Yr Dead by Sam Sax

Author:Sam Sax
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: McSweeney's Publishing
Published: 2024-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

Before Arnold, I thought that heartbreak was the worst thing that can happen to you. I’ve had my fair share. Am familiar enough with the deep pit of it, in fact have learned to love it, to make a home down there.

Historically, love is considered a sign of lunacy. Scientists say it lights up the same section of the brain that responds to addiction, opioids, and the moon. Arnold’s always seemed gentle enough. Sure, he gets mad, but everyone gets a little mad sometimes, and he’s manageable. Until, of course, he isn’t.

I’ve been drinking since getting off my shift at the warehouse, strolling through the nearby towns, unsure how my life has become this life and so I’ve decided to drink about it. Hash out some things in the old way, inside my own dull-gray-haze. A mouth shaped bruise has appeared on my neck from Noam and I’m annoyed I’ll have to look at it for another week. That people will make jokes and I’ll have to laugh. I kill a bottle of something cheap and clear and then another of something dark.

When I finally come home, Arnold’s sitting upright in the leather recliner in the morning’s half-light, waiting up like a street between skyscrapers. His face looks strange, pasted onto someone else’s face. He’s quiet in an empty kind of way. I lean in for a kiss and I’m kissing a rubber mask. I’m about to speak when I hear him whisper, You don’t get to do that. He rises and I don’t know exactly what he means, but I’m tired and just want to lie down. What don’t I get to do?

It’s only when he grips my neck that I realize how much bigger he is than me, and he lifts me up how a mother lion disciplines her cub, dragging me all the way to the hall closet with the umbrellas and raincoats. I’m wasted enough that I don’t resist being moved, though the pressure on my neck feels almost dangerous. A part of me likes being held, even under these circumstances, a point of stability in this dizzying world. He lowers me into the closet like I’m an extension cord and I hear the lock click home.

I laugh for a bit at the metaphor swimming around in my head—after all these years, wasted in the closet again. I throw up into his rainboots. Some minor justice. For a moment, relief floods through me—at last, I don’t have to do or be anything, don’t even have to stand up to brush my teeth, and isn’t this the obvious conclusion of all my indecision? That, by following the path of least resistance, I end up here on the ground, in perfect darkness, wearing the bottom of an expensive wool peacoat for a hat. It is something adjacent to relief. That is, until I sober up.

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