Animal (excerpt)
snippet from what was meant to eventually turn into a novel, written in November of last year
i.
There is a bit of confetti in his hair and I notice but I don’t say anything. I hope that later, in the bathroom, searching his reflection for wine-flushed cheeks or whatever it is men above the age of fifty do in front of mirrors at a party, he’ll see it and think of me, and wonder if I saw and if I thought about telling him but then didn’t.
Maddison is quite beautiful today and he smiles at me while he lights my cigarette. One cigarette, that’s all I get from him. I thought about getting upset at him but a man that pretty doesn’t deserve my coldness.
“Let’s walk,” he says, nodding away from the house and he pushes a cigarette between his lips as well and I do as he says because I won’t complain today.
The house looks bigger at night, mightier.
We walk and we smoke and it’s cold, somehow colder the further we get from the house. The loose gravel crunches under my boots and I wonder what roller-skating on these grounds would go like. Then I think about roller skating in the house, in the big reading room upstairs, how loud it would be and how I’d probably fall as I’m not exactly good at roller skating and the floor is a little slippy.
Something about the loose gravel reminds me of Maddison – it’s there because when the tarmac is still hot, sharp little stone fragments get pressed down into it, to give cars a better a grip while driving, but there are always a few of those little, tiny stones that don’t get stuck and only lie there, lie there and make a hell of a noise when you drive over them, that will leave a scar from when you were fifteen and decided to steal your younger brother’s skateboard and a bottle of rotten-tasting booze from your father’s office, and you fell on your exposed knees as you were only wearing a skirt because you liked the way it made your mother frown.
Maddison is like that. He really is beautiful – tall and dark and buzzed, his high cheekbones making him look famished in the weak light from the street lamp. He is like that in the way that he fits in or leaves the impression he does, but once you get close, once you drive your younger brother’s skateboard over him, he makes you trip and fall and crash and your knees will forever carry the ghost of decisions you made and quickened heartbeats you will never get back.
ii.
He likes my place. I can tell. I know it’s a lot different than his, smaller, of course, and it smells different – I remember the house smelling like sandalwood and old spice and the pasta he made us, while mine only smells like burnt candle wax and the subtle stench the building came with, its very own special note of rot.
He likes it. There is a faint smile on his lips, the corners upturned. His hair is a little damp from the rain and it reminds me to bring my umbrella. Where did I leave it? Did I leave it at the house?
I spot it by the door and I’m filled with something along the lines of disappointment. Oh, the thought of knowing something of mine is at the house while he’s away, while he’s with me. Like a lonely umbrella would somehow make me more connected to him – there’s a clicking noise from the kitchen, indicating the electric kettle has done its job regardless of its admittedly dire condition.
“Made tea,” I say and his smile doesn’t waver despite my biting tone – I don’t mean to sound so displeased, but seeing as I am displeased, I refuse to feel bad for it.
“Lovely,” he replies and it irks me how he says it, not quite smug but amused, amused by either me or something that I did, not that there’s really a difference, though he claims there is.
He follows me into the kitchen and once again I feel enamored by the lightness of his step. A man his size should not possess the elegance of a fairy and yet I barely hear him behind me, only the crackling of his coat, the one that’s definitely too cheap for him to own, but he does anyway because he doesn’t care for things like that.
The kitchen is warm and cold at the same time – I’ve cranked the radiator next to the fridge up, no matter how counterproductive that might be to not only the half-empty almond milk in the far back of my fridge, that I probably should’ve thrown out if I am trying to make a good first (or at least a redeeming third) impression on the man in the room with me, but also my electricity bill.
“It gets cold in the winter.” I immediately regret saying it, because if he didn’t notice before, he definitely does now.
Maddison doesn’t reply and I catch him looking at my things like it’s one of those art exhibits filled with works meant to make you feel uneasy and disgusted with the entire human race, but for some reason they have a strangely calming effect on you, like you finally found a place you can belong, like you’re one of the unnerving pieces just waiting to be hung up on the wall.
His eyes remain on the picture frame hanging over the kitchen table I cleaned for him, containing a photograph of me and my brother when we were, I believe, seventeen and fourteen, when my hair was longer and my smile darker.
I used to have braces and I feel embarrassed that he knows this about me now. I was so blue at seventeen. A sad excuse for a teenage girl whose parents weren’t even divorced.