Esopus
Adam Moorad
The girl chewed her nails until they bled. The floorboards croaked as she walked through the house, towing her feet like dragnets. People sat on pieces of furniture, reposed in silence. Pale hands held glasses. Muted mouths gummed honeydew.
The girl lived in a small apartment in a big city. It had been a long time, she thought, since the last time she had been inside a house – a house in a town where people lived spaced sporadically amongst hills and barns and cattle. She had at one time aligned the spatial in her mind as a point of contention. Its rustic wind had once wafted stale gales of monotony. But for some reason the ambiance now sedated her, unknotting the grapevine tangle within her like a rebirth.
The people in the house stood, gently embraced, and gradually departed. Some straightened their arms and softly patted the girl on the shoulder as if to console her. She felt ridiculed, malingering on a papasan, her legs crossed, fingers prodding the blood clots in her cuticles.
Once the girl was alone, she walked from one room into another where she had left her purse. She reached inside it, took out her cell phone, and tried calling her boyfriend. It rang once and went straight to voicemail. She closed the phone and saw a box made of white cardboard. It looked like an ashen building standing on a linoleum table. A set of keys rested beside it. The girl took the box and considered throwing it away. Her hands began to tremble. She replaced the box, collected the keys and walked from one room to another room to another and left.
She walked around the house to the garage and pulled the door open. A small sedan was parked inside. She climbed into the car, plugged the key into the ignition, and started driving. The shells of dead bugs and pine needles flew off the hood up into the air as the vehicle moved. White scabs of bird dung had dried in the worn wiper grooves across the windshield. She could tell the car had not been driven in a very long time.
The girl crossed several intersections and lost her sense of direction. She did not recognize most of the buildings along the road – and buildings she did now housed businesses with signage of which she was not familiar. The girl pumped her brakes. She scraped her nails against her teeth. The nerves in her fingers flared. The car lunged forward. She pumped the brakes again.
The road dead-ended at a small inlet along a dock lined with boats. The pavement became gravel and dove downward into a wet fog. Now it was dark. The girl turned on her headlights. The beams pointed towards a dockside tavern with a neon bar sign that said LOSERS.
She parked along the curb and walked into the tavern. She sat down on a stool, waved at the bartender, and ordered a glass of chardonnay.
A fisherman moped on a stool like a buzzed burlap sack watching basketball on a television above the bar. A scruffy Steve McQueen-type shot pool alone in the back of the room. His hands looked like wild potatoes. The bartender brought the girl her drink. She took a sip. The wine tinged of cold vinegar. There was no one else around.
The fisherman muttered something indecipherable and shooed his hand at the television. Steve McQueen re-racked the balls, chalked his stick, and broke. The bartender knelt down and tuned a knob on a stereo. Bruce Springsteen sang, “Everybody’s got a hungry heart.”
The girl looked at her phone. She tried her boyfriend again but her call would not go through. She peeled a chip of polish from her thumb and blew it away. An African American man slam-dunked. He clapped his hands and high-fived a teammate.
The fisherman sat up, pumped his arms up and down, and tipped backward on his stool until he fell, hitting his head on the floor. The television screen went scratchy. The bartender folded his arms across his chest and looked bemused. The fisherman rubbed his head mumbled fucks. Steve McQueen walked over and watched the fisherman roll around on the floor.
“Did you hit your head?” the bartender said.
“That’s a bad egg,” Steve McQueen said. “You should put ice on that.”
“I’ll be alright,” the fisherman said. His eyes looked like barnacles. “Once my ears stop ringing.”
“Maybe you should go home,” the bartender said. “And go to bed.”
“Baloney,” the fisherman said. He staggered to his feet and tossed a wadded five-dollar bill on the countertop. “I’ll have another,” he said, smacking his lips like a hungry guppy.
The bartender unfolded the bill and stuffed it in the drawer of a cash register that resembled an old sewing machine. He shut the drawer, cupped a pint glass around the yellow nose of a Kelso tap and poured.
“I wouldn’t serve him any more,” Steve McQueen said.
The bartender topped off the glass and placed it before the fisherman. “He keeps this place from going bankrupt,” the bartender said, holding a wet bar rag up like a white flag. “I’m helpless.”
“I miss watching Michael Jordan,” the fisherman said, eyes fixed on the game. “And The X-Files.” He looked at the bartender and the bartender rolled his eyes.
Steve McQueen leaned on the bar, maneuvered his legs around a stool and sat with his feet high on the spokes like a jockey. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and held it up to his face. His knuckles bulged from his paws like a topographic map. “I think I’m roaming,” he said.
The girl chewed another flake of polish off her finger and wiped the saliva on her dress. She twirled the same finger around a lock of hair and curled it around one of her ears as she scanned the tavern.
The fisherman sipped his beer and set it down. A dollop of oleander foam hung from his nose. Steve McQueen thumbed the buttons on his phone and said, “The service sucks in here.”
“Why don’t you try ordering a drink?” the bartender said.
The fisherman started laughing. He rubbed his hands together like a fly.
She sipped her glass and started craving nicotine. She asked the bartender for a cigarette, but he said he didn’t smoke. When she asked the fisherman the same, he offered to buy her a drink.
“I have some cigs back at my place,” he said, winking.
“Gross,” the girl said. “I don’t even know you.” She looked into his turquoise eyes and he looked away.
“I ain’t the Unabomber,” he said, scratching his beard. “Don’t be scared.”
The girl expelled a weary sigh.
“You must have a boyfriend,” Steve McQueen said.
“That’s right,” she said.
“Where did y’all meet?”
“The internet,” she said, leaning her elbows on the countertop.
“I quit the internet a while back,” he said. “Cold turkey.”
“What was that like?”
“A lithium wean,” he said.
Several seconds passed and the girl said, “Well congrads.”
“You’re not from around here,” he said. “Are you?”
“I was born here,” the girl said. She chiseled a fleck from her thumb and flicked. “But I live in the City.”
“So what brings you upstate?” he said.
The girl dabbed her raw cuticle and segued from one elbow to the other as if to parry the question. “Had to scatter some ashes,” she said.
“Hope everything’s okay,” he said.
“It’s not the apocalypse,” she said.
The fisherman lurched off his stool and moved towards Steve McQueen. “Hey man,” he said, hunching over like a village mystic. “Put me in a headlock.”
“No thanks,” Steve McQueen said.
“Come on,” the fisherman said. “Every famous fight in human history has been won with a headlock.”
“How many famous fights have you been in?” Steve McQueen.
“I almost got shot one time in Mexico over some damn sombrero,” the fisherman said.
“Just ignore him,” the bartender said. “He’s drunker than a pile of cars.”
“Sorry,” Steve McQueen said to the fisherman. “Maybe next time.”
The fisherman waddled back to his stool and burped like a glum toad.
The girl finished her drink and scanned through old text messages, recounting her recent past from morsels of abbreviations. Nothing made any sense as she read. Every character of text looked like a crooked pound sign. She began to sweat. The girl closed her eyes and felt the pores across her forehead expand and expel beads of perspiration. She felt fatter than an old supermodel in a cocktail dress. She opened her eyes. The fisherman massaged his jawbone and cringed.
The girl looked at Steve McQueen and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Are you sure?” he said, surprised.
“I guess,” she said.
“That’s alright,” he said. “What changed your mind?”
“Cigarettes,” she said.
The girl went outside with Steve McQueen and they walked across gravel towards their parked cars. “Follow me to my sister’s,” he said. “She’s out of town tonight.”
“Do you live with her?” the girl said.
“Temporarily,” he said. “I have the basement to myself.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders and said, “Lead the way.”
She followed him in her sedan as he drove through the hills. All she could see were the ruby eyes of the break lights blinking from his fender somewhere in the darkness ahead.
The girl stopped in a cul-de-sac where Steve McQueen’s sister’s house sat surrounded in woods. He pulled into the driveway and parked. The girl got out of her car, walked across the lawn, and followed him inside.
“Would you mind if I took a shower really fast?” Steve McQueen said. “I smell ripe.”
“Take your time?” the girl said. “The night is young.”
He opened a door, revealing a narrow stairwell. “The cigs are on the table in the basement,” he said. He patted the girl on the ass. “I’ll be down in a few.”
The girl descended steps. An old rotary phone hung on the wall above the banister. She dialed her boyfriend long-distance. He did not answer. She left a voicemail telling him she didn’t love him anymore. “I’m running out of time,” she said, “I have to go.”
She hung up the phone and panned her eyes across the basement. The air felt damp and greasy. A frumpy futon was feng shui-ed in the corner of the room, and beside it, a door to a small bathroom. The pack of cigarettes sat on an oval table beside a remote control and a tattered stack of fap mags.
The girl took a cigarette from the pack and walked across the basement towards a bookshelf. She moved her eyes across the dusty spines and stopped at a mason jar serving as makeshift bookend. The glass was dredged with dust and cobwebs. The jar contained a set of old dentures basking like yellow pickles in translucent goo.
She carried the jar into the bathroom and watched in the mirror as she poured the contents into the sink. She foraged through a medicine cabinet, found a toothbrush and used it to fish the dentures out. The teeth fell into the basin and made deformed palate around the drain.
The girl rinsed the teeth under the spigot. The water stung the invisible cracks in her skin. She took the dentures to the toilet and sat down opposite the mirror. She held the dentures by the gums in front of her face and nibbled them together like a puppeteer. “Look at me,” she ventriloquized. “I’m a happy girl.”
She could hear water running through pipes behind the wall as Steve McQueen showered somewhere in the house above her. The rims of her cuticles throbbed. She put the dentures into her purse quietly tiptoed up the basement stairs.
She slowly turned the knob of the front door and slipped outside. She placed the cigarette between her lips and let it hang. The yard was dark. The dead leaves on the lawn crunched beneath her feet as she moves towards her car.
The girl climbed behind the wheel and sped off, drifting back and forth between lanes through the black hill country night. Dolphin grey clouds hung above the horizon showering in the poltergeist moonscape.
She lit and finished the cigarette with a few drags and then flicked the butt through the crack in the window. She reached into her purse and caressed the dentures. Her hand felt moist as it probed like spider. She maneuvered one of the dentures onto its back and cupped her fingers against the incisors. She pressed her nails firmly upon the fillings and began scraping her fingers, filing the clots and meat of her enamels through to the bone. She would not stop until all the polish was gone.
The girl lived in a small apartment in a big city. It had been a long time, she thought, since the last time she had been inside a house – a house in a town where people lived spaced sporadically amongst hills and barns and cattle. She had at one time aligned the spatial in her mind as a point of contention. Its rustic wind had once wafted stale gales of monotony. But for some reason the ambiance now sedated her, unknotting the grapevine tangle within her like a rebirth.
The people in the house stood, gently embraced, and gradually departed. Some straightened their arms and softly patted the girl on the shoulder as if to console her. She felt ridiculed, malingering on a papasan, her legs crossed, fingers prodding the blood clots in her cuticles.
Once the girl was alone, she walked from one room into another where she had left her purse. She reached inside it, took out her cell phone, and tried calling her boyfriend. It rang once and went straight to voicemail. She closed the phone and saw a box made of white cardboard. It looked like an ashen building standing on a linoleum table. A set of keys rested beside it. The girl took the box and considered throwing it away. Her hands began to tremble. She replaced the box, collected the keys and walked from one room to another room to another and left.
She walked around the house to the garage and pulled the door open. A small sedan was parked inside. She climbed into the car, plugged the key into the ignition, and started driving. The shells of dead bugs and pine needles flew off the hood up into the air as the vehicle moved. White scabs of bird dung had dried in the worn wiper grooves across the windshield. She could tell the car had not been driven in a very long time.
The girl crossed several intersections and lost her sense of direction. She did not recognize most of the buildings along the road – and buildings she did now housed businesses with signage of which she was not familiar. The girl pumped her brakes. She scraped her nails against her teeth. The nerves in her fingers flared. The car lunged forward. She pumped the brakes again.
The road dead-ended at a small inlet along a dock lined with boats. The pavement became gravel and dove downward into a wet fog. Now it was dark. The girl turned on her headlights. The beams pointed towards a dockside tavern with a neon bar sign that said LOSERS.
She parked along the curb and walked into the tavern. She sat down on a stool, waved at the bartender, and ordered a glass of chardonnay.
A fisherman moped on a stool like a buzzed burlap sack watching basketball on a television above the bar. A scruffy Steve McQueen-type shot pool alone in the back of the room. His hands looked like wild potatoes. The bartender brought the girl her drink. She took a sip. The wine tinged of cold vinegar. There was no one else around.
The fisherman muttered something indecipherable and shooed his hand at the television. Steve McQueen re-racked the balls, chalked his stick, and broke. The bartender knelt down and tuned a knob on a stereo. Bruce Springsteen sang, “Everybody’s got a hungry heart.”
The girl looked at her phone. She tried her boyfriend again but her call would not go through. She peeled a chip of polish from her thumb and blew it away. An African American man slam-dunked. He clapped his hands and high-fived a teammate.
The fisherman sat up, pumped his arms up and down, and tipped backward on his stool until he fell, hitting his head on the floor. The television screen went scratchy. The bartender folded his arms across his chest and looked bemused. The fisherman rubbed his head mumbled fucks. Steve McQueen walked over and watched the fisherman roll around on the floor.
“Did you hit your head?” the bartender said.
“That’s a bad egg,” Steve McQueen said. “You should put ice on that.”
“I’ll be alright,” the fisherman said. His eyes looked like barnacles. “Once my ears stop ringing.”
“Maybe you should go home,” the bartender said. “And go to bed.”
“Baloney,” the fisherman said. He staggered to his feet and tossed a wadded five-dollar bill on the countertop. “I’ll have another,” he said, smacking his lips like a hungry guppy.
The bartender unfolded the bill and stuffed it in the drawer of a cash register that resembled an old sewing machine. He shut the drawer, cupped a pint glass around the yellow nose of a Kelso tap and poured.
“I wouldn’t serve him any more,” Steve McQueen said.
The bartender topped off the glass and placed it before the fisherman. “He keeps this place from going bankrupt,” the bartender said, holding a wet bar rag up like a white flag. “I’m helpless.”
“I miss watching Michael Jordan,” the fisherman said, eyes fixed on the game. “And The X-Files.” He looked at the bartender and the bartender rolled his eyes.
Steve McQueen leaned on the bar, maneuvered his legs around a stool and sat with his feet high on the spokes like a jockey. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and held it up to his face. His knuckles bulged from his paws like a topographic map. “I think I’m roaming,” he said.
The girl chewed another flake of polish off her finger and wiped the saliva on her dress. She twirled the same finger around a lock of hair and curled it around one of her ears as she scanned the tavern.
The fisherman sipped his beer and set it down. A dollop of oleander foam hung from his nose. Steve McQueen thumbed the buttons on his phone and said, “The service sucks in here.”
“Why don’t you try ordering a drink?” the bartender said.
The fisherman started laughing. He rubbed his hands together like a fly.
She sipped her glass and started craving nicotine. She asked the bartender for a cigarette, but he said he didn’t smoke. When she asked the fisherman the same, he offered to buy her a drink.
“I have some cigs back at my place,” he said, winking.
“Gross,” the girl said. “I don’t even know you.” She looked into his turquoise eyes and he looked away.
“I ain’t the Unabomber,” he said, scratching his beard. “Don’t be scared.”
The girl expelled a weary sigh.
“You must have a boyfriend,” Steve McQueen said.
“That’s right,” she said.
“Where did y’all meet?”
“The internet,” she said, leaning her elbows on the countertop.
“I quit the internet a while back,” he said. “Cold turkey.”
“What was that like?”
“A lithium wean,” he said.
Several seconds passed and the girl said, “Well congrads.”
“You’re not from around here,” he said. “Are you?”
“I was born here,” the girl said. She chiseled a fleck from her thumb and flicked. “But I live in the City.”
“So what brings you upstate?” he said.
The girl dabbed her raw cuticle and segued from one elbow to the other as if to parry the question. “Had to scatter some ashes,” she said.
“Hope everything’s okay,” he said.
“It’s not the apocalypse,” she said.
The fisherman lurched off his stool and moved towards Steve McQueen. “Hey man,” he said, hunching over like a village mystic. “Put me in a headlock.”
“No thanks,” Steve McQueen said.
“Come on,” the fisherman said. “Every famous fight in human history has been won with a headlock.”
“How many famous fights have you been in?” Steve McQueen.
“I almost got shot one time in Mexico over some damn sombrero,” the fisherman said.
“Just ignore him,” the bartender said. “He’s drunker than a pile of cars.”
“Sorry,” Steve McQueen said to the fisherman. “Maybe next time.”
The fisherman waddled back to his stool and burped like a glum toad.
The girl finished her drink and scanned through old text messages, recounting her recent past from morsels of abbreviations. Nothing made any sense as she read. Every character of text looked like a crooked pound sign. She began to sweat. The girl closed her eyes and felt the pores across her forehead expand and expel beads of perspiration. She felt fatter than an old supermodel in a cocktail dress. She opened her eyes. The fisherman massaged his jawbone and cringed.
The girl looked at Steve McQueen and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Are you sure?” he said, surprised.
“I guess,” she said.
“That’s alright,” he said. “What changed your mind?”
“Cigarettes,” she said.
The girl went outside with Steve McQueen and they walked across gravel towards their parked cars. “Follow me to my sister’s,” he said. “She’s out of town tonight.”
“Do you live with her?” the girl said.
“Temporarily,” he said. “I have the basement to myself.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders and said, “Lead the way.”
She followed him in her sedan as he drove through the hills. All she could see were the ruby eyes of the break lights blinking from his fender somewhere in the darkness ahead.
The girl stopped in a cul-de-sac where Steve McQueen’s sister’s house sat surrounded in woods. He pulled into the driveway and parked. The girl got out of her car, walked across the lawn, and followed him inside.
“Would you mind if I took a shower really fast?” Steve McQueen said. “I smell ripe.”
“Take your time?” the girl said. “The night is young.”
He opened a door, revealing a narrow stairwell. “The cigs are on the table in the basement,” he said. He patted the girl on the ass. “I’ll be down in a few.”
The girl descended steps. An old rotary phone hung on the wall above the banister. She dialed her boyfriend long-distance. He did not answer. She left a voicemail telling him she didn’t love him anymore. “I’m running out of time,” she said, “I have to go.”
She hung up the phone and panned her eyes across the basement. The air felt damp and greasy. A frumpy futon was feng shui-ed in the corner of the room, and beside it, a door to a small bathroom. The pack of cigarettes sat on an oval table beside a remote control and a tattered stack of fap mags.
The girl took a cigarette from the pack and walked across the basement towards a bookshelf. She moved her eyes across the dusty spines and stopped at a mason jar serving as makeshift bookend. The glass was dredged with dust and cobwebs. The jar contained a set of old dentures basking like yellow pickles in translucent goo.
She carried the jar into the bathroom and watched in the mirror as she poured the contents into the sink. She foraged through a medicine cabinet, found a toothbrush and used it to fish the dentures out. The teeth fell into the basin and made deformed palate around the drain.
The girl rinsed the teeth under the spigot. The water stung the invisible cracks in her skin. She took the dentures to the toilet and sat down opposite the mirror. She held the dentures by the gums in front of her face and nibbled them together like a puppeteer. “Look at me,” she ventriloquized. “I’m a happy girl.”
She could hear water running through pipes behind the wall as Steve McQueen showered somewhere in the house above her. The rims of her cuticles throbbed. She put the dentures into her purse quietly tiptoed up the basement stairs.
She slowly turned the knob of the front door and slipped outside. She placed the cigarette between her lips and let it hang. The yard was dark. The dead leaves on the lawn crunched beneath her feet as she moves towards her car.
The girl climbed behind the wheel and sped off, drifting back and forth between lanes through the black hill country night. Dolphin grey clouds hung above the horizon showering in the poltergeist moonscape.
She lit and finished the cigarette with a few drags and then flicked the butt through the crack in the window. She reached into her purse and caressed the dentures. Her hand felt moist as it probed like spider. She maneuvered one of the dentures onto its back and cupped her fingers against the incisors. She pressed her nails firmly upon the fillings and began scraping her fingers, filing the clots and meat of her enamels through to the bone. She would not stop until all the polish was gone.
