Paper Planes
by Laura Madeline Wiseman
You are on your knees clutching the
thighs of your ex-roommate. Your ex-roommate reclines on the couch. It’s the
middle of the day and the sound of traffic tires lap at you like ocean waves
while you wait. Fine, he says, but for how long? You shrug, kiss
his knee cap, and leave the room to unload your car. Each box enters the wedge
and nook of your old room, eight months later. You tuck your full-size mattress
below the windowsill. You arrange the desk against the wall. You tack up lace
curtains to partition the door-less closet from the room, all this in the exact
order of the past. Why had you left, anyway? Because it became clear that once
you arrived, there was nothing you could do. On the window ledge you see the
plastic blue hairbrush you thought you threw out, one yellowing aloe, and an
ivy plant, leggy and small. The only thing you don’t do is remember the eight
months of your absence, nor the first nineteen years of your life. Last month,
you turned thirty-three.
Your ex-roommate’s flatmate ducks
into the front hall, peers at you, but enters the kitchen for a can of cola and
a bag of cheese curls. He bangs around and ducks into the living room where you
sit in a red satin men’s bathrobe and a pair of tighty whities. Who are you?
the flatmate asks. You answer, but at that moment a train cries in the
distance, a motorcycle guns, and a semi backs down the street enveloping your
words in diesel engine and the ding-ding warning signal. The wind from the open
window bathes you both. Your nipples harden, but the flatmate doesn’t notice. Well,
alright, he says, watch out, someone pissed in that room at the last
party. I’d get a lock.
You get a lock. Then you think
better of it and get two locks. The flimsy chain kind and a dead bolt, which
you’re not sure will work given that the doors to your room are French doors
and paned in glass. But you have no options. It’s either here or your mother’s
house, and your mother has a gun. Correction. Your mother has the gun.
In your room there’s a hole in the screen of the window, big enough for a fist.
You drop things through the hole you don’t want: the blue hairbrush, cheese
curls you found beside your computer that you did not put there, and
pharmaceutical vials from the medicine cabinet. You drop them and wait for
their sound, but something interrupts: a dog barks, footsteps to the apartment,
a low knock on your door. When the noises stop, and they do sometimes, you try reasonable-enough
therapies: exercise, journaling, deep, long breaths.
*American Short Fiction does not intend to objectify or demean these stories with use of the term pinup; our intention is to give our readers full exposure to great writing.
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