Nostos by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer
Like kisses, rain on the windshield. Five minutes
into our drive, the back right tire went flat in a burst
of air. When confronted with my own inadequacy,
I have turned away from it: I couldn’t help change the tire,
and so the man bent over in the tall August grass on I-10 East
and explained it to me, and I stood there. When confronted
with the emerald body of the dragonfly dipping low
in the grass to find its breakfast, I chose to ignore it, all the while
wondering if dragonflies could bite you. Yes—
something had bitten me on the wrist last night, where the man’s mouth
had closed over me in rapture. The day before, we awoke
to raw sewage creeping up the pipes like a thief. It was raining then,
too. Hurricane season, he told me. He took me into the garden, nodded
to the gecko on the side of the fence, and together, we watched the sky
come down in gray sheets. Once inside again, his skin flushed
as we moved tables and backpacks and piles of clothes onto whatever
counter space was available to us. We made pancakes
in his landlady’s house. I crumbled butter into flour for what felt like hours.
Measured salt, tasted sugar. He touched me from behind, hands
turning in the white apron lashed about my hips. I washed dishes
and thought, yes, this could be my life. He drank my coffee. I wiped
the dots of dark liquid from the corner of his mouth, and we talked
about the deaths that made us capable of grief, and what
they used: the guns neither of us could ever own, the hypothetical light exiting
the apertures of our bodies. How easy to imagine a hole like that
splitting the forehead’s monotony. How easy to think, yes, that too
could have been my life.
