Rub the salt from your wounds into the earth
by Leah Hilson
Freddie was hiding in the shower when I got home. Steam curled to the door, greeting me, damp and warm like a dog panting on my face. The train ride was long. Ice and snow smothered the tracks, strangling wheels intent on trudging through. And at every station, a strange parade of orange vests would receive us, lugging industrial sized shovels, fixed on digging us out. Nine hours running from the weather makes a train vibrate at just the right frequency to bump your teeth and jiggle your brain. By Montreal, the remaining mush inside of my skull ached. It’s not like I was expecting a welcome sign or anything, but some help getting my suitcase up our narrow stairs would’ve been nice.
Sameness stretched out in the soupy air of the apartment. I took my time looking around, I was trying on an old pair of shoes and seeing if they still fit. It was cluttered, like I left it. Freddie moved the couch, but she left my photos and paintings up around the living room, like some museum exhibit featuring vestigial scraps of my life.
“Jesus fuck it’s hot!” I yelled out, once I heard the water turn off. Freddie appeared in my doorway, dragging her fingers through her dripping hair.
“The radiator broke while you were gone. It’s been boiling for months.”
“A little gift from our landlord, huh? A tropical experience in the middle of January.” My brain was slowly starting to solidify again, so I felt like putting on a bit of a show. I mimed laying a towel on the ground, sticking an umbrella in the sand. Finally, when I acted as though a seagull had stolen my hat, Freddie broke. I earned a laugh.
“Man, I missed you.” She gave me a tight smile before she went to her room. I deserved that. The lock on the medicine cabinet, too. She’d said she had forgiven me, but that’s only because she’s the nicest person in the world.
There’s a vintage store around the block with a big collection of army surplus and fancy old coats. I’d forgotten I’d sold most of my things before I left, so I told the owner I needed something warm, but I was skint. I said I’d abandoned the city to join a real circus, one of those ones with a fire eater and a lion tamer. But then they replaced my act and the lion got to keep my coat. He laughed and laughed and disappeared into the back. When he came out, he was holding a shearling missing all its buttons. He said he could sell it to me, plus a bag of mismatched buttons, for $50. I went home and sewed them on.
Freddie laughed so hard she snorted when she saw it. She thought I looked homeless, like those bums in the park with their big raggedy coats.
“Thank you.” I said with a little bow. I spun around to show it off like I was Kay Thompson.
The next day Freddie sprinkled rock salt on our steps for the ice. It got everywhere and dotted the sidewalk like someone had popped a pill open and all the little crystals spilled out. I must have picked some of it up in the soles of my boots and carried it with me to every business in walking distance looking for a job. I had the best luck at Discotek. The owner Gary liked my coat and gave me an interview on the spot. He asked me what I’d been up to since I wasn’t in school.
“Writing.” That wasn’t a lie.
“Fiction?”
“No. More like answers. Observations. That kind of thing.” Not quite a lie either.
“Like Joan Didion?” He smiled.
“Sure.”
“You should meet my son. He’s about your age. He’s writing a novel.” Great. I always fell for guys who thought they were writers.
Discotek was a cramped place, every single shelf on every single wall threatened to fall under the weight it bore. It was one of those book slash record Frankenstein shops that also sold a collection of vintage Italian porn. Gary told me to mention that when customers walked in.
I met Ellie when he came by the store with a cardboard box full of tapes in his arms. We flipped through them on the counter, like we didn’t know what else to do with our hands.
“I don’t know where my dad gets this stuff.” He blushed. A topless woman sat astride a running horse on the cover of the tape he was holding.
“I’ve been wondering who he thinks is gonna buy it.” That earned me a laugh.
“I’m Ellie. And uh,” He stuck out his long hand. “I don’t normally carry this much porn around. I swear.”
“I’m Vincent.”
“That’s a pretty name. Interesting too. For a girl I mean.” Whenever I felt like indulging myself, I wondered how my life would’ve turned out if my parents had chosen something normal. Maybe I would’ve been bland like a Sarah, or delicate and sweet like a Chloe. “My dad told me about you. You’re the one who’s gonna be the next Fran Leibowitz.”
“Something like that.”
The rest of my shift he hung around helping me restack books and talking to me about the weather. At closing, he invited me over for coffee.
“I can’t. I’m not allowed to have fun.” That earned me another laugh. He thought I was kidding.
We walked a couple blocks to the nearest grocery store. The kosher one, where Orthodox children with long black skirts or curly pieces of hair hang around and play with the carts outside. We grabbed one and filled it with what we guessed the other might want. I picked out green beans, cans of tuna, lentils, that kind of thing. He chose grapefruits and sauerkraut for me.
The sun was low in the sky when he walked me home. He looked funny, with his scarf wrapped all around his head to keep heat against his face. At my door he asked if he could come up and fill his water bottle. I knew it wasn’t a good idea. I opened the door, touched my fingers to the side of the frame, brought them to lips. We both walked in.
“What’s that?” He asked.
“Just an old habit.” I shrugged. I’d forgotten my grandmother hung up that mezuzah when I first moved in.
In my room, I put my old Television record on, and we smoked his cigarettes on the balcony until our noses and fingers turned pink.
Smoke curdled around us. Against the cold, our breath mixed. I shivered against him and turned my face into his sweater, I couldn’t help myself. He traced a finger over my flushed cheek, up towards my eyebrow and back towards my ear. His mouth on mine felt hot and sweet, crumbling away the scabbed over dust. Under his body, I felt completely covered, like a kid playing in the snow, swaddled in layers of scarves and coats. His hands were warm. His breath on my skin was warm. For the first time in a long time, I felt warm.
“Don’t you feel like it’s a little too soon?” Freddie was facing away from me, staring at the moka pot on the stove.
I sat on our counter in my underwear, with my knees tucked under my chin like a little kid, taking up as little space as possible. Freddie always talked like that, saying feel instead of think. Like she could feel I was making a mistake the way she could feel happy or sad or cross or nauseous. Or maybe these thoughts took hold in her body the way heat burned her skin. She could feel it like silk between her fingers or toothpaste on her tongue.
“Where do you feel it?”
Freddie turned toward me, her eyes squinting, like she’d gotten the morning sun stuck in her face. “I feel like you have this habit of acting before you’re even halfway done thinking.” I decided it felt warm knowing she could still feel me.
I kept busy like I was supposed to. I’d go to work, restack the records and the books and the porn, and Ellie would pick me up at closing. We’d end up at the café, and we’d sit and work on our writing. He was so wrapped up in his own words I don’t even think he noticed the blank page I kept for weeks. When he’d get stuck, he’d ask for my advice.
“There’s too much minutiae.”
I always thought minutiae was a Jewish word. It felt like one. I imagine it was a Yiddishism that sloughed off my grandmother’s tongue like schmutz or schtick. “You get so stuck in the menusha Vincent,” she would always say.
“No such thing.” I said.
“Or maybe I’m being too soft.” Ellie went on. “It wouldn’t kill me to throw something their way. My professor told me I treat characters too tenderly.” I didn’t think anything could be treated too tenderly. A snowflake will melt in even the coldest of hands, I wanted to tell him.
“In high school I had a teacher write ‘Vincent, you seem to really grasp human suffering’ in the margins of my essay.” Ellie’s slow nod told me that caught his attention. My jaw snapped shut, I didn’t know why I said that. “She didn’t know what she was talking about.”
“Of course.” If he noticed my clumsy retreat, he let it go. I clenched my teeth hard to push it away.
All the good writers have moody black and white photos of themselves to put on the backs of their books. Gary let me borrow his camera and I took some of Ellie when he asked, wearing a mismatched plaid suit, posing in my bathtub. We went to get them developed at the photo store across town. I was all out of sorts that day. I tasted blood in my mouth before I noticed I had chewed half my cuticle off. That horrible feeling I hadn’t known in a while started to creep up on me again, and I clenched my jaw tight to push all those bad thoughts from my mind. Just another bad habit I needed to break. That day it was so unyielding I couldn’t open it back up. I pushed so hard it popped.
“Ouch.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I think I might’ve cracked a tooth.”
“Open.” He took my chin in his hand and tilted my head back to get a good look. “Huh, nothing to see here.” I circled my tongue around his fingers. That close I could smell his breath and see myself in his eyes.
Ellie and the film clerk got to talking, and he mentioned this bookstore near Concordia. Ellie wanted to check it out. My twitching jaw started to scream. I hadn’t been around there in a long time. I should’ve told him no, but my jaw wouldn’t budge.
We were in a convenience store when I saw his face. Ellie was outside, smoking. I ducked behind a shelf. It was too late. He’d already caught me.
“No fucking way. No fucking way, Vince.”
“Hi.”
“I don’t fucking believe it. You pissed a lot of people off when you left, you know. You still owe Mark a shit ton of money, yeah?”
I heard door chimes, and I knew it was Ellie coming in. I didn’t move. If I pretended it wasn’t happening, maybe Ellie wouldn’t notice either. If he knew, he wouldn’t like me so much anymore.
“Oh, what, you’re suddenly shy now? Things have been really boring without you. No one knew where you went. People thought you died. Someone said you killed yourself – or tried to and ended up a psych case. I thought you ran away after what you did. Someone else said they sent you off to get clean. No fucking way.”
I was watching myself from the past. I could see a man was talking to a girl but they both felt years away. Without realising what she was doing, the girl spun on her toes and sprinted for the door.
I didn’t notice the tears until I felt the cold air burn my eyes. I’d eaten something rotten, and suddenly I was full of impatient squirming maggots that threatened to come back up. I leaned over and gagged until the force of it reached down and pulled my stomach inside out. My unravelled intestines hung out of my mouth like wet wriggling worms. I gathered myself and grabbed a fistful and shoved them back inside.
Ellie followed me out, asked who that was. God, why couldn’t he just leave me alone. I could hear him calling after me, but I knew he’d get the message and turn back eventually. I’d never see him again. I’d never go back to Discotek either. I’d just keep walking.
The cold air was gone just in time for Freddie to turn twenty-one. At the bus stop I sat down beside an old man who was cleaning his teeth. He was dressed the way I probably do in Freddie’s mind, in a big pinstripe jacket and orange fur trimmed hat. He looked at me and smiled.
“Hey Vince, haven’t seen you around in a while.”
“Yeah, winter hibernation.” I sighed.
“Do you have any change? I’m short a dollar.”
“Just enough for one ride.”
“Ça va, ça va. I’m feeling lucky today.” He took a deep breath.
I had this bad habit of talking to strangers, especially all the old men in town who said weird stuff I found wonderful. It’s something that made my mother seriously worry when I was a kid.
“You’ve got salt in your wounds. I can really smell it.”
The wounds were my fault, still, “Someone else put the salt there.”
“You ought to know that’s a gift. Just like this hat. Now, it may seem ugly but it’s really beautiful.” It wasn’t. “I like the way it fits; Lizzie gave it to me, and she thinks it looks real nice.”
I really didn’t have a single clue who Lizzie was, but I nodded along. I thought of my own coat, how much Ellie liked it. How sometimes he’d put it on and look in the mirror to appraise himself, turning this way and that. Then he’d drape it over my shoulders and tell me he liked it better on me.
I wasn’t paying attention, and when I started to listen again, the old man was talking about the rapture and shaking a little. We would all shake, the earth too, I imagined, at that gnawing end, back and forth until all the skyscrapers crumbled away. I imagined the floods that would sink the city. The fallen, the wretched. Wounds reopening, and others scarring over. Sacred water drowning the whole island, soaking deep into the earth until all the worms and other gross things crawled up out of the muck.
I remembered the restaurant wasn’t too far a walk, so I gave the old man my change. He smiled again, and probably thought it was some sort of payment for his doctrine.
As I was walking, I got out my stuff, and took my finger in it and traced my gums. I didn’t have a gift, but when I’d reach Freddie, I’d pepper her cheeks with kisses, like I did when I was a kid. Yeah, that’d make her laugh. There was a festival on the street, and they closed the road to cars. It was busy, carts and vendors dotted the sidewalk. I walked through the crowd, and let myself feel, tangibly for once, how the city bent around me and took shape. I pictured that drowning city. I thought of some god who would take his hand, and gently pick the salt from my skin. The tide would catch it, carry it over my shoulder up up up and away. And when the rain eventually stopped, that salt would sow sun-baked fields, rub itself into the earth beneath it. I felt myself inflating. My meninges ballooned over my brain, air filled my legs so my steps were light, my jaw, at last, loosened up. I hardly even tasted the bitterness in my gums.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Leah Hilson is a writer from Toronto, Ontario. She currently resides in Montreal, where she studies Pharmacology as an undergraduate at McGill University. This is her first publication.