"Notice of Eviction" was first published in Quarto's 2017 Spring Print Edition.
My first memory is of California. My uncle opens the car door to welcome me and I vomit on him. I watch his smile dissipate. My sister splits her knee open on the pavement while running to see my aunt.
I have a lot of very early memories and I have tried, on several occasions, to revisit my timeline and rearrange them, hoping earnestly that somehow something else will surface first. But still, it is this arrival (I remember nothing else of that trip) and my parents’ apologies, my uncle’s patient reassurance, my sisters screams.
After they had removed the sutures from my sister’s knee, they found the wound dotted with small black flecks, where the gravel had lodged itself so deeply into her flesh that the surgeons thought it more harmful to remove them. For some time after our visit to California, I watched her turn translucent next to me in the bathtub and coax the gravel out from her knees. I wanted very badly to collect the tiny fragments, to tuck them neatly under my fingernails and wait for them to hatch into my own precious galaxies but instead I closed my eyes as my father poured water from a cup over my head.
Physicians started using sutures to close wounds four thousand years ago. They say that before they had sutures of the variety we use today, ancient Indian doctors affixed beetles to the edges of wounds, let them sink their pincers in before cutting off their bodies and leaving just their heads to hold the skin closed.
Last night I dreamt I held a gaping hole in my midsection between my teeth in a sort of urgent maternal panic stimulated by the sense of my cells spilling out million by million in streams of everything I had swallowed — him, her, hurt, violet, rose petals, pills. But the real nightmare is: what happens when the skin accidentally fastens itself around something that does not belong? Gravel, for example, or worse — something that cannot be soaked out in Loreal Just for Kids bubble bath. Like you.
Consider this a kind of plea.
I was fourteen the first time I got my heart broken. The next morning, just before the sun rose, I slipped into bed between my parents and felt the space between my cells throb with a kind of hot and percussive vacancy.
Isn’t it funny how there is nothing so dense and opaque as that particular strain of emptiness? Loneliness is when you realize that “vacant” doesn't mean what you once thought it did.
Isn’t it equally funny that there is no sensation to bleeding? You can taste the blood, watch it seep through your sleeves, but there is no precise feeling to the state of bleeding. Your hand goes to the wound, not your consciousness. Only when your child eyes are met directly with reddened fingers do you know that your body is leaking.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if the heart were similarly impaired? I was fourteen for the other first time. He was eighteen. When it was over, right after he reminded me not to tell anyone what we had just done, he tried to discard the condom but it slipped between his fingers and its contents spilled all over his exposed torso, pooling in the divots between his collarbone and his shoulders. Horrified, I looked in the other direction and pretended not to notice.
That year I started weighing myself.
Here is a brief interruption for a fun fact which reads: in the summer of 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed in the Apollo 11 on the surface of the moon. When the two men came home, they alone had left over 100 items on its surface, including a cast golden olive branch, five American flags, two golf balls, a silicon disk with goodwill messages from 73 world leaders, and 96 bags of urine, feces and vomit.
Yes, there are 96 bags of piss and shit on the moon.
Dad drops me off at the Institute of Living in his work clothes. A few hours later I am caught hiding my hummus beneath my lettuce. Dad would be disappointed. I am handed an Ensure. Cory looks up and tells the dietician: “You sure better let her go to the bathroom after giving her all that.” Dad would be proud I’ve made a friend already, though he would say I need to self-advocate. I stop sipping immediately. “Does Ensure make you shit?” I have just learned that we are not allowed to flush without a staff member checking the toilet first and I cannot imagine anything so undignified — maybe cleaning your own jizz out of your clavicle, but this is a close second. “No,” Cory says, “I just mean you’ll have to piss after drinking all that.” She’s quiet for a second. “But, if it’s anything like SlimFast, yeah it makes you shit.” I mumble, “It’s nothing like SlimFast” as the dietician politely reminds Cory that we don’t use the word “slim” in the dining room.
Cory wants to be a phlebotomist when she gets out of here, which is interesting for a number of reasons.
There are two scars on my right hand, two pale little dots like tadpole eyes or distant moons at the base of my first and third fingers where my knuckles used to scrape my teeth on their way down my throat. But no matter the carrots shooting out my nose or the flecks of blood on the water and saliva on my chin, something festered between my ribs.
Bloodletting goes back at least three thousand years and has only been has only been abrogated as a primary treatment for illness in the last century and a half. I guess it’s natural to replicate the process when your body won’t do it naturally. Do not forget that we still have our autonomous but equally ugly leeching processes.
A leech’s body is made up of 34 segments. It has suckers on both ends of its body and has 32 brains. Because of nervous system similarities, or perhaps the wealth of subject material, they are often used in research on human brain disorders.
Maybe they consumed our disorders and passed them all down through thousands of generations (the longest life span of a leech is ten years) to spit them back up in the laboratory for our studies. Would this be considered self-preservation?
All evening I lay in bed, listening to the distinct silence of my toes making shadows on the wall. In color, these shapes are somewhere between whale song and hunger and imprecise longing and the figures are angular, nebulous sprawled across the armoir. I think how there might be more inside. Angular, nebulous and the color of the word “damp.” Like memory. I want to ask them what about that moment in California was big enough to decide to begin preserving the things flashing before my baby eyes?
Imagine, if you will, a telescope in this room, poised right in front of my window. The shadows shift over it from time to time as it collects dust and stares out at the moon orbiting around me and my toe shadows, with its 96 bags of piss and shit and vomit.
Since today is trash day, this morning I walked the garbage to the end of the driveway and the steam from my coffee rose and tangled with my breath and right there, suspended in the bitterness, was a delicate miniature milky way, and the familiar way it smoldered for an instant before dissolving made me think that maybe you were somewhere in there, dozing between the molecules. Maybe, I have finally breathed you out.
Illustration by Dora O'Neill and Lily Ha