fiction: Shira Erlichman

Your Worst Best Friend

 

Shark is smoking cigarette after cigarette in the phone booth we’re sharing.

My car broke down way outside of town, and hers too, and here we are.

She can’t wait till I’m done, so she comes right in. My lungs are so distracted I can’t remember who I should dial. Shark’s teeth are thin and hundred, like matchsticks.

I wish it would rain. She shoves a wrench through an old slot on the door, locking us in. “What the hell did you do that for?” I’m losing it, whatever I have, or had most of the time, I’m losing it. She’s curling her lips back like a dog, showing her teeth, her magenta-shit lipstick smudged around the corners of her mouth. Her bleach blonde hair is up in a tangled ponytail. Her roots are anything but root-like, makes me forget I love trees. “What the fuck, what the fuck,” I say to my blacked-out sight, palm over my eyes. I wish it would rain. I wish it would wet matchstick.

She pushes her back against the wall, slinks all the way down the foggy  plastic to the floor. Lights another, like this is vacation. “So what now?” I’m shouting. I’m not a shouter. I wasn’t. The nearest town is at least thirty miles out. No gas-station I can recall. She’s picking the black from under her nails, humming a show-tune. I don’t know which one. It’s all the same.  People singing about taking out the garbage or loving a Montague, a Jet,  a poorer person, whatever. Shark could be thirty, she could be fifteen,  she could be close to seventy, like a snake in the pipes I can’t pin her.

 

I grapple with the wrench for ten minutes. I cuss. I slink down too.  I’m so tired of wishing it would rain. So I ask her, this thing-woman I can’t stomach the stench of, radioactive over-the-counter perfume,a factory of lilacs, I ask: “Why are you doing this to me?” She looks up at me the way my mother looked up at me when I told her I was gay. Tired. She eases a slice of bubble gum into her mouth. It’s not that Shark doesn’t care, it’s that she cares so much it has worn her out. Her whole life she has been finding the arsonist. It used to be worth something. Now she looks me in the eye like Fire, Fire, Fire, and sighs. “I’m your best worst friend, baby.” Pop. Inhales bubble-gum against her teeth. “Or  maybe, I’m your worst best friend,” she ponders. “Yeah, I like that better.”

 

It’s settled now. I’m not getting out of here till morning. Apparently, she belongs. Like a whip in a crib. Like a doorknob in a house on fire.

“So worst best friend,” I spit, I’m about to let loose, if I’m gonna lose my mind I’m going to get some prize out of it, “Why is love a burning onion?”

She laughs, says, “You should write things. You should be a poet or something.” She doesn’t say anything else.

I don’t say, “I am a poet. Except for right now. Right now I’m locked in a fucking phone booth with a walking Shark whose nails are longer than my patience.” Pop.

 

An hour passes. She graffitis the fuzzy glass with a toxic marker.

Bubbly heart after bubbly heart after bubbly heart. Smells up the entire zone. She’s humming my least favorite song from Grease, the one where Sandra Dee is on the swing or something. “Hopelessly Devoted” that’s it. Shark is full-on singing it, eyes moony and juicy. Just a blonde girl wandering the streets in her (fully covering) nightie and the melody makes me want to skin a cat for fun. Then she sees John Travolta in a kiddie pool! Of all the songs in Grease, Shark is belting this one.

“Why can’t I flow?” I ask. “What stops me and makes me criticize and analyze myself? Huh?” Shark stops twisting the gum in her mouth around her finger in stretchy spirals. Looks up at me like she was just born. Empty.

“Oh, I don’t know honey. Because.” I look out the smudgy door, past the wrench, into the black. I think: that’s it, that’s all she’s got, here we are.  But, she keeps talking. “When it rains, you think everything looks imperfect. You’ve always loved it. People coming in from outside all messed up, taking off their soggy jackets and pushing around matted-down hair, smelling like concrete and the dirt all at once. You like it all messed up, sugar.”

Her mascara is running. From the song, I think.

It’s not that it stops being bad to be in there with her. It doesn’t.  It’s just bad isn’t a word anymore, really. I’m looking at her teeth. How’d they get so sharp. Who does she have to protect to warrant such ugliness?

“Fuck the what, more like, fuck the what,” she trails off, pop. Scratches gunk off the glass with her thumb nail, painted aqua with a tiny neon yellow palm tree.

 

 

Born in Israel, SHIRA ERLICHMAN moved to the United States when she was 6. She remembers the sun setting as her family boarded the plane. She has read her poems in nearly every state in the US and sung on stages with Ani Difranco, TuNe-YaRdS and Coco Rosie. She has had her poetry set to motion by a dance company as well as animated for a pro-choice campaign. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY where she teaches poetry and lives in her indoor treehouse. Her poems can be found in The Massachusetts Review, The Reader, and more. Check out www.shiraerlichman.com for goodies.