Fiction
There’s a bag of your ashes tied up in the passenger seat of my car—etched into the crater where you spilled an entire iced caramel macchiato and scrubbed it out with toilet bowl cleaner. Bleach on my black seats. I try to remember the anger I felt, but what greets me is emptiness pretending to be apathy.
Instead of chasing the memory, I shake for a minute, and stare, wondering whether I should do your seat belt up. Yes, I decide. Of course. The last thing I want is to see you go flying. Heat singes my hands when I grab the buckle, and instead of flinching, I grip it tighter and tighter until it burns. I wonder at the summer we were supposed to have—eating mayo bologna sandwiches by the beach and lapping at the sticky popsicle juice under your chin. Instead, I got to wear black on the hottest day of the year and sweat through my mascara before it was even time to cry.
I drive down the PCH, the ocean breeze taunting me by running her hands through my eyelashes. You used to tell me, “Close your eyes,” voice all sultry and seductive, but instead of kissing me, you’d rub your thumbs over my eyelids, back and forth, fanning my lashes like the teeth of a comb. I’d shudder, but with my grin on full display; you knew I’d take your touch anywhere. I’d take your touch like a Catholic takes penance—with relief, grasping at the love of absolution.
“Renata.” Your voice from the passenger seat. A tug on the wheel. I open my eyes a second before the alarm blares, a blood-red banner flashing across the screen on my dashboard. BRAKE. I swerve in time to avoid slamming headfirst into the garbage truck in front of me.
I laugh in stark hiccups. It strikes me as hysterical, that we both could’ve ended up thrown out with the trash.
“White trash,” you would say. “That’s what my whole family is, Rennie. You don’t want to meet them.”
Well, the joke’s on you. Your mom was there when I picked you up at the crematorium. She wanted to split you in half down to the ounce. I thought of the Judgement of Solomon and almost let her have you, but she contented herself with enough ashes to fill the flask masquerading as her belt buckle. Before pouring your ashes inside, I asked her if it was empty and she tipped it back, two glugs of amber liquid vanishing down her gullet. “It is now,” she said. Well, I thought, fair enough.
I saw something of you in her smile lines—I guess you’re both the laughing kind. Not that she was laughing when I met her, but the way she held herself told me she was well acquainted with mirth. The sharpness of her eyes and the rank smell of ethanol on her breath told me she was just as well-acquainted with suffering.
I wonder if there’s something different about me now. It seems impossible that I could look the same as I used to. The architecture inside of me has crumbled. I half expect to wake up every morning and find that I can no longer move my fingers, wiggle my toes, beat my tongue into the shape of your name.
I take the exit and keep driving until I hit False Point. There’s a blank slate in my mind where a mental map would usually go, but I take the turns, easy and automatic. As if I could ever forget this route. I’d sooner forget how to bleed than I would stop retracing that night with grubby fingers coated in sand. Did you vanish? I want to ask. Was that the last night your hands on me weren’t saying goodbye?
“It’s not like other beaches,” you said. “It has cactuses.”
“Cacti,” I corrected.
“Your beach might have cacti, but mine has cactuses, ya hear?” One finger dragging out the Southern drawl you’d spent the last few years trying to shake.
I nodded. You could’ve turned the entirety of the English language on its head and I would’ve stumbled over the rules like a foreign speaker, nodding my head the whole time. “I hear.”
A mad smile. Your hair wet on my shoulder. The San Diego sunset like light shining through hurricane shutters. I wish I could hold the past in my hands.
There’s a California parking sign by the curb where I pull up. And by that, I mean a basic rule with seven addendums. The gist of it is that I’m doing something illegal, being here at night. “My personal motto,” you used to say, “is that I do one thing a day that would piss off my dad, if he was still around to wear that fucking badge.”
I pop the trunk open. They gave me your belongings in a mailing envelope—said they ran out of boxes last week and the office manager hadn’t ordered more. Said apologetically like they’d gotten my order wrong at Burger King, but I would have taken every item even if I’d had to stuff them in my pockets and down my bra.
I take your water bottle out—still half-full. The plastic might’ve been clear once, but it’s been the yellow of butter meringue cookies for as long as I’ve known you. I snap the lid and thumb at the white powder caked on the straw, my tongue darting out to lick it before I can even think to pretend I want to stop. It’s gritty, and instead of taste it leaves behind a tingling numbness, like the sting of a fire ant. For a second, I catch the scent of your sweat, your spit, the flat space between your breasts, but it’s gone before I can grab it, rain-like and slipping through my fingers.
I unbuckle the passenger seat and hover over the bag holding what used to be you before deciding there’s nothing to do but move. You’re heavy in my hands, a weight to you that I don’t remember from hoisting you onto rumbling washing machines and cold countertops. I cup you close to my chest and swing the water bottle back and forth as I walk to the shore, trunk and side door still open.
The ocean calls me to my knees and I heed it, feeling the cold touch of waves rising to mid-thigh and drenching my pants. I dump the rest of your water out and fill it with the sea, salt, and brine.
“Okay,” I steel myself. “Okay.”
The knot on the bag of ashes slips easily between my thumb and forefinger. I tilt the contents into your water bottle like the needle of an hourglass and watch as it takes the shape of clay, of silt, of mud and paste. It’s as frigid as the waves on my palm, heavy and cloying when I slather it down my neck and on my chest, ripping my shirt off the second it stands in the way between you and my skin.
This, more than anything, is familiar. The desperation. The heady want to be one being, to do away with separation, to let your skin absorb me and melt into me until there is no thought I could have that you wouldn’t hear. But in all my sordid fantasies, I was the solvent and you were the solution. I never dared to imagine it the other way around—there was always so much more of you.
The waves thunder, crash after unspeakable crash falling to the background around me. I can only hear the sound of your morning hum, a sleepy and low-pitched moan calling me back to bed. My back hits the shore, body splayed like a starfish gripping a reef. Shattered-glass stars above me, your bloody fingernails closing my eyes one more time.
I touch myself in the same way you touched me that night. Arms first, slow grip walking from my shoulders to my wrists, clay clogging my pores. I hope they suffocate. More of you on my hands, my own touch trailing down hips and knees, between my legs. I coat myself in what’s left of us and pretend. I pretend that I’m enveloped in all of you and not 3.5 percent of what you were (that’s how much they give you back after everything is said and done). I pretend that the gravel and ocean water is your rough tongue, your scarred hands. I pretend you’re still here, that we got to have the late July blooms.
Then, bright lights. Red and blue cutting through the haze of moonlight mirrored on the crested water. A loud and wailing siren overtakes the air, vibrant and alive, mocking. I don’t move. I am still held and fastened in your arms. They will have to pry me off the sand. I refuse to let them have the last of you.
On another night we had five more minutes.
Valentina Gómez is a writer and literary enthusiast with an educational background in psychology and creative writing from the University of Southern California. She recently completed a master of arts in Literary Editing and Publishing from the same university. Born in Medellin, Colombia, she was raised haphazardly among three countries. Currently, she serves as the Literary Arts Coordinator for Light Bringer Project, an arts and education nonprofit based in Pasadena. She writes about people and the ways they relate to each other, and her favorite kinds of stories are the ones that leave her wondering how it’s possible that the characters didn’t know each other at the beginning. Her creative work has been published in F(r)iction, an imprint of Brink Literacy Project, and her research has been published in Cognitive Development, a peer-reviewed journal of psychology.