I’m sweeping the floors one morning when I notice a gouge in the wood like a fingermark in cake icing. I cover it back up with the rug and resolve to sand it down, but a few days later I see that the hole has widened, deepened. Now I can run two fingers through it. What’s more, it’s soft around the edges, wet to the touch. Hunched over it on my knees, I feel as if I’m intruding on something, the embarrassment of watching an animal give birth, and so I cover it up again, avoid it for days, even averting my eyes.
At first, I’m not sure if I’m being a little ridiculous. There are, in fact, a great many holes in my home. Functional holes (shower drain; garbage disposal), nuisance holes (the one the doorknob punched in the wall; the one the mice came in through). There is a hole in the kitchen ceiling through which I can hear all of the neighbors’ arguments. That one, perhaps, is a bit of both. But none of these has ever grown in size.
The next day I can’t stand it and decide to vacate the place completely. I load my dog into the car and make off for my mother’s house for the weekend. She lends me a bathing suit and points out deer on the lawn. I eat my sister’s cereal and spend hours trying to float perfectly still on the face of the pool. Every time the microwave beeps, my dog barks herself cross-eyed. On Sunday night I decide I will stay through Monday. Come Thursday, at my mother’s behest, I load the dog back into the car and head home.
Inside, the house has fermented. It smells of the sweet rot of old flowers. Everywhere I look there are signs of my haste, my panic: a stack of folded laundry and an open window, a peeled orange dry and shrunken on the countertop. What did I have to fear? The television is still on. It seems silly now, the intensity of it inaccessible to me, even in reflection, even as an exercise. The dog sniffs around the spot, quite cautious. I click my tongue and shoo her away, but as she runs off the rug sags beneath her. I pull it up. A perfect hole, big enough to pass my hand through, has worn clean through the floor. Inside it’s dark and cold, and when I press my face down, I hear the pipes hissing.
“Goodnight,” I say and put myself to bed with the dog.
We dream all the most common dreams. The dog whines and pumps its legs, chasing after something. I’m taking a test, and my teeth fall out into my naked lap. The dreams resolve themselves to our satisfaction.
—
When I wake up, I see what I expect to see: in the semi-dark, a bit of light coming up from the floor, as if from a keyhole. I crawl to it, put my eye to it, twist my neck, contort myself on all fours. It’s a room, stretching on and on in every direction. There is daylight but there are no windows. Maybe windows but no walls. Whichever makes less sense. Marching through the sourceless glow, big crowds collect and disperse, passing along at curious speeds. Someone looks up and waves to me. All I can do is blink. How big and bald and stupid my one eye must look, gawking down from up here. But they go on flowing, like schools of fish, and I, flat on my belly, watch, delighted.
When it happens, it registers without much surprise. She is just below, her face upturned. She is, mostly, me. My size. My likeness. Is it exact? Perhaps it is. How can I say? I, like you, am never quite sure what I look like.
“I’m ready for you,” I say. “Are you ready to come up?”
She reaches for me, and I take her hand and pull. I can hear her shoulder knocking against the underside of the floorboards. I wrench. Her wrist goes white in my grip, and her face, my own, emerges little by little into the darkness of the room. When she drops onto the floor the impact knocks a yelp out of her. She goes on crying, two fists balled up against her face, and I turn my slackening body away from her to feel in private, and not without shame, an unexpected pleasure—a tremor, like the bird that beats its wings one last time after landing.
—
At first it seems like she’s allergic to something I’m wearing; half her face breaks out in a rash while she sleeps on my shoulder one afternoon. I throw out my sweater, but then I wonder if it’s my perfume, my laundry detergent. I stop using them. A few days later she’s braiding my hair and keeps stopping to rub her eyes. I ask, “Are your eyes bothering you?” and she shakes her head no. But I suspect she’s not being truthful—doesn’t want to worry me—and I become paranoid about the ingredients in my shampoo. Then I think, maybe the problem is wool. Or soap. Or the fragrances in soaps. And so I wear very little every day and I wash myself sparingly. I’m never sure if she’s allergic to anything at all, but I am satisfied knowing that for her I made myself as bereft as possible in pursuit of an answer I never found
She’s frightened by loud noises, comes into closer orbit when a car alarm triggers or the neighbors’ fights pipe through to our kitchen like clanging heat. Once after a long storm, she holds me by the back of my shirt for hours while I move around the house. And I let her, gratified by the plainness of her need. But there are times, too, when I need her, and on those days I close kitchen cabinets loudly and carelessly to drive her into my comfort. At night we sleep face to face in perfect symmetry. The two of us, together, look exactly like me.
But as time goes on, she has less to say, asks fewer questions. She leaves my bed and strays farther and farther from me on our walks. When I find her, she doesn’t seem relieved, doesn’t seem like she ever had the sense that she was lost.
One night I bring home a whole salmon for dinner. It lies flat and dumb on the counter, looking much too alert for a dead thing, like it could reanimate at any moment. She fillets it for us, presses her hands along its insides in search of its smallest bones, which she removes one by one with pliers. Useless, I stand aside with the discarded head and run my finger along its teeth.
As I’m cleaning up, she calls to me from the table. She wants to know if she can give the dog a bit of fish. “I’ll scrape it into her bowl,” I say and come take her plate. But I can tell she wants to be the one. She wants to feed the dog from her hand.
That night someone passes by the window. His little chihuahua and its stippling gait, impossibly small, more butterfly than canine. I see her watching them, her head against the glass.
“I want my own dog,” she says.
—
Gradually I stop recognizing her. I consider that, perhaps, it is I who have changed the both of us. But I don’t think so. She begins to startle me around the house. Sometimes at the table her hand reaches for the salt, or to top off my coffee, and I see a stranger’s hand, and I think, briefly, to stab it.
It ends in the sun one day, at the outdoor market beside the park. She walks off toward the fruit stand. I track the top of her head, knowing if I lose sight of her, I might not be able to recollect her again. But the light is so strong. It shines off of the white plastic tents, off of the scales of the headless fish on the ice, and off of the ice. I can’t help it. My eyes are stung shut.
I wait for a long while, sit on the bench, comb faces. Eventually, they begin to break down the tents. Walking home, it occurs to me that she had probably seen me sitting there, watched me. I imagine her, biting into an apple and realizing I don’t recognize her. Turning the apple over slowly in her palm, choosing not to come back.
Lindsay Vranizan’s poetry has appeared in LEVELER Poetry and Bayou Magazine. She lives in New York City with her husband and newborn son. She is at work on a project about disgust. This is her first published story.