The Heartbroken Woman

In June I drove north for three days to my father’s house. When I got there I started thinking each day about a heartbroken woman who used to work in his shop. Sometimes I thought about her when I walked my dog to the ocean, which I did every morning, or when I walked my dog to the cemetery with hilly tombs and cement monuments in the evening. When I was there at my father’s house I dreamt of a thin seam in the pavement that I pressed my foot against, and with that little pressure, the crack began to spread and spread. I watched the pavement crumble down into the crater below, where there were steps going into the darkness. The steps were made from stone and they looked very old. When I followed them down to the bottom I was transformed into the heartbroken woman and there were lots of rooms made from granite and lime, lit by flickering torches. One of the rooms had a girl tied to a canopy bed. I walked up to the side of her bed and poured acid onto her face. I watched her skin peel back to bone. Soon I began working at my father’s shop, and I’d come home with deep red bruises on my wrists and I would tell my family about how I’d been kidnapped and tortured and had acid poured onto my face and my father would hand me the lemonade and nod, super, super, sounds good mhmm. I’d tell my family about how I’d been held down and made to swallow stones and then we’d eat spaghetti with clams and salty canned peas and drink watery lemonade. People came into the shop and asked me where the heartbroken woman was and I’d say nothing and nod, mhmm, sounds good. Later in the summer I began writing an imaginary history of her life. She was born in the town by the ocean that my father lived in, where the air was salty and smelled clean or salty and smelled like dead fish. She had left to go to school in the south but she had to come back after one year because her entire family had died in a car accident. She said, it isn’t cool for me to tell you my heart was broken, but I don’t know any other way of saying it. I transcribed her words dutifully although I agreed that they were not cool. I wrote until I began to feel her at all times, as I moved through space or as I moved from morning into afternoon or afternoon into evening until, in some way, it seemed as though she had broken through me and begun existing outside of my story of her. People would come into the shop and say, oh you’re back, we didn’t know where you were. And she said I would rather convey emotions than a precise account of facts. I could lie down in front of you like a grid of dates and images, but to tell a story is to be in a relationship, so this is where I begin.

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