Notch: A Short Story -The Toast

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Home: The Toast

Ladder-Backed Woodpecker (Male), Desert Botanical Gardens, Phoenix, ArizonaThe August we agreed to do the vasectomy and I’m recuperating on the deck, laying down on the big wicker chaise, a ziploc bag full of ice cubes crammed down the front of my basketball shorts. That’s when the woodpeckers show up. It’s the mom woodpecker who notches me open, right under my adam’s apple, crawls inside my windpipe and tunnels down between my lungs. She lays her eggs there and I feel her little claws on my ribs when she grips tight and then pushes herself up and off each egg. Five, maybe six times she does this, filling the space between my lungs until I’m packed full there and have to resort to taking shallow breaths so I don’t crack the shells.

The dad woodpecker arrives a little later in the afternoon to have his time and turn with the eggs. Mom stays gone all night, but my wife comes out on the deck to rotate my ice and to bring me a blanket and to bring me a pillow and to scruff my hair and to not talk about the procedure and all the reasons to have the procedure because we finished talking about that months ago, after the Xth miscarriage in Y years, but it’s okay, we’re okay, all okay.

It’s my favorite blanket, the Seattle Supersonics one Gwen crafted from big sheets of polar fleece. She used her Fiskar fabric shears with the competition orange handles to fray the edges and then hand-tied them back together, using her round little fingers. When we were expecting the first time, before her fingers got bigger and rounder with each false start, each failing preparation for all the babies that we would never have. When the Sonics were still in town and not renamed the Thunder and not out in Oklahoma.

I keep the fleece up tight against my chin even though it’s August, keep it there so she doesn’t see the notch and so we don’t have to exhaust that talk, too, because you can’t exhaust a conversation you don’t ever start in the first place. And we’ve been married long enough now that most conversations Gwen and I have can be maneuvered with simple nods of the forehead or turns of the neck. Not necessarily because we want to. Because sometimes that’s just the only way to.

Mom returns in the morning and dad hops out and they pass each other in my trachea. I listen close to see if I can hear them chirp something to each other, but they don’t. I feel them pass each other, one thick bulge of wings, beaks and feathers washboarding across the cartilage of me, stopping the airflow. Everything I can hear, see and feel whitens.

When the colors return a few moments later, it’s only mom inside, and Gwen is leaving for work. She changes out my ice pack one more time with those big pale hands of hers and sets a freshly-charged telephone handset on the arm of my chaise, even though she still has no idea I can’t talk. She kisses me on the top of the head with those lips I used to kiss a billion times every day, back when they weren’t part raw and bleeding, other part dried and scabby from the constant biting she started a couple of years ago. And because I can’t see where she kissed me, I can’t tell if the wet smear of her up there is bloody or not. Gwen re-scruffs my hair and clomp-clomps through the sliding glass door, then through the house, then down the driveway to get in the car. I hear the engine turn over, rev up, fade away.

At noon dad returns and mom leaves and everything whitens again. Colors and breath rushing back, big rivers of light and oxygen. Light I can feel inside every cell of me.

Gwen calls the telephone a little while after that and I just let the answering machine pick up and she doesn’t leave a message and she doesn’t call back, so everything must be okay. Dad stays the rest of the afternoon and evening. Gwen brings Kentucky Fried Chicken home with her for dinner and we share a big styrofoam cup of mashed potatoes with beef gravy already mixed into it the way we both like it, and I keep my Sonics fleece up close to the notch in case any leaks out. “Are you cold?” she asks, and the long slick of skin underneath where her little carrot chin used to be ripples when she says it. I nod that I am. “Is it because of the medication?” she asks, and I nod some more.

That night, with dad inside me, Gwen takes the ice bag away and doesn’t bring a new one and so I go inside the house to sleep next to her in our bedroom, where the walls aren’t painted in complementary colors because they aren’t painted at all, and where both windows have had blackout curtains on them for even longer than before the lip biting. I keep the Sonics wrapped around me all the way up the stairs and until the light goes off. Gwen slides into bed next to me and then the white goose down comforter smothers us.

That night, dad lays perfectly still between my lungs when Gwen accidentally pushes her big hips into me. I feel the stitching underneath the comforter, underneath the fleece, underneath the flannel of my pajamas, underneath the ribbed cotton of the jock strap they made me wear home from the hospital, underneath the medicine fog and ziploc numb. Gwen says she can feel it, too, but I think she just says it.

Out on the deck I’d learned how to roll over by myself without bothering the eggs and dad inside me, but in the bed it isn’t as easy because there aren’t any arms on either side of me like in the wicker chaise and because my own arms are strapped down and locked against my sides by the fleece and the goose down. The only arms that can stop me from rolling once I start are the pale fleshy ones to the far side opposite me, the ones Gwen had swell on her seven separate times just like the hands and fingers did, and even though it’s all okay and we’re okay, she can’t stop me from rolling out of the bed and landing flat on the floor.

Flat on my chest. Still burritoed in the fleece, my ribcage thrashing, a tumult of thin air and full space and big cry from down deep that lasts all night and keeps me awake, even after Gwen helps me back into the bed with her slow and sorry touches. That cry pulsing through the night for what feels like weeks when a sound in the dark just won’t stop.

When morning comes and mom arrives, the silence is louder than the crying ever was and feels not like months feels like years. There is no bulge in the throat, no whitening, no colors, no rivers.

Just air.

Mom and dad absolutely still, the terrible quiet, the thick knot of them between my lungs. Gwen helps me back to the chaise before she has to leave for work, her brown high heels in quick scrapes down the driveway. And because she overslept and is running late and has even more foundation on her face than normal because she’s rushed the job and has oranged her drooped cheeks in big, uneven circles and has completely forgotten to shade or line her dim grey eyes entirely in her rush out the door, she doesn’t leave me with a recharged handset and she doesn’t end up calling it even one time while she’s gone.

Mom and dad stay right there the rest of the day and Gwen and I eat cold leftovers when she’s finally home late from work, because she had to make up the time. The wax paper inside the red and white striped chicken bucket turned clear by all the grease, thick brown gravy splotches on my blanket still wrapped under my chin. We go to bed early, upstairs in our bedroom, and she keeps her arms and her hips on her side of the bed all night, and I make sure I have my arms on the outside of both the fleece and goose down, and the whole planet shushes itself to sleep.

When I awake the next day, mom and dad are gone. Gone through the opening they’d made below my ribs, through my stomach, through the very middle of me. After Gwen leaves for work, I go to the medicine cabinet mirror above our bathroom sink to look, and I see the broken shells inside instead of the cold chicken or the mashed potatoes or the beef gravy. Not even a single black or red feather I see.

Just shells.

I take in a big breath, deeper than I have for years, and feel something poke me inside my rib cage, something sharp. I exhale and the pain ebbs off as quickly as it rose up. I feel something fall inside me, and then I see a single shard of shell tumble out my stomach and onto the stone tiled floor. I am slow to bend over, even slower to pick it up, and hold it in my palm. I ask myself inside my head why they chose to leave through my stomach instead of the way they’d came, the way they’d started, up in my throat, up in the place where my voice used to live.

I tell myself I don’t know. And then I ask why they bypassed my heart, why they didn’t come out there, because that’s what it feels like to look at myself in the mirror and see all the holes and fillings of me, the places where I’ve been stitched up and the places where I’m still ragged flaps of tissue. I can’t feel the shreds that are left of me where my stomach is, but I can feel those shreds I can’t see, the ones where my heart used to be. I look really hard and long in the mirror, run my thin fingers over my chest, watch them washboard the skin and part the curls of hair there, feel nothing in my fingers or between them.

I don’t answer myself. I save it for later and close my hand, the shell still in my palm. I keep the shell clenched in there when I use my other hand to pick up the handset and set it back on the charger. The battery is low and today Gwen’s only working a half day so she can take me to my follow-up appointment in the afternoon and she’s going to be calling.

I don’t know what to do. When it rings and I can’t answer. Or when she comes home to find me here all dressed and ready to go and no voice in me and with gaping holes that I can’t explain.

I don’t know what to do so much that I try swallowing all my medicine at once instead of only the one pill I’m supposed to in the morning, but the pills aren’t thick like bites of chicken or mashed potatoes or gravy, so they spill right out onto the floor after falling through the notch in my neck, landing next to where the shell was.

I don’t pick up the pills and try again. I slump against the wall, right next to the sink, and join the pills on the floor, dragging my toes through them.

While I wait for Gwen to find me, wait for the handset to recharge, I try to speak but nothing vibrates anymore in my throat to make the sounds I need to make. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Gwen, she’s going to have lots of questions today.

But with any luck she won’t call before she comes home. She’ll just find me here and not say a word. She’ll just wrap me up in all her extra skin and fold me into her and tie up all our frayed edges. And it’ll be okay, we’ll be okay, all okay.

Trevor Dodge’s most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Little Fiction, CHEAP POP, Hobart, Gargoyle, Metazen, Juked and Nailed. His latest book is a collection of 60 flash fictions, The Laws of Average.

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