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Degrees
by Audrey T. Carroll You take drives in the car because once it starts to warm up it's a more normal temperature than the apartment with the broken heat that you know won't be fixed even if you tell management because there's black mold the cats drink up from the windows, a result of their winter "sweating" even though you know what window sweating looks like because the house of your childhood with five people and three rooms was seventy years old but you're just thankful the heat is still working in the car even though the engine ate the belt that makes the cold air happen in ninety-five degree Arkansas. You sit in a tax office with your cherry ankle socks on top of knee-high socks, your lacey tank top under short-sleeved sweater under hot pink cardigan under leather jacket, your Ravenclaw scarf and your three dollar gloves with the hole in the one pointer finger even though they're only a month old and ask him if you can stay here for a while because you know you'll be returning to that apartment and you're distracting yourself from the fear that the tax return won't be enough to pay to file it and you just spent seven hundred on a stark white dress because he wants you to have one thing that you really want on that day in July when you'll maybe take the train to Chicago and then New York because you're fairly certain that you'd end up stuck somewhere in Tennessee with no wheels if you take the car with heat but no air conditioning and you fear the tubes of metal that bounce around on air currents, though your argument to him is that trains are romantic (almost a pre-honeymoon adventure in themselves) and they're conducive to writing. When you come home after teaching or taking classes or just being lost in the whirlwind and see the cats cuddling on the edge of the bed and the tailless one scrambling to distance herself because she's been caught in a moment of sweetness when she is an alley cat, damn it, you understand the impulse, the sleepless nights spent pressed against his bare chest, no heat to turn on but the fan blowing on the other side of him because if he doesn't drown them out the neighbors will keep him up all night with flirtatious giggles shared with their guitar-playing boyfriends on the one side and the same baseline vibrating through the wall constantly on the other until you're not sure if there's truly a rhythm or if it's just noise. |
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