by Brent Crossen
1.
You couldn’t stand me leaving the bathtub slippery, but I only learned this too late, you see. It was the winter of baths. Hot baths with olive oil in them. Just a spoonful plus a drop or two, maybe, of one of those essential oils you kept in the cabinet. While the flakes piled into drifts or the apshalt froze black, I was soaking. Steam fogged out the network of naked branches, fogged out the third story view of crows that perched there, just outside the bathroom window. I could hear them through the steam, making that strange clicking call in their throats as the water drip-dropped from the faucet. Dripped into the full tub where globs of oil floated at the surface, refusing to mix with the water.
“You’re like water,” you told me later, before you kicked me out, “seeping into every corner, filling every room you’re let into.” It was almost violating. You wanted me to go to the movies and buy an extra large buttery popcorn. You wanted me to take a real shower. You wanted me to stop putting olive on my hair, on my body. Most of all you wanted me to stop putting it in the baths, so that when you went to take a shower you didn’t have to hold on, to hold onto…
It was all too slippery and I was a fish, slipping through your hands over and over again, flopping around in your bathtub. Quick! Come haul this boy out and take him to a movie. Teach him to buy the buttery popcorn, even if he doesn’t want it. Some things you’ve got to do, got to do to please others. You can’t lie in the bathtub all winter.
2.
Outside the roads are slippery. Black boughs are cracking with ice. Tonight it’s going to dip below zero. You’ll go across the hall to your boyfriend’s and I’ll play music, the star spangled banner in the extra room I’ve strung with Christmas lights. You’ll come home and complain how your boyfriend never does anything. Sits on the couch and gets high. Only thing he’s got going for him is the XBox, on which you can not only play games, but watch movies. No need to go out. Especially in this cold.
Still, there’s something dead about him. I feel it and can’t sit on that couch for long, have to keep moving. When I get high I have to get outside and walk for hours, through blinding flurries, up and down the gentle Appalachian slopes of this town. While you and him watch “The Call of the Wild,” I am all wolf, leering from the flurries at the bright steamed-over windows of coffee shops, where bodies lounge huddled. I would never fit in.
Yet I long for warmth. Need it more than anything else. I need your bathtub, Ann. I’m no wolf and all fish. I can’t walk these streets forever.
Then I remember I have a car and can park it by the cemetery, leave the key in the ignition, the heater yawning full blast. I’ll lock the doors and put the seat down. Good night friend, good night. I can’t see outside myself yet. All the windows are fogged over with heater warmth, body heat, and breath.
3.
To be fair, you waited ’til it was almost spring to get fed up with me. Really you loved me too much to have me hanging around. You had a life to get on with. I can see it all now.
At the time, though, I couldn’t understand. That’s probably why I joined the religious cult. In some deep way I didn’t like myself enough. I wanted to die, to diminish, to disappear. To not want anything enough to fight. To grow hunger-less and never have to take a risk. Now, I’m a fighter. I had to fight for my soul. Against the odds I came out of the cult whole, even after I’d raised my arms in prayer, next to the Chief Shepherd. I watched a mosquito sink it’s needle into his neck, then felt it bite mine. My arms were up in prayer, reaching towards the heavens and I couldn’t reach down to slap that bastard. Chief Shepherd was intoning, “You’ve got to give up your rottin’ stinkin’ life, lay it all down.” Lord knows I was ready to, ready to join the body of Christ, become an arm for the Chief Shepherd’s brain, never have to make another decision again.
But I didn’t join. And you were my saving grace, driving me up into the mountains to go swimming the first hot day. It was the day I left the uniform folded on my bunk in the Shepherd’s home. We wound our way into the mountains, Appalachian laurels opening white mouths beside the road. I wedged that bible beneath the tire of a car parked on the highway’s shoulder. I fell off a rock into the stream below. I fell in backwards, an act of faith. It was my own baptism, full immersion. The cold sting of the water was a far cry from olive oil baths. I came up for my first breath and the daylight was sharper. I swam ’til it was shallow enough to touch bottom, and my skin was tingling as I stood. I was emerging from a long hibernation. I came out of the water and saw you. Then I realized how hungry I was.
