Free The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender Page A

made an attempt at a scared face but he couldn’t get himself to do it. He felt too tired. “Go, Mona,” he said. He laid his head back on the arm of the sofa.
    Mona paused. “Do you think she’s sick?”
    “She’s just tired.” His voice was fading. “She just needssome sleep.” The sofa arm dug into his neck. “I can’t believe she wanted to give you her ring.”
    Mona smiled and checked herself one last time in the mirror. As soon as the front door closed and the clop-clop of her tightly laced boots faded away, Haggie tried to doze off, but the floor was hard beneath him and the air felt clotted and thick without Mona stirring it up, and he couldn’t find the familiar relief of that slow descending weight.
    Heaving himself up, he sat on the couch. He almost twitched, craving the comfort of his chair. The woman snored lightly now. She had flushed skin and her eyelashes made simple black arcs on her cheeks.
    “Hello lady,” said Haggie, “wake up and talk to me.” She kept sleeping, sending out her breath to the air and pulling it back in. Private.
    It made him feel worse to be awake when there was someone else there that was asleep. The house seemed twice as big and twice as lonely. Dragging himself up, Haggie lumbered over to the bathroom. He wondered: was it possible to die simply from an absence of tempo? Sure, Mona was ruled by some kind of frenetic march, but there was no doubt that
something
was moving her inside—Haggie’s internal rhythms were so slow that he wondered if they counted as rhythms at all.
    Inside the bathroom, he opened up the medicine cabinet above the sink; sometimes Mona kept sleeping pills in there that she used when she was too wound up. Which was often. Holding the mirrored door, Haggie took down the tiny red-brownbottle. He read the label.
Do not exceed two in six hours
. Haggie spilled them out on his hand; they shimmered like miniature moons. I’m bigger than she is, besides, he thought. He took nine, his lucky number, and washed them down with a handful of water from the tap. That should do something, he thought. Because I don’t have my chair. And I’m tired, he thought again. I’m very tired and I want to sleep. He sat down on the floor of the bathroom and waited for a strange feeling to overtake him. The woman in his chair stopped snoring and the house filled with darkness and quiet.
    4.
    When he had finished exploring every knob and bump in the frame, he took in a breath and got ready to face the mirror straight on. He fiddled with the itchy gold necklace. This time would be different, in this fancy man’s mirror, this good-looking man’s looking glass. He crossed his fingers inside the chain and let his eyes shift in and focus.
    5. At the Side of the Road
    That night, I sleep in a bush. I don’t sleep very well there, but I never do, I’ve never been a good sleeper. I can’t ever get comfortable. So it’s okay; the dirt on my cheek is okay, doesn’t make any difference to me. A pillow is no better.
    I dream about my husband. I am dreaming that he is going to the refrigerator to fix himself a sandwich, my food, mybread, my self—digested then gone—and that’s when the shot rings out and that’s when I’m off, in the race, I’m off. He grabs his knee, and I’m out the door. I’m a racer, I’m so fast. In my dream, I run a lap around the world and some people in another country build a monument around my footprint.
    When I wake up, I want to walk for a long time, I think I could walk forever and never get tired. I take one of the cigarettes that man left me and smoke it, it’s been a long time since I did that, and when I stub it out in the bush, it catches on something and the bush starts to burn. Just near the bottom, but it is burning, the bush is on fire. The air is dry, sure, but it was one tiny cigarette and so I am shocked and I look at the bush burn and then I think: maybe this is something spiritual. Here, by the side of the road, just me