Annesha Mitha, “No One Wants to Be Here Forever”
“When Mrithika first came home, she expected, selfishly, that she would be taken care of. She didn’t account for the tumors found on the ultrasound screen, curled up with the dog’s wet organs. She didn’t understand how much care a small body like the dog’s could absorb. But now, the dog is fed pills stashed in Vienna sausages three times a day. She’s held until she falls asleep, and her messes are cleaned up with bleach that warps the floorboards. As Mrithika slowly regains her strength, or rather, learns how to move with the pain still inside her, she and Cupcake haunt the courtyard like ghosts in training.”
—
“At first when it was happening, when the process of dying began, Vanbrugh hadn’t paid attention. Exactly like Vanbrugh: not paying attention.
On the phone. Concentration elsewhere. (In fact, ignominy of ignominies, he’d been on hold.) Couldn’t be bothered to take heed of a physical symptom. Or two, or three.
First twinge of headache, nausea, gut cramps, fever—Vanbrugh’s strategy had always been to ignore. Onset of flu, diarrhea—ignore for as long as you can.
Not a hypochondriac. Indeed, the antithesis of a hypochondriac.
Priding himself on being fit. For a man of his age, unusually fit.
And so, Vanbrugh had no idea it was dying that swept through him like a child running through a house switching off lights.”
—
“I stroked my insanely lifelike Kanekalon fiber mustache in the way guys do when they want to appear meditative. I really looked better as a man. But what did that mean? I took in my new self in that lambent, paranormal light: bolo tie, denim shirt buttoned to the neck with flashy pink-and-red-sequin roses embroidered on my shoulders. My jaw became more square. I felt a keen, quiet tug in my heart. You would have never known the feeling was inside me. I sang a bit of a gunfighter ballad.
Jim let his hand fall limply over his other arm. He said, ‘Now, go break some hearts.’”
—
“Lately, Camp Jabberwocky, a summer retreat on Martha’s Vineyard for troubled teens in need of an attitude adjustment and a healthier relationship with social media, had been receiving more than its usual share of drive-bys. The perps were a bunch of townie jock douchebags, scum of the island, who rolled by in an Infiniti—or some other car with satellite radio and a navigation system—and shouted obscenities intermingled with lines from the famous Lewis Carroll poem. They were trolling the trolls, so to speak. ‘Beware the Jubjub bird! Suck my dick!’ they would shout. ‘All mimsy were the borogoves, you fucks!’”
—
“The psychomanteum is run by a psychic whose name is Kate.
She lives at the top of Topanga Canyon, where the real bedlamites roost, snarfing bananas and being Neil Young. Her father was on a long-running and very popular TV show from the eighties, so she is dilapidated Hollywood royalty. Nobody at anyplace current knows who she is, but if you walk into the lurid diners on Hollywood Boulevard, drink a hot black water from a Styrofoam cup with a dead fly floating at the top and say her full name within earshot, the owner with the jaunty terriers inside his nose will perk up, white-smock over to you, and wax about her dad.”
—
“Do you remember, she says, as a kid, and you flinch, knowing that the answer is usually no, though you have to pretend it’s yes. When you woke up one morning and cried and cried because you said everything had changed? And when we got in the car, just you and me, you told me that sometimes you wake up and the world is totally different and you don’t understand anything anymore? How lonely that is? Tears fill your eyes as you nod. I still think about that. She reaches for the weed gizmo and you hand it to her. She laughs. You were like a little crybaby poet and you had no idea, she says, and together you listen to the music of the frogs.”
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