“Heat” by Maria Suarez
We can’t sleep at night here. Our arms move from hip to stomach to shoulder, but it is too hot in this cabin. We come here every summer, a wooden box in the Poconos with a stone floor, the only thing Matt’s family owns that is of value. It’s always hot here in the summer, but this trip has been worse, almost intentionally cruel.
Last night I wanted to rip my body open. We lay in the dark, both naked with no sheets, and I listened to the old metal fan blades swing and creak their way around and around. Matt was already asleep, but I couldn’t possibly, not even close, so I just tried to breathe and think about the room around me. This room like a hot dark closed thing, like a sealed thing. The inside of something horrible. So still and thick it seems like even air can’t get in, but the moon has managed to slip a line of light in between the curtain and window frame. I can see part of the wooden boards that make up the wall. They have the original stain, and you can tell they were installed still wet because there are hand prints on each side where someone held it, fingers wrapping around like a ribcage. Is Matt descended from those hands? It was built in the 20’s I think. Did his great grandfather pay people to help? It could be a stranger’s hands. Maybe there is a girl out there somewhere, a relative of his, and she is walking around with no idea that her history is marked out here. What choices could she have made to be lying here instead of me? Breakfast cereals, part-time jobs, t-shirt colors, I Love You’s. Choices that don’t seem big on their own, little paving stones that you can pick up, throw, place down anywhere, stones that seem entirely under your control until you look behind you and see them as part of the road that’s been steadily pushing you here, so far from where you started. So far from anywhere else you could be. If I were my mother, I’d have a six-year-old child right now. I will never be an Astronaut, or a child actor,or an overly accomplished 23-year-old. Or 24, 25, 26…
Matt rolls over to me and I can feel his skin touching mine, but we’re both so hot, I’m not even sure where. Can you ever make a decision you don’t want back again? Can you hate someone and still know that you don’t deserve him? This room is a dark, hot pit. The hand-printed walls are steep and slick. I will die here. I will lose all of my chances. Matt’s Humming now. Some water song. Cold-water song.
The light around the window frame is turning bluer and I can’t think straight, so finally I will be able to sleep my way out of this heat, sleep myself into a different body. Maybe even get back some of the things that have been boiled out of me. In the morning I will remember what it feels like to be the person I have become. I will remember that the dirt by the river is so fine it feels like talcum powder. That it gobs up and reddens on my wet feet. I will remember that we have coffee flavored ice cream in the freezer, and that I like coffee flavored ice cream. Matt’s starting to wake up a little, speaking, but clearly also still dreaming. You can wait all day, he says. I saw you first, he says. It doesn’t work that way, he says.
Copyright © 2010, Maria Suarez