Monday Morning
By Amanda Ellard
I used to think remembering was a poison, one you needed to vomit out as soon as it surfaced.
When I paint in my apartment, vermillion shows up around the edges, like the color of the stove burners mom would leave on when she'd cold-turkey her medication. Leading boys by their school uniform ties from the door to the kitchen counter, she’d pounce, her hips shifting dangerously close to the fire with each rut.
When I try to snuff out that bright color, the resulting mixture of brown is patterned the same way as the mold that grew atop the cracking rubber of mom’s Pinto window. The afternoon of my ninth birthday, I stared at the mold, wondering if it would successfully poison me if I ate it, if she'd still drive my body back to the group home anyway.
My balcony railing is slippery with morning ice. I think of how today I must go out onto entire streets of ice. It’s Monday, so I have to film a livestream video among concrete nature of my hands dragging cadmium, baby blue, lavender—holy colors—through the cracks of canvases. The livestream chat comments will line up indistinguishable before my eyes, and money tip notifications will dash out of formation for a moment to kiss my brain, tell it I love you but I’m marching off to trade my life for your sertraline.
Posterboards piled into the back of a pickup truck are stuck at the traffic light below. I step onto the balcony to read them, but the girls lower their posters face-down in order to wave at me. My fingers slip off the railing.
But vomiting doesn’t work—remembering isn’t a poison, it’s a chronic illness, born with it, indestructible. When it’s dormant, you feel weightless, like you might just float up and come back down somewhere entirely new and strange. When it’s in full flare, sandbags drop from your ringing ears to your feet. You might just fall through all five stories of floorboards and drywall to land on the ice, footbones and kneecaps shattered, scattered across the sidewalk.
You’ll be scavenged then, by radicals and livestream viewers alike. They’ll sift through your vermillion painting, trying to fit splinters of your bones inside the voids in their own bodies, giving you tips: don’t fall again, get some brand-new parts and fix yourself up. And you will—you’ll reach out your arms as wide as they’ll go and use them to make blood angels, cash in tips so you can mail order some new bones, stuff your remaining parts back inside your legs, and return to your balcony railing.
THE END
Author Bio: Amanda Ellard edits short stories and novels, writes prose across genres, teaches English and writing, and is a multi-media artist. She's a PhD in Creative Writing candidate and the current Prose Editor of Quarter After Eight literary journal at Ohio University and has an MA in Folklore Studies and an MFA in Creative Writing. Her work (anellard.wordpress.com) has appeared across eBook platforms, literary journals, and in the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage's Folklife Magazine.