Temporary Organ by Lauren Slaughter
After our mother died, Gemma, my brother’s girlfriend, moved in. Her situation at home was even more fucked than ours, so I agreed to it, though it’s not like I could really refuse. Mostly, I couldn’t hear the two of them trying to be quiet on the other side of the bedroom wall. Was my ear very hot to the very cool stucco? I couldn’t sleep; sleep was our mother’s gaping fish jaw when they turned off the machine. Gemma suffered a similar restlessness, and sometimes, late, with the owls outside pitching their singular cries through the night of our rural property, she’d leave my brother’s bed and come find me, in the den, where we’d play Xbox until dawn, beanbag to beanbag, munching on dry Fruit Loops. Ready to lose, again? I’d jab, too aware of my newly-sprout Adam’s apple as I spoke, how it slid up and down my throat totally out of control.
Picture the most nothing place you can, and that’s our spot: our acres of tangle at the end of a gravel road, our brick rancher with faded floral bedsheets tacked up for curtains, our brown yard complete with tire swing collapsed into the dust. There’s the window smashed with a baseball-sized hole and the flattened cereal box duct-taped over it. There’s the moldy water stain on the bathroom ceiling shaped like Greenland, a place none of us could ever go. There’s the kitchen ceiling fan my brother and I lay beneath summer afternoons, letting the tile chill our agitated, teenage skin. There’s the entryway penciled with etchings that marked our tallness—me measuring way more than three years shorter than my brother. In pink marker is a single line for Gemma who hasn’t grown an inch since sixth grade.
I met Gemma in Chemistry at the end of our senior year. For a whole semester, I’d watched her slip in late and take the desk behind mine, smelling of lozenges and shampoo. All I knew about her then was that she hummed quietly to herself during exams and always had a diet cream soda propped on her desk, or in her hand. I’d thought about trying to talk to her, maybe asking her something about the winged insect tattoo on her forearm, or even if she wanted a study partner, but the more I thought about it the clearer it became that I am a scared little pussy chicken shit. Then one day, she caught me after class and asked if I knew anybody who could buy her some beer. I said I did. There was a party that night, and maybe I wanted to come? To me, she looked like a very soft, very kind, pilgrim: black dress; ruffled ankle socks; short, bleached hair. More piercings than I could count. When I blushed, she didn’t look away.
“What’s that tattoo of?” I asked, emboldened.
“A moth,” she said, holding out her arm for us to inspect. The eyes of the creature were cartoony and enormous, with spirals for pupils. The wings were different shades of blue feathers and speckled like a hawk’s.
“Rad,” I said. “What kind?”
“It’s not any kind,” she said. “I made it up.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, maybe you should name it.”
“It has a name,” she said, but didn’t offer to share it.
That night the three of us—my brother, Gemma, and me—ended up at some random party in the woods, drunk off the beer my brother bought. It was loud, and cold, with the feeling you might see a shooting star. I sat on a log and counted the mid-drifts of freezing girls to distract me from the hazy bubble I saw forming around Gemma and my brother as they talked, the campfire strobing all the light and all the shadow upon them. He appeared a giant next to her, thick and strong from his construction job. To catch up on the mortgage he’d been clocking overtime, and would come home exhausted and covered with sweet lumber powder. I’d make him our mother’s spaghetti from the recipe taped to the cupboard door as he’d sit outside on the stoop and smoke in stoic silence. Then, over dinner, in front of the news or Law and Order reruns I’d say, Seriously fuck high school, I’ll get a job, help out. Hell no, he’d say, with bloodshot eyes. Your only job is to graduate.
When we were little, and things got bad with my parents, my brother would usher me outside at night to escape their drunken racket, jackets zipped over our pajamas. If the dark was brindled by galaxies, we made sure not to say anything about beauty. Haloed by the moon he’d ask our favorite question: Ready to lose again? Then, one, two, and we were off through the woods, jumping roots in the moonlight, weaving through trees, racing toward nothing in particular, just fast, and hard, and away. With the crisp air widening my eyes, filling them with tears, all I had to do was stay with him. To stay with him was to be safe. In the firelight that night at the party, I could see Gemma beginning to feel that way, too.
Oxygen plus heat plus fuel makes the flame. In chemistry, we learned all about those chain reactions. For example: I brought Gemma to my brother, to our house, and to his bed. And the bed, with its almost-silent springs, puts my brother, five months later, on a late-night run to Food Lion for citrus fruit—grapefruit, oranges, even lemons and limes, halfway to term, Gemma couldn’t get enough. And, then? It puts him right through that red light, smack into a Tyson Foods truck that was plastered with an enormous drumstick.
This plus this plus this makes that. You’re here, you’re here. Poof.
My brother, with his Hot Wheels collection, and concert tee shirts, and stinky-ass farts, and thick neck, and photos of spiderwebs and fall foliage goes from a stupid errand for his pregnant girlfriend to getting pulled from his mangled truck then into an ambulance that didn’t even bother to flare its lights or blare its sirens that night because there is no emergency when a body is headed straight for the morgue.
Eastside Funeral Home, the voice on the other side of Gemma’s phone said when I picked it up off the floor where she’d dropped it. It was the same place we sent our mother, so I already had the name and number fresh on a Post-it-note.
The new crack in the phone glass like a vein.
The service for my brother was the same as for our mother but turn the communal grief up to eleven. Father O’Brien, with a ruddled face that smelled of cigarettes and the most astringent aftershave, spoke of plans for us and afterlives to a hungover church of folks in their best Carhartt slacks and Bargain Basement dresses, their brains periodically flashing images of the deceased to relieve themselves from their mortal selves. I stood there frozen both times, but for my brother’s could not burrow my face in his vinegary armpit because now ropes being held by his former basketball teammates were lowering a box of him into the wet and wormy ground. Also, for bro: add pregnant Gemma sitting graveside, nothing-faced, in a fold-out chair with the most bumbling, inept version of me hovering beside her wondering just what exactly he would have me do here: should I step in? If so, how?
Gemma hands me the scissors and tells me to cut. The haircut is for her job interview—a real one, for which Only Graduates Need Apply, she said. I don’t think she should be handing anything sharp in her condition, just weeks from her due date, but I swallow those words just like I keep mum at the sight of her teetering through the door like an off-balance teapot after her shift at Huddle House. But you see, she does not wish me to express my concerns. She does want to be asked how she’s doing or for me to guide her to the reclining chair and pull the lever that shoots her pink feet and tree trunk legs up. The more bottles of vitamins I leave by the sink, the more she retreats to my brother’s room, door shut. When I picture the baby in her belly, I picture my brother’s kind, sunburnt face sprout with gummy appendages; arms from the ears, legs from his red, stubbled chin. Gemma says she’s sworn off citrus, but I’ve seen the masticated rinds in little piles on the bedroom floor.
“I’ve never done this before,” I warn, looking over Gemma’s head of puffed hair.
“Let’s just get this over with,” she says, squeezing her eyes shut.
Perched on the kitchen stool, our fungal dish towel draped salon-style around her shoulders, she looks tiny—almost shrunken—despite her protruding belly. I wonder what would happen if I made her a peanut butter sandwich right here, right now, or if she’ll ever even open one of the pregnancy books I’ve checked out from the library and stacked around the house, dog-eared beyond usefulness. Headaches, backaches, dizziness, swelling, blurry vision, increase in hormones, decrease in the baby’s movement; it could all be something fatal. And, frankly, it’s all just a tad too surreal, too similar to that alien invasion Xbox game we used to play. Incubating some strange lifeform, her blood has nearly doubled in volume. Her uterus can expand to the size of a watermelon; her placenta’s an ad hoc organ.
I try not to gawk, bite my lip, stare. “Dude,” she’ll say over her shoulder when I’m too attentive, make too many lists, give her that laser beam mien. “It’s just me over here, man—I’m not some weird mother machine.”
The alarms, whispers, and whirrs of it.
The hair-dryer blasts of air the ventilator pushed into my mother’s lungs.
My brother’s deep, low voice talking to doctors in the hall as I held my mother’s hand, which was a limp, translucent fledgling flecked with blue.
“Ask me something,” Gemma, says, her puffed hands feeling around her head for the places I’ve trimmed. I’ve worked slowly, deliberately, careful not to take a single risk. But I’m still shocked that the cut looks so neat and clean.
“Like what?”
“Like something they’ll ask.”
“Miss,” I begin, searching, “what makes you the ideal candidate for this position?”
At first, I’d just be working the front desk, she’d told me when she sent in the application, explaining what the job would entail. But if they like you, they’ll help cover the training program. Two, three years, and we’d be okay, she said, her hand on her belly. In a moment of weakness, I let myself imagine her we to include me. I see our rusty fridge buckshot with alphabet magnets: suspended by the T and the Z is a crayoned drawing of this house with three stick figures grouped out front. See? I’m the tall one, with the worried mouth and zig-zag hair. No. There are four of us; my brother is alive so he can be the tall one and I’m just my face in the window looking out but still in the picture.
“I’m the ideal applicant,” Gemma starts, ready with a catalogue of stock answers. She has both people skills and a sunny disposition; she’s a quick learner, with a can-do attitude, a self-starter go-getter who always keeps her eye on the ball. This morning I had to wake her twice after she slept through both alarms I’d set. Imprints from her pillow ran, like rivers, along her cheek. Beneath her eyes: yesterday’s black makeup. Minus the baby she’s growing, it’s how she looked when she first moved in.
“How was that?” she asks, her voice cracking a little.
“Perfect,” I say, watching her body settle.
“Now, a harder one?”
Tacked to the corkboard with the take-out menus, and Mom’s prayer card, and some crooked school portraits, and all the layered miscellany gathered over two childhoods that I could never distinguish in order to describe, there’s a picture of my brother with his basketball team when they won the league that year. As always, he’s the tallest one with the widest smile. I try to see myself somewhere in it.
“Okay,” I say, putting the scissors down and brushing cut hairs from Gemma’s neck with my fingers, “How about telling me about being a team player—like, an example of it.” I can’t remember Gemma ever talking to a single person who wasn’t me or my brother. She tenses and seems to look around the kitchen for her answer. My fingers go from flicking away the little hairs to feeling her shoulders, which are just as tight as bridge wire. I knead, knead along the tension.
“I’d tell them about your brother,” she finally says, pulling me out of it. She’s settled her gaze on the ceramic, puffed out rooster. “You know, the three of us? This house?”
I was too young to join my father and brother for their target practice sessions in the backyard, and by the time I was old enough the old man was long gone. My mother didn’t like it, but he did let me watch the two of them if I sat way out of the way, which usually meant positioning myself in the tire swing, back when it still hung from that oak’s thick limb. What I’d do was hold my breath and try not to sway as the two of them set to shattering the green and brown green empties they’d set up on some stumps. The shots made tangible ripples through the air that sent all the tiny forest animals scrambling to their dens, to their cozy nests of sticks. I wanted so terribly to follow them—the creatures and my brother, at the same time.
“Ready to go?” Gemma asks. It’s one of those days that’s all heat and no air. For the interview, she’s wearing one of my mother’s old floral dresses. It sticks to her legs and drags a bit on the floor but fits just right across her middle. We get in my brother’s truck and start down the long gravel driveway, with the hot sun ricocheting from each single stone onto our skin. Once we reach the paved part it suddenly gets too quiet; I start fiddling with the radio, but every song is the saddest love song you’ve heard in your whole life.
“I feel weird,” Gemma says, bumping up and down with the truck. I offer her some of my water and notice she looks awful—flushed and pale at the same time. The AC doesn’t work, so I roll the window down, but it’s just a bigger blast of hot air. “You’re all blurry,” she says.
She looks at me, and faints. Then, she starts to shake.
We stopped playing video games after the accident, so sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I’ll lie in bed with the door open until I see her, a ghost in my brother’s huge white undershirt, walk from his room to the kitchen for a glass of water. Backlight by the buzzing florescent light is every line of her body. I’m a fly that tastes through my feet as I stand below her belly then travel slowly down, savoring each hint of salt. I tiptoe to her thigh, pause at her wrinkled knee, keep going to her shin, to the top of her foot, to her always-grubby toes, back along the side of her arch, up the Achilles tendon, to her calf, then all the way around taking as long as I please. Sometimes, I have to pause and touch myself. Sometimes, I’ll return to the worm that started me, and it’s in this shape that I burrow right into her belly button, through to the place filled with heartbeats where each of us came from and where part of my brother still lives.
In the time between when I call and they come, I dab Gemma’s head with my water-soaked bandana and try not panic cataloging all of the pregnancy-related ailments it could be. On speaker, the operator does their best to reassure me. Gemma’s eyes roll beneath her eyelids and you can do this, the voice says, strong and sure. What we want to do is elevate her feet. As gently as you can, lay her seat back and lift her legs up just a little. Maybe there’s something in the car you can use. I try to look but my vision is fractals narrowed by fear. Hello? The voice says, Talk to me, kid. What’s your name? But my name has left the premises. Vamoose. Jon… Darren… Joseph… Steve… On the arrival/departure board beneath my eyelids, the list of possibilities ticks by, but none of them is right. Kid, hey, you there? The voice says. Listen, son, they’re coming, they’re just a few miles away. I look from Gemma’s swollen face through the window to the road, blank as far as I can see. Is there ever any beginning or end to it? The loss in our lives. The always-traveling-through it. When I finally find a name, it’s my brother’s in my mouth. Soon, you’ll be able to hear the sirens, Robert. Next will come the lights. We’re not going to lose her, Robert, you’re doing a good job. Talk to her, Robert, say she’s going to be fine. Do you hear the sirens, Robert? I hear them, I hear them. Do you see the lights, Robert? I see them, I see them. We’ve got you, Robert. Robert, we’re coming.
Lauren Slaughter is a NEA Fellow in Poetry, the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and author of the poetry collections, Spectacle and a lesson in smallness. Her short stories appear in Image, Four Way Review, Harvard Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other places. She is Editor-in-Chief of NELLE, a literary journal that publishes writing by women. Find her online at www.laurenslaughter.com.
24 May 2024
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