Gone Lawn 64 : Laurie Blauner

My child is blowing soap bubbles that float and then burst around me as I enter our front door. I’m carelessly but glamorously clad in a black silk dress that looks like a bomb had recently exploded inside it. The holes and rips in the fabric are meant to be sexy. One of my black high heels accidentally punctures a skidding bubble on the floor. Shimmering, effervescent water splatters the back of my shoe. My mother sometimes scours the apartment, mumbling how she lost her children and can’t find them, until she sees my child. I discover her trying to juggle the bubbles the child is blowing in a stream her way.

You’re full of interesting minutes inside, she tells the soapy water balls that pop between her grasping fingers. But I’m already exhausted and thinking about work tomorrow. It’s late and my young child is growing bored and dragging out her enormous stuffed bear from a chair in the kitchen.

I take him with me everywhere, she explains to her half-empty soapy bottle on the table. Then she abandons him on the floor.

None of us are talking to each other, only to the inanimate objects that surround us. It’s easier. You’d never know we are related.

I nod, thinking about how this bald man liked being upside down and wanted to do something that perhaps couldn’t be undone. Instead we did what wouldn’t be noticeable outside my clothing. But I feel alive again and glad about it. It’s been a long time since my short, bad marriage and it’s terribly late. Outside I watched the moon disappear behind clouds like an afterimage from the man’s silver car when he dropped me off.

I remove my shoes and chase the child around the few rooms of the apartment. She’s squealing and the soapy water, in the plastic jar she’s clutching again, drips along the floor. I wonder what the neighbors think we do to her.

Coffee? My mother seems preoccupied with fiddling with kitchen gadgets, taking the pieces apart and then trying to place them back together.

The child is in her pink bedroom feeding the remaining contents of her bottle to a plastic doll, tilting it onto the doll’s lips until whatever is left dribbles out.

I like this man, I tell my perplexed mother. She shakes her head. In the kitchen I notice that the small dog-shaped planter, with its spiky green aloe vera, has been placed onto a table. I stare at its unchangeable ceramic dog face then move it back to the window sill.

You always do, she mumbles. I like living in bubbles. They’re in the toilet and bath, in my dresser drawers, on my toast. She sits, wipes invisible ones off her arms.

But I’m thinking about the man. How hard it was to rise up out of his bed and put my fussy clothes back on as his clock argued with its loud, nonstop ticking. Afterwards he lit a cigarette and all those fumes filled me with secondhand smoke. I dared them to kill me faster.

My mother is staring at my abandoned black high heeled shoes near the front door as if they might walk outside, into the dark, shabby hallway, soon.

I have feelings that I sometimes need to hide in plain sight. It’s nearly dawn. Soon I will be arguing with my computer and all those customers zipping around my screen. The child will be off to school. My mother will sing songs as she cleans. The bald man is tender in his own way, holding my wrists, doing things for me that I like. Everything accumulates inside. I gather all my emotions into a bomb-shaped object which I consider letting loose into the morning.

Laurie Blauner’s flash fiction has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Laurel Review, LIT magazine, The Rupture, The Best Small Fictions and New World Writing among other magazines. Her second hybrid nonfiction book, called Swerve, was just released from Rain Mountain Press. She’s the author of The Solace of Monsters and a recent novel is available from Spuyten Duyvil Press. Her latest poetry book, Come Closer, won the Library of Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander Press. Her website is www.laurieblauner.com. She lives in Seattle, Washington.