blue toenails

Her feet stuck out as she was falling asleep. Her toenails were actually blue, her hair already wafting on the sheets. A record swirled in the background with more scratches in every groove.

In their minds they were just X and Y.

I need some coffee, she thought. She was reading a letter from a friend at The Greasy Bulb. Something about how some guys will dine you before laying on you something heavy.

She was afraid to come here because the last time she came here, they played this woman’s tape with a high melodic voice and all the characters she had been studying that day were suddenly rushing out of her skull making a halo around her head.

What she had to notice was his hair. It looked like all the split ends had been ripped off. It was dyed light blue.

Cough. She grabbed under her throat checking for swollen lymph glands. This never told her anything.

She brought her stuff to the bedroom.

“No toilet paper.”

“Oh. I’ll fix that.”

He was frantically searching for toilet paper, which was of course right in front of his face. He grabbed a roll, “So what do you figure, Horatia? Should I roll it to her like red carpet, or should I throw it to her and make ribbons in the air all Rocky Horror Picture like?”

“How’d you get your hair that colour?”

“I bleached it, right. Then I used Methylene Blue cough syrup on top.”

“No way.”

“Yeah, I swear. $I.89 a bottle at Jean Coutu.”

He left her there with the ceramic bowl of golden light brown sugar in the middle of the table packed to the top like a sandbox. She reached for the fork and tried to make it shower yellow.

“You got sugar eyes?”

“It’s that girl over there.”

Horatia looked at the girl by the window curled up with her coffee in the frame. “But she’s just sitting there, hardly moving at all.”

The waiters, if you could call them that, didn’t get paid except for sharing tips.

X saw Y making his way over again slow. He was all violins and bow-legged.

She was waiting on his mattress on the floor of his bedroom, and he only had crackers in the cupboard. But when he came back, the crackling went on and on forever. Somewhere between this is crazy and wasting time, and this is allowed as a dream. Somewhere, like X always equals something.

If she came to his place more often, she’d learn that his cupboards would never have more than one lonely can or some box of something but always the perfect thing.

She had smiled when he brought out the box of crackers. She had gone and crawled inside it.

He was holding her bra in his hands, threads coming out of it all over.

“This looks like it’s been through the whole football team,” he said.

No, she shook her head. No.

His fingers curled around the back of her head.

“My band’s playing at The Bulb tomorrow night. Will you come?” I’ll get Horatia to bring you lots of free coffee, he was thinking. “It’s actually getting kind of ridiculous. We’re always playing the same songs and it would be really helpful to know if you think we’re fresh at all…” he said grabbing a toe. He heard the sound of potatoes frying.

He was taking more and more of the black records out until they were everywhere.

She went over to his shower. There was a spider there on the wall. She put her foot on it. Yellow liquid dripped down the wall. She opened her book. The pages a dark yellow. The black ink type started to suck up the yellow. Then crawled up the curtain.

She woke up in his cold apartment with cracker crumbs all over her skin. She sat up. He had left. Did anything happen? No, he had kissed her a lot, and she had told him she had a cough, and he had said like I care.

She let her head fall back on the pillow and she knew he had put his hand on the top back of her head like chocolate fudge pouring on vanilla ice cream.

But now there was only this dark magazine page with ragged edges, above and askew, and out there like eye breakfast. She had never seen a poster on the ceiling before.

Its letters were a little cloudy without her glasses on, but it said “Pray for Rain”.

There’s a fine line between Kleenex and toilet paper, she thought as she stumbled towards the shower. When she undressed, she saw seven blue numbers penned on her leg. She turned on the water and got in with her brick of soap.

Y was looking sick hunched over the table by the window. The table’s centre at the floor split into four.

“Do you want me to go buy you some cough syrup or something?” Horatia came over and asked him then said, “Fuck it anyway, let's keep your voice scratchy for next week’s show.”

He remembered that the scratchy sound of the records didn’t seem to make X uncomfortable at all and they had gotten to talking and she had said, “I’m in the book” before she began to drift. A bootleg crackled in the background, a live show, and the singer in his throaty voice had gone, “So Montreal, you’ve got me here again for another night – now that’s luxury.”

Then she was asleep and he had been holding her feet like her wanted to hold her hands.