A Thousand Starlings
A Short Story via Ingredients
On the day of the event, you organized your ingredients and cookware on the countertop the way a sniper would organize rifles and scopes, in a geometric puzzle with an invisible outer boundary:
(1) All-Purpose Flour. You woke up with half of the blankets and sheets ripped from the mattress, swirled into a ball and cradled into your arms. Again, the fitted sheet snapped from the corners on your side of the bed despite the high friction pads I bought you six months ago. But you made the bed every day, smoothed out the patterned comforter and tucked it beneath the pillows. This process was part of your nature, immutable and automatic. You washed the sheets on the second Friday of each month.
(2) Vanilla Extract. You tugged your hair back into a wet ponytail and then dropped it over your left shoulder. You clicked on the television. You pulled your legs up in front of you and locked your knees toward your chest by wrapping your right arm around your shins. You swung your phone up to your face and scrolled through: scroll, scroll, scroll, scrolled for five minutes while the tv blared the news. You don’t even watch the news. You abandoned your phone the way you always would, leaving it face down for hours, oblivious to its buzzing and brightening. Turn off vibrate so that if I text you’ll pick up. You nodded without looking at me and bit into (one) cinnamon pop-tart (cold), holding it like it was its own plate and pushing it into your mouth.
(3) Salted Butter (most people use unsalted but the salt adds just the right savory notes). You would look at me that certain way that made your face look flat and your eyes like the white crescents on the base of thumbnails and I would want to hold you there forever and not let you leave, not let anyone else in the world see the way your ears attached to your head like a stamen to a stalk. Because if they saw you they would see what I have and no, no — I couldn’t let anyone else see what I had because they would take it from me and then I would have nothing. Nothing to prove that I am even here. You are my goddamn all-everything, with your flat face and crescent eyes.
(4) A small mixing bowl, lime green, and from beneath the sink, your hand mixer, also lime green. At first to myself, and then eventually out loud, I would say “please no.” I would say, “how do people not remember how many times they tell a story and to whom?” But it never failed — you would tell me about the children’s book you were going to write one day about the lime green mixer and the lime green bowl, one from Target and one from Walmart and — jesus — not even the same fucking brand! Yet perfectly matched in color, the same exact lime green. And the nice lady — that nice lady — she brought them together in the perfect untroubled Union of chocolate chip cookies.
(5) Baking Soda. If the sheets smelled strange a few days prior to the second Friday of the month, you would rapid-fire three shots of Febreze — 1–2–3 — over the bedspread and then breathe in deeply, excessively deep really, as if to prove that you had maintained for one or two more days the delicate balance of our biome. I enjoyed the smell of it, sometimes. Sometimes the smell of the Febreze just mentally cued me to the smell of sweat and spit and cum still curled into the folds of the sheets. I didn’t like when you did this, because I prefer to lay back down into bed for awhile after I put my socks on, but then I couldn’t because of the feeling of cold uneven dampness that Febreze left on fabric. Not the feeling of dry sweat or spit or cum, but the dampness, oh yes the dampness was not of me, or even half of me, and was like unheated shower water hitting my head when I forget to stand out of the way.
(6) Just over two cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips. I knew that your placement and replacement of the moveable parts of our home was your way of keeping it together, holding back the swell of impounded water from creeping above the line. You push cookie dough like putty into cracks, because you knew, you’ve known for awhile, and goddamn you for never saying you knew, making me the criminal, me the one that was failing to try. Although you know it has nothing to do with trying, nothing to do with fighting, it just is. It just is as much as one likes or does not like tomatoes. It is not to be quantified. It cannot be negotiated. And the more I try to undo it the more it undoes me and I can’t, I can’t.
Here baby, you can lick the spoon. Before I put the eggs in.
(7) One wooden spoon for mixing, dulled. One piece of art hung on our East wall. One piece of art hung on our West wall. On the left, a 20x30 canvas covered in what looked like a shower of sparks pressed into a deep black background. The Eastern (and smaller) print was a sepia shot of a starlings murmurating, swirling over a silhouette of tree line in northern Australia. I did not care for the first and deeply disliked the second. You said the starlings were beautiful the way they moved, each separate to himself yet part of something bigger and more coherent. I said (and I still say) the starlings looked like a swarm of locusts, like the plague, and I don’t like waking up thinking about the Old Testament or bugs or blood above doors and the fucking wrath of the almighty.
(8) One measuring cup. It was the eleventh time, not the ninth or tenth, but the eleventh, that something about that iteration of the lime-green story dropped a single cup, a dollop, a heaping tablespoon into the reservoir, the impounded water, the water that was still and placid and really just fine, just inched over the top and extravasated into the room. Yes, that was the moment. If you want an autopsy, then this was the moment. That critical mass that burst open a seam, the water flooding out, the deluge that drowned and dispersed.
The smell of cookies flooded the apartment. The kitchen was warm, so warm I started to sweat. I opened the small window above the knife set. It stuck in the winter, so I had to beat it open from beneath with my palm.
(9) Two Eggs You would crawl into bed with me, already half asleep, and move your hands around until you found the small dimples on my lower back just above my ass and press them in, and say “on! on! on!” And I would turn and pretend to be mad and then wrap you up in blankets and twist you onto your back and you would smile up at me, daring me, daring me to kiss you in the way that pulled your lips up and smashed the cartilage of your nose up into your eyes, to kiss you so that you sunk your head into the thickness of the pillow and then rebounded back upward toward my face. Pushing at me, pushing like you wanted to push me all the way up and pin me to the ceiling. Our eyebrows velcroing into each other, your soft mellow hair caressing a line across my forehead. Your mouth was a baby bird’s arching up for the worm, your crescent eyes now small lines of stars being passed in hyperspace.
(10) Granulated Sugar. Our desktop, facing out toward downtown, was clean and well organized. You kept two black gel pens perpendicular to the left edge of the laptop. The mousepad with the wrist rest and the wires bundled with a black twist-tie snaking back and down to the outlets. The only piece that seemed to fall outside of natural alignment was my copy of Tous les hommes sont mortels, which you did not adjust.
(11) Chopped Nuts. I said I can’t be with you anymore. I said I don’t think I can be here, not even for one more day. I can’t do this I said to you. You put down the remote and stared up at me. This cramping vacuum, feels like it’s sucking me out through my intestines. Feels honestly like I have to shit but then there’s an upwave too, like being nauseous. But different. My face gets warm. When I sit in the bathroom, you would speak to me through the door about the parade in Hampden and the market in Fells Point and I would double over and shit because there was something in me that I couldn’t get out and your words through the door keep filling me up. And when I kiss you and fuck you I’d start to feel it rattle around inside of me and smash up against my organs, and it would make me sick. So sick, I was so afraid once that I was going to throw up into your mouth. And then you’d ignore my retching and pull back and say “remember when we got that motel room in Adams Morgan just to fuck?”
Say it.
Say it again.
Say it again with all of the colors of our dreams. Say it again so that it really happened, so that it’s not just part of our mythology, so that it’s not just something we did but something we do. To ignore the complacency of our tired sex, so hurried and functional you almost fall asleep, but you keep pushing, I keep pushing, because we want to feel that knot inside of us tighten and then release. You called it “blooming,” but I know it’s just a knot. It’s just a knot.
(12) Oven, heated to 350. How long can we keep our palms in the flame? We promised too much. “I can’t fucking do this anymore” “Can’t do this.” “This.” I say this over and over, it plays like a tape in my head. I say it to your quiet self-deception. I say it to our biome. I say it until honey-thick vinegar drips out of my eyes, and then I rewind. Don’t you understand? — we’re fused at the wound, baby. Come here and let me put my fingers on the back of your arms. Now you cup your hands and cry into my chest. Don’t make it hurt more than it has to, please. I can’t remember the last time we’ve made each other feel safe. So call it a failure. Call it a cosmic error. Call it a draw and we can count to three — 1–2–3 — then rip apart and bleed out on the floor.
Promise me you will wait til they cool. You never wait until they cool and then they fall apart. Wait for them to cool. Please wait. Please wait.
(13) Place on cooling rack. I want to sit next to you on the couch and eat cereal and have you rub the wisp of hair on the back of my neck, idly, dutifully, as if there was absolutely nothing else you’d rather be doing. I want to be frozen there on that couch, with that cereal, and you, and your fingers on the nape of my neck, forever.
The timer beeped relentlessly on the stove.