Cusp

by Lidia Yuknavitch

This bed smells of my skin. If I roll from my back to my belly, sweat cools near my spine. If I close my eyes, I am like an animal up here in the heat and wood, baking in the daylight, my eyelids heavy, my thoughts slow and thudding. From the frame of my attic window I have imagined the inside-out of this town, its heat rising from dust and scrub and asphalt, its mindless longing for rain, its heart beating with dumb insistence. I used to think, who would want to live here, like this, some town at the edge of the storyline, never quite making it into the picture. Washed-up, dried out. There is a black-and-red sign over the door of the Texaco. It reads: "Texas, USA." No city. No need. Thatís the whole deal stuck up there on a piece of metal the size of a license plate. Like thought stopped for gas and never left.

I remember the day I moved from my room downstairs up to the attic. It had been my brother's. He'd gone to college, I'd hit puberty, the two motions crossing paths with fierce electricity. The white canopy-bed of a girl died that day, for I never went back. My first day in the attic I felt the wooden walls close in, as if a second skin was there to hold me.

Underneath the bed I found artifacts from my brother's life. Empty bottles, trash, foil, used rubbers, tiny vials, and a stretch of surgical tubing. I didn't find needles for a year, but not for lack of looking. He'd shown me his world when I was around ten, knowing I would be in love with it. I adored him, the dark of the room, the rules broken, the silence thick and almost unbearable, the smells I hadn't names for, the dizzy swell of skin making sweat. But I did find everything. A loose board in the wall, a stash I only barely comprehended at the time. Wasn't I meant to find it, to find it all? Wasn't I meant to identify the smell as sex and move my body toward delivering itself? Wasn't I meant to rise to the challenge, to prove my worth, to carry on the weight of that room?

On my 14th birthday I got Jack Daniel's from my brother. He was home from college for the summer. He gave it to me in secret, after dark, and we sat up in the attic window and drank it until I was bleary. At some point after midnight we became heated and half-clothed. The heat works on you like that. You shed layers like the skin of a snake until the body can bear itself....

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Lydia Yuknavitch is an assistant professor of English at Pacific University in Portland. Her most recent collection of stories, Her Other Mouths, was published by House of Bones Press (Portland). E-mail: lilnub@aol.com