Quarter

Court Ludwick

Nine days before you moved to West Virginia, you told me octopus can squeeze their bodies through a hole the size of a quarter. I thought it sounded like a made-up state. West Virginia? No. I don’t believe you. You told me to focus. But your mother cried when she found out. By the way, I’m still mad you made me be the one to tell her, the one who had to watch her motherbody turn to liquid then nothing. She squeezed my arm, and it felt like she was unsure that something could be so solid. After, I told you: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. 

You drive the U-Haul away. I frantically text:

     wait but do they actually? 

     the octopus

     squeeze their bodies into quarter-sized holes

     like they can but do they? or no? 

     they only could? 

     only if they wanted? 

You were always lousy with verbs. I was bad at state changes and forgetting important things when I passed through doorways and leaving coins in my back pockets. Your smile was liquid, radiant plasma, when you rolled the window down and yelled out an answer. I couldn’t hear. You shouldn’t have been in there. You threw your golden head back and I saw teeth in the side-view mirror, no laugh.

We still talk sometimes, less often now that snow’s on the ground. I send videos that I think will make you look whole again, and you make my face crumple into something inhuman when you send me Wikipedia screenshots, shadows of conversations we used to have. Plus I keep remembering the way we listened to music, my arcade pennies, the washing machine set to spin. 

We danced to those clangs. But get this—I don’t forget to empty my pockets anymore. And now I’m afraid of becoming liquid like your mother, not like you, like everything that melts then evaporates then is gone, not like how you could thaw then rubberband back into a shape I could name under my fingers. You should know that I blame you for the way my hipbones frown. Also lint’s heavier now than lint is. You’d be able to tell, you’d be able to see my skin, no the veins underneath, and you could finger all my protrusions if you were here. It’d be easy since everything’s slipping down. I’d let you do it too. Only no, no you can’t now. I bet you’d look at the plastic laundry basket I snapped in half and grin too. Yeah, I know you would.

When we talk, I toss a quarter in the air. Palm it, can’t palm you. You turn me into gas vapors, something less sturdy, when it lands tails, no, heads down, on your plot of frozen dirt in the cemetery with all the rest of the change. 

© Variant Literature Inc 2023