Dread
When I was a little girl I was terrified of climbing stairs in the dark. I would run like hell to the top, listening to the blood jump in my veins. Sitting on these steps with you, I feel the same. You’re drinking a beer, like you don’t care about campus security, and I’m chewing on my bottom lip, trying not to smoke a cigarette. We’re sitting between two street lamps, in this concrete pocket of darkness, not saying much of anything. Not saying what should be said.
Sometimes I could hear something grunting behind me when I ran up the stairs, my skinny knees cracking and my toes punching carpet. It was the Boogie Man, I’m sure of it. All children can hear him. We just lose it when we get old, the awareness of things that hunt us, that can outmatch us at any turn. I tell you about it, about being terrified, sitting here in front of your dorm, while you drink and deflate beside me. You used to be swollen with this adolescent gas, your short hair feathering out in a sea of wind on your way to class. We would wave and stop on the quad and you would always hug me and I would close my eyes when I could feel your heart thundering against mine, your small firm breasts marking their territory, making promises. I liked it. The fear that fluttered between us.
“So.” Your bloodshot eyes spill over my body. I hug my knees to my chest; they’re still skinny and they still crack and I don’t know why I dug this hole that I’ve pulled us into. “You’re dumping me, right?”
I want to tell you about Katie. She was lovely. We kissed on her trampoline and she braided daisies in my hair. We went to the sixth grade dance together and some seventh graders stuffed us into a pair of lockers. I told her she looked like Jesus and she told me I’m going to hell for saying that. I told her there’s no such thing and we broke up and I sat outside her house for days, crying voluptuously, like I thought lovers do, until her mother came outside and told me to leave her daughter alone, that I was deeply disturbed, that I sounded like a drowning cat, that my mother was going to hear all about it.
“I don’t know. I’m just fucked up.”
You shake your head. I can see the outline of your lips, opening and closing. “Uh… okay. Well you’re kinda stringing me along here. You fuck me, you ignore me. You say you’re falling for me; you say ‘we need to talk.’” You chuck your empty bottle into the trash can beside you. “Well this is my fault. I knew I shouldn’t have fucked a straight girl.” You stand and jiggle your keys, leaving me hugging my knees on the steps I’m still a little afraid to climb alone. “Just go home.”
You go inside and I sniff the air around me. I can still smell your cologne and I forgot to say how much I love that you wear cologne instead of perfume and how you always pull out chairs for me and you stand when I walk into a building and I want, want, want it all back. I want to leave all the lights off and run laps until I faint. “Shit,” I say, and light my emergency cigarette. Some guy from Anthropology 220 swaggers by and says, “Hey, you waiting for Mickie?”
“No,” I say. “Do I look like a fucking dyke?”
Dawn West lives, writes, and has a dirty mouth in Ohio. Her work has appeared in The Molotov Cocktail, Camroc Press Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and other lovely places.
