the blueshift journal

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next: spell bound

I’m going to start with Catherine. I was living with Catherine. I was living with this yellow slip of girl who could have been named anything and I still would have thought she was utterly and completely terrifying. She hid knives everywhere, for one thing, she hid knives behind pillows and doorways and lights and it made the loft we shared into one gleam of blade. I walked slowly, I had to, because fucking Catherine with her sallow skin and threats of hipbones at her waist hid fucking knives all over the apartment.

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“Makes you careful, careful about the air, careful about everything,” she’d say. That’s why there was a steak-knife in the bathtub and a fish knife in the shower and a pair of kabob skewers glued to the floor like teeth near the front door. I thought about asking her to not do this. Clearly, obviously, translucently, there was something wrong about it and her and how she came to own so many sharp things. But all she did when I’d bring it up was mention how, before her, I had been living in a smaller space with a smaller body, unable to pay the gas bill and shivering my skin away under ribs of Michigan winter.

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She talked like that; she talked about bodies, told you what your skin was doing and your

lungs and your heart and the inside left-most third of your right kidney. And you didn’t want her to say these things, didn’t want her to know the cardinal directions of your bloodflow, but when she said them you believed it, believed her, and there wasn’t much to say back besides “yes” or “thank you” or maybe just scream.

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I remember her asking me to move in and I remember saying “yes, thank you” and then running out of words to go against the yellow in her voice. So I moved in and the fucking knives are everywhere, on end like the arm hair of a constantly unnerved person. I am that constantly unnerved person, they are my ends, and Catherine is the one who puts them out.

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I’m starting with Catherine because I know exactly where she lives. She lives with me and she lives between orange and green and she lives inside a girl who doesn’t let boys touch her anymore and who only let me move in because, as she said:

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“You look cold and gay so can live with me if you want but if you bother me or aren’t gay I’ll put you back down where I found you.” And I told her I was very gay and she smiled and said “that better be fucking true” and I said “it is particularly fucking true.” And then I got to not get hypothermia in my own home, which was not a home but a rentable closet that I could not pay to heat.

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I’m starting with Catherine because she is one of those very gentle people who doesn’t seem to do anything gentle at all. I can write about that, I can write about her colors and her eyes and where she chooses to place cutlery and how male guests are not allowed inside our apartment unless they too are particularly fucking gay and how she likes it when I cook for her and how I’m not aloud to ever touch her and I never have and I don’t know why and I don’t need to know why to hear her and care. What’s harder to say is that I was named Ezra and I live with someone who scraped me out of a small room’s insides like sticker-residue off a wall and let me into a place with heat for the low low price of me keeping my life on the inside of my skin and I cannot keep a job and cannot keep a body and cannot keep a way of being for very long until I feel my sense of self dissolving like a tablet of alka-seltzer in a river. I foam, look rabid, and have teeth, but I always always end up without a mouth to foam from or put the teeth in.

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I have come home feeling like this. I have come home feeling like foam and teeth and have been too tired to sleep, spending whole nights trying to rearrange my boy into a body. She, one time, stood in the doorway to my room with yellow light behind her and told me she would go get eyeliner and I sat up and said “what” but by then, she was gone. And then she was back.

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“Touch me and you get aborted from this apartment,” she managed to say between clenched teeth in the dark. She turned on my lights and clambered over the sheets and held my eyelids still and drew lines on them. I blinked a lot and her hands filled up with tremors the same way a hole in the sand refills with ocean when the tide breathes in. I was so careful. I was so careful not to move or lean into her or move my body which felt like a joke I was wearing. She was already shaking with the vicinity and later, after, she would have to go back to her room and lock the door and heave air out of herself for a half an hour to get back to okay. You don’t touch that sort of thing, you just let it draw eyeliner over you and try not to say anything back.

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“Go look,” she insisted before sprinting away to breathe. I walked out towards the bathroom and I could see the thing in the mirror because I hadn’t normalized it like I’d normalized all of me. I usually couldn’t process what that glass gave me, she knew that, Catherine did, she knew how I saw a blonde-haired blur every time I courted a mirror. I could see the eyeliner though, and I could coax the eyes out from under the lines and this was the first time in a few years that I could know I had blue eyes, blue eyes that start with Catherine.

SECURITY DEPOSITS

CLAIRE OLESON