The Man or The Bear
by Samantha Strohbusch

Runestone, volume 11

The Man or The Bear
by Samantha Strohbusch

Runestone, volume 11

I am sliced wide open.  I cannot breathe.  This is a dream but not the usual kind.  I can feel every inch of my body and the wound is pulsating with blood and heat and pain.  I can see the heat waves rise from midsection.  

He comes into the room.  I’m too weak to cry out.  I’m too lethargic to care whether or not I am losing the ability to raise my arm.  In my mind I don’t want to die, but the more important thought is that it would be kind of nice to be nothing again.  

He stands over me and smiles, sweetly.  He seems to see me and seems to want to scoop me up, put me in his pocket, carry me home and tend to my little, fragile broken wings until I can sing again.  

He bends down and I feel him rummage around in my guts.  

When he comes up again his mouth is a bloody gash in his face, and he wipes it with the sleeve of his shirt.  My blood, on the cotton, is black.  Clotted.  Thick and unmoving.  I have been dead for days.  Yet my head vibrates against the floor, a low pulsing that imitates life swimming through my veins.  I watch my love devour me.

I never knew him in this life.  He has no name and no features I could have pieced together in a daydream or copied from the TV.  He is nobody and nameless, and he stitches together the last details of my death.  

 

When I wake up, I am sobbing- but the silent kind.  The kind that makes you feel like you’re faking it because your eyes and your throat are dry, and grief is supposed to be wet and loud.  

So is joy.  

Nothing is silent but ambivalence.  

I am grabbing my white covers with white knuckles and fists that ache from tense cramps.  I can’t remember the last time I felt so zipped into my own skull.  My arms are a distant stranger to me, and my body is detached.  I float above myself as I travel downstairs to the kitchen to get coffee like it’s a side quest in a videogame, remembering why I hate videogames.  They feel too real.  

I hear families of birds expressing joy to each other over the true appearance of spring.  It’s June and there will be no going back to gray that precedes white.  We can collectively relax and allow ourselves to settle into the pseudo-southern ease we all adapt four months out of the year.  We pretend we are all best friends who just got too carried away during the darkest months.  Who was I in January?  She isn’t someone I recognize.  

I tell myself it’s a good day, I repeat it like a prayer or a mantra as if either of these things ever worked for me.  It’s a good day.  It’s a good day.  Today is beautiful and golden.  I am lucky to be alive.  I won’t tell my therapist about the dream.  I won’t relay the sinking feeling I have in the base of my tailbone that radiates upward into nausea.  She is probably having a great day.  She should continue that.  

As the coffee seeps into my blood and my mind relaxes from the grip of my subconscious I start to believe it.  It is a good day.  I laugh with my therapist; I make plans with my new friend.  I enjoy a James Beard Award winning dinner that is paired with lighthearted gossip and fruity drinks with a girl who has the same life goals as I do and similar taste in fashion.  I have saved up my weeks’ tips just for this and I let the smells enter my lungs a little deeper and the salt dance on my tongue a little more sensually.  When red wine laps across my tongue in a bitter way that I can never quite grow accustomed to I remember the summers my grandmother and I spent sneaking off to Pedro’s Mexican Restaurant for dinner so she could eat fresh hot tortillas that she slathered with butter (provided just for her at her special request)  without my parents chastising her about her health.  She always became Rosey-cheeked and loose lipped after half of a margarita.  It was the only alcohol she enjoyed.  

I get my affinity for tequila, laughter and giving myself away to good feelings from her.  She did it much better though, always leaving places having made her servers feel special.  Everyone around her was in on a secret little joke that just she and they knew.  

I sip my bitter wine and try not to wince.  I am 30.  I am grown.  I like good wine and a well-made marsala, and I own two Better Homes and Gardens magazines.  I am a woman now. 

When I get home, I peel my dress off like lizard skin and go to sleep in a shirt that has seen me through my worst days and has a hole in it for every occasion.  I fall asleep in it knowing that when I wake up, I’ll feel exposed and embarrassed by the amount of skin showing.  It is more of an idea of a shirt than it is an actual shirt.  But it knows me better than some of my closest friends.  I endure the vulnerability.  

Tonight, I am slumped over a kitchen table.  It’s not my house, a house I have painted in happy colors and pastels.  My metallic green wicker and glass table is nowhere to be seen and my girly mugs are out of eyeshot.  Instead, the smell of bacon, cooked weeks ago, is putrid in the air.  Wood paneling surrounds me.  A cup of warm milk is in front of me when I lift my head up.  An old man who I have seen in family photographs sits across from me and a chill that feels like aluminum foil dragging across my canines travels up my spine.  He smiles at me.  He is saying “Wow, how you’ve grown.”  Except it’s silent.  I can see the wind coming out of his lungs by the way his mustache shivers.  I can distinctly read his dehydrated and sunburnt lips.  But there is no sound.  

His eyes flit to the left and to my feet.  I follow his gaze.  There is a baby there.  Irish curls peeking out from a swaddling.  I hear him lick his lips like a hungry wolf.  His stomach growls.  Suddenly I know that is my child.  She has my aunt’s hair and my mothers’ nose, but she has my face.  The one I hate sometimes when it’s on my own body.  But on her it’s beautiful.  She wears it well, having made no mistakes, yet.  She laughs but I can’t hear it over the kitchen clock that sits in the archway.  It is ticking as seconds pass.  It is so loud I feel like it’s shaking the table.  I hear the old man’s chair screech and I know he is going to ask to hold the baby.  

His footsteps are akin to someone walking through quicksand, he wants to approach so badly, but he is savoring all of the moments before contact.  I need to scream.  I feel it in my throat.  The urge is bubbling up and I want to release it, it hurts so bad.  I open my mouth and start to force a guttural cry from my body, but no sound comes out.  

Instead, thick and heavy, tar trails over my tongue.  It is putrid and so hot that I feel blisters form along my esophagus.  The man, who now has a kind and gentle twinkle in his eye, is laughing.  He is laughing heartily and joyfully as I purge this black molten rot from my body.  I am trying to scream, and he is holding his ribs.  He wags his finger at me and says, “You always were a character.” Yet, once again, I can only feel the wind of his words.  

Like a thunder clap it starts, the noise of fists banging over and over on the kitchen walls.  Pots and pans that hang over the stained wooden table bounce as if a million children were using the side of the house as a bounce castle.  I wipe my mouth as the last of the darkness escapes it and look to my baby.  She is crying, and she won’t meet my eyes.  I know she will never be the same again.  The pounding grows louder, and I watch the fear and loneliness grow in her eyes.  I am screaming for anyone to stop it, but nobody can hear me over the banging.  Just the old man, still laughing.  

I reach to pick up the baby and she is sliding through my grip.  I cannot get a firm hold; the house is shaking and there is nobody to save us.

I wake up covered in sweat, but it feels like when I look down the moisture will be blood.  I know it is my fault, whatever it is.  I cannot catch my breath at first and when I see that I am 30 minutes late to my first meeting I think to myself that maybe it’s good that I don’t drink coffee today.

 

“I can’t have another dream like this.”  I tell my therapist, who sits across from me and scribbles randomly.  

“What are you trying to cope with?”  She asks me, dumbly, as if I would be here if I knew.  I am a good girl; I am a grown woman.  I don’t go out at night, and I have always had a very loving family.  There is nothing to stress about.  

“But stress or trauma that we sometimes shield ourselves from can seep subconsciously when our body feels safe enough to process it” She prods.

My body doesn’t feel like a safe place these days when the lights are out and I’m alone in my mind.  Behind the shutters of my lids dark and twisted versions of life have their way with me, ripping apart a rotten core I didn’t know I had.

I don’t say that.  I smile, I nod, and I say I’ll think about that until the next time we see each other.  It placates her.  Good girl.

Buy myself time.

I pull a tee shirt over my head and button department store jeans that don’t fit me well so that I can go to the store for bananas.  The shirt is the same color as this tankini I had in fourth grade.  I loved it.  I wore it year-round until my parents threw it away because it no longer fit me.  

Somewhere between the shirt settling on my torso and the thought of that Lion King tankini I am pelted with a deep feeling of homesickness and guilt.  I wonder where that Tankini went after it was discarded too carelessly.  I wonder where the years of love I poured into its threads went.  Are they sitting there in a landfill, unused and forgotten?

I zip myself back into my skull and drive to the store.  Tomorrow I will have a smoothie for breakfast, I will jumpstart back on my health.  I will cleanse my body and that will cleanse my mind.  There will be no more bad feelings if they have nothing bad to run off of like dollar store ramen or microwavable meals.  

My gas meter dings and the orange light flashes.  I pull into the gas station by my house.  I put the nozzle into the tank and admire the late June afternoon.  A dark grey cloud, spread wide above the city, is withholding a sweet, warm rain from us.  I know it’s coming.  It’s the kind of storm that erupts suddenly and you feel like your house will float away down the street before the rain ever stops again.  There are some brave birds still singing but Mother Nature has called most of her living things back into the safety of their houses.  

The hair on my neck rises even before I hear the voice behind me.  He’s asking if I need any help pumping gas.  I try to ignore him.  He asks again but this time a little louder.  I turn around to tell him no.  I can see that he is hungry.  He’s like a wolf baring its teeth to the prey below him.

“What’s a female like you doing filling your own tank?”  Is the question he asks but it’s not what he’s really saying.  I repeat myself ‘No thank you’ as thunder strikes above me.  I can’t blame him for not hearing me.  I say it again.  The crack of lightning close by withholds my voice once more.  

The roar of rain on the metal hood of the gas pumps is truly deafening and my throat tightens.  I’ve been here before.  He stands so close that I press up against my car.  He pushes his stomach into mine.  I can’t hear what he’s saying.  I can only feel the wind from his throat, and I smell cigarettes and beer.  He holds one hand against my car, his fist balled up beside my neck, just like my first boyfriend the time I didn’t want to leave the party when he did.  He wanted to go home so bad.  He had gotten his fill of rubbing up against bodies.  He needed to go home and use mine.   

I tell the man the back away from me, now.  I want to push him, I would punch him if I was confident in landing it, but he’s so close that I know he could do much more damage in retaliation than I could in defense.  He laughs.  I feel the nausea build in my throat.  I feel his sticky, warm fingers on my hip skin.  The confidence to invite himself under my shirt.  

He repeats something I didn’t hear the first time, from the rain.  This time, though, I can’t hear because my ears are burning, and I am screaming.  I am screaming inside of myself.  If I could unzip my skull and see myself from the outside, I would look demure.  Delicate.  Damsel.  All of the D words my mothers’ mother told me to never use as descriptives and to never live by.  

I am the same child who spent eight months inside my grandmother as my mother formed.  I have felt her rage.  I have felt her nightmares.  I have felt the sick and twisted betrayal when a trusted adult touches your daughter.  I have my mother’s inner will, but I also have my grandmother’s inviting face.  

I tell the man to come closer.  I know that for this breed of man, the chase is best part.  The fight, the struggle.  Watching the will to live slip out of a woman’s’ eyes is what feeds his spirit.  He will not get that from me.  My screams are not accompanied by silence any longer.  

I bat my eyelashes and lick my lips.  He is so fucking flattered.  He leans in, and I kiss the tender flesh of his neck.  I am the same as the monsters whose DNA exists inside of me.  I hunger, as well.  I am the wolf in sheep’s clothing.  

I bite.  

Blood trickles down my throat and my neck.  Fresh, fluid, hot, red.  It is pulsing.  I feel the power of life behind it as it spills out onto the front of my shirt.  

Tinny, metallic and thick.  It’s like sea water sloshing in my mouth.  He is no longer laughing.  Now he is screaming, he is pushing me away.  He is clawing at his neck like a pathetic and wounded animal who didn’t see it’s predator as it crept along the bushes.  

I am the one laughing.  I am the one licking my lips, hoping for another taste.  I tell him to get down on all fours.  To bark like a dog.  I am the one whose fists are balled up now.  I am the one watching his will to live bubble to the surface as he decides between screaming for help or running away. 

I watch, smiling, waiting to see which action wins out.  I’m not afraid of going to prison.  Not for this.  

The smile, I think, is what gets him.  I’m watching the souls of his shoes nearly kiss his back as he performs a sprint with such speed he could win an Olympic medal.  The click of my gas tank alerting me that I’m proficiently fueled happened so long ago, now, that it feels like years have gone by.  I hit No Receipt and close my gas tank, taking notice of the drops of blood that linger on my back seat passenger side window.  

“Are you alright?”  The young man I see in Aldi’s every single week eyes me, horrified.  I wipe my mouth on the cotton sleeve of my tee shirt.  Black blood, sticky and clotted, barely comes off on the fabric.  

“I’m fine.”  I smile and wave him away.  The card machine beeps for me to remove my card and I don’t allow it to tell me twice.  I put my wallet away and take a deep, clear and satisfying breath before grabbing my bundle of bananas.