Candice Morrow: MELT • Cleaver Magazine

Candice Morrow
MELT

A record high, the porch thermometer reads one hundred and nine, and your father sleeps naked without even a sheet. You left for college yesterday, and I suppose this means, among other things, that we can sprawl exposed for the rest of our lives. Fuck.

From the freezer I take a Popsicle rocket pop, a kitchen staple since you were three. Grocery lists on the refrigerator door read milk, eggs, bread, and, in your tiny, scrunched cursive: rockets. I set the sprinklers and sit by the window to watch water spray out from the dark, hit and roll down the pane.

The rocket is Americana: red cherry fading into vanilla fading into a mouth-staining blue, its very colors suggesting a revolution for the driest of summer tongues. But why keep buying them now that you’re gone? Gone with your new suitcases—I ripped the tags off at the airport. Gone with your shiny handles and soft leather—“Only the best for my daughter,” he said. Gone with your plastic wheels rolling with ease—as if every road after our road is a smooth road. Well, it’s not.

The way I see it, there’s a real bummer to how the two sides of a double-stick rocket split. They rarely separate equally, one side always melting faster, dripping over palm and wrist a liquid thicker than saliva and, let’s be honest, tasting wholly unlike cherries.

You know, your Nana used to buy double-stick rockets for Uncle Ben and me. Standing outside the Safeway where she worked, she would wipe her hands down her thighs and chew open the wrapper. She had crooked, yellow teeth back then, and I remember feeling disgust as I watched her. Part of me just didn’t want her ugly mouth near my dessert. (And now you know what they looked like before they were straight and white and vacationed in a water glass every night.)

To head off potential whining, she paused before breaking the popsicles apart and said, not with sympathy but as a command: “Life is not fair.”

Behind her stood a defaced phone booth, the half-sized, metal kind that protrudes from the wall, providing enough privacy for your elbows only. She didn’t seem concerned if we studied its graffiti, the vulgar accusations and invitations. In fact, she used the scribbles as another lesson. In two parts, one for each child. For Ben—what good people don’t do. For me—what good people don’t do to you. We nodded and paced atop concrete parking blocks, watching her ugly teeth and watching our rockets split and ooze thin lines of cold sugar.

Roughly ten years later, I left for college and, come to think of it, became captivated by similar wet lines. These were on cans of Shasta cream soda: the tabs cracking in and the aluminum contracting like bodies with the breath knocked out of them. This was Houston, in an empty UH dorm room where my—girlfriend? lover?—and I met for lunch and sex. I’ve never told you about her. I wanted to when we were driving to the airport, but your dad was there, and I’ve never told him either. Her name was Sue, and she drank Shasta cream soda.

◊

I was your age. I’d impressed my family with acceptance into a real university, not one of the community branches with its free daycare after six p.m. I was nursing a major in History when I met Sue, a thirty-five-year-old groundskeeper who blew the leaves off our sidewalks.

An empty dorm building was scheduled for renovations the upcoming summer, and while No Trespassing and No Loitering signs were posted outside, she had a key. We chose the room with an abandoned Einstein poster tacked to the wall. Beneath it, we started with little games evolving through flirting and joking. You’ll know what I mean someday. Silly games that made us feel closer than we actually were, things like swapping memories as if they were future plans. Like this.

She would unbutton my sweater while I said I had big ideas about plant life that could land me a blue ribbon in my high school science fair.

I would unlace her boots while she suggested she might someday regret trading her extensive baseball card collection for a neighborhood kid’s second-rate water gun.

I eventually realized she never shared memories past the age of eighteen. Pumpkin, you have to watch for shit like this. I began to feel like I was talking to only half a person. I began to feel like we’d grown up together, and then she’d gone off to win an extra fifteen years, squandering them on other people and experiences.

We ate cans of ravioli. I purchased a can opener at the campus convenience store and kept it in our abandoned dorm closet. Cranking the tool as if winding a toy, I felt a silly fear of the metal snapping up—like how you can’t bear to hear a biscuit cylinder burst. I would then press in the tab on her Shasta, and we might sing the brand’s jingle. I taught it to you when you were a toddler.

I want a pop, pop, pop. I want a Shhhhhhhhhhhasta, Shasta.

◊

We met on my nineteenth birthday. Before sitting, we stripped down to our underwear, laying our clothes out beneath us on the cracked linoleum. Her jumpsuit smelled of cut grass. When she took it off, sweat beaded between her shoulder blades, not unlike the sweat on your sleeping father.

I finish my rocket pop, and, licking the stick clean, return to the back of the house to stand at our bedroom door. He sleeps on his belly, his arms and legs spread wide.

His moonlit ass frightens me. How perky it still is?

I, too, am not much changed from when we first met. We have wrinkles, yes, most notably around the eyes. We have aches. He denies it, but his hair is retreating up his scalp. Still, he looks good, we look good, and we have something like thirty years ahead of us.

I see, superimposed on him, Sue—for the life of me, I cannot remember her last name—Sue unsnapping my bra and pressing her forehead between my breasts like a billy goat gently bucking a tree. And if Sue is a goat, then he is a starfish, pale and tender in the moonlight. For a moment, I feel as if I can reach out and break off his limbs. I extend my hand into the room, opening and closing my fingers.

I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t know, Pumpkin. Maybe? To watch it grow back?

◊

For my birthday, Sue packed a bottle of vodka to add to our Shasta. She presented me with a portable CD player and a mix CD wrapped in layer after layer of red tissue paper. We uncoiled the headphones, clicked the CD in. Leaning cheek-to-cheek with cramping necks, we listened to Modern English, I’ll Stop the World and Melt with You.

Sue raised a forked ravioli: “To the tenth-grade science fair!”

But I didn’t want to toast the past. I said, “To love!”

She pressed me to the floor. Through our makeshift bed, I could feel the imperfections, the cracks and bubbles of the aged linoleum.

◊

I take off my nightgown and nudge his shoulder.

“Hot,” he groans, turning onto his side to make room.

The sheets are damp with his sweat.

◊

Afterward, the outside walkway was blindingly bright. I rested against the doorframe, feeling half tipsy with an ache between my eyes like a mild case of brain freeze.

She said, “I guess you’ve had too much of me too fast.”

With an anxious hand, I clipped the CD player onto my pocket and hung the headphones around my neck. I asked her to take me somewhere real, like a restaurant.

She reminded me we just ate.

I told her I’d like to see her house.

“I live in an apartment,” she said. “And anyway, I have to get back to work.”

We cut down a side path, past the chemistry building. This path, well this path is three memories to me, and, goddamnit, they’re running neck and neck and neck tonight.

◊

One memory is how we met—at the hydrangea bushes. She’s clipping off dead heads. While she’s not the first person at college to in-that-way look at me, she’s the first I look back at. Her gloves are thick and covered in dirt. She offers me a flower. When I point out the petals are browning around the edges, she says she knows where she can find something more like me, pretty and fresh.

I smile and ask, “Where’s the chemistry building?”

“Better question is,” she says, “can you feel the chemistry building?”

◊

Another is more bricolage than event, a memory composed of the weeks after my birthday—hot, sad days dissolving into a single moment: me, sitting on one of the concrete benches. Of course, I’m convinced no one will ever love me again. I am not ugly, I tell myself, not dumb. But, somehow, I will die alone, and how fucking fair is that?

I imagine my death as only the young do, as I’m sure you imagine yours—with beauty and whimsy. I envision the Virginia Creeper at my feet wrapping around my ankles, pulling me into the ground where I gracefully swallow dirt and become still. Of course, how I now think about dying involves a car crash or cancer, and your father is always standing over me.

◊

The third memory, the one I think I’ll linger on and let carry me through dawn, is my shiny June afternoon. You see, Pumpkin, in Texas you have to learn how to fall asleep with the ones you love.

It’s my birthday, and I’ve had more than enough vodka in my Shasta. I’m walking Sue, returning Sue, to her work. At the end of the path—right as I’m thinking, What do I really mean to this woman?—she grabs my hand, and my body spins back toward her as though she has something sweet to say.

As though she will say one sweet thing, and it will split into two sweet things. Then four. Eight. I keep spinning toward her, always toward her until I finally win my science fair, and my body falls to the earth under the weight of my enormous blue ribbon.

Candice Morrow’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked: The Fiction of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press), A capella Zoo: the Trans, Gay, and Lesbian Collection; Eunoia Review, Prometheus Dreaming, and elsewhere. She teaches writing in Poulsbo, WA, home of the world’s best donuts, the ghosts of Vikings, and considerable rain.