Frass

1

A blue-green river runs down to just above her chest, branching out into streams, as in spilled ink. It is one river poured on her right clavicle. When we were children she used to tell me it was a mark of haughtiness. She might have been right; I have never known anyone so self-important.

In a rush of vitality, red blood cells deliver oxygen to her limbs, her cheeks, and her full lips, which are parting to say:

“When you’re old, you stop wanting. I don’t know what in particular. You just stop.”

Still, pulses of neurological activity jump down from synapse to synapse, as her pale, bony hand restlessly taps on the table in minute but fast-paced tick, tick, ticks: an old habit. Like a clock. I do not know why I am spending the last few hours of the year with her. Right now, though, I feel like everything is a ringing perturbation – the bus rides, the small talk, the pounds I put on. She is here, and along with the throbs of blood that make her physically alive, she is tangible.

“Toby,” she starts – I know I am in for a long talk – “I think this is enough.”

Isla was adopted by Aunt Patty, my father’s cousin, a year after she changed her marital status to Widowed. Aunt Patty loved having me around in her home. In the summers of my early childhood she would come to pick me up with her husband; so one day, when her characteristic knock on our front door came, I was surprised to see her husband replaced by a somber waif.

I was reserved from Isla like any other boy at that age, though fascinated at how she was so fragile, so different from me. How her arms stuck to her sides like limp pasta and that when I held her for the first time, I felt her soft, pale skin sink into the hardness of her bones. As we grew up I realized that the other boys liked her demented face. That she was, perhaps, beautiful under a certain aesthetic category. And when my face finally started being home to hair, I loved her too.

It was not the explosive romance people write about in the fiction section of men’s magazines but the increasing weight I felt whenever I visited her to find her pressed against a corner of the bedroom, crying. It was the palpitation that occurred whenever I felt her breathing into my neck, the coldness of my feet when she would tell me she would never bother to find her real parents because she was “okay here.” You could say that she was a burden I wanted to bear.

Like in any old romance, we grew apart. She went to her men and I went to my dog-eared books, until one day I found her again on my doorstep. “I’m with a bad man, Toby,” she said.

They say it in all the books: four years pass and your first love reels you in with a sad face and ugly blue spots on her cheeks, and you rescue her with bed sheets like the hero she needs you to be until she gobbles you up and spits you out like whatever she has taken from every man.

In the end she never gives you anything.

2

“Do you remember what happened when you were,” she presses a finger to her lips in recollection, “fifteen? Were you fifteen? When the house was attacked by termites and we came home from the park to all of these termites flying around?”

I nod. In truth I was sixteen years old, but that does not matter.

“Yes. Well, the next day you had to go home because your parents were feeling a bit uneasy with the whole termite situation. Mother called someone to treat the house. They had to get rid of our kitchen counters, cabinets, everything! For a long time the kitchen looked like a storm went through it. It was almost empty.

“I was nineteen then. Eventually Mother gave up on the house although it was an heirloom for her late husband. The day we moved out, she was crying really hard.”

3

We walked around and my steps disturb the distortion, the melting of colors above the cemented ground, an inferior mirage. It is something I did not fully understand. Light is an elusive concept, as is "home." That day, we took our last strides from outside and sank into an unfamiliar pool of dejection as soon as we opened the old door. The old door to Aunt Patty’s, the house at the end of the cul-de-sac; one being repaired, renovated, and fixed because it is dying.

It began years ago, not too suddenly. Nobody saw the decay until the deformation on the wooden cabinets grew more prominent, like curdled milk. Nobody minded when a little frass accumulated on the shelves, when the paint cracked or appeared like a bubbling cauldron of questionable stew. For the longest while, the house was kept ill and nobody was bothered.

The first attack was on the night of a rainy Tuesday; Isla and I walked home as the sun was disappearing and the sky was cloaked with a vehement longing for another day. The lights were off and we thought everyone was away, which was odd because Aunt Patty never goes anywhere. The garage was lit, though, so we went that way to the other entrance.

We saw it – the tempest of winged, godlike termites – and we ran as fast as we could to reach the backdoor, our faces almost torn apart by the nauseating feel of tiny wings batting against our skin.

That night was our first massacre. We turned on the lights in her bedroom and opened the windows. We felt imperial, except we were wallowing in our own dirt. They came in five's, then ten's, then twenty's, to the fluorescent light bulb, fifteen watts of murderous intent. We killed them in five's, then ten's, then twenty's.

I did not do much afterward. Isla swept away the wings and bodies as I lay limp on the bed from exhaustion, seconds away from deep sleep.

4

From what I can see, from the flesh unconcealed by her woolly sweater, there is the smallest hint of age. It is not the rotting obscenity of wrinkles and age spots, but the smooth skin of a woman who just turned twenty-six. It is the skin that carries liquid foundation, pressed powder, and various shades of blush-on. I know this because once she spent thirty full minutes trying to explain.

When she squints at a framed photograph behind me, I can see little lines at the outer edge her eyes and some of the dust from the powder fall off.

“I’m sorry but I’m going to get married soon. I’m going to start a family, and that means I can’t come and visit you as much.”

She stops tapping then takes my hands into the small enclosure of hers.  The lack of physical labor has kept her palms soft to the bone. They are a distinct contrast to the hardness of her face, which, in the approaching sunset, appears transparent to the tempest stirring up inside of her. Around us, notes of Chopin’s Nocturnes float around like gossamer sheets, barely masking the history of the room.