An Old Friend, and: After Leaving, and: Mistake

Abstract

An Old Friend, and: After Leaving, and: Mistake Amanda Allen (bio) An Old Friend A friend and I went to a museum. We hadn’t talked in a few years. There had been some falling out, some anger, someone to blame. Neither admitted to remembering, so in silence we agreed to let it all go. We had been meaning to go look at art, but stumbled instead, out of the cold, into the Museum of Natural History— dinosaur skeletons, a room of diamonds, the giant squid translucent and leathered sprawling inside a Plexiglas tank, it was all wrong. But we stayed. The cold outside kept us, encasing us in its own way so that we gave up hope of finding the place we had meant to go. In a later conversation, I asked what he meant by quoting Keats, So in my veins red life might stream again and thou be conscience-calmed. See here it is— I hold it towards you while we were looking at giant sloths. Strange, even for him, and I couldn’t remember the thing I had said first or if I had said anything at all. [End Page 124] It was only a response, he said, nothing to dwell on. Maybe I had said what I was thinking: that an unspoken word can never stand in for mercy. This formality we held each other to. We took the metro home, kissed each others’ cheeks, we’d meet for coffee sometime in the coming month. Or sometime. Outside the sky was so blue, so blindingly blue. After Leaving Eventually, I had to wash the clothes he left in my bedroom. To think he’d left his smell on purpose, to think he might come back for it or for anything. Here’s the thing about holding on: years ago, when the family dog died, my father kept her body out in the garage in a blue canvas bag. Waiting for a night when we were all home, waiting for a weekend or a nice day. Waiting then, of course—because it was late November and snowing almost every day—for the ground to thaw. For weeks the body lay curled and cold, stiffening in the bag. Our neighbors put up Christmas lights. Wire reindeer congregated along the edges of lawns, half buried after the snow plow went by. My sister and I would dig into the dirt-crusted mounds at the start of the driveway, snow collapsing in on us before we dug through to the other side. Those months were darkest, even in the daytime—the sky that terrible opacity, the scent of snow hanging dry and harsh in the air, urging us all inside. Even as kids we kept our heads down, [End Page 125] quiet, half the year spent waiting for it to end. And that November my father, going out each night to drink, sitting with the canvas bag. I would be in the kitchen doing homework, listening for goodbyes, for decay. Maybe I was young, but it seemed to me that regret is all the dead leave us. And we did bury it in the spring, dug up some of the lilacs that grew wild around the backyard. Where my father tossed them— half-heartedly over the fence like old brush, like a mound of garbage—they took root and continued to grow. Mistake The burn—I won’t say—is from an iron, innocent enough at first. The shirt laid out over the bed the heating metal a familiar thing, the smell, curling across cotton. But then, as if in a trance, my hand lifting to my chest. Thoughtlessly, directly, the small triangle tip touching—just for a moment, less—the skin above my left breast. I won’t say I did it to myself. How foolish a thing to admit. And for a moment I could think it didn’t happen really, just a strange impulse. Until the pink stinging of flesh, the smell. In sleep, the triangle burns cold. In my dreams, it is always winter. No more than a moment, but enough to blister, burst the skin. The thinness of each layer peeling back, [End Page...