Stuck Between the Walls

“Feel it.”

She dug her fingernails into my shoulders again.

I did. I did feel it.

Outside, it sounded like the squirrels had gone to war. I could hear them scratching in the trees, plucking little bombs from the branches and raining them down like artillery fire onto the hoods of waiting cars. I’d never seen a neighborhood with so many squirrels. In the months I’d spent staring out her bedroom window, it felt like I’d seen more squirrels than people, as if each of her neighbors had a squirrel they sent out in their stead, gathering treasures to bury deep beneath the earth where no one else could reach them. I said that to her then, and felt her laugh where she sat, straddling my back on the mattress, naked but her socks, jagged nails scraping flesh from my bones. She said it sounded like an apt metaphor for capitalism.

“Feel it.”

“I feel it. For real.”

The power was still out from last week. I’d given her a handful of cash on Friday; a combination of allowance and the birthday money from my uncle. The next day I’d seen it on her dresser, wadded up like used tissues. Then it was gone. She said she’d paid the bill. It just took a few days to turn back on. 

She caught my skin on the rough edge of her nail and my body ran away into the mattress, face pressed hard into the springs. Some part of my nose clicked.

“Did that hurt?”

“A little.”

I heard her push a breath out through her nose, but she kept scratching away at me. It might have been lighter. I couldn’t really tell.

By the time she came back from the bathroom I’d lit the last cigarette and sucked it halfway down, ash collecting like drool in the sheets. I hadn’t had the energy to move, so I just lay there, staring at the open window from the nest of scattered linen. Man’s Search for Meaning on the milk crate beside me. A stick of Nag Champa burning slowly on the dresser. She threw herself down on the mattress still naked and plucked the cigarette from my mouth, planting it between her teeth. When it was done, she leaned over and put it out on the windowsill, exposing me to the curve of her back like a switch flexed taut, and I felt something stir in my stomach, something oceanic and painfully familiar. She was right, I thought to myself, but it burned my eyes to do so.

“They mean it’s time to stop taking things so seriously.”

She said it like the next line in a conversation we hadn’t been having. She did this often, leading me to believe I’d blacked out halfway through, and was only just coming around.

“What?”

“At least according to North American symbology,” she said. “Squirrels.”

“I didn’t realize they had symbology,” I said. “I thought that was just for eagles and bears and stuff.”

“Everything has symbology,” she said, rolling on her side to face me.

“People too?” I said. “Or is it just animals?”

“We are animals,” she said. “Think about it. Man is a symbol for everything: war, suffering, madness, joy. Everything. Man is the ultimate symbol.”

“Woman too?”

“Oh, you want me to show you what I’m a symbol for?”

She twitched her nose and sniffed. It was perhaps the only cute thing she ever did. I clung to it every time, a buoy in open water.

“When I think of squirrels, I don’t think of fun,” I said. “I think of the future. Like planning for the future. Because they bury nuts.”

I rolled to my side too, and we inhaled each other’s air. She slid her arm beneath the sheet and touched the small of my back. I felt her fingers on my skin. The hair stood on end at her touch, the fear of what always came next. I was a funny bone, and she struck me again and again, until I couldn’t feel my hands. But even before that, her lips were on my neck. And before that, she was on top of me, rolling her hips like a stone grinding wheat. Pulverizing. Or maybe that was after. Maybe it was always happening, then. Maybe it’s still happening now.