Straight No Chaser

Denouement

fuck. i had a couple paragraphs about thinking i was getting carjacked yesterday, but the window closed, and it was a stupid and anticlimactic story anyway.

the point is, or was going to be, that i'm really going to have to stop making dumb physical decisions, like driving around solo in places where my friends have been mugged at gunpoint, leaving the car door unlocked in strange parts of town, et cetera. no, i don't drink or do drugs, but i'm twice as likely as treesje is to wind up bound and gagged in an alley somewhere, because i'm reckless with myself, because i've consciously decided i'm not worth protecting. subconsciously, of course, i'm sure i've got instincts or whatever, think i'm the best, things like that. but up top, i never have that thought that i am a precious treasure. it matters whether or not i make it back to campus; someone would cry if i died today; marcus would rather have me than all the journals and cds i might bequeath to him. i need to have thoughts like that, before i get myself killed.

either that, or i need to stop assuming that everyone who seems to want to rob/rape/murder me, actually does. yesterday, the guy who rushed at my car with a razor blade in his outstretched hand only wanted to scrape the orange violation sticker from my windshield (very embarrassing). and the stranger who climbed into my passenger seat when i went to the smoothie place, he climbed out just as quickly, and didn't take anything, from what i can discern. but still. i could have had my throat slashed or been assaulted in an alleyway somewhere. scary. i have to be more careful.

i can't think of anything that will make me care, short of getting pregnant. when i was little, to prevent me from doing stupid things, my mom used to carry around a stuffed animal, and tell me i was responsible for keeping him safe. "always buckle him in," she'd say, in the car, and i'd put him in my lap and buckle us both in, a step i always forgot when it was just me. "he gets scared if you step off the curb," she'd say when we walked around outside, and just like she wanted, i'd stay out of the street. i was always more self-aware when i had a passenger. it would be nice to have that again, a baby, we'll just say marcus's, so the precious treasure would be built in, and i'd think twice about putting myself in obvious danger every five seconds. i'd think, marcus trusts me, i have to get this thing back to him safely, i'm lucky to have them both, i should be careful. and i'd remember to lock car doors, drive like a licensed driver (as opposed to an unlicensed banshee), stay safe everywhere and always.

which for some reason reminds me, i need to buy pink oil for my hair, which is beginning to show signs of the usual substandard college treatment. and is in dire need of a cut. or some braids, but that would involve making nice to treesje, and i don't have that in me, not yet. maybe after marcus.

i was out too late last night and paid for it; i slept too late today; i've got papers to write and am choosing island instead; i'm being a bum and i know it. oh well.

i never stop thinking about babies. what the hell is wrong with me.

**********

Sometimes he sets her humming, so much so that her body doesn't stop clenching for five or ten minutes after. She uses this time, this residual energy, to get things done: to wash his clothes (a duty she's taken on with unspoken resignation, just as he's made himself responsible for the fishing and fruit-gathering; she's never felt quite so primal in all her life), to splash around in the spring (there are days when she thinks she'd like to stay there all day--and days when she, in fact, does), to write in her journal (he thought he was lucky to find the little red notebook; she's got the bigger one, more pages, fewer of them waterstained, and the prettier pen, with the rhinestone cap).

It's a Saturday, her tally tells her, and she's been humming all day.

*

She is surprised at how easy it is to start a fire, but still insists on his doing it.

"That's not bad," he pronounced when she came to him, whimpering, with the pencil-thin burn on her left hip, from where the twig jumped forth and licked her. "You just have to stand back when you do it." She read irritation in his face, and didn't complain again after that, even when she burned herself over and over, and now she doesn't even try, just praises the height and might of his efforts, and lets his masculine pride take care of the rest.

"It is so easy," he says, "to light a fire. Watch where you point that glare, you might do it by accident."

She does, twice.

*

Still humming three days later, an uneventful Tuesday spent scribbling into separate notepads on opposite ends of the island, she decides to take an unprecedented step.

"Tell me something from before," she says when he comes around for their sunset ritual.

Kneeling on the sand, piling the sticks and twigs onto the well-used circle of ash, he clears his throat and answers. "Sometimes I loved that fucking Hilton," he confesses. "Just, not as much as I hated it. Because, you know, living with roommates or whatever--not much decorated beauty. I just, at least at the beginning of the workday, sometimes I just really appreciated how clean things were there. Deliberately pretty. I liked to look at the pretty stuff."

The flame bursts onstage and leaps high into the air with its usual inelegant whumpf noise. The temperature instantly climbs twenty degrees, but she pulls her knees to her chest and clutches them, shivering. "Even when you had to look at it every day?" she presses.

He reaches behind and grabs her ankle, cups her smooth heel. The sand buffs away all roughness, there and everywhere; even elbows are a welcome surface. He swivels around to her side, kisses her his answer in Morse code. Remembers they don't know Morse code, neither one of them, and whispers it instead. Touches her elbows, coaxing her arms to her sides, snuffs out her giggle with his lips.

*

Afterward, the humming will intensify, and she will think that was The Time. She'll be wrong, off by weeks, but no one will ever know.

*

He is making a crab-pineapple-fish kebab when she comes to him with her news.