yolk oh, oh no. by Ava Reitmaier Stone

fiction

yolk oh, oh no.

I cracked an egg that morning, into a bowl. Then I whipped it because I had accidentally bought the kind with two yolks and I couldn't face it. I did it in my mother's house because that’s where I live. I am too old to be there, it’s true. I think about that a lot. I thought about it while I held your face and looked into your desperate eyes.

The house is old, we have aged it. The cupboard doors lurch on their hinges and the floor creaks. The walls are patched over in places because my older brother keeps punching holes in them. The paint peels. It is on a road, next to other little houses with front porches and gardens. You don’t live in a house, you live in an apartment on Bay Street, on the thirty second floor but we both share walls with our neighbours.

A house will shudder at anything, if you slam its doors enough, if you throw spoons against its walls, if you rub your body tight and then loose again, over and over, pressed tightly into its corners at night. It shudders like the fragile membrane that holds the egg inside its shell.

My house has a mother inside it. She is old, we have aged her. She looks at me with a shudder in her eye: love and something else. Her body faults and I grow into the legs that were once hers. Your apartment didn't have anyone inside it, just us, and you were dying and I didn’t count just then.

I cracked an egg on the crown of the day that you almost died inside of, that night your dead weight was realized upon your mattress. Did you wash it? The spot you left yourself? I know I did, in the shower, holding my thighs apart, I know I did. I went to bed for a long time after that, in the groove that I have carved into this house, I holed inside my mattress like a weevil. I drank from the same water bottle again and again, I reorganized my pennies and jewelry, I held books in my hands, I felt their covers and bent their spines and pulled them apart and peered inside them. But I didn't eat any more eggs.

The first time we had done cocaine it had been marvelous. In your apartment, Ruth had let me paint her face blue with a perfect shade of eyeshadow, we had put on blazers and piled our hair on top of our heads and twisted around to look into the lens of a camera, we had played Duran Duran and talked over it about the fantastic virtue of life. The night of the day I cracked the egg I sat on the edge of your bed with a glass of cheap wine. I pressed a sweaty hand to your sweaty forehead, fear welled in my chest and I felt the scream of your shuddering body. An overdose is just a heart attack after all.

The comedown is a lot faster as it starts to end. The comedown is a lot harder as you arrive upon yourself again. The comedown flirts, it wants to die and it wants you to kill it, drown it in whatever. I can relate to that, just last night in fact, I found myself dreaming of some soft-bellied bachelor, found myself whispering into his thin hair, take me, I deserve it. It’s not what I really want, to be taken, it’s just the hiss that I make when poked. It’s just how I shudder.

I almost left you to die, it wasn’t on purpose, I thought you were checking your nails, turns out you couldn't feel your hands. But your eyes caught me on my way out, big and terrified. And so I sat on the edge of your bed and held my wine and looked into your big terrified eyes until I realized that I should be terrified too because that's what friends do. I put down my wine and picked up my phone, I googled the words cocaine overdose and then I became very scared.

I didn’t cry, I said your name a lot, I touched your face a lot, I put my fingers under your chin and tilted it up, I told you to look at me, I kept doing that, I listened to your heartbeat as it faded away, I picked up my phone again to call the police, then you came back, and you weren't dead anymore and my numbness crested.

I was angry with you for a dreadful amount of time. An awesome, sort of spectacular amount of time. And so angry too. Because you had slipped your death under me like a piece of paper, made me sit on it, and then pulled it right back out. Of course it ripped. I won't apologize for being heavy. The anger started before this, though, maybe right away. Maybe that's how it is, the anger is always born right away, it just waits. It lives right next to all the happiness and the fascinations and then, when everything fades away, it steps in. It's quite embarrassing, when it strikes you, as if you had been distracted by bubbles before. That’s what is so reassuring about anger, because of how it calcifies, at least it feels solid.

Your room, it's magic what happens in there. A stretch of window that points right into the heart of our campus. I've tried to draw it before, I quickly accepted that it refuses to be. The piles of books, those luxurious sprawling types. Wilde and Wordsworth, I stuff right down between them and smoke cigarette after cigarette blowing smoke out of my nose. You let me be a dragon.

Wooden dressers, and mirror and carpet and candles and a beautiful and totally impractical desk. So gorgeous and so poorly designed I believe it not to be a desk at all, but some sort of ironic fireplace. You are magic too, you have a trench of black hair and you don't wash your hoodies enough. You have a darling sort of body that I have always loved in my women, little ankles and fingertips and a wide stretch of ass. You let me hunker down there and be a dragon. But oh magic, that transformation, I was not built to be a dragon, it makes my lungs hurt.

“I think that we are going to be good friends.” The first promise I ever made to you. I had said it over my shoulder with a real smile and a tenderness. I had said it at 3am after we’d known each other for a week, in that room of yours, after we had been carried away by our brilliance and the whole room was so golden that it was ruining us. You told me once that you think about that and that it makes you smile. I started to think about it too, after you told me you did and gave me the impression that that is the sort of thing I'm meant to do. It never makes me smile though. So there.

At around 1am, we had come up with a great idea. It wasn't very good, those ones never are, always as watery and thick as a pond. But it didn't matter, because it was great to pretend, the same as making mud pies. There were two yolks, two of them. In one shell, and we didn't start over and we didn't bleed.

The thing about those books though, the stacks of them, the heaps, is that you don't read them. And that is the worst, I think, because books should come off and on shelves. Books should be caressed and worn, they are pearls, maybe that is why your bed felt like a ship in a storm, maybe the sea was only angry because you hadn't tended to its pearls.

This is a goodbye letter Maddy, as I sit in a very hot attic in Nova Scotia. This is goodbye Maddy. We stand in the airport and consider lobsters and I think of our pointlessness. I can’t live a life right next to you. It's a shame, because I know there is a thirst for total love in you. That is the calling, the one you are meant to find in people. On the plane in, I scribbled out love letters among desperate notes about Walter Benjamin. The Cranberries forgive me. The wind in Halifax is so beautiful. It's been tailing me all week. It's buffeting and bracing and terrible and incredible and it just doesn't leave you alone. The perpetual wind and the ever sloping hills and the low hanging clouds, like a fat hat, overhead. Halifax is just incredible, we ran home after a bad party. We smoked cigarettes in the supermarket parking lot among a clan of men Sylvia Plath would have adored. We waited for your phone, your McDonalds got soaked, I tried to tell you about my dreams and you snipped at them. I think about how totally I love you and how giving up will mean giving up everything. So goodbye Maddy, there isn't much else to say, the eggs aren't supposed to meet perhaps. That the two yolks even frightened me is a sign of our mutual self-absorption, to think of ourselves as yolks at all, in relation to egg.

Redon, Odilon. The Egg. 1885, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/106589/the-egg