Blue Manifesto Letter from the Editor
Playlist
Not Full Enough
Henri Bergson on Possibility and Creation
Expectations
Madeline Haze Curtis
Halfway through the summer of perpetual storms, we are floating in the pool of my uncle’s house. The sky is swollen with dark clouds. I feel pinned beneath their weight. The pool is clotted with withered blossoms from the crepe myrtle tree.
Sloane is suspended in a deflated green inner tube. The tip of her ponytail has been wicked by the water as though dipped in ink. Sweat pearls on her upper lip. I want to lick it off, but she would laugh and call me ridiculous. I stay in my own inner tube, my legs moving through the tepid water. I let the wet heat drape my shoulders like a shroud.
Each summer my uncle flees to New England. His house rots quietly in the humidity, like many uptown mansions in this warren of broken, oak-shaded streets. The house towers above us now, faded yellow with green trim. The place has been overtaken by the same cat’s claw vines that have swallowed much of the city. They’ve enveloped the roof and the backyard fence and consumed the dilapidated shed. Their yellow flowers are bright and watchful as the eyes of animals.
I first brought Sloane to this house at the beginning of the summer. Everything was new between us then, stranger but simpler. The interior of the house was shadowy and cool, recessed from the intolerable brightness outside. Filmy termite wings piled up on the windowsills. We rummaged through the bottles of rum in the dusty walnut cabinet and drank from plastic Mardi Gras cups. The taste of rum lingered in my mouth, acrid sugar. I straddled Sloane on the stiff yellow couch, my hair curtaining us both. She smiled against my mouth as she slipped her hand under my dress. Everywhere she touched me my skin prickled as though struck. That was when I knew there was no escaping what I felt for her. It didn’t matter that she was with Arthur, that they had a life together that left little room for me. I would batter at the periphery of her life like a moth, if it meant I could stay close to her.
Water smacks against the porcelain lip of the pool and the sky sussurates with hot wind. Sloane catches my knee between her feet, pulling me closer. My existence whittles to the sensation of her skin slicked on mine. Sometimes, when she touches me, I am reduced to a shapeless cloud of want.
She smiles, her slanted smile that reveals nothing. Her face is lifted toward the lowering clouds. I want her to look at me; I want it so badly my body feels tight. When she turns to me, it is a reprieve, it is the sun. The look she gives me then is one of unbearable intensity. No one has ever looked at me that way. Like I have become everything. When she looks at me like that, I want to grow around her like a vine.
I won’t tell her I love her again, not even when she looks at me that way. I’ve learned it’s best to keep my words under my tongue, where they can’t frighten her. Instead, I say, “What are you thinking?” because I want her to put words to that look, to give me something I can hold onto later, when she is with him again.
She says, “You know how I feel about you.”
It’s a rhetorical statement, maybe, or maybe it is a question. Maybe she needs me to give her an answer, to explain her to herself. But she is inaccessible to me, a door with no handle.
“I never know how you feel.” I’m appalled at the desperation in my own voice.
“You terrify me,” she says, but she’s smiling still. “You give me nightmares.”
“Why?”
She laughs, but not unkindly. Then she lets me go, skating away across the pale surface of the pool, disturbing the dead flowers that constellate the surface. She feels so far from me now, like I am losing her, or I’ve lost her already, or I never had her at all.
At a certain hour in these July afternoons, the anticipation of the day’s storm becomes nearly intolerable. When the rain finally begins, it does so all at once, in gray veils that erase the edges of the world. Now the rain is everywhere, and the din of it has overtaken even the clamor of my thoughts.
In the blur of rain it is impossible to know Sloane’s expression. I know that I will only leave the pool if she does it first. When I am near her I become devoid of will.
You expect too much of me, she told me on the stoop last week, after I said I loved her. Ever since that night my feelings for her have seemed monstrous. And yet I’ve expected nothing of her, really. I always knew she wasn’t the kind of person who would unravel her decisions. I knew she was with him, and they had an arrangement, and I had to fit myself into the space she had allotted me. I expected nothing, but I wanted everything. It is my want that scares her, but she doesn’t understand that yet.
It is all too much.
I plunge down through the center of the inner tube, pulling my arms straight above my head. I am under the water then, a world murky and swirling with sediment. I blink in the hazy dimness. From below, I watch rain disturb the topmost layer of the pool. I watch Sloane’s muscular legs churning the water, her fingertips pressing down onto the surface as though it is a pane of glass.
One day there may be a storm that washes all of this away: this city built on mud and slipping sediment, this city sickened with vines and rot, this broken and ill-fated place I love. That will be the last storm, the last summer. This place exists under the widening shadow of apocalypse. There is no future here, only the stains of the past, only the dire present. And yet I know I won’t leave. I don’t want this life, but I want her. Maybe it’s possible for me to weather the storms that break each afternoon. Maybe it’s possible to press myself so close to her life that it is as though there is no space between us. On the days she is with him, I could subsist on the hope of her, the anticipation of her. At least then she could still look at me that way, could still bring me into being by touching me.
Then she is submerged too, and her expression is almost surprised through the haze of chlorine, as though she did not expect to find me here. In the green, she is made creaturely and strange to me. I want us to stay here, where it is quiet and safe, where the storms can’t reach us because we are already under. I imagine her life with Arthur eroding. I imagine Arthur himself eroding. I imagine this entire city rinsed away like sidewalk chalk.
Under the water, it is just Sloane and me. Her presence charges the water with a new brightness. I can feel it all around: her nearness. Where the water touches me it is as though she is touching me, as though she is finally everywhere.
Madeline Haze Curtis holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her stories and comics have appeared in publications including Copper Nickel, Bellevue Literary Review, and the Florida Review.