, twisted so tightly that I can't crush them more than they've already been crushed.

I've let a fox move into your upstairs. She walked into your flat one day, and I waved her past. Now she has kits in the bedroom closet, nested with your sweaters. There are bats in the basement, but they're from before you left. My heart is full of hammers. I don't understand how you could've left me here, with your keys, and your bed, with your bookshelves. I have my own place too, but you left me in yours when you went.

I have a little pile of metal animals. I have a bunch of things you gave me, things I hung around my neck. I have bracelets that hook to chains, and out in the back there's a rock with a view of the water.

Sometimes, when I sit out there, I see the monster under the surface, the tension scraping over its scales. It's big. What I can see of it is only a spine, or a tail, sometimes, and then it's gone. I sit on that rock, looking over the edge, and think about how I used to love swimming. When I was a girl, I could hold my breath for a month. I'd sit on the bottom of a river in the mud, or on the pebbles, and wait for the season to change. Once I tried to come up but the river had frozen, and I ended up swimming just under the surface for a while, waiting, waiting, until I found a fisherman by seeing his shadow. The fisherman had made a hole in the ice. He was crouched beside it, with a thermos and a fishing pole, and I rose up naked from beneath him. I took him in my arms, and he screamed with such terror that ice cracked elsewhere, a spiderweb of fractures, trees black and leaning, wolves howling, and his blood in my mouth. I was not sorry.

There used to be laws about this, but there aren't any longer. No one could bring me to court to tell me I can't have you. No one could force me onto a stand and question me. I look down, off the cliff behind your house, and I see that dark shape waiting, but it never rises up.

Your neighbor came over for tea and you fucked her once a long time ago, if I have any skill at reading these things.

“Are you okay?” she asked me, and I said I was not.

“You don't imagine everything,” I said. “You think you might have imagined everything that could happen to love, but you can't.

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