fiction: Megan Falley

THE RUNAWAYS

 

We live in a nameless town. Our mailbox is red and rusted shut like a mouth that has not been kissed in fifty years. There is no mailman because there is no mail. These names have been borrowed from books we liked best. Beyond our wraparound porch there is nothing but infinite green. Throughout the day we fill an endless pitcher of half-lemonade (Wendy’s favorite) and half iced-tea (mine), and sway in our rocking chairs all afternoon watching the nothing pass by.

 

After all these years, I’m still not much of a painter but that never stops me from painting.  Wendy is not much of a singer but hers is my favorite voice.  She picks the guitar as I play the strands of hair, she hums, “Alice, which note is that?”

 

“A-Flat,” I answer.

 

When I paint it is always her dancing in the grass, her white dress moving slowly behind her like a less-skilled waltzer trying to keep time, but she moves so quickly that I can never capture her face.  Each canvas arrives as a blur; a layer of milk poured over a water lily.  Wendy cries in C-Minor.

 

We know so much of each other’s mouths that we no longer have to speak our fake names. Wendy can sense from the kitchen when my thoughts turn to what those men did, so she meets me by the tulips and seizes the gardening sheers.  When she trembles in the bathtub I throw fistfuls of soothing lavender from the bush below her open window and they land on the bath mat. She does not say thank you and she does not need to.  Instead, when I am cold under the stars she does not bring a spare afghan but shimmies her tiny body into my sleeping bag and we rest like two caterpillars tucked in the same cocoon.

 

The aroma of chocolate simmering in a saucepan tells me that Wendy has gone to the place we never speak of.  I know its time to begin my part of the ritual.  I build a piñata and she stuffs it with her freshly baked sweets as if packing the Trojan Horse with soldiers.  She sews up its belly and I hand her the wooden bat but do not let go until her eyes meet mine.  When I am certain she understands, I tie the blindfold, spin her around until she is drunk as a husband and let her swing.  Striking tentatively at first, Wendy’s beating crescendos as she slashes its body open, and we dance in the candy rain.

 

We have made wind chimes of everything we have left behind: engagement rings, baby’s rattles, knocked out teeth delivered by the hands of men who loved us so much we couldn’t smile for anyone else.  I will never forget the day Wendy came to me with tools in hand and we drilled holes through everything we once owned, strung it all like popcorn garland and hung them throughout the yard. All that we have left has been turned to chimes— whose music plays loudest when the wind blows with fury, who sound most beautiful right after they’ve been struck.

 

MEGAN FALLEY is one of a mere handful of poets to be published both on Penmanship Books and Write Bloody Press.  After representing SUNY New Paltz for four years on the college slam team, Megan later earned her degree in English Literature and Creative Writing and returned to New Paltz to coach the team.  In 2009 she helped found the second largest collegiate spoken word tournament in the country, The Wade-Lewis Poetry Slam Invitational.   In 2010 she represented New York City on a competing team at the National Poetry Slam and her work began appearing in several literary magazines and anthologies including PANK, Muzzle, Kill Author, The Legendary, Danse Macabre, and The Literary Bohemian.  When she is not writing poems, Megan occupies herself by turning her ex-lovers into pies.