Unspooling Gold
Alia Michaud
The dark of a burnt-out lamplight looms above her and she hovers below where a pool of an orange bulb used to glow. It’s a black thorn, a spire, a prick on the spinning wheel that, if she could only reach up and touch it with her fingertip, would press the dregs of sleep down her throat and take her under. It’s a charred streak that breaks the sky and she is found somewhere at the bottom, a richer shadow than that of the night. And she’s here because there’s not many other places to go.
Her best friend is drying out on a strange man’s towel rack, or trying to, but he’ll continue to slide more brine down the tunnel of her neck. If she were interested in numb, she’d be there.
All the church’s lights are dimmed until just the brown-stained face of Jesus meets her blackened eye with his, and he doesn’t even blink. Her face continues to swell.
Clubs cost money. So do fake I.D.s.
And home… she can just scrape together the memory, like juices clinging to the hollowed skin of a fruit crate. She can almost recall the taste. But it burns sour on her tongue after all she’s done and the numb from this sweet, cold sin is safe.
So she stands along the lip of the road, stares down into the black of it, and imagines her skin slipping into nothing but a grease stain under toe. A smooth pebble, swooped and swollen like the blood bursting in the skin by her eye. That’s all they’ll see. That’s all they ever see. She can’t go home.
When the mottled old truck pulls up along her street, she steels her skin. The car slows and burps and drives on by until the break in the median, and then trundles back her way. Its tires roll slowly to a stop, silver-faced hubcaps cracking open their dark eyes, and the white face of a man rises from the blackened belly. She nearly sinks down into the motley of her bruises to hide. He comes closer.
His head tilts, eyes squint, and after a long moment, he finally calls out, “Love? You alright?”
She knows she’s not in much of a charming state, but a man like him won’t care. There’s only one hand she can play if she wants a warm bed for the night, so she’ll spill her cards right, drop the words from her open mouth, and hope they tempt him. She purrs, “For the right amount, I’ll be anything you want.”
“Oh?” He falters and touches his fingers to his face. “Oh. You… that is, you’re a, um…” Here his eyebrows raise and his chin dips, a gesture to his jeans. Something in the motion, in the surprise on his face, nearly makes her hackles rise with embarrassment.
She tamps down her temper as well as she can and says, almost patiently, “Are you asking me if I’m a prostitute?”
“I, uh,” he says around a nervous titter, staring at the street. If he notices her glare, he doesn’t show it. “I guess so. Are you?”
She swallows a biting remark hard, because she wishes the answer to the question he’s too meek to voice was a righteous no, but her prospects are low. And her lover is cold, her skin colder. The purr of her stomach is always on her mind. She doesn’t think she can afford to say so. Her pride tries to tackle the word in her throat, but she manages a quiet “Sure.”
His body locks for a withering moment as if he’s not sure how this is supposed to go, and she wonders if she’ll have to make the first move, but just as quickly as the panic became him, he relaxes and gestures to the truck grandly. “After you then, miss.”
***
His apartment is small, smaller than expected for a man who throws his cash away on such fleeting fits of pleasure. But it’s warm and homey—safe. Nice. A bit too honest. With his shoes tossed messily as soon as he stepped inside, sprawled beside a number of other pairs; with his coat dropped upon the back of a sagging leather couch, wearied and molded to hug his manly shape; with knick-knacks and dirty dishes on the table and photographs in small frames. It’s too pure for her filth. The cavity in her chest aches.
It hardly matters what his home looks like, she decides and settles deeper into his sheets, waiting. It only matters how thick his wallet is.
She stirs the last of the risotto he had basically forced upon her, which she only accepted after clarifying that it would in no way lower her price. It’s gone cold and moves in sluggish clumps, but she finds she’s hardly hungry. Only anxiety has room to settle now in the pit of her stomach. She can hardly bear the thought that this is how far she’s fallen. Some things can’t be dwelled on. Some things are too cruel and too true.
When ten minutes go by, then thirty, and then nearly an hour, she’s ready to burst with all of her unthinkable thoughts and she fears the weight of them now that she’s been left too long alone. This man, this stranger, has her where he wants her and has left her to squirm. Her mind wanders to horrible scenarios of him waiting on some friends to share in the fun. Or perhaps his wife came home. Maybe he’s a serial killer.
She imagines him gliding a dulled blade over a whetstone, imagines the slide of smooth metal cutting through her skin, imagines his grip on her chin to keep her quiet. Imagines the weeks that will go by without even a flyer. She can’t wait for the worst; she can’t wait to die.
She slips from the bed, flesh roughened by the cold sting of the air, and ghosts down the hall, mindful of every sound the flat makes, the mutters of the AC and the refrigerator’s hum. They whisper sweetly to her a night song. But if there’s a man, he makes no sound.
The living room is darkened, cast only in the blue light of a distant billboard and a small, tabletop lamp. It spills its bright orange glow, slow molasses pooled, a warm crack of fire upon the near end of the couch, and his hair is lit like unspooled gold amongst the darkened locks, caught up in the steady light. She creeps through the dark, inches closer, and listens to him breathe. Slow and even.
His eyes are closed, lips gently parted, and there, slumped on his chest, lays an open book, black and spine-cracked and old. Used. And in his fist, a fold of cash that’s much too big.