Two Seater Salvation
I was lonely, so I prayed to be haunted. I opened my palms and tried to lure a ghost out with clicking cat noises. My stomach screamed like a lobster. Before I was lonely, I was softer. On my own, I didn’t need food to survive. I could make it until four pm without eating. I drank a measuring cup of gin and took my empty stomach for a walk. My body wrapped around itself like an embrace. My ribs came up for oxygen. It was swimming lessons all over again.
He left me as we were eating plain bagels on the park bench overlooking the empty baseball fields. We waited all year for them to reopen in April. That morning was foggy and he told me I was a bad vegetarian because I ate lox. I said he was a bad boyfriend because he never kissed me on the street. We hissed out of respect for the other’s soft animal. We were fawns or kittens. We were new to living and soft to the touch. But when we left that bench we became yellow-eyed with killer instincts.
He left because the lease was up. He lied about getting a fellowship in Budapest. I said “Bon voyage, bitch,” and he said, “Wrong country.” Other than the sofa, everything was his. The sofa was my liferaft and the floor was lava and I left the front door unlocked so the delivery men could set steaming paper bags afloat toward the ship.
I could imagine feeling that immobile forever. I thought about ripping open the cushions and taking up residency between the springs. The roof turned out to be my first step toward eternal life. There, Tuesday afternoon, in the humidity and among the pigeons, I offered a sacrifice. “Save my life, sofa,” I said, as I shoved the two seater from my fourth floor roof to a third floor roof. The landing was brilliant, two legs on the ground, an avant garde angle of the back. Inside the empty apartment, showered, I laid on my camping mat. I felt resurrected. But even reborn, I missed everything, starting with him and ending with the sofa. I ran back up to the roof in only a towel. There it was, my very own salvation, turned right side up, occupied by a beautiful, young couple projecting Mamma Mia on the side of another four story building.
No one warned me that mourning would stop and what would come next would buzz like a razor. I wanted the heartbreak to keep on exploding. Being sucker punched had its charms. Instead, I was praying. I was conjuring. I was in an inflatable bed with a ghost like a bird in a nest like a sofa in midair like a lobster slipping out of a pot--never even there.
Erika Veurink is a writer living in Brooklyn by way of Iowa. She is receiving her MFA from Bennington College. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Entropy, Hobart, Tiny Molecules, and x-r-a-y.