Constricted
by Jamie Lin
My best friend told me I had attachment issues. “You don’t realize it,” she said. “You’re in denial but I know.”
I wondered how, if it was obvious even without seeing their names on my arms. I hated my arms even before I started cutting and leaving white marks. They sagged even though I was thin everywhere else.
That night, I looked into the face of my new boyfriend. He looked a bit like a rat but I found him gorgeous. There was something about his startling gray eyes that seemed to paralyze something within me and made it hard to breathe. I had met him at the pet shop. I was getting food for my rat. “I have a snake,” he said, coming to stand next to me. “She’s completely blind.”
“Awesome,” I said.
“Want to come see her?” he said.
I grinned, impressed at how casual and smooth that invitation came out.
In his aunt’s basement, he let me hold her around my right arm. “Aren’t you hot?” he said, tugging at my sleeve.
“Nope. I always wear long sleeves no matter what.”
“Oh?”
“I have fat arms,” I said.
He kissed me as the snake coiled tighter and tighter around my arm. Then, he put the snake back in its cage and pushed against me on the couch, his knees on either side of my hips, his breath spicy in my ear. I tried not to leave marks on him though my fingernails itched to scrape down the side of his face. He came with a coyote’s cry and I promised to see him the next day.
“You have never been this way before,” my best friend said, examining my giddy smile. “Are you in…”
I slapped her. “Don’t kill it.”
Jason and I did everything together from then on. I had arranged outings in the past but since I couldn’t breathe around him, I was incapable of planning for each stage of our relationship. It was all a bit of a blur, timeless and consuming of everything I had.
When he arranged a fancy dinner for us at the new Italian place in town, I thought he was going to braid us together. Instead he said over the Caesar salad, a fork in his hand, mouth full of garlic croutons, “I want to see other people.”
That evening, I picked up my pocket knife and pulled up the sleeve. I knew there was a precise fraction of an inch of difference between deep enough for a scar and too deep to heal on my own. I knew but still, I pressed too hard. The blood flowed creamy as milk and I stared at it for so long that when I looked up again, I saw red dots everywhere. I stared at the J of his name but couldn’t continue the other letters. I pulled down the sleeve and walked over to my empty rat cage, touching the little metal bars.
I missed most those Sundays when we’d stay in his place, naked as newborns and horny as dogs. Before I left, he’d always let me feed the snake a dead rat. Once he wouldn’t stop fussing about the pet store burning down and how he hadn’t fed his baby for days because he was busy and had forgotten. He looked at me once and I agreed without so much as a blink. I even watched it struggle between his fingers before being released into her stretching mouth. I could feel the stomach churning desire in her green eyes and sympathized with the pain of being left hungry for so long.
A week later when the taste of him had evaporated from my mouth, I turned to my best friend and said, “See. I got over that just fine. I just need a new rat. That’s all.”
What I didn’t share was how at night I was prone to let the transparent moonlight shine on the faint J and wish I was that rat, already consumed, no longer constricted.
May 24th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
well written. i suspect something you lived. sickening to me, because it is complete as a short story, but i want something beautiful for you, or maybe beuty as in heroic, rather than passive.
well portrayed. sickened me that the momory of a man is substantially the taste of him in your mouth. could there be more than cock in you mouth? i wondered. there’s mills and boon. there’s a nasty world where men and women become parents, before they fail to reslove an argument, and act petty and likke victims, and walk away with the children, helped by the state.
i think of the romance young people have in indian villages, starry and breathless with just looks. it bodes well. the story here is of our world, and is a great contrast, its ending is apt. loss of something you never really had, or could have, and ‘attathment issues’ remain.
rats thrive at the fringes of human habitation, - they are here around us. They depend on us, but don’t need us to take them in. Rats are this persons’ interest in the world which takes them into encounters. now a symbol of offbeat and whacky, and really a symbol of no interest, no beat, no whack. A passive interest, hanging on at the fringe (where the core is unwelcoming and corrupt?).
This is an example of very well written story, that makes me sad because it goes nowhere, does nothng (not transcendental) and experiences no difficulties to overcome. Yet so much better than the masses of drivel we get. yet so sad - if it wasn’t a very short story i could have said flat.
So it’s dangerous, and bad and gives me nothing except for pause to reflect.
best wishes,
john.
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