treatswords

Whiskey makes my heart beat quick. Black panther pawing through the jungle. Thump, thump, thump, thump. I wonder if I started a metronome if my heart would beat to that beat. And if I ate a raw beet right now, would my teeth stain red? And if I walked around aimlessly with red teeth, would people be frightened of me?

“A vampire!” A woman yells, her heels clacking on cobblestone. I smile wide but I have no fangs.

People will think I’ve had too much red wine.

“She’s on her fourth glass.” A woman with long white hair whispers to her husband. His eyes grow wide.

I am drunk and on the loose. Heart racing, my blood a deep cabernet.

“Maybe I’ll steal your husband.” I think. His navy sports coat and brown Sperry’s scream, I will fuck you in the bathroom, just say the word.

Instead, I move past him and grab a handful of olives from a plastic tray and shove them in my mouth. I don’t even like olives. The pimiento pepper in the center reminds me of a snake’s tongue.

Hiss hiss.

I stumble onto the balcony and spit them down below. A woman in a fur coat is walking her Dalmatian. I imagine its name is, “Spot.” The olives and their snake tongues hit her shoulder. I can’t see them land on her purse strap, but she suddenly looks up and shouts, “What in God’s name?”

I duck behind the steel bars.

I pretend this woman’s name is Marry. Marry and Spot. She travels home pissed about the wet mush of olives on her fur that smell despicably like aged grapes.

“If I had any respect for myself, I would march up to that apartment, knock on the door and demand to know who spit at me. Who does such a thing? It is beyond distasteful.”

She carries on, purse over her shoulder, playing the conversation she would have with the said olive spitter again and again. In one version of it, Marry punches the person square in the face and shouts, “Spit on that!”

But as she passes by third street, she hears a low growl from the dark alley beside her. A shadow appears. A man in a ski mask, black denim, shiny boots.

“Give me your purse.” He mumbles through the fabric stretching around his mouth a 223-riffle pointing at her head.

She screams, Spot flips on its back, tongue hanging out, wanting belly rubs.

She cries, pulling her Gucci purse from her despicably wet shoulder. He rips it from her and runs back into the dark lagoon in which he emerged. The Loch Ness Monster with the long neck who almost took her life.

She cries her way home until she enters the front door of her mansion in Carnegie Hill, Manhattan. Her husband is hunched over the dining room table. His face is in his hands and he’s visibly crying too. He looks up and runs to her.

“What’s wrong?”

Earlier that morning, she’d looked at him pouring his coffee and said, “I want a divorce.”He’d dropped the cup on the kitchen linoleum. Blue porcelain scattering beneath counters and tables like cockroaches in bright light. She had stared at the steaming black coffee on the checkered floor and all she could manage to say is, “Please clean that up Howard,” before she fled out the door.

But now she’s leaning into him. Having her life flash before her eyes, she realized one thing. She didn’t want a life that didn’t include him. Every memory that flipped like slides on a projection screen were of him. Their first date sitting on a pink leather booth at the local diner, ketchup on his chin, a big grin filling up his face. His wrinkled hands that hold hers perfectly inside. “They were made to hold each other.” He’d said the first time he’d slipped his hand around hers at the drive in theater. His long gray mustache that curled up on both ends. A silver basket that seemed to hold onto everything, like crumbs that inevitably fall beneath the couch cushions.

Beneath that florescent light, Mary forgot all about the green, spit coated olives.

It’s all about perspective.

And when I wake on the balcony in the wee morning hours. Hangover sitting like Jell-O in my brain, shaking back and forth with every small movement, I decide to get sober. Peeling myself up, teeth furry from sleeping beneath a sheet of wine, hair as greasy as my face, I walk through the apartment, bottles on the floor, a body sprawled out on the couch.

I open the door and walk into the sun.