You’ll Never Find Another

by Lydia Copeland
 

Last night I dreamed I slept with a man who wasn’t Tom. He whipped my body with a guitar string that left thin, stinging cuts in places where Tom would see and know I’d been unfaithful. The man was someone I knew. A former college professor. A shit in real life too.

I was in my house in the dream but it had extra rooms. Nearly every night I dream of houses with hidden rooms. After a few dreams, I know the rooms are there and begin to look for them, long hallways, doors in walls. I walk around in a green cardigan, opening cabinets, sliding curtains. A handful of lentils in my sweater pocket.

This morning I think about how good I have it with Tom.

I spoon mashed bananas, my mouth moving with the baby’s. My face taking on his expression. Tongue short like a parakeet tongue. The round cap of a mushroom. Tom laughs when he catches me in the act.

You can’t chew for him, he says.

The baby’s name is James. But we’ve started calling him Jimmy.

Jimmy swallows, moves forward and says, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh!

There is a glob of banana–like a loogie–on his hedgehog bib.

I’ve tried hard not to lose myself in Jimmy. To keep some sense of my old life just as people told me I should when I was pregnant.

But I can’t stop staring at him. Wondering if he’ll get the loose kneecaps that were such a problem in my childhood. So easily dislocated. Will he get Tom’s tenderness? Bringing cups of water. Valentines on random days.

I still enjoy walks in the woods. The Paris Review.

Shower sex is the only sex Tom and I have lately. We can make noise there while Jimmy sleeps, and I can pretend to be someone else. Someone anonymous and less attached. Tom slips in behind me after I’ve warmed a while, and I lean against the back wall, the tile slick under my elbows. I let my mind unspool into a flash of faces. Mostly women and men with jobs in offices. But sometimes I think of sea foam on a shore. Or resin hardening into amber. Yesterday morning I thought of the Andean bone cave someone found in the basement of their home in Mexico.

Skulls petrified to the wall.

It has rained and rained. Rained for weeks on end, the way it does every February in East Tennessee, the way it did last February when we lost the giant oak, its root system a sponge of yellow fungus. The garden fence has lost its grip in the ground. Posts fall over like collapsed flowers. Two have snapped–rain-rotted–in the earth, and this weekend I’ll repair them with a set of stakes Tom fashioned in his woodshop. The stakes are stunning, as long as my arm with a picket point at the bottom. The kind of stakes that make vampires nervous.

Jimmy inches forward more. Crying now. He wants the banana, but he cannot figure out how to work his tongue. How to keep the food in and not push it out. I feel his frustration.

Let me have a go, Tom says. I give him the miniature spoon, the bowl of banana. We switch places.

It’s mid-morning and I’m already tired. Ready to fall into a quick sleep. My arm across Tom’s chest. In a dream world, dizzy with secret bathrooms, corridors and landings. I walk through tile by tile, plank by plank, stud by stud. Finding the prize of an unsung room with drawers from someone else’s life. Tissues in a box. Flowers on the wall.

 

Lydia Copeland Gwyn’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Elm Leaves Journal, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, the Florida Review, JMWW, Gone Lawn, and others. Her book of flash fiction, Tiny Doors, is available from Another New Calligraphy. She is an instruction librarian living in East Tennessee with her husband and children.

 

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Muslin

by Lydia Copeland

I stab myself on the lemon tree. I’m after Sweet Peas, the pink one in the red clay along the bank where the kitchen scraps are tossed three times a day. “Here, Tom!” says Ma, and the cats come bouncing from beneath the house or from inside the boat that sits in the sunny part of the yard. I squeeze my finger until a globe of blood swells out.

There are flowers on the velour of the couch, golden and orange like the height of summer. Aunt Livy nurses Little Joe there, while Big Joe sleeps in the guest room where the blue curtains blow in the air conditioning vent and the shelves of pickles turn mushy in their jars.

Pop and his boys swing golf clubs, hit balls off the car jack and into the dry creek bed, where I used to pour kettles of water wishing it would rain and the creek would run again. Wild onions on my jeans and dirt, the curl of new leaves in the garden. It’s summer, but I always picture fall and winter and burning garbage piles, brick chimneys. Pop’s words like butterscotch around the dove house. All the men stoking the fire and us cousins sleeping on the carpet by the hearth all night, watching the kenneling split and crack and glow toward ash. Eyes closed while the walls creak in the wind.

Pop gives Ma’s injections in the bedroom with the door closed. I want to see. It is part of my fear of needles. The door from there has been removed or perhaps it was never there. Ma wears a hat. It is red and hand knit. Pop holds her arm steady. He keeps her supplies in the dresser drawer. She has a baby doll in there as well that looks like a real baby.

Pop smells whiskery, like Listerine and aftershave and car engines, like the orange and blue Gulf Gas Station ring that keeps the key to the bunk house where more relatives live. A husband and wife, newlyweds. They sleep in a skinny bed with tools hanging on the walls and a film of motor oil over everything. They have piles of mail on tables and bicycle chains and discarded books from the library. Dante and Bluebeard, the Clue in the Diary, the Wind in the Door.

There are apples and chocolate snack pies in a bowl on the kitchen table. The aunts embroider there. They knit baby socks and wear Harley Davidson t-shirts and jeans. They talk about their bosses, some lady in line at the bank, a rude driver. The newlyweds have matching chain wallets. The husband has a mustache, is rail thin. The wife’s hair is like Tenille’s of the Captain and Tenille.

I sneak around, watching the aunts mother their babies, someone slicing an onion over a pot of water, the gray cats through the bedroom window walking in the garden. Some afternoons I see Ma rocking that baby on the edge of the bed and whispering into its muslin face, its Christening gown like the sway of a candle flame.

Outside I see the daytime moon, and it is faint as a fingerprint. My cousins have up-turned the biggest rocks and removed all the Sow bugs. The land is damp and red, and the trees feel wet to the center.

I put my finger in my mouth and suck and lick until the blood is gone. It is easy to make it go away, like rolling out dough, like pulling plums out of pies.

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Lydia Copeland’s stories have appeared in Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2010, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Flash Fiction, Glimmer Train, The Mississippi Review and others. She works at a library in Manhattan and lives in New Jersey with her husband and son.

Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.

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