What You Always End Up
With
by
Jensen Whelan
Her apartment is on the first floor and because
of this smells strongly like the Chinese restaurant that sits
squat and permanent at street level.
I was visiting when it happened. When I made it
happen and she let it. We were talking about a colleague of
hers and she grabbed my arm and said, “I feel mixed up.
Like everything is in the wrong place.”
She told me she was scared and let me kiss her
on her cheek, very close to her mouth. I said, “Let me
help you.”
I used a different pen for different parts. On
her left arm, where I wrote ‘right leg’, I used
a ballpoint with thick, blue ink and scribbled the words quickly
like a signature. Both of her breasts I caligraphied onto her
shoulder blades. Just under her navel, in confident block letters
from a marker I wrote in her eyes. I switched her elbows and
her knee caps around, replaced her fingers with her toes and
inked her hands into the space left by her hips when I pushed
those around to the small of her back. I laid the flat of my
hand softly on her abdomen and decided to move her feet there.
Mary didn’t say much while I was working.
Occasionally she looked interested but I think that was more
for my benefit than anything. She looked at me at one point
and said, “Do you really think that my mouth should go
there?”
“No, I guess you’re right.”
I moved it to the bend on the underside of her elbow.
When we were done, it was late. Mary went to bed
and I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up to the dull light
of morning being slurred throughout the room.
She called my name.
I followed her voice into the bedroom where I
saw her on the bed wrapped up in her sheets and blankets.
She pushed them off and showed me her naked body.
I had never seen anything like it. At first all I could think
of was how she had managed to wash off the ink without waking
me up with the shower in the middle of the night. The labels
were gone but everything had moved to the new place I had given
it.
Her mouth spoke to me from her arm which was now
her leg. Her breasts were no longer on the front of her body
but had resettled on her back. Her eyes stared up from the soft
skin beneath her belly button. Her feet gently protruded from
the top part of her stomach. Her toes stood where her fingers
should have and flexed slightly when she stretched her body
awake.
I stood above her bed looking down at what I had
done and tried to concentrate on a body without a focal point.
Sometimes I’ll go downstairs to pick up
Chinese food for dinner and I’ll stay in the restaurant
a little longer than necessary to let myself be absorbed by
all the spices and the distant smells.
....
Jensen Whelan's fiction
and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Eyeshot, Surgery
of Modern Warfare, Identity Theory, Perfectland, The Glut, Pindeldyboz
and other places. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden for the fine
weather and searches endlessly for the chef.
