Hello, our pretties! And your little dogs, too!
It is, for all adults and purposes, the last week of Summah-time! Oh, what a world, what a world!
But we get to introduce you to the shining light of an angel baby, Trenna Soderling! She sent us a story that opens on the familiar warmth of Summer nights and a young lady who spends the rest of the season suffering an illusive physical ailment. Her head becomes a spinning tornado and, like with Gingam-Clad Icon: Diva Dorothy, it upends life as she knows it.
And with these End-of-Summah Blues? Quelle relatable! We just had to share it with you.
We need hearts like the Tinman (aka like this post)! If that joke didn’t turn you off, please share, subscribe, and show Trenna (@trenonthenet) some love, as well!
LYLAS,
Marilyn and Sam
Ur Misguidance Counselors
(@misguidance4u)
The May evening is just warm enough to be summer without all the sickly sweetness of June or July, not to mention August’s suffocating miasma. She lies under a tree, her back pressed to the cool, spring-rain-soaked grass. The man, her lover, lies next to her.
On a stage a few yards away, glib heartbreak floats out from a three-piece folk band.
She can’t discern if her aversion stems solely from the current aural experience or the singer’s pre-show behavior, in which he milled through the crowd eating a salad and spewing pretensions until thirty minutes after he was supposed to start, while his guitarist and percussionist wore milky smiles of apology and exchanged “we are definitely having a band meeting after this” looks.
Her man likes this band, so she sits without complaint (although she rages mental war with her id, who’s winning the argument that sitting in fresh air watching live music can, in fact, be considered torture). Then amidst one of the singer’s convoluted, lace-draped metaphors, her head spins, and keeps spinning.
Silver wisps of cloud, luminescent oil slicks, blur across the sky. She turns her cheek into the grass. Blinks twice, hoping her eyelid flicks stop the world from wavering. They don’t. She turns to him.
“Do you feel that?” Looks at the bottle of wine, her cup, his.
“Feel what?”
The calm steadiness of his voice confirms he’s not experiencing whatever she is. Even laying down, her center of gravity is off course.
“I’m dizzy.” A deep breath, in and out. “Really dizzy. I might throw up.”
“We just opened this,” he says, gesturing toward the bottle. “You’re not drunk.” A statement, not a question, and he’s right.
She repeats an inchoate mumbling about the dizziness as a hot tingle of nausea floods her jaw hinge. The music sounds far away, and her desperate blinks aren’t clearing her head. The sickness is evident in her eyes, in the way they follow unknown, drifting points.
Walking home is out of the question. So is standing up. The music is a pathetic distraction, but it’s better than moving, so she lays on the wet grass, feels the summer mugginess all over her skin, and wills a shade of deafness over her curled body. In a small act of mercy, she falls asleep.
After the band packs their instruments and drives off, he wakes her. The sun set over an hour ago and the wavering remains, despite her hopes. She struggles to her feet, willing herself to get home without incident. Her desperation-laden mantra: foot in front of foot in front of foot.
An amalgam of smells from restaurants and neon signs from bars assault her nose and eyes. CVS’s storefront hurts the most, as if they spent the extra money to electrify her corneas. She finds anchors in the spots of worn gum on the sidewalk. Her black path of breadcrumbs.
A woman stands on the corner of a mildly busy intersection, wearing a yellow raincoat and purple snake-print leggings.
She’s not in a particularly shocking state of dishevelment, but there’s something unsettling about her. Her hair haloes her head, her gaze is far away. She waits, docile. As they approach, her partner slows down, and she must too. He’s supporting her body weight.
They all exchange tight smiles, then a hand shoots out the sleeve of the raincoat.
“They’re trying to keep me here.” the swath of yellow says.
“What?” She hadn’t expected movement or sound. Filtering it through the dizziness is difficult.
“They’re trying to keep me here.”
“Who?” She responds like a flinch.
The raincoat is on the opposite end of a portal, through her spinning head. A motorcycle flies past, engine vibrating air. The roar and heat hit her and she shrinks back.
“They are,” then faster, “they are they are they are.”
“Ma’am,” her man says to the raincoat, “she’s not feeling well. Please don’t yell.”
“They’re trying to keep me here,” the yellow mass intones again, the same volume as before. Not a yell but insistent.
She looks into the eyes above the coat. Even in her own blurred state, she’s met with a gaze of surety and warning. A new churning in her stomach starts.
Eons later, they reach their apartment.
It’s two rooms outside of the kitchen and bathroom. The wall is cluttered with posters of his friend’s bands, a Mark Rothko print, things he’s pulled from the recycling bins at record stores. On every surface sit knick-knacks. They never rotate. There’s little of her present, apart from a worn and faded red velvet chair, her favorite spot. It’s pointed out towards the window, away from the TV and other chairs. A ratty afghan is draped over the back.
She sits down and pulls the blanket over her, but the air is hot and close and suffocating. She pushes it off.
This corner’s proximity to the window and a bookshelf is what makes it hers. She reaches for Orlando, a three-dollar copy found in a dusty corner of a used bookstore. Not too badly creased, with only minimal underlining. Truth be told; she would have been gorged on any marginal notes had they been there. She read the evidence of someone’s divorce and subsequent estrangement from their child in the margins of The Road. At least, she thinks she did. Whatever the details, that annotator thought in black and white futures.
The former owner of Orlando was more opaque in their underlining. She runs her fingers over the pages, smells it, turns it over in her hands, sets it on her lap. She doesn’t have the energy for anything requiring focus, but still the spot, or the book, or maybe the humid air conditioning from the window unit has calmed the sickness for a moment. If only she knew how much she’d come to crave these moments of relief.
In the bathroom, he brushes his teeth. She appears behind him to do the same.
“Feeling better?”
“A bit, yeah.”
“Did you drink more water?”
“Yes, Mom.”
She sends a breath to the edges of her torso, fills herself with clean air, then lets it all out, purifying herself from the inside. There’s an unsteadiness knocking at her head still, but this is little in the face of the ride she’d been on earlier.
He comes up behind her and kisses her, leaves an extra layer of mint on her mouth, then exits left. She brushes her teeth, spits. Watches the warm foam pour from her mouth through the dirty drain collar. Now she’s clean but she keeps brushing, savoring the scratch of the toothbrush against her tongue, the floss between her gums. She leaves the bathroom too.
He’s on the bed, folding a Neutral Milk Hotel t-shirt into thirds. Laundry is piled next to him.
Things are mostly normal, until she starts thinking back to the woman in the raincoat, how she was smoky at the edges, how her ears popped and clicked when she heard the woman’s “they’re trying to keep me here.” When had they walked away, and how? Remembering it encourages the spinning, more nausea.
She holds it back, knowing she’s at her limit, that should the rush in her head return with vengeance, she’d succumb to the acidic feeling in the back of her throat. She steps forward, pushing against the feeling, as if she can outrun it.
He puts the folded clothes away and she collapses on the bed, pushing the rest of the laundry into the basket. She rolls back over; slow, timid. They’re trying to keep me here.
She forgets she was moving towards him but he’s here, kissing her jawline. She reconnects to reality, kisses him back.
He mutters “you’re okay?” and she nods into his face.
The spinning, in this moment, feels like drunkenness. The swirling, heady feeling bordering on sickness. Kissing now, feeling hands and arms and lips and chest, makes her forget the world is off-balance. Now it’s only hands in hair, fingertips on spine. It’s sex in devotion to self, partner, maybe whatever it meant to be alive. Dizziness was no match for this urgency.
For an hour or two, the world is stable, silent. His shampoo is on the pillows and in her hair, a woody, citrus scent. Not tired, she goes to the kitchen and retrieves coffee, pinches a filter, takes milk from the fridge.
The grounds are the cheapest grocery store brand, dark and bitter. It leaves an acidic coating on her tongue but tastes enough like the real thing. Anyway, it’s more about the sound of the grounds scraping from bag to teaspoon, the stream of the water as it filters into the pot, the way the scent of the brew teases its presence, then consumes the entire kitchen seconds later. It doesn’t need to taste good, as long as she could do this two times a day. Caffeinated in the morning, decaf at night.
She sits by the window for a bit longer, sips her coffee, thinks of all the laundry she needs to do. Then the dizziness returns, her cue to sleep.
She wakes in a gasp as the punch of leaving the dream world for the spinning one hits her. It’s unpleasant and already familiar. Pangs of headache seep through her skull.
She doesn’t want to move, but Saturday morning mundanity is unavoidable. Evidence of the past week’s activities is scattered throughout the apartment and, when open, the fridge emanates a scent. Standing in front of the open door, cold air wasting away, her head spins. Her vision blurs again into a headrush that won’t clear. She grips the fridge handle, turns away from the wilting produce and too-many-days-old leftovers, falls back against the fridge, and sinks to the ground.
Gulping in and out, she tries to empty all the sick from her lungs. Pictures her torso expanding her ribs and the skin around them in a breath big enough to catch all the air she needs. The flood of oxygen in her lungs allows her wherewithal to return enough for her to close the door, but the dizziness remains, chloroforming every breath.
---
She suffers the incessant spinning for three weeks without reprieve. Doctors peer through their glasses to tell her she appears perfectly healthy, that there’s nothing they can find, so the sensation follows her day to day, stalking her at home and work and bars downtown.
Resigned to another day in a long string of them, she goes for a walk, desperate for fresh air.
An orange tabby walks into the middle of the street, stretches, lays down, begins licking itself. Maybe the cat is suicidal, or having a lapse in evolutionary judgment, failing to see this stretch of asphalt is a potential death sentence.
She walks up to the cat. It sits, looking at her. Here kitty, kitty, kitty. Instincts kick in, something animalistic that tells her how to posit her body, what level of voice to use.
The cat moves maddeningly slow, looking up at her after every step. Seeking confirmation, validation. She croons at first, then growls.
The cat moves forward in apathetic movement despite her growing frustrations, despite her sense that if this fucking cat didn’t pick up the pace, she might kick it. Why was she even helping this thing, standing too much in the street, using her body as a shield for this cat from cars? Leave it, a wicked snarl sounds.
She’s frightened of the angry bubbles in her gut but ignores them, continues her encouragements until they’re both safely on the sidewalk, and again ignores the clamoring thought: Stupid thing probably ended up right back out there. But she thought about the cat all day, and when he came home for the day, she laid her head on her partner’s lap and told him of how she ended up in the street, and how she thought maybe her head had spun just a little less today.
---
“It tastes like…”
“A $10 bottle of rosé.”
She’d bought the wine after running into a friend at the grocery store then inviting her over. They weren’t particularly close, but she’d wanted a distraction, something different, someone to talk to who knew nothing about the spinning, or her fear she was losing her mind.
The conversation is clunky and awkward; small talk and shallow pleasantries about the show they’d both gone to last week (separately; for a mutual friend). In spite of her attempts at lightness, pressure envelops the room, as if they both know she’s hiding something. Her friend breaks the silence.
“Are you okay?”
Despite, maybe because of, their emotional distance, she wants to spill her guts, lay them bare across the table. So she does: the first spin under the tree, the doctor’s visits, how every morning she wakes to her heartbeat thrashing at her ribs, panicked at the thought that things will always feel this way.
The more she divulges the less natural their dialogue is, but she can’t take back the baring of her bone-deep truth.
“You feel the spinning always?”
“Yes. I mean, no. There are moments of reprieve.”
Sometimes her head would stop spinning if she was caught off guard. When she got up the courage to go, concerts (the noise, the people, the music, she couldn’t pinpoint the distraction) would allay the nausea momentarily. A joint worked sometimes. In the moment, long walks would either stave it off or make it worse, but she usually felt better afterward either way.
“It’s like the man who had hiccups for fifteen years. Did you ever hear about that?”
Despair rips through her gut.
“I won’t survive this for fifteen years.” A bubble from her throat; half laugh, half sob.
“You’ve gotta figure out a way to scare it off.”
“When I’m scared, I spin more. If I feel ‘better,’ I still feel it in the background, just less. I can’t fight it.”
“Do you ever feel better better?”
Inexplicably, she remembers the face above the yellow raincoat.
“When I think about, well, changing everything, it stops.”
“Changing everything?”
“I mean leaving what I know.”
A pause as she checks if this is what she really means. It is.
“Moving away from here, to somewhere I’ve never been. Making the not-practical choice. Getting a step closer to something I actually want—not that I know what that is. I don’t like it, it makes me want to barf. But when I think about that, about everything changing, I feel better. Like VapoRub on my brain.”
Her friend acknowledges her with a long glance and a head nod, then changes the subject.
She feels the burn of her confessions between her muscle and skin, alive, laid bare at her own hand. They struggle through conversation the rest of the night, then as her friend moves to leave, she says, “just make the choice and see where you end up.” It isn’t scripture, but the words feel holy and she chews them the rest of the night.
Later, she dreams of a stranger, no, her friend, wandering a tree-lined street wearing a yellow raincoat. The sky is dark and blanketed in clouds, the only light the waning crescent above. It isn’t raining yet. She stands watching the stranger/friend, who stares fixed at the moon until she doesn’t, and their eyes lock.
They stand apart, but the yellow raincoat is approaching. A scream claws at her throat—there’s something in Stranger/Friend’s eyes, and her edges are indefinite.
“They’re trying to keep me here,” says Stranger/Friend.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she pleas back, aware that she’s dreaming but drowning in it.
“Yeessss,” the word is a hiss, stretched and awful. “You do.”
Days pass. She thinks of the conversation often. The spinning, or maybe it’s her mind, revolts against her complacency. She’d considered her mind and the dizziness as separate entities, crammed into dysfunctional co-existence inside her skull, but now it’s indistinguishable. She is the spinning, the spinning is her, and this is all she’ll ever know.
She’d wanted an answer as tangible as a slap in the face; a moment of blinding clarity in which lightning ricocheted from the heavens. She didn’t get that. Just a subtle dawning of marrow-deep truth.
---
She told him of her plans. Of how they might sound crazy, but she is not.
She tells him the revelations of her past few weeks, how distractions could appease the hungry spinning for a while, but only a while, and how inherently different the thought of change felt in comparison to those distractions.
“Where are you moving to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is this coming from?”
“My bones.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
He’s blustering. Had she not lived in her own head, not felt the physiological assurances of her thoughts and actions, she’d have felt blindsided, too.
“You can’t run from yourself.”
“I’m just running towards something different.”
Any concerns she’s trying to run away from him are assuaged by an invitation—pleading, genuine—for him to join her. Where to, she doesn’t know, but he refuses anyway. She’d known he wouldn’t have come with even if he fully grasped her motivations, where she was going, what she wanted to do. And despite the truth of her pleading, she’s relieved at his answer. Doing this next part alone will be easier. Frightening, no doubt, but easier. She won’t have to explain the things she doesn’t understand.
She finds an apartment across the country, applies for jobs until “cover letter,” muttered by any unsuspecting bystander gives rise to nervous tantrums. In the interim, she tries to determine how to tell the five people who’ll care what she’s up to.
The spinning hasn’t stopped, but since she’s spoken her plans out loud, it’s abated, especially when she chips away at the necessary arrangements. In between vague visions of the Pacific Northwest, her mind marches a steady dirge for her life as she knows it.
---
A night of sleep, then awake. It’s the morning of her departure. Her heartbeat: thunk, thunk. Thunk, thunk. Thunk, thunk.
The spinning’s worsened in recent days. Her resolve is weak and frazzled with anticipation. He sleeps beside her and won’t wake for a couple more hours, after his brain can clear the alcohol they drank to her departure last night. Either that or until his bladder sends alarm signals into override.
She wants to move, but the dip in the mattress from the sum of all her pressures makes it hard to get up. She can feel all the ways she’s laid on this bed, all the hard sleeps after nights of staying up too late. A muscle memory in the fibers of the time she concussed herself on the wall jumping into bed. All the ways she’s been fucked on it or the way the springs felt under her as she jolted up after oversleeping.
She’s laying still, considering if ‘soaking in these last moments’ is better than getting up, when something glows in her vision, caught between fields she can and can’t see.
It’s a line, thrumming with energy, pulsing to a steady rhythm, fast and high-pitched. It emits a faint buzz, like a neon sign. There’s a slight heat, too. Her skin warms under the radiation, the hair on her arms stands up.
The sounds outside the walls of the apartment—bus brakes, a car with a faulty muffler, neighbors leaving for work, sirens—all move to the background, the volume knob turned way down. She stands up and walks around the line, its beams shrinking back from her. She looks back at the sleeping figure on the bed. If he were to open his eyes, could he see what she was seeing? Could she explain it to him? Would it break the spell?
The glowing form pulses and a series of fires blaze inside her. She can taste the energy emanating from the line. She reaches out to touch it, not sure if it’s safe, not caring. It glows brighter, thrums faster as her finger approaches. She can’t touch it, not really, but there in her bones is the same feeling that steered her toward her new path.
She thinks this, and the line shifts, waves up and down, thrums faster. It warps, twists, sings out. It disintegrates from a line and warmth, like a million tiny rays of sun, moves over her. Heat melts into her. It spreads throughout space up and down, and into every crack and solid piece of matter in the room, no matter how impenetrable the atomic bonds think they are.
She blinks, now warm all over. Whatever this force is—her mind turns to aliens, to Interstellar, anything to puzzle out what she’s seen—it’s told her something. Left her with a feeling that past and present are out of touch, unreal. Inundated her with the sense that life is a series of people and places swimming in next to her for a time, swimming out, and she feels less sad than she has in months.
She grabs her backpack up, feeling like a little kid in her earnestness to strike out on her journey. As soon as she touches the straps, the glow fades. She sits in wonderment and disbelief.
It’s seven. Her train leaves at ten but there’s little to do, most things are already packed or gone. Still, she quietly prepares for her departure: washing her face, brushing her teeth, pulling a sweatshirt over her head.
She blinks herself out of her daze, her head moving in the gentlest spins it had since the feeling started. She looks at him, sleeping.
They’d planned for him to take her to the station, but this goodbye didn’t need to be a production. They’d been saying it for months. Goodbye was in the division of their properties and the kisses that were more urgent than when they’d first met. There was a farewell in every spot they’d visited for the last time, checking off the park and the movie house that played rare, straight-to-VHS slasher films. She looks around one more time. She opens the door, slips through it, drags her stuff out after her. The only sounds that follow her are the creak of an old floorboard and the click of the deadbolt.
Outside, pink and orange burn the sky. Puffy rococo clouds are graphed overhead.
There’s a coffee shop near her apartment she’s never been to (the many pictures of dachshunds in the window had, until now, deterred her). She orders a hot coffee, black. The drink is somehow sugary and oversweet on her tongue, although she watched them make it and they added nothing but coffee to the cup.
Before leaving she pees, opting for the bathrooms here over the ones in the Amtrak station. She washes her hands, stares in the mirror.
Extricating herself from the city is turning out less like the rough tear of Velcro she thought it’d be, and more like diving into a pool and streamlining to the other side. She glides toward the station.
It’s still early; no trains are set to depart soon. One other person scrolls through their phone in silence. The speakers aren’t playing any music or announcements. There are no conversations to overhear. Mostly, the place is empty.
She takes stock of her assets—her coffee, backpack, and heartbeat, thunking soft. A beetle walks across her shoe. She waits, the sharp edge of spinning softer than it’s been since it began. A pull from her stomach, pulsing with the feeling of being. Blurriness pulling at her edges like she could evaporate at any moment.
When the train finally comes, she stands up, gives a final nod to the skyline behind her, and walks away from what she knows.
Head is a Top by Trenna Soderling (@trenonthenet)
JOIN THE CONVERSATION!
Let us know a time when you burned your life to the ground! Drop your favorite The Wizard of Oz quote! Tell us how many Oz-mopolitans you had the last time you saw Wicked!
We need to know!!!