Marisa Crawford
California
We carved out the lid and scraped pumpkin guts for fall.
Megan was a container. Where she’s from, people eat oranges
all the time and their skin shines. She sits exactly still, watching
the travel channel. She said I’m gonna teach you how to
draw and then I knew how to draw. She turned me into an old
lady by following the wrinkles in my face, painting them deep
laundry shades of gray and brown, and we wore old lady hats
with violets on them and went to the dog bakery. We took
pictures in the million rose garden where people carve their
names in benches and then get married. All the flowers pull
their petals together and try to project their bodies as homes.
She was a girl who hung kites in her room, had a bearded
dragon with a hot rock. She couldn’t walk in the hallways at
our high school cause they were too crowded, cause her body
was too electrically charged and blue bolts shot out of her fingers.
Sometimes she saw nice girly ghosts caught in the corners
of the ceiling while she was traveling, had a proclivity for
hotel fires and wore three washers from her boyfriend’s skateboard
as rings on her fingers. We fell asleep on a plane talking
about gypsies in Italy. When we woke up all her rings were
gone. Megan,
I’ve been using geography as an excuse for everything. One
time we were going 60 in a 25, wearing fake eyelashes for the
carnival and she said this place. Makes me crazy. How the cars
move down the street and the people move in hallways like
they’re cars. They say the whole world is. Falling apart, but it
isn’t. They say crow’s feet and listen past the trees for thunder
clapping. They count the seconds in the sky and say
everything. Is so far away.
And her car’s interior was soft leather and vanilla. And we
carved the pumpkin into a shark with jagged teeth and fins.
We baked the seeds and ate them watching tv with the lizard
in our laps. He eats live crickets, crunches them whole. His
skin gets dark when he’s sad. When he’s cold, his entire body
flattens.