2024 HFR Contest fiction runner-up selected by Venita Blackburn
Spaceship
Grace says her first memory of me is body odor and the only hygiene item in my bathroom being a bar of Irish Springs soap. She says that I’m a particular kind of dyke. I’m not sure if I know what she means.
I talk to her on the phone, from an apartment bathroom 3,000 miles away, in the woods of northern Idaho. I can hear my downstairs neighbors talking to each other while in the shower. The one with a deep voice says he’ll only eat Grape Nuts within the first minute of the milk being poured. After that, he says, they’re too soggy. I spit out my toothpaste–most of it missing the sink, making a distinct pattern of small white dots on the mirror–and wonder what kind of dyke he is.
I tell Grace on the phone about where I live now, about the bright yellow fields of canola that make the world look like a video game. I tell her I’m not sure of what I’m winning or losing yet.
Men here sit screwed into place behind the counter of the hardware store. They have the ability to separate my body into its primary colors with just a low glance and a can I help you? The four words are always in a predictable rhythm like the sound of a gurney being pushed down a hospital hall while it’s wheels rhythmically catch on the seams of linoleum.
At the airport, I try to remember that turbulence isn’t dangerous, that it’s impossible for a plane to simply drop out of the sky like a dead weight, that there is something called aerodynamics.
Aerodynamics I whisper over and over to myself. A mantra, my therapist calls it. Even if both engines fail, the plane would mostly glide from its thousand mile height down to the ground—an 8’ X 11’’ sheet of printer paper gently floating to a dark pit of unearthed grass, flames and fumes.
In 7th grade, I told Jake Taylor that his hair cut made him look like a dyke. I remember the way the word burned as it fell from my mouth. I remember how the linoleum underneath my feet gave way to a patch of raw, smoking dirt and there I stood, no survivors, burning for years to come.
My neighbor here has 5 kids who are either screaming or silent, no inbetween. I feel an affinity, and sometimes, when the family is on vacation I go and sit in their sandbox, pretending I’m somewhere at the beach. I lay in wait for someone to build me into a beautiful sand castle, every grain packed neatly into a bucket, dumped out to look perfectly round and sturdy. Inevitably, I am found by the neighborhood cat, who scratches around in the sand by my feet, looking for a place to a shit.
The summer I got sick, a stranger took me to the hospital. My sodium levels dropped from drinking too much water during a bad week, a bad stretch of anxiety. I was at the grocery store and suddenly couldn’t remember where or who I was. My body lost its balancing function, its horizontal stabilizers. I tripped over a man who was stooped at an end cap, considering the sale on toilet paper. I fell over him and collapsed in front of the display, in front of all the soft rolls of tissue wrapped in plastic.
In the ER, I laid on a gurney for hours. My only company, a machine measuring my vitals. Everytime my heart moved, the machine let out a “beep” like the end cycle tone of a microwave. A few hours in, the machine stopped working. The sound stopped. I could still feel my heart–a small bird caught in the net. I knew I wasn’t dead, but all that was now on the screen was a glowing flat line and an absence of my name. When the nurse opened the door to my room, apologizing profusely–it’s old. it does this, i’m sorry. I could see the stranger still in the waiting room, sitting on a bench, hands folded in his lap and felt the little bird break loose from its net.
In my dreams, I am always pregnant. I name her Marjorie everytime. Marjorie–like the name of my late grandmother but also what I always thought was the name for fake butter. I realized, recently, it’s Mar-garin not Mar-jorie.
–IN like someone commanding me to get IN the car, or get IN the game, or get IN the mood. As I’m laying on the hospital gurney–just me and my machine– I whisper to the dream baby inside me—I’m trying, I’m trying, I tried.
The first person I ever kissed used to pick me up in her beat up Nissan when my parents worked nights. On the highway, out of town, when we’d hit a stretch of no cars, she’d roll down the windows and click off the headlights. A game we called spaceship. Before reaching our exit, before she flicked the lights back on, she’d take her hands off the wheel, lean over the center console and kiss me in the dark.
I tell Grace about the fall here. About how after the harvest, the canola fields are covered in crooked, criss-crossed tractor lines. They look the same as the back of my head after a fresh self-haircut in the bathroom mirror. The buzzer echos so loud off the tiled walls of my bathroom. I bet the downstairs neighbors think it’s a vibrator. I bet the downstairs neighbors think they know what kind of dyke I am.
When I told my friend I was a dyke. I said–I think I might be a Lesbian. The word came out of my mouth with a capital L. It felt like a big balloon animal full of whole milk. The word hovered above me, underlined my first name, put every body part I thought I knew in quotation marks. The word floated me up to the ceiling where I could do nothing but wait for the atmospheric pressure or a bird strike to the engine to bring me back down.
I light a small candle and place it on the back of the toilet, invoking my late grandmother to help me keep a steady buzzer hand. With my glasses off, my whole body in the mirror is just one big blur. The smell of burning proteins sometimes hits me when a tuft of hair lands in the open flame. When I was a kid, Rosie and I would burn our hair for fun while her mom was in the shower. We’d stick the end of our braids into the flame of the giant scented candle that sat in the middle of her kitchen table. It was supposed to smell like french vanilla, but really it just smelled like old magazines and corn oil. Once, Rosie didn’t take her hair away in time and burned a good chunk of her braid off. After, her hair had a panhandle like the state of Oklahoma; she couldn’t put it in a ponytail for months.
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Most of the in-flight movies now are comedies from the early 2000’s. Most of them have some extended punch line about so and so being a dyke. In 2004, I broke up with my boyfriend the night after we watched Bring It On together on his couch. We played footsie for the entire one hour and forty minutes while on screen, my boyfriend grinding his socked foot into mine while Missy asks if Courtney and Whitney are quote–dyke-adelic. The word ricocheted off the walls of a room somewhere inside me, bouncing a few times on the floor before disappearing down a heating grate. After the movie, I let my boyfriend’s hands move around my cold skin, to try and find it.
Me and Grace are trying this thing out where we talk all the time, but we’re just friends. I wonder if we can do it or if the movies are right about us dykes are only ever thinking about pussy. The fog on the drive from the airport is thick so I end up staring into the headlights of oncoming traffic. I try to keep my eye on the little white line that separates me from the shoulder of the road, but they disappear into fog, and for the first time, I don’t think I can make it.
In Grace’s bed, she’s asleep and I’m self conscious that my body odor is rubbing off on her sheets. I pull my arms close to my side and stare out the window at the halogen street light that stands next to her apartment. I watch as the shadows of bugs singe themselves on the hot bulb and fall suddenly out of the sky.
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Alex Connors is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Idaho where they are the 2024-2025 Hemingway Fellow.