Discomforts: An Itemized List
For His Nibs — beata Beatrice, heart's home
[Whoof. Been kinda grim around here. Last week we saw Statius being his very worst self, and before that was fun with abortion, and before that that was Walter, our gloomy little serial killer, and the annoyingly saintlike Linen. Time to liven things up with some smut.
Suppose I should throw this in the Good Witch universe, since Lucy is clearly a changeling of some kind. You know that scar is a goblin mark. Bertie must be a time-traveler, a real Miniver Cheevy, who’s stuck in 20th or 21st century East Tennessee and hating every minute of it. Worse luck both of them; it’s hard to get back to Avilion.
If you need a picture:
Lucy: Somewhere between 40 and 60, straight brown hair shingled off close and spiky, brown skin, blue eyes, big smile, big burn mark pulling the outer edge of her left eye down her face.
Bertie: Could be any age, fair skin (it’ll be burned lobster-red by the end of the day), slim upright figure, carroty hair cut short. I think he has a cowlick. Gives the distinct impression he’s just here slumming.
They aren’t quite human. But I doubt either of them remembers that part.
This one’s for #Eastdale and for all the folks who followed me here from FetLife and need a topping off. But if you’re here for allegory, I invite you to perform an exegesis at your leisure.
Walter: “Fuck your allegories.” Achoo!]
The day you work on your fancy antique car in wretched Chattanooga is such a discomforting day you decide to make a list.
The pavement, which sizzles under the June sun and is entirely too cracked and full of loose gravel
That weave, which you can see from the corner of your eye. It lies there like a skinned rodent — the furry part, not the meat part, though you don’t doubt there might be a chunk or two of skin here and there.
“What is that?” you ask.
Lucy just laughs. “Looks like someone had a fight. See? There’s the other one.” She points at a different, lighter-colored dead weasel. Then, seeing you stare: “It’s a weave, silly, a hairpiece. You yank someone’s weave when you fight. Let me show you — ”
She starts to give your hair a yank and you turn out of the way, tempted to trip her flat. This is not what you had in mind.
You go back to pondering the day’s discomforts.
Arching up — just when you think you’d got them all — to pick a big piece of gravel out from under your shoulder blade
The fellow with the spit-stained beard crouching down and peering UNDER THE CAR to say: “Ey mister. Ey mister! I’m trying to get my momma’s insulin, just her insulin, and I’m $9 short and — ”
“Lucy!” you holler. She was meant to be your bodyguard. But she seems to think this homeless guy, who’s probably going to bring your jack down on you — he’s hauling himself up by grabbing your car and pulling — is not a problem.
You holler again. “Lucy!”
She says some words. Laughter. Prolonged conversation. You hear her give a ten to the homeless guy, then ask about his mother.
Delightful, you think. Now we’ll get more of them.
Time, which creeps like ants
Ants. Everywhere.
Music:
Mariachi from the Auto Zone parking lot across the street
Hip hop from Dreyfuss, a wiry young guy with a couple of speakers set up in the back of his pickup truck
School fight songs from the elementary-school girls on the corner. Holding plastic Easter buckets, they keep darting into traffic. They’re collecting for their cheerleading squad.
Spirituals from the big guy in the torn Green Lantern tee shirt. He’s standing across the road in the Octaplasma parking lot and holding a Jesus Is Coming sign.
“Why this parking lot?” you asked a few hours ago. Her house, of course, was impossible. She had no real driveway, just a bit of loose gravel wide enough to barely fit one car.
“Closest to home,” Lucy explained. “Plus, you’ll have company. The Pharaoh’s Angels gather down here Saturday evenings before they ride. And all the rice-burner fans bring their cars to show off. You’ll have people to talk about vehicles with.”
You didn’t bother explaining that neither of these cliques sound like they have much in common with you. They will probably see your pretty car and ask: Is that a toy?
But now you do ask, “Pharaoh’s Angels?”
“A charitable organization,” Lucy explains. “Motorcyclists. They keep crime down in this area.”
Adorable.
“Don’t worry,” Lucy says. “They do have shootings on this corner, but only a couple of times a year, and the rest of the time it’s chill. Plus, I live around here. Don’t act like a freak and you’ll be fine.”
You add to your list:
Lucy. Definitely the least comfortable, or comforting, thing to happen this lifetime.
The Walgreen’s parking lot here on this corner does, in fact, seem a bit like a carnival on Saturday. Now here’s someone setting up to fry fish.
“Hot fish!” the old man calls. “Hot fish! Whiting, perch, catfish, Mississippi tamales! Hot fish!”
The fish smells good, but it’s all pretty oppressive, given the heat. You grope for your handkerchief, wipe sweat off your head, and keep working on your list:
Car grease
Mosquitoes
Ants (again)
Heat
Sweat
Cold — no, that is not uncomfortable. That is nice. Lucy is holding a glass soda bottle against your neck.
You scooch out from under the car and find a Coca Cola and a whiting sandwich with slaw and mustard. It’s wrapped up in foil but oozing coleslaw in every direction. Well, this handkerchief’s living its last day, you think.
Lucy gives you the cooler to sit on. Unlike you, she enjoys the ground. Sits there with her knees propped, legs spread, boots planted on the pavement in front of her, big India cotton skirt everywhere. She does not mind getting that skirt grubby, you notice. Or herself. You watch her pick gravel out of her palm.
“If you want another soda, they’re under you,” she says. “Water bottles, too.”
“We didn’t need a whole cooler, did we?”
Lucy shades her eyes to look up at you. “The thing is, every half hour minimum someone here will ask for something. Cigarettes, money for gas, money to go in that Walgreens and get something to drink. And I don’t have enough to give everyone money. But with this cooler, I can set up here and say to anyone who asks, Sorry, no money but do you want a cold drink? And so we’re not making use of the space without any kind of recompense. And it’s a hot day. People need a cold drink.”
“I fail to understand your logic.”
“Oh, you understand it. You just don’t want to engage with it.”
Back to your list:
That Lucy. She’s kind of an ass.
People asking for money
This bolt, which is not — not — coming off. Ouch.
Skinning your wrist bone and bleeding everywhere
Out from under the car again. “I don’t suppose you have another handkerchief? Mine is full of coleslaw, and — ”
You hold out your arm. Blood is sluicing out of your wrist.
“Sit still,” Lucy says. “I have the whole inventory of this Walgreens at my disposal.” She hops off the cooler and steps away, then turns back. “You’re adorable when you’re bleeding.”
“How adorable?”
“How much do you want to bleed?”
She doesn’t wait for the answer.
Iodine. Gratuitous violence, that.
The air cools, but the year is climbing toward solstice. Light lingers in the air. The Pharaoh’s Angels show up, or you suppose that’s who it is, and, would you believe it, two of the guys are riding Triumphs. The conversation is pleasant but you still haven’t finished. The rice-burner boys show up. Another guy pulls up with a truck and trailer and sets up a little kitchen. OXTAILS. FREE SAMPLES. He, too, wanders over to visit.
“Ever tried oxtail?”
“Can’t say as I have.”
He looks at your car. “What is that, a toy?”
The smell of oxtail
People who ask if you car’s a toy
Lucy, again, because you’re annoyed and she’s the only person you know here. You’re going to twist her ears all the way off after this long afternoon. Definitely all her fault.
You look over. Lucy, perched on the cooler again, is dying laughing.
“Enjoying ourselves, are we?”
“You have no idea.”
Finished at last. You lower the car and pack your tools. Lucy is lying flat on her back on the pavement, arms and legs spread like a starfish, in the middle of a parking lot filled with strangers. She gazes at the pale violet sky.
You squat down. It takes a minute. Your back is killing you.
She doesn’t look at you, but she wraps her hand around the nearest part of you; in this case, your boot. “Lie on the pavement.”
“I just got up from the pavement.”
She continues to take in the sky. Violet deepens to indigo.
“You know, gravity is supposed to pull you down, and I have no idea whether this matches the physics of it, but you can imagine it equally well the opposite way. Gravity is the earth pressing up into you. Everything below pressed into everything above.” She spreads her fingers. “The earth holds us and lifts us. When you think about that, this is comfy as lying in a cradle.”
She turns her head to you at last. “This is the most beautiful day of my life, and you are the most beautiful person in the world.” A smile, wrinkling her nose. “Especially all that grease.”
“Your most beautiful day is sitting on a cooler in a parking lot, handing out water bottles, listening to trap rap, and watching some guy cuss at a manual jack?”
“Yup.”
You don’t see it.
Nonsense
Foolishness
Being worshipped for no good reason. But then, what would be a good reason?
“If you won’t come down, guess I have to get up.” Lucy rolls to sitting and hops over to you — a sideways monkey-transfer on her hands. “Sit like this, then. Mirror me.”
She sits with her boots planted a foot or so in front of her, knees tented up. After a little figuring you take the same seat facing the opposite direction, so you’re just offset from shoulder to shoulder. It’s now full dark. Moths halo the streetlights. A couple of the rice burners peel off down Brainerd Road.
By tipping her profile to the side Lucy rests her face right into the pocket of your neck against the trapezius muscle. She feels for your hand.
“Rats! You cleaned your hands.”
“I generally do.”
“Never mind, I came prepared.”
In lugging away the jack and tools, Lucy has absconded with something out of the tool bag — a round plastic tub of grease. “I hear this is terrible to get off.”
“Yeah, I still have to scrub my hands some more.”
“That’s good.”
She opens the tub and dips her fingers into it like she’s greasing them in Crisco before making a pan of biscuits.
At this angle, she can run her hand up under your shirt perpendicular to the ground. Not tenting the fabric. Unless someone’s paying careful attention they may not notice how truly discomforting things are becoming.
Grease on your belly, a big handprint
Grease in your belly button
Grease on — shit — your nipple
The pad of Lucy’s thumb, very greasy, going round and round —
— in a parking full of people
“How hard did you say this was to get off?”
“Pretty hard.”
“Pumice soap hard?”
“Um — ”
“Bristle brush hard?”
You look down at her and you’d love to see her expression but no good; she’s still got her head tipped down against you.
Your list takes on a life of its own:
Having your nipples scrubbed with pumice soap
Having your nipples scrubbed with a bristle brush
Blood skirling from abraded skin into the bathtub
Iodine. Hopefully Lucy’s forgotten that but you doubt it.
All the invasive and distracting ways you can imagine Lucy comforting you better
Scabs for days
Wearing a shirt, any shirt, over —
“Miss lady?”
“Miss lady, you sick?”
Your head whips around. Lucy looks up more leisurely. Two girls in their teens have wandered over. They wear cut-off Apple Bottoms and snug tee shirts. One is filming, making a TikTok video.
“Miss lady, you hear us talking to you?”
“You too good to talk to us?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Lucy says — a long drawl. “I was distracted. What’s y’all’s names?”
“Monica.”
“Keisha.”
Keisha asks, “Why you didn’t talk to us?”
Lucy laughs at them. “Y’all too busy talking for anyone to get a word in.”
Monica keeps filming.
Being in any stranger’s TikTok video, especially when sitting on the ground in a strange city with a crazy person’s hand up your shirt.
Lucy keeps a tight hold.
“Your braids are pretty,” she says to Keisha. “How long ago did you start them?”
Keisha wears long box braids with purple ombre shading and aquamarine beads near the ends.
“Bout nine months.”
“Your hair grows fast.”
“Yeah, it does.” Keisha looks more closely. “You grow your hair out, you could cover that scar.”
A good quarter of Lucy’s face has been turned to ripples by a burn of some kind, as if someone poured hot grease down her from the hairline. The scar peters off under her jaw on that side. The texture is something like lava that’s flowed and set.
“I like my scar,” Lucy says. She angles her head up to show off the scar for the TikTok video. Puts one hand under her chin like she’s posing for a photo.
“Who’s that?” Keisha asks, looking at you.
You’re watching the conversation and hoping no one talks to you. But they’re about to.
Perfect. Just fucking perfect.
“Well, I call him Bertie Wooster … ”
Stupid names. Jesus H. Fucking CHRIST, woman, how low-hanging of a fruit must you — owwww twisty touches
“He your brother?” Monica asks Lucy. Then she asks you. “You her brother?”
“He your twin?” Keisha asks. “Y’all look like twins.”
Lucy again laughs at them. She has a laugh like she’s sharing a secret. “Look how young he is, we can’t be twins.”
They wait.
“I’m his bodyguard.”
“Whatt.”
“You awfully little to be a bodyguard.”
“Low-value target.” Lucy gives your nipple a vicious tweak. “Doesn’t need much guarding.”
Almost cumming in a parking lot in a strange city while being filmed for a stranger’s TikTok video
“You’re messing with us,” Monica says.
“Of course I am.” Lucy is happy, spinning the situation along. “And you’re messing with me.” But then her voice changes. “Look out, police.”
The car rounds the corner from Brainerd Road to Germantown with a single whoop. You remember Lucy saying there’s a curfew on. The girls clear out, with about half the rest of the parking lot. You and Lucy both revert to form and make your way easily to your feet. Police you can handle.
But they aren’t interested in you at all. They’re here to see if the OXTAILS. FREE SAMPLES guy has a business license.
“You’re a maniac,” you tell Lucy.
She glances up. “I don’t actually own a bristle brush.”
She has thought herself almost into orgasm. Or perhaps, though it’s hard for you to imagine it, those minutes pressed up against you helped. Her pupils are dilated. Her lips tremble.
Lucy’s scarred, lined little face. She looks at you in open supplication, like you were her manna and it’s up to you whether she feeds or starves.
Realizing it’s just you. Just your person and presence.
Something on her eyelash that might be a tear. But maybe she’s just caught a star.
She hears your thought. She wrinkles her nose in a smile. “Easier when I’m being an ass?”
You reflect that all this while, with these big feelings sinking their claws in her heart, she was protecting you from the TikTok girls — and having a helluva time doing it.
You don’t have big feelings in return. You don’t think you’re likely to. But sometimes (you can’t remember when you learned this, what other time, what other world) the only way to treat someone with kindness is to use them for a bit. Lucy will understand, you think. She won’t mind.
“In point of fact — ” You smile back. “I do have a bristle brush.”
The air begins to move. Mimosa and diesel on the wind. OXTAILS. FREE SAMPLES packs up his food truck. A police officer writes him a summons. Peddling without a license, second offense. A star shimmers out like a dewdrop on a petal. Something about Wordsworth’s poem with the violet. But what?