Respite
I am now in a position to share the short story that I wrote for Slumber Party, a zine intended to raise money for the National Network of Abortion Funds. You can still buy copies of the zine at that link, and I recommend doing so—there’s a lot of extremely good stuff in it, my own work notwithstanding.
Without further ado, here is “Respite”:
“Is this spot taken?” you ask, and he looks up at you with a come-hither softness gone horribly threadbare and tired. You don’t have it in your heart to be insulted. Who has the time for romance anymore? The respite centre gets emptier every day; and okay, you haven’t been outside in long and nerve-shredding weeks, but you’re pretty sure it’s not because the world’s fault lines are healing.
“Sure,” he says, which is not the answer to the question that you asked. “Whatever. Come in.”
In means an old changing cubicle, its floor occupied entirely by the sketchiest mattress you’ve ever seen. Better this than the sports hall, or the emptied-out swimming pool—both still crawling, miserably literally, with other people’s kids. You were never going to be anyone’s mother. You wonder about the parents in the bigger rooms, trying to sleep through the end of days with frightened children utterly relentless in their need. You wonder if they regret it—if they would have done things differently, had an angel of mercy thought to call ahead.
Better you than them; you were already a goddamn cockroach, long before you ever had to be. You lie down beside your fellow recluse and you turn over onto your side, your back an impassable wall for him to stare at if he likes. He’s not the point. It’s the weight of another body on the mattress beside you, one of the few illicit pleasures still left to you; he could be anyone like this. You could be anywhere else.
“I’m Ben,” he says, once your eyes have been closed for a long and insufficient minute. For all his bedroom eyes were unconvincing at best, his name is a perfect entreaty. It’s the only reason you answer in kind.
“Cordelia,” you tell him. It’s not the name on your passport. No one has the time for passports now, either.
“Kids were keeping you awake too, huh?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.” This is dumb. You ought to ignore him and sleep. You haven’t spoken to anyone in days, not even in the line for food or for the bathroom; in the thin and flickering generator light of the cubicle, you feel yourself opening, a plant starved for sun. “I love baby saliva on my face at the ass-crack of dawn. Best skincare routine I ever had.”
He huffs out a tired laugh that turns your bone marrow momentarily to starlight. “Yeah, the late-night toddler scream cleanses were—they were really something. God. That’s mean, right? They can’t help it.”
“We all wish we were screaming,” you point out, and shift without really thinking to lie on your back. You can feel the tiled floor against your every vertebra, straight through the mattress like it isn’t even there. “Literally everyone in here wants to be screaming one hundred per cent of the time. Self-control is what separates us from the animals.”
“And the kids.”
“And the kids,” you agree, and chance a sidelong look in his direction. Joke’s on you: he’s on his side, faced directly away from you. His shoulders are broader than they looked when he was lying on his back. You readjust accordingly; he’s not better than you, even if lying on your side is somehow even more painful than lying flat out. Your bony arm is an ill-conceived pillow for your ribs. You end up curled in on yourself like a pillbug, hoping he hasn’t broken your unspoken compact and turned to look at you after all. “You don’t have your own?”
“I had baby brothers.” Had. You know better than to press for more. “You?”
You hum in the negative, shaking your head and hoping he can feel it. “No one for me,” you tell him, brittle as old bone. It’s true. It’s always been true—even now, so close to this almost-stranger, so unimpeachably alone.
Is this what people lived and died for? You don’t mean to wonder; you try not to think about this stuff, when you can help it. This half-formed performance of intimacy, this terrified gesturing toward togetherness—did people build lives out of this? Even in a kinder world, you don’t know how to believe it could sustain them. And yet here you are. (And yet, you think to yourself, here he is, as well.)
The bare bulb gutters overhead, then dies without a sound. They’ve killed the generators, then. You can all cook quietly in your own night sweat until the dawn.
“I was home for my dad’s birthday,” he says, whisper-hoarse, to the wall. “Long weekend, you know? We fought for—for days, the whole pack of us. I wish I hadn’t—” A sniff, poorly muffled by the mattress. “Wish I hadn’t been such an asshole to him, you know?”
There are religions built on this: secrets whispered in the dark through the veil of anonymity, forgiveness an implicit condition. Who are you to forgive this guy anything? You walked out years ago, spitting invective you can never take back. Wherever your parents are, they probably never asked a soul for forgiveness; they certainly never wanted yours. “You didn’t know.” It’s the best you can do, and it’s not enough. Platitudes taste like ashes and bile these days. “No one knew.”
“I don’t even live here.” He clears his throat, too loud in the sweltering dark. “I mean, I guess I do now. Whatever. It’s so dumb, but if this was going to happen, I wish it happened when I wasn’t fucking…”
You can hear so clearly what he’s trying not to say: I want to go home. You want it, too. You want home to be anywhere other than a tiny box in the depths of a respite centre, tiles faded to a dingy grey, years’ worth of other people’s sweat soaked into the grout. The difficulty is that if you say this aloud, you will never stop crying again. Your tears will flood the hollow carcass of the swimming pool until all those screaming babies are lifted on the rising tide.
But you have to say something. You have to, or he’ll start crying instead.
“Hey,” you say, too sharply. It’s whatever. He can take it. You reach blindly behind you, and you tell him: “Shut up and give me your hand.”
Amazingly enough, he does it—like he’s been waiting for a clear instruction since the earthquakes first hit. His hand is cold and clammy, but yours can’t be much better; and either way, you can feel his pulse in his wrist, something insistent and alive in the wreckage of the world. He holds your hand with a hesitance that ought to leave you squeamish, reminiscent of the mall-rat pseudo-dates that have haunted you since middle school. Maybe you’re just desperate now. Beneath it all, his fingers are surprisingly strong.
If you lived in a movie, you’d turn to face him now, and you’d kiss. If you weren’t two refugees from the end of the world, homeless and loveless, clinging with bitten-down nails to the sundered surface of the planet. You imagine ghost people, not quite the people who lived to become Cordelia and Ben, falling asleep beside each other safely every night.
You don’t live anywhere now. You hold his hand in silence, and you wait for one more dawn.