It is Halloween 2016 and we are two weeks away from
everyone talking about the world being on fire.
Jacki is dressed up as a vampire,
but you can only tell if she smiles. Julia is Nancy
Kerrigan but doesn’t want to make her knee bloody
because that was corny so instead she is just the ice dancer
before the scream.
I am Mia Wallace and I am trying too hard.
My lover doesn’t dress up as anybody because he didn’t have time.
Usually, he dresses up as a woman.
Not a specific woman, just a woman.
That’s the only joke.
I find him outside smoking.
He looks at me in my black wig and my fake bloody nose and says, Meli, it’s you.
I look down at my feet, thought, Meli, it’s you.
I look out the window of his car, Meli, it’s you.
I look at the ceiling as he took off my costume in a hurry, with a hunger. It’s you.
The next morning he lays his guns out on the bed like dress socks.
He is very excited.
How did I get here?
We were just drinking orange juice.
We were just talking about music.
He hands me the cowboy pistol, and I’m already forming
the story I’ll tell my friends later,
the ones I ditched the night before,
when we were all dressed up as women from movies.
He tells me the first rule of gun safety is to point
to the safest spot in the room and there’s a baby
downstairs and us right here so the best place
to point is up.
The gun isn’t loaded so there’s nothing to worry about.
Maybe I’ve just got to hold it in my hand,
the way I kiss people at parties
like I’m never gonna be this tight and young again,
like I know one day someone’s gonna take me out back.
Why doesn’t everything end
with something loud that shakes the room?
Boom-boom, it’s over, bye-bye, I don’t see you anymore.
Boom-boom, the world ends, we gather our essentials, put on our good boots,
pack into our cars and head west.
I think I’m bringing my own end.
I’m making everything happen.
I’m moving the air around me
until I’m someone he can choose.
I’m pointing up, to the place where I can’t get hurt and I’m pulling on the trigger
and there is barely a noise, there is a sound
that could’ve been
the absentminded click
of the tongue while searching through an e-mail,
the snapping of fingers during a halfhearted
dance at the end of the night,
the sigh that escapes when
you light a match
and it fails to strike.
“If you are here,” she asks
Yolanda,
“Then where
is the Yolanda in jail?”
Yolanda shifts
in the room.
The floors creak.
The curtains rustle.
“There can
only be one
of me,”
Yolanda says.