from PRETEND I AM REAL

Every time Leigh Chadwick closes her eyes, she sees a dead animal on the side of the road. A deer. A dove. A duck. A dodo. A Danger Mouse B-side. It doesn’t matter what animal; the animal is always dead—nothing but patches of skin and fur covering what skin and fur was always meant to cover. Some. A word. One. Another word. Everything is always a word, and a word is always one is a thought Leigh Chadwick has. When Leigh Chadwick closes her eyes, the dead animal is tattooed on the back of her eyelids. A duckbilled platypus. A dog hiding from a missing poster taped to every light pole down the block and the block next to that block. Somewhere, someone is crying. Somewhere, something howls. I breathe in the most obvious tenor is another thought Leigh Chadwick has. Leigh Chadwick likes to walk when she’s not driving, but today she’s driving. The sign off highway 61 reads Fallen Rocks. There is no Beware! in front of Fallen Rocks. There is no Warning! There is just one word plus one word: Fallen and then Rocks. Leigh Chadwick keeps her hands on the wheel, ten and two. She looks for rocks, the fallen kind, but only sees patches of grass, a Shell station that died a decade before, back when the world was shitty but maybe a little less shitty. Leigh Chadwick blinks and there’s a turtle on the side of the road, upside down, turned inside out. Leigh Chadwick tries to remember the days before she learned what it meant to blink. She can’t remember. The days, she feels, were so long ago. Leigh Chadwick realizes she can’t remember much: The morning she watched the body bags pile on top of each other, like clumps of coal. Or the morning Oklahoma fell off the map. Or which song was playing through the loudspeakers when Waco turned into an afternoon barbecue. Instead of discovering facts, Leigh Chadwick turns off Highway 61 and spends the afternoon in a Macy’s fitting room, trying on metaphors and similes. Leigh Chadwick is a check engine light. Leigh Chadwick is a piece of gum you swallowed three years ago. Leigh Chadwick stands in front of the dressing room mirror. She keeps herself straight, stiff. The hair on her skin turns needles. She holds her breath. She knows if she does this long enough, her blood will turn sweet and thick—a brown malaise—and that she will turn into a tree. But Leigh Chadwick breathes deeply. She bends and stretches. She tries on a chimney from the 1940s. She tries on a black dress that looks like a third date. Leigh Chadwick is a universal remote. She is an out of the office email. Leigh Chadwick closes her eyes. When she opens them, she is standing at the checkout counter. She buys a dress shaped like a dress. As she leaves the mall, Leigh Chadwick promises to learn how to pray again. She doesn’t know what that means. Leigh Chadwick has never seen an olive that wasn’t drunk. She doesn’t know what that means, either. Leigh Chadwick feels nothing whenever she hears the word smog, though she once ate an entire package of grapes without rinsing them off. Another time she let a candle burn in the foyer while she went out to check the mail. She knows what that means but decides it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters until it does. And then Leigh Chadwick is back in her car, heading out of the parking lot, her hands ten and two on the wheel as she merges back onto Highway 61. Her eyes sting. She wants to rub them. She wants to blink. Instead of blinking, Leigh Chadwick thinks about the Macy’s fitting room—the stiffness of her back, the shortness of her breath, the sap that began to leak out of her skin as her body turned linden.