Free Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips Page B

tossing and turning of one keeps the other up. No more debates about whether Brussels sprouts should be steamed or fried. No more disagreements about the timer on the air conditioner. No more of those startling sneezes. No more weird smells. No more loud chewing, no more forgetting to clean up the honey when it explodes on the kitchen floor, no more slamming the closet door too early in the morning.
    We sit there for a long time.
    We use a method we learned in elementary school. We fold the letter in half and tear along the creases. We rip it again and again and again until it’s in so many tiny pieces it’s like it has vanished.
    *   *   *
    At home, you take a shower even though there’s mildew. I sit on the toilet seat. The toenail clippers are nowhere to be found. A whitish towel dangles off the sink. A smear of toothpaste on the counter. A piece of dental floss hanging from the trash can. The shower curtain’s red barbershop stripes move as you shampoo. When you knock the soap out of the shower and onto the floor, I pick it up. The bathroom fills with steam until we’re just a couple of blobs in the mirror.

 
    FLESH AND BLOOD
    It began on Tuesday morning; my landlord had been in Florida over the long weekend, and when I glimpsed him schlubbing around in the backyard two stories down, I was stricken by the extreme redness of his skin. Florida! The place where old white men go to turn bloodred. I stepped away from the window. I’d been to Florida once, a big group of friends, a happy bright blur of a week, so long ago.
    Showering, smoothing lotion onto my arms and legs, I enjoyed the healthy golden quality of my skin. In the mirror my face seemed almost to shimmer. I felt clean inside and out, my morning poop having arrived precisely on schedule, my immaculate stomach awaiting milk, granola, apple.
    It was not that there was anything displeasing about my life. Still youngish, still prettyish, a tiny tidy apartment, parents to visit and friends to complain to, a guy with whom I’d been on a series of lighthearted dates, a photography hobby and a hostessing job at a French restaurant where they deferred to me when it came to arranging the flowers, no great grief or heartbreak, a few moments of lonesomeness and meaninglessness here and there; it pleased me to think of myself as a person like any other.
    Somehow I managed to stay in my own world all the way to the bus stop. It happens in big cities. But then, boarding the bus and inserting my pass, I saw the bus driver’s arm and hand, his fingers tapping the wheel.
    First there was the instinct to gag, but, ever polite, I tamped it down. Second there was the rational explanation: He’s a veteran, how tragic, don’t stare. Yet the soothing logic of that explanation faded as my gaze moved up his arm to his neck, his face.
    I could see his muscles, his blood vessels, the stretchiness of his tendons, the bulge of his eyeballs, the color of his skull.
    The other passengers trying to board the bus were getting restless, pushing a bit and clearing their throats. I turned around to give them a look of compassion and warning. The woman behind me was wearing a light brown raincoat; I perceived this raincoat as I turned; atop the raincoat, the woman’s skinless head.
    Gagging, I stumbled forward into the bus.
    â€œYaawlrite?” the bus driver said in some language I didn’t recognize, his bloodred muscles contracting to reveal teeth that appeared uncannily white.
    I grabbed a metal pole and clung to it. When I opened my eyes: rows upon rows of skinless faces, eyeballs bulging and mouths forming grimaces as they observed the little scene I was making.
    â€œWanna sit, sweetheart?” one of them said, standing. A man, probably, though it was hard to tell.
    I shook my head and gripped the pole. I would never, ever sit among them. The idea was so horrifying, so absurd, that I half-giggled. The “man”