SCAVENGE — ROBIN BISSETT
/Well, when the sun ran down and the sky turned red, we left Austin for the country. We pitched our tent on a farm with a pond where the fish wobbled up and gasped. We couldn’t eat them. They were alive. They had long legs and they could walk. They were radioactive, Powerade blue.
For days, we waited for a sign. We wondered if anyone was watching. For sustenance, we chewed grape-flavored Kool-Aid powder, inhaled whippets from a finished can of Cheez-Wiz, and slept on the earth like worms, like splintered ceramics. Our lungs bled yellow. We were everything, waiting for the end of nothing. We didn’t know what to believe.
On our second anniversary, the first since the partition of Texas, I burnt the mac-n-cheese, left it sitting too long atop the Whisperlite, and you grimaced and said, “Not romantic, hardly even Italian.” Yes, it stung, but you were worldly, you were trilingual. You had all the words. I had nothing. I had known this when I married you.
But still, I tongued the goop, stirred in brown sugar with a plastic spoon. Tu sei un ragazzo; io sono un uomo. I asked you a question. You pretended not to hear me. Green owls and ghouls flew from the branches overhead. Their teardrops fell, searing our skin.
The next morning, I woke alone. I went to find you. Inside me, I had all of these bare shelves, waiting for an apology. Instead, you were building an altar. A walking stick in hand, you were spitting out smooth stones from your mouth like sunflower seeds. They spelled out S-O-S. You had sent a message up to the gods, without me.
“Fuck,” you said. “You snuck up on me.”
“It’s sneaked, Mikey,” I said, disappointed. “Not snuck.” I grabbed my pack and stalked away.
Months have passed, and I’m underground now and I don’t know who you are or where you are. But I have thought of you every now and then. And should I find you, I will know what to say. I have harvested these words like organs. I have imagined their taste.
“C’mere, baby,” I will whisper. “Look at me. Yes, look at me.”
“You are barren,” I will say. “You are barren, and hopeless and a wasteland. And I, I am a city.”
Robin Bissett is a writer, editor, and teaching artist from West Texas. She is an alumna of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program Summer Institute and a first-year fiction MFA candidate at the University of Montana where she serves as the Online Managing Editor of CutBank.
