Eloise eats paper courage to walk into the home where her sewn heart hides in a boot. Ink on tongue counteracts the vision of maimed talent. Tells her to keep walking, No distractions. The house itself is a craftsman's invitation to enter whenever, bring whoever. The exterior pink rises like a mercury thermometer when the sky is indigo cool, blowing the house into naked fever. Any other time, it’s what a hand comb through hair followed by a kiss on the helix of the ear would appear as.
It was leaning nine pm when Eloise ran in to use the bathroom. The screen door ajar before her arrival. The porch’s broken rocking chair awkward without breeze, cardboard boxes stuffed to the point where their wings were useless. Eloise’s friend, housemate, but friend she preferred to say, plays the baby grand piano. Sending wood chips to collapse with a shrill hum instead of putting the house to sleep. Their fish, a tetra named Baby, usually pokes through the tank’s edges as if its weight wasn’t taking up existence in the house. Like a mourning dove nesting into rock crevices, Baby will sink into the holes of its rock tower when the piano is played. Five times a day, at least. Eloise’s friend once joked about getting Baby its own piano. Those probably didn’t exist, Eloise responded. She searched “Piano fish tank” before her friend corrected her only for Google Images to reveal piano bodies replaced aquariums. Eloise showed the photos and they laughed real, then sheepishly. Eloise noticed that her friend, specifically the first months of getting to know each other, would stare at Eloise as if seconds were stretching into lunging minutes. Eloise never tried figuring out why, just picked up on how her friend stopped. Only sometimes in public settings. Seconds were swift again and Eloise remembered feeling like she was in an empty tank, transmuting silence into water. Holding her breath for an eventual reason.
From the toilet, Eloise rests her hand on her knee thinking about her friend's public effect, like going out to lunch to see a welder vaporizing metal right beside their grilled cheese.
Leaving everyone around her equal parts concerned and allured. Where pedestrians ought to cross streets just to ask what her plan is. To hear what her voice sounds like. Her tool. Her prowess. Her friend twiddled with high voltage, though. She had these grey dawning eyes and had trouble asking questions. Somehow she still remembered the sheltered and spider webbed, expired and molded parts of Eloise’s life. Like bringing up figurines Eloise should paper mache, even though she gave up that past time two years ago. Or telling new friends how Eloise won’t go near onions, which still holds truth. Her friend is their house at dawn kind of gentle. Eloise had the privilege of seeing her friend in her smallest form. Her final Matryoshka doll: eyelashes flat, mouth agape, and just really sleepy. While the rest would see her running zig zag with her toothpick bangs, seducing strangers with her misdemeanors. This was why her friend was leaving the house. Not just career guff. She was over the softness of plucking splinters and needed cement to penetrate a concussion in her already.
Eloise wonders how to choke the melody, but feigns closing the bathroom door as it rendered the same trepidation when she was seven and tied floss to the bathroom door to yank a tooth too strapping. She thinks back to her grandpa slamming the door, how dizziness was performing jumping jacks in her esophagus. Then gurgling blood on the floor. Eloise remembered her grandpa lifting her to her side, patting her back as her mouth shot splatters all over his pajama pants. Eloise had a hot metal tongue and slanted quiver as she crawled for her tooth. She searched while her grandpa grabbed a cloth to wipe her cheeks and chin. The toilet, sink, shower, every crevice of the world was deserted. So her grandpa pulled her to his lap and hushed her with all his teeth. She nestled into him with mimed emotions, where predictable blood poured onto a white shirt with rehearsed screams for a mirror with an inaccessible audience. So Eloise didn’t shut the door.
Her friend was now playing a song she recently wrote, where Eloise would imagine herself in a cradle. It was pacifying. Now, though, she was discovering that the reality of being in a cradle is not knowing how to get out. You have to get someone's attention to pick you up and out. Eloise shifted around the house, murmuring frustrations and pretending to search for her boots. Her eye movements matched her friends every downstroke until she noticed herself freezing. Her friend stopped playing. She said, Your shoes are right here. Right by the piano seat's foot. Eloise said, Oh. She bent down, reaching into the soles as if she would find her friend's hands through them, Eloise’s own molding into piano keys, and they could both just. Stop. Stop and stay for Eloise to remember that there is still something to hold onto. Her friend probably viewed her, Eloise, as some cloud who’d let airplanes dismember her. What else could a cloud do in that situation, Eloise tried reasoning before closing the thought. She removed her hands to replace the wrong place with the right part.
Eloise was heading toward the kitchen to unload the dishwasher despite needing 20 more minutes. Her friend was a megaphone, and she didn’t know why she was thinking about her friend in such proximity to her with steps removed. It was hard to stumble upon megaphones. Megaphones that everyone felt comfortable speaking into. Eloise knew she had to start thinking in terms of this megaphone I once found instead of the megaphone I can access at any time. Her friend was a megaphone making her ears bleed out. Her friend was the airplane.
Eloise was dismembered. A rag doll, where she left a loose string on the piano seat’s foot and it was squeezing her into a clot. She folded to snap the string, which opened a lesion, which meant she was a sprinkler dousing carpet. Wholly hemorrhaging. Until she’s a fish in the aquarium piano staring hours into her friend’s devotion. Until she reveals the smallest wooden doll of herself in her friend’s palm. Or lays on her friend’s lap as the rag doll being stitched back together. In twilight so they both see the house when it’s a kiss.
Instead, Eloise will lay drained on the kitchen island blinking invisible. Then tomorrow, Eloise and her friend will go to a donation store. They’ll wait beneath a red light, and her friend will notice a bumper sticker on a camper van saying “Safely Surrender Your Baby.” She’ll bring it up to Eloise. Saying, Imagine the fetus was a fish. They'll laugh and look at each other unscripted, until they’re made pink.
-- Isabelle Newson is from Los Angeles. Her work is featured on Burial Magazine, Dream Boy Book Club, Expat Press, Hobart Pulp, and more.
