fiction: Rohin Guha

We Sat Around For a While & Talked About Eyjafjallajökull

1.

We sat around for a while and talked about Eyjafjallajökull. The 5 train was stalled somewhere between Union Square and Grand Central and it was 3:28 Saturday morning. My breath reeked of vodka and French Fries.

The girl sitting next to me had mascara creeping down her cheeks like spider legs. She was sitting on the opposite end of the train car, but moved to right beside me because 3:28 Saturday morning was no time for a young woman to be traveling without a chaperone on New York City public transit.

I didn’t mind her company until she somehow mistook my silence as consent for her to break into a lurid anecdote about how a couple nights ago, she and some of her girlfriends were at an Outback Steakhouse in Midtown for happy hour and she ordered the Bloomin’ Onion and ten or so minutes after chipping away at the ziggurat of breaded onions, she fell sick and suffered from violent diarrhea.

“There I was,” she told me, “shoving some onion rings into my mouth and I got gassy and then suddenly…I just had to shit! There was shit everywhere. It oozed out at first—but then just exploded. It was like that volcano that erupted a few weeks ago—shit smearing the entire toilet…like the rocks and shit that exploded out of that volcano.”

At which point, my digestive tract decided it would be a marvelous idea to eject some portion of the vodka and French Fries all over this girl’s Steve Maddens, via my mouth, as a thick, chunky spray.

2.
We sat around for a while and talked about Eyjafjallajökull.

“What is the world coming to?” he asked me without looking up from his Waldorf Salad and at that point, I wanted to reach across the table and push that salad into his lap. The noisome crunch of nuts between his molars made me want to tear my skin off. I wanted to climb onto the table and kick his teeth in. I sat still instead. I contemplated his rhetorical question.

Those. Fucking. Walnuts.

He ate with the grace of a bulldog chewing kibble. Each complete click was a comma splice, breaking up my thoughts, preventing them from coalescing into a single, full idea.

I prodded the romaine lettuce of my Caesar Salad with my fork because it’s not like I could very well follow through with this instinct, pushing aside my plate and stepping onto the table, my combat boots crushing votive candles underfoot, smashing the fine china—with each step, panting like a mad stag. I couldn’t draw my hooves back, leap into the air, and tackle him, pushing his head through the plate glass of our French doors leading to the back patio.

That would be déclassé.

At some point, I would’ve given up my eyesight to be next to him, to be near him…to have the privilege of sitting where a faint air current could carry his scent right under my nose.

His hand reached across the table and hope sparked that maybe his hand was creeping up to brush mine, but he was reaching for the salt shaker and I thought about pinning my knees against his thighs—his head having already broken through the plate glass of the French doors—and fixing my hands around his neck, digging my fingernails deep, and pressing my thumbs against his gullet enough to seal off the passage of air.

“I’m getting a glass of water,” I told him. He asked for one as well.

I imagined zipping his body up into a garment bag and tying it down with some stones, then pushing it off a dock. I’d invite his mother over for tea the next week.

“What kind of tea is this?” she’d ask.

“I killed your son,” I’d say.

“It’s quite delicious. A bit tangy, too!”

“It’s Russian Tea,” I’d say.

“Well, isn’t that something?”

3.

We sat around for a while and talked about Eyjafjallajökull. The TV kept playing the eruption over and over again—it was gorgeous. The expulsion of rock and fire, the airship of ash stretching from London to Moscow. He came over and handed me a glass of merlot. We toasted to clear skies in New York. “I love you,” I told him.

4.

We sat around for a while and talked about Eyjafjallajökull. It was all my mother and I could really do, bristling in the warm neon glow of the television set and the reassuring white noise of news anchor banter; she had just walked in on me clicking through some gay porn and mothers aren’t trained well for that sort of thing—to talk their sixteen year-old sons through the rights and wrongs of looking at older men sticking their forefingers up their assholes. Mothers aren’t trained well for that sort of thing at all.

But mothers aren’t hard-wired to throw their sons out on the streets either and because she could neither endorse nor condemn my habit of looking at older men sticking their forefingers up their assholes, we sat in silence and stared at the television set as it flickered in and out of commercials and the same looped footage of a remote glacier exploding in some far-away part of the world near where no doubt someone else’s sixteen year-old son was coming of age.

5.

We sat around for a while and talked about Eyjafjallajökull.

There were still several hours until the cremation. None of us really knew what to say as we endured the muggy July morning in Calcutta. Breakfast had already been served—naan, potato curry from the night before, and cups of tea with sugar and milk—and none of us had a bite to eat. Breakfast was cleared, but we continued nursing our tea. Slowly, ahems and uh-huhs had turned into whispers, which then became conversations and in the next room, the television had been left on, with Eyjafjallajökull erupting over and over again. On mute.

Several uncles, watching the muted footage of the volcano, joked about how the name looked like a cat stepping across computer keyboards. Several aunts shot them daggers because this wasn’t an occasion for laughter. There was a knock at the door and a withered priest in orange robes with all kinds of beads draped around his neck walked in. We all went up to go pay their respects but then I splintered off from the cluster. I walked into the next room. Staring absently at Eyjafjallajökull bursting open over and over again, I tried to reconcile how, at the age of six, I would return to America with no tangible connection to my grandmother’s generation.

6.

We sat around for a while and talked about Eyjafjallajökull.

The 5 train was stalled somewhere between Union Square and Grand Central and it was 3:28 Saturday morning and my breath reeked of vodka and French Fries—and the girl sitting next to me had mascara creeping down her cheeks like spider legs and she decided it would be a wonderful idea to bleat, “My boyfriend broke up with me!” out of nowhere.

And I deadpanned, because the 5 train was stalled somewhere between Union Square and Grand Central and it was 3:28 Saturday morning and my breath reeked of vodka and French fries—and because I lived so deep into Brooklyn that I thought I would definitely shit my pants if I did not get home to use the toilet soon, “Fuck you. My parents just told me earlier today they’re getting divorced. You lose—I win.”

Suddenly, an angry flood of lava, the flight of debris, the blacking out of the sky over Europe all sounded like nothing but tiny meaningless whispers.

ROHIN GUHA has a short collection of short shorts, Relief Work, forthcoming in December 2010. He has previously written for BlackBook, Gawker, New York Magazine, and Paper, but shifted his focus back to fiction after Erykah Badu once told him in a conversation, “I can tell you’re not a journalist. You’re a writer.” He remains hard at work on his first full-length novel. He finds that sometimes, pop music can make better inspiration for a writer over books. Seek him out on the internet at OhRohin.com.