
A Crack in the Woods by Sarah Brokamp
The sun is red today, and I don’t know what to say to you. I am staring at this red sun cutting through the smudged clouds, buckling under the decision to say everything or nothing. I imagine you at the kitchen sink, hands plunged into the dish water. You loved making a home for me. And I have hated destroying it in secret. I don’t know how to show you the mess I made, my ghastly desire, and why you are not enough for me.
Every day I come to the woods. They sit a few meters from our back fence. Sometimes I don’t use the gate but hop it instead. I want to feel young, like everything has yet to happen. Like the greatest risk is a scraped knee clamoring over a fence. It is only when I am in the forest that I can breathe. Unapologetically breathe. Breathe without interrogation. What were you talking about? Where did you go? Were you with him?
Everything today is red. The buzzy paths of bees scream red. Shadows flip over leaves, turning them scarlet. Everything feels too big and too frail. My pain is red as an open mouth, orbiting my body. I think of us, in your old bed, running fingers down each other’s noses. I think of us with our elbows on the table, leaning in to tell secrets, kissing in the crosswalk, arguing in that rectangle of light on your apartment floor. I think of us. Before the country house, before the woods, before him. I think of it all and feel as if I am bleeding from somewhere but can’t find the wound. I tilt my chin to the sky, I say your name silently to myself, as if it will all make sense.
It was your birthday. That is when the questions started. I peeled off my dress and laid myself bare on our coffee table. I wanted to be served up like a roast. Ravished like a fresh carcass. I wanted to want you as much as you wanted me. I was bare in the bright afternoon light, nothing hidden. Until this point we only had sex in darkness, like a respectable couple with too much to hide. You looked at me, excited, but also sensing something was wrong. Dramatic acts are only done when something is wrong. After, you asked if I ever fantasized about other people—strangers on the street, our friends, coworkers. And without hesitation I said yes. That’s when it started, a simple confession that loosened all the others.
I press my palms into the mud. I think of him and not you. Again. I think of how he smells after we fuck. Sweet and damp. I think about the slope of his shoulders, the notches down his spine that I count when he lays next to me. When we first moved to the country, I fantasized about him while I cradled the phone to my cheek and listened to you talk about orange canyons and the coyotes you could hear at night. You were away, visiting a friend in Salt Lake City. I was home, squatting in our new house amongst sealed boxes, building a TV stand. I didn’t go with you because I needed time to settle into our new space. I needed it to feel like mine, not ours. I needed the freedom in knowing that I chose this place for me and no one else. The house shrinks and grows as if under a spell. Sometimes the walls squeeze me in. Other times it leaves me panicked by the expanse.
Tree roots rope around my ankles. They are a deep dark purple, like an asphyxiated face. A beetle crawls atop my boot, caked in mud. I wiggle it off. It is here the noise of questions and desire transforms into twig breaking and leaf crunching. I can’t feel him or hear you. I am as quiet and unimportant as a moth. Papery and distant. But today is different. The rattle of autumn isn’t changing anything. I swear I can hear you washing dishes, the sucking of the drain. I swear I can feel his hand on my back. I can feel and hear everything.
I breathe in deeply. And out. It is insane that it takes a whole lifetime to learn how to breathe like this. Slowly and intentionally. The red sun is sliding out of the sky. The trees reach up and up, and because of this nothing seems as bad as I once thought. Leaves tremble and when they finally spring loose from the branch it is a graceful act of freefall. All around me these trees are sighing, relieved by what they are able to let go of. Leaves are spiraling down, as if they were dared but secretly wanted to fall anyway. I feel the crack in my chest and I know it’s time. I walk myself home.
Sarah Brokamp work has appeared in Lammergeier Magazine, RuneStone Journal and 34th Parallel LitMag. She won the Jerome Lowell DeJur Prize for her manuscript,The Brighter Ones Are Deadly. She received her M.F.A. from The City College of New York. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
18 March 2022
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