Member-only story
The Last of Lee
— Short Fiction —
Lee wipes his face with the belly end of his t-shirt. I watch, as if on radar, the hurricane of hair around his navel. He sees me see him. I still don’t know if he likes me as a person. But tonight, he loves me as a mirror.
He lights a cigarette, kisses it orange just once, then hands it to me. I let it slow burn between my fingers. I don’t need to taste the smoke. I just need to hold something. There was beer during the party, but the beer’s gone. The people are gone. We sit on the porch and put off touching each other until we can’t stand it. Lee stares past me into the living room window and narrows his eyes to read the titles on the bookshelves.
We can stand it a little longer.
I snap my fingers.
“I’m listening,” he says, even though I didn’t say anything.
I collect our empty bottles between the knuckles on one hand and line them up on the windowsill. Lee makes finger guns and mimes to shoot the bottles. I duck behind a fern like the guns are real, like the bang-bang of his voice knocks my hat sideways, like I’m back in class and this time it’s not a drill.
A spider crosses from the fern to the back of my hand. Too dark to identify what kind. My grandmother was bitten by a brown recluse hiding in a garden glove. I stayed on her farm for two weeks as she healed. I got no sleep from worry. This isn’t the same spider. I know that. And even if it were, I would tell myself to be kind. I blow on it to please get a life away from me. It falls. Hangs in the air. A black pearl on the thinnest thread there is.
“Kill it,” Lee says.
“Kill what?” I say. “You’re drunk.”
The spider thanks me by disappearing through a crack in the floor.
Lee asks if I like him better sober. I know the right answer. The right answer is to take his hands in my own, thumb the self-inflicted cigarette burns and say, “I like you no matter what.”
Instead, I stay where I am and say, “Sure.”
A possum climbs up the steps before it notices us and freezes, a chunk of prehistory poking into our time together. My first instinct is to grab it and force it to sit on my lap like a cat. I want to see if it’ll…
