Swans
You own a lot of earrings. Enough to wear a different pair each day for a month, you say. Tonight you are wearing your red, polka dotted heart-shaped ones.
“They would good as buttons,” I think. But I don’t tell you this.
We are drinking beer at a table outside the Blue Moon Café. The air is warm and wet and my hair keeps sticking to my face, making it difficult to eat my veggie wrap. You are telling me about your friend from Boston who married a mail order bride. He went all the way to Japan and brought her back to the US. I didn’t know people still did that.
“Yeah and he fell in love with her,” you say, “but then she divorced him.”
I nod, to show that this is completely unacceptable. And then I pick up a paper New Castle coaster and rip it in half and then rip it some more to make it smaller. Into several pieces. You and I work together at the same craft store. We are constantly cutting, folding and dismantling paper.
“Bitch,” I say. The mail order bride is probably a bitch.
And this is when we imagine now, that the mail order bride is happy. On the weekends she goes shopping or drives to the zoo. She takes a picture of a swan with her new iPhone. She eats cotton candy. She enjoys flattening the cotton candy on the roof of her mouth and then peeling it off with her tongue. She carries a designer compact mirror with her everywhere she goes in a very large bag and forgets about it. She likes watching the movie called Mail Order Bride starring Lucy Liu and admiring her shiny hair. “I like Lucy Liu’s shiny hair,” she thinks. “Lucy Liu is nice.”
You take a sip of your beer and swallow it all at once and scrunch your lips and eyes into little lips and eyes. I stare at your heart shaped earrings. They are dangling, sadly and holding on for dear life.
I gather all my paper pieces with my hands to form a mountain.
“Do you want the rest of my beer?” you say. You’re not used to going out. I can tell because you are more interested in the spilled seasonings on the table.
“No,” I say. “Not really.” I bite into my veggie wrap. Some lettuce and mayo fall out the bottom and land on my napkin. I notice a tomato slice poking out the side of the tortilla. It looks confused and dumb.
Outside it is getting dark and people are beginning to talk louder and softer at the same time. Some of these people are laughing or yelling across the street. And some of these people are whispering very quietly into each others ears. I listen to the table behind me and they are saying things that may or may not mean something. They are saying things like “motherfucker” and “entrepreneur.”
I look at your face and it has the expression you make when you feel uncomfortable. And I feel small, like the granule of salt on your hand.
I reach for my pile of torn paper. I search for pieces that still have letters on them and arrange and rearrange the letters to spell a word.
“Swan,” I think. I spell the word swan.
Hannah Pass received her BA in English from University Wisconsin-Stevens Point. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she makes things out a paper and plans on pursuing her MFA.