Evil Queen Magda

Wan and shivering, she retreated to her bed.  When Captain Rutherford told her that taking the Cure in Lausanne was out of the question, she drew the blinds, gathered her animal in her lap and took comfort in the flickering lights of motion pictures.  Soon, the laudanum would take her away from this. 

Eclipse V

Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

The worst part was that she was so young.  I hadn’t walked in on them fucking, but the way S looked at her told me that he had thought about it.  Was probably thinking about it at that moment.  This was my breaking point, seeing his hand reach for a strand of the girl’s hair.  The girl all but spat at him – I imagined her hissing at him in her mind – jerking her head away so that his stubby fingers wouldn’t come near her.  When I asked him what was going on, she used that moment of distraction to scurry into the back room, leaving the rags she’d been using to wipe down the bar in a heap on the wood.

“She can’t be more than 14.”

“I didn’t ask.  She shows up on time every day.”  He took a straw from a caddy sitting on the bar and popped it in his mouth.  “Stop blinking at me like that.  Why does everything have to be so dramatic with you?”

I swung at the caddy, sending it to the floor.  It rained limes and napkins.

“Jesus.  Calm the fuck down.  Come here.”  He grabbed my elbow and guided me to a booth at the back of the bar.  It was early and the bar was still mostly empty, but the few customers present stared at me, at us.

“I’m done,” I managed to say without my voice breaking, but when S didn’t argue, I burst into tears.  It wasn’t the girl, it wasn’t his arrogance, the way he dismissed me.  I felt so stupid, realizing I might have constructed him completely in my mind.  That person didn’t stare at teenagers with unconcealed lust, with hips that edged forward as hands reached for something they felt entitled to take.  I thought about him touching me with that same hand.  I had looked into his eyes at those moments and thought they were unreadable.  They weren’t.  I’d recognized the look and then convinced myself that I hadn’t.

“Sweetheart, this isn’t news.  We were already done.  But you…you still came around.”  He shrugged his shoulders and absolved himself of responsibility.

This only increased the volume of my tears.  I knew it appeared to him that I was distraught over our break up (this would be our third rupture), but really my tears came from a place of horror.  Horror that I had given anything genuine to this poor reproduction of a person.  I looked at him and felt like I was reading an x-ray, a film negative, something two-dimensional and in need of further development.  I gave a sharp laugh and he sat up straight, startled.  The image of him as a dancing skeleton, a cardboard cut-out taped onto doors and windows during Halloween, had popped into my head.

Eager to leave, I nearly fell out of the booth as I left.  Down the street, the band would be playing and he would be there.  He would be there and I never had to worry about him – his eyes were his tell.

Nice try, asphalt.

The feeling of an impending loss of consciousness is a very specific one.  There’s a queasiness, there’s a clamminess, there’s the darkness creeping into your peripheral vision.  So imagine my concern when this feeling announced itself in the terminal for the Staten Island ferry that would take me to the start of the New York Marathon.  I’m literally lurching onto the ferry, hoping I can get to a bench before I hit the deck and I do, just barely.  I sit with my head between my legs for a few minutes until I can see again, all the while hoping nobody notices, because I suspect I would have been advised not to run a marathon shortly after almost passing out.

This is how my marathon morning started, and it didn’t get much better.  My body had no interest in running, let alone running 26.2 miles.  At mile 5, I was on pace, but it felt awful.  At 10k, 15k and the halfway mark, I was on pace, but it felt awful.  My calves were tight, I had no energy.  The headwind didn’t help.  The mile-long low-grade hills that came at us every other mile didn’t help.  The dodging and weaving you have to do in a field of 42,000 didn’t help.  The foot cramps that started at mile 16 really, really didn’t help.

And that point, mile 16, when you come off the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan on 1st Avenue, was the only point I can remember having any fun whatsoever.  The most awesome song came on my iPod, on which I hit repeat pretty much until I got to the Upper East Side, when the crowds that were 8 deep thinned out a bit as we headed into the Bronx.  But my body kept betraying me.  I wanted to run hard, but every time I pounded down a hill after struggling to the top (because there’s no way I’m walking any part of the New York Fucking City Marathon, especially the hills) my feet turned into twisty-ties and I had to slow my roll so as not to have to stop altogether.

When I hit mile 20, I looked at my watch and saw that if I ran my best 10k time, I could meet my goal of 4:00.  But at 21, I looked at my watch again and saw that I needed to run 8:00 min/miles until the finish I knew it just wouldn’t happen.  (Mostly because I was running with my left pinky toe curled up under my other toes.)  My internal pep talk went from “You got this” to “It’s okay.  You will be fine.  This pain is temporary” until I finished, 9 minutes slower than my goal but 15 minutes faster than at the LA Marathon.

A funny thing happens to me after the finish: my brain stops working.  I don’t know if it’s the dehydration or the exhaustion, but I don’t really do well with “words” and “complex thoughts” for an hour or so afterward.  Which is why this video is funny to me. (Tumblrs, this embed doesn’t show up in the dashboard.)

The person filming is a friend with whom I did my carbo loading the night before.  At that dinner, he misspoke, talking about his dogs and these bones that he called “restaurant grade”.  I, of course, pounced on this, as is my way, and this spawned an entire series of jokes about asking the waiter for his finest bones, the bone list, special free range farms where they inject bones with calcium, etc.  So vigorous was my skewering that he said he couldn’t wait for me be a broken shell of a person post-race, so that I wouldn’t have the wherewithal to keep up with the verbal jabs.  And if you watch closely, you can see this moment of confusion on my face when he references the “restaurant grade bones” because I could barely tell him where to find me, let alone remember the substance of our conversation from the night before.  So he got his wish.  A huddled little mass of hurt that was all sassed out, shivering on the sidewalk wrapped up in a glorified piece of tin foil.  

But after he heard how I ran the entire race on vapors, he gave me a hug and even restrained himself from commenting (too much) on the dried salt and dirt on my face. He then carried me up and down stairs so I could shower and then get to the veggie burger, onion rings, fries, vanilla milkshake and Guinness that was my reward for not letting some stupid asphalt break me.

Marathon runners are regular people too.  We put our pants on one leg at a time, using our hands to lift and lower that leg into the pants leg because our thigh adductor muscles aren’t interested in doing it alone.

Eclipse IV

Part I, Part II, Part III

I knew someone who lived in this building once.  This was years ago, when saying goodnight to the sunrise felt rebellious.  Now it just felt like something I should have seen coming.  At 2, I knew the sun would rise and I still knew it at 3, 4 and 5.   But I kept making the same mistake, refusing to turn around and go home so I could approach the morning the same way everyone else did.  Feet forward.  Instead, I kept going backwards, ending up at this building, walking up to her door.

I’m here again.  I’m here in her tiny apartment with its creaking floors and mismatched plates.  She’s looking at me with those eyes, dark like coffee grounds and equally sedimentary.  She’s drained and buried and I take consolation in the fact that I had nothing to do with it.  I lie down on her mattress, separated from the floor only by a box spring.  It should feel at least a little uncomfortable, lying on her tangled sheets, fully clothed, but it doesn’t, which makes me wonder if I’m fighting the wrong battle.

The girl’s mother lived here.  The girl – my girl.  My daughter.  I don’t even want to say the words.  That’s the battle I should have fought or at least lost more gracefully.  But she had been determined and I didn’t know what I was up against.  The girl – my girl ran away, maybe up against the same thing.  Now I looked for her everywhere, in every face, but I probably wouldn’t recognize her if I met her.  I hadn’t seen her for two years and the school photo her mother provided to the police was of a stranger wearing black lipstick, her hair in her face.  I comforted myself with the thought that someone who pushed her resentment through the lens of a camera so intensely might have known what she was doing. 

But this girl, the one people think is mine, pretends to sleep while I try not to think about these things.  I speak to her forehead, asking about the cut on her scalp, where it came from.

“The corner of a table,” she tells me and I part her hair to inspect it.  When the scab forms, it will blend in with her dark roots.

“You shouldn’t see him.  You know it upsets you.”

“Tables have sharp edges whether I’m upset or not.”  This was an impertinent answer meant to keep my advice at bay, advice she insisted she didn’t need because she’d rather figure things out for herself, but she burrowed under my chin as she said it.

She should tell me to go.  She shouldn’t have even let me in considering I only come to her when she doesn’t ask me to.  So I try to summon any telepathic power I have, willing her to tell me to leave her alone.  But instead I feel her arm grow heavy across my waist and her breathing slow.  She twitches once, but uses that moment of wakefulness only to push one cold foot between my legs.

She's right, I'm a mega bitch.

People like to say that LA is full of wishy-washy flakes with commitment issues.  This can be true.  But!  They’re really committed to hating pedestrians.  Like the bus driver that yelled “bitch” out the window at me after I had the audacity to cross at the crosswalk, on a green light while she was looking at traffic going the other direction and nearly hit me.