The Rappahannock Review

I have pockets of questions, spilling out answers to nothing. Like, do dogs in space still kick in their sleep? What’s a plot of land at 50,000 feet cost? How many saints will fit in the heaven of tomorrow? Endlessly, I’m plagued. The pleasure of thought decays. Imagine how easy it would be to destroy the entire known universe in pursuit of the perfect paper clip. Polar bears are not a high priority for whom?

I used to go to the dentist to feel better about myself. “You never had braces, huh?” various dentists have commented throughout my adult years. “So straight. Good bite, too.” Only one adult filling leadens my mouth, but it’s forgettable, way back in there, and at least twenty years old now. On my way out of dental appointments, I’d grown accustomed to running my tongue along my teeth with a certain amount of pride. In Chicago, after a stupendously bad experience under the x-ray gun at one particular office (a visit that began with the dentist’s voice reproaching some crying child down the hall—“Sss-top. Stop it! This doesn’t hurt”—and that ended with flagrant insurance fraud in my account), I landed in the padded chair of a Ukrainian dental hygienist who was positively ecstatic about the state of my teeth.

science says we have 70,000 thoughts per day, not counting my impulse to jerk the steering wheel and miss the guardrail, not counting the taste of orange wedges, nor the way their sugar makes my fingers stick to one another, not counting anything I do in the dark or before dressing, because wash and brush, shampoo and rinse, and socks before shoes and tying the laces are habits controlled by the lizard brain,

The problem was you were always jumpy and I was always silent. You’d be in the bedroom, matching socks and folding towels the correct way, when I’d appear in the doorway and you’d start like one of those women who is about to be murdered in the first five minutes of those Scandinavian dramas you always watched without me. Or you’d be in the kitchen, draping scraps of uncooked bacon over uncooked breasts of chicken, when I’d pad over the tiles in wool socks, and you’d spring like I’d tripped a wire, your hands up and glistening with meat slime, eyes baby-big and blue, defenseless as they always are in your selfies.