Consumption

These days I try not to think of Aleena. I find it best to live life unencumbered by her weight. But

But when she does slip through the cracks

When she does enter my thoughts, unwarranted, unwanted

When an image of her materializes in my mind

 I always see her at Seal beach that too cold day in September 

When she stood planted like a tree above the thigh-high waves, shivering cold as I begged her to come back to the shore. She wouldn’t budge. Just stood with her thin arms wrapped around her like a petulant child ignoring the shouts of those who know better.

 I wanted so badly to know what compelled her to ignore her own body's cries for warmth and shuffle her feet further past slimy, squirmy things that sent shivers up her spine, scared her like the teacher’s warnings of stingrays on a field trip. As I stood at the shore, I felt the sand dangerously, deliciously unstable beneath my feet. 

Maybe 

Maybe she felt the same as I did at the opening last May, caught in the ghostly gasps throughout the dark of the gallery, illuminated by headlights rushing by. When I watched the reveal of my painting at the auction in New York two years before, at the height of everything, I felt the happiest and proudest I’d ever been. But when I saw this one, mounted and looming over me, seeing it for the first time in weeks since—

since, well, that horrible thing

—a lurid feeling of disgust plunged deep within me. 

I saw the woman that I loved with all my thoughts, brown and heavy, filling her like a balloon, sucked in through her mouth and nostrils until she burst. Raw sewage on the hot asphalt. And just like the mirror, I couldn’t look away.

Sometimes I have to stop myself from digging up that old pain. I could place it in front of me and watch it spasm and pulse for hours on end.

I think I understand Aleena better now than I ever have. It was her who gave me the idea for the painting after all. I guess in that way, I owe her everything. 

Aleena

Toni stared blankly at the empty expanse of white before her and waited for it to reveal some hidden work of art within, as if it would solve some unanswerable question. She had been doing this for hours at a time lately. 

It was the biggest canvas I’d ever seen her purchase. It cost half a paycheck and spanned all the way from the locs brushing her forehead to the low hanging pantline at her waist. I thought of how my hand had rested on that stretch of skin as we slept, and I wanted to touch it again.

“You know you’ll burn yourself out just sitting there and staring,” I mumbled into the light stubble across her neck where my lipstick smeared, wrapping my arms around her. “Come on, let me get you ready for my mother’s party.” 

Beneath my arms she tensed. I wondered if she was feeling my apprehension or her own; the start of a new project was always an unsteady time for Toni. We were in that tiny, crappy studio apartment she kept on Sueno that I hated and she stubbornly held onto. In my mind this was to spite me, but Toni wanted nothing more than space for her art studio in one corner and her mattress in the other. 

I could tell she didn’t want to go. For reasons I couldn’t comprehend Toni preferred her blank solitude to a party. She wanted to pull something out of the darkness.

“I told you I wasn’t going. I don’t have a dress.” Her hand on my arm was gentle, passive.

I bit my lip. “I got you one.”

“Of course you did.”

She pulled herself from my arms and crossed the room, trampling strewn laundry thrown around the night before: Toni’s dirty work uniform still stinking of coffee grounds, the Parisian lingerie she had so disinterestedly torn off of me, two steaming bikinis sopped together in a pile so close you wouldn’t know we wore them with the tops swapped. 

“I didn’t get a dress because I didn’t want a dress. I don’t wear dresses, Leena, I don’t like going places where I have to wear a dress.”

“Oh come on, Toni, it’s just one night. Don’t make me show up alone.”

Her eyes refused to meet mine, so I turned her chin my way. 

“Please? Just say yes.”

And it was enough to break her resolve, to know I’d won.

Toni 

The place was palace-like: towering, gilded, and full of dazy people and servers with permanent half moon smiles. We’d been there only a few moments and I was already alone. From the second we arrived they had all descended upon Aleena, leaving me by myself, easy prey. 

I watched as Aleena glided through the room greeting friends and relatives, her silver gown glimmering under the light of the chandeliers. The dress Aleena got for me was uncharacteristically girly and a bit ill-fitted. I couldn't stop from pulling at the hem.

Aleena’s mother, for whom the party was for and put together by, found me instantly. When I saw her I pulled a fat smile to cover the cynical look Aleena thought was inappropriate for these types of functions. Her liner creased at the corner of her eyes in courtesy. Paula, like her daughter, was a writer. A journalist. 

She told me about Aleena’s collection getting released in five days, this Friday, as if I wasn’t the one to choose the date. Her last book was number three on the New York Times Bestseller List three weeks in a row, didn’t I know? It wasn’t first but there’s always room for improvement. As she spoke I noticed a crack in the tile underneath my shoe, a missing crystal in the light fixture.

I hadn’t read any of Aleena’s new work. She refused to show me anything yet, and I didn’t feel any urge to press her on it. I was much more concerned with the new work that the gallery was pressing me for since my last collection.

But of course I hadn’t finished a painting in a while, and Paula pretended to be shocked as the group she’d attracted listened attentively. It was Paula who gave me the connection to Roman’s gallery from one of her friends. I was ashamed that I couldn’t remember their name and wondered vaguely if they were in the crowd. I felt smothered in heavy colognes and glassy eyes.

“She’s just in a creative block,” Aleena would then interrupt, my charitable savior. She smiled bigger than she needed to as she nudged me with her arm to do the same.

My mouth was dry, and I hated needing to be saved. I took a long drink of champagne that made Aleena furrow her brows.

“—so close to number one,” Her perfectionist mother would say.

“Three is great accomplishment, Mom,” She’d reply.

“Of course it is, of course it is, but—there’s always room for improvement.”

Aleena looked to me for support but I could offer nothing but a tight-lipped smile. 

The night dragged on, lulled by the haunting moans of the orchestra and the tall, thin glasses dancing around my head. I lost count of how many glasses of champagne I’d downed while the room dizzied and glittered. Bored by any attempt at small talk and too tipsy to fake it, I secluded myself to an odd corner of the room near the door. In my mind I was half-way out.

I watched someone step in front of me, into the mirror hung on a far wall: a young girl with large, sad, green eyes. One who looked so out of place, like she was too young for her designer dress and expensive highlights, her overlined lips. 

She stayed in front of it for several minutes, too engrossed in the delicate flyaways on her head to notice the drunk woman watching her from behind. She looked like she could fall into it, and it would swallow her up whole.

Then, the girl paused, squinting into the mirror. She turned around and walked towards me. 

“Toni, what are you doing?” She said, her words buzzing around my head and darting towards my eardrums. She placed a hand on my cheek, warm and smooth. “Toni?” 

Her name was on the tip of my tongue. I wanted to get close to her, but my mouth couldn’t manage. I reached out to her, mouth agape, and I guess in the end my stomach spoke first, then the floor rose to meet me—

My apartment door slammed shut. The mask that Aleena had held all night finally fell. 

My head spun. “‘S the party over?”

“You can’t stay sober at one fucking event,” She muttered, kicking off her heels.

“I don’t like them.” I unzipped the dress and twirled as it fell around my ankles in front of the mattress.

“Don’t giggle, Toni, you’re acting like a child.”

“I told you I didn’t want to go.”

“Yes but I asked you to try. For me.”

I fell backwards onto the disheveled mattress and let the ceiling spin above me. “You’re not enough.”

I don’t know why I said it. I wasn’t even sure what it meant. I’m sure she made meaning of it on her own. Even though I didn’t see the look on her face as she slammed the door shut, I still felt painfully empty.

 I took solace in my studio and smoked with legs tucked to my chest til the room was choked with it. My head became dizzy with it. Outside my window the city was restlessly, endlessly alive and the neighbors upstairs were deeply in love and I stared into an empty canvas until my retinas burned and I remembered to blink. 

My phone vibrated with Aleena’s call on my thigh and I saw her glowing face in the Santa Barbara sun where we summered with her family, my face reflected on top of hers. The two pictures fought to align with each vibration, the back ends of a magnet in a toddlers grubby fingers, repelled by an invisible force. Then the screen went black and I was left alone with my reflection. She’d given up.

I looked up at the canvas and saw someone reflected there, her face all stretched out like a funhouse mirror. I picked up my brush and began to carve her out.

I woke up in a cloud of my own stink, slumped under the window with several paint brushes wet on my bare lap. In front of me a canvas lay face down on the floor. The face was smudged slightly, creating the blurry photo of a large, ornate mirror within which was a woman with serpent-like, greenish-yellow eyes and bloody lips blooming from her face. 

There was only one notification on my phone, a text from Aleena asking if I was still coming to her reading. Today. I closed my eyes and convinced myself I’d never seen it.

Aleena

When I first met Toni, it was at a party our senior year at Pomona. She talked smooth to me in that deep brown voice and liked to dance with a hand grazing my waist. Her touch sent tingles up my spine. 

I thought she was so cool, interesting, a little bit dark. I didn’t feel interesting. At twenty-one I still felt like a child in high heels playing at being grown, writing whiny verses into my notes app, but she made it all real. She kissed me like she’d known real love and in her art there was real pain. I thought she was the most talented person I had ever met. I wonder how I looked to her.

Like a little girl, I’m sure. That’s how I felt. Just a dumb, little rich girl getting her first taste of the real world as she took me to see indie shows and experimental performance art. Over eager, overly excited. Too open in showing interest.

Maybe she liked the adoration, at first: the fun and the flirting, the intensity of it all. But I think overtime I grew tiresome. 

Toni was never the commitment type, yet I thought we were going somewhere serious, and so after graduation I used my mother’s connections to get her a spot at a prominent gallery, hoping that cementing us both in our careers would bring us closer. Sometimes I think it did the opposite. Toni’s always been so flighty, so hard to catch up to. 

I was needy, so desperate to be loved it didn’t matter to me how I got it as long as I had it. I needed it from her now.

It was ten minutes before my reading and Toni wasn’t picking up her phone. That day was, above all else, for her. Everything I wrote was for her—what did any of it mean if she didn’t show up? I dug out half a valium from my purse and downed it with a lukewarm coke, then downed another. The shirt I was wearing was too small, I’d accidentally shrunken it in the wash. At the edge of the hem my skin was cold, lonely. I stared out to the bookstore from the doorway, a small crowd seated on folding chairs. 

“It’s time, Aleena,” said Claudia, the agent Mother found for me after my first book, never once looking up from her phone. The success came as a surprise to me, but I found later that Mother’s connections got it published in the first place. She had such high expectations at times, it felt inevitable that I’d fail them on my own.

I stepped out alone, with only my book to hold. The pill made me clumsy, I stumbled to the table. The crowd quieted.

I cleared my throat and painted on a smile. 

“Hi. Thank you all so much for coming,” I recited, “My name is Aleena Abid, author of Between the Sheets.” A small pause for applause. The people in the crowd smiled politely, anticipatedly. They were middle-aged women mostly, the kind that liked to read something raunchy and passionate to fill that gap in their own lives. 

“Thank you, thank you,” I struggled to contain the anxious energy in my voice, I was talking too fast. “The collection that I will be debuting today is a bit of a departure from my previous work. In my last collection I was very focused on the physical. Of fully capturing what makes certain moments so intimate to us. This collection titled Consumption, explores the more… scary part of relationships. The unsaid words, the terrifying thoughts that we don’t dare speak to our lover. 

What happens after the intimate: the fear, the obsession.”

I paused, but didn’t dare look out. The room was so quiet it felt as if I was completely alone.

“This poem is called Undercurrent:

I have made love with faceless ghosts

swept up in soft seeming surges of so-called love

at the hot, panting core of desire

only to wake cold beside a stranger.

I have looked out at the sea

and marveled as she reflected the skies,

and when I turned away,

clung to the moon 

desperately and crashed—

exposing her dark underbelly—

the brown and the muddled.

Swarms of flies 

lick away the salty tears of the sea.

To know even then

how hopeless I truly am

that I’d drown in you willingly

If only you’d let me–

Lover clean me out, heal me 

not consume me

never consume me.”

The air was heavy with silence as I finished. Then, a soft smattering of polite clapping. I looked out into the crowd to see a few women leaned over whispering to their partners, many were on their phones. Only one person in the very back row held my gaze. The messy black curls falling over her face reminded me of Toni. Not now, but when we first met. I guess that was enough.

 I read a few more pieces to an underwhelmed crowd. I didn’t trust the agent my mother found. I didn’t trust this crowd of bored housewives looking for something to make them feel excited. Women with hollow heads full of gossip and hot air. That wasn’t what I was here for. 

The woman with the inky hair lingered after the reading at the cheap table I was meant to be signing copies at. Not that anyone wanted a signed copy. I guess Mom could kiss that number one spot goodbye. 

She told me she thought I was a beautiful writer, but her eyes lingered at my cleavage, pushed up in the tight-fitting top. Still, I let the woman smooth-talk me into her car, since I had nowhere better to be and no car to take home. Back in her apartment she pulled me into her bed.

But when she kissed me I just felt... nothing. No pull. No warmth. No heat. Why was there no heat?

And when I couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down my face it was because I couldn’t stop thinking—

why doesn’t she love me why doesn’t she love me why doesn’t she love me why

—I’d never felt so alone.

The woman was understanding. She let me cry in her arms for a few minutes before driving me home where I stayed awake the rest of the night. 

When sleep tried to engulf me, Toni’s smile, her brown lips against dark pink gums, flashed on the inside of my eyelids and my chest seized, I jumped awake to chase her out of my mind. I nursed a bottle of rum in front of channel seven until the morning.

It must be hard to be needed that much—I know it is—but I’m so sick of being desired and not loved. I can't help that I need to be loved. 

Toni

Showing up at Aleena’s door Tuesday night to apologize was an obligation, the paint splattered on my sweatpants, an excuse she hated to accept, and yet always did. She looked as if she hadn’t slept with wild, dark eyes and a glass in hand. I wondered if she’d been self-prescribing and mixing again. The apartment was a mess, scribbled pages littered over the kitchen counters. 

“Come in,” She told me without hesitation, as if I hadn’t stood her up yesterday, as if she hadn’t left me seven voicemails the night before. As if she’d been expecting me.

“That reading,” She started, laughing unsteadily, “Was a complete nightmare.”

And when I said nothing she continued on her own momentum. “It’s like everyone is expecting something from me, the same thing they had before, just more. Just better. But I feel like I have nothing left to give.” She then slumped back on the counter.

“I’m sorry I didn’t—”

She raised her hand. No, she said, not now. Aleena stood and stared intently at my face. This closely I could smell the alcohol steaming off her breath and see the concealer creased under her eyes, patchy powder and slipped cream. It felt strangely terrifying to be this close to her, her fervid energy radiating around us. 

Feverishly, she rid herself of yesterday's clothes and pressed my hand to the warmth between her thighs. I obliged and pushed her back against the counter. The way she gripped my arm, desperately as I made love to her on the kitchen island, made me feel like a drug she was getting her fill of. I closed my eyes and waited for her to finish.

When the panting ended, her eyes were full of sorrow and she asked me to stay the night. I could see in her eyes how badly she wanted it, but couldn’t match the intensity in her eyes, couldn’t let myself feel that deeply. So I left.

I started spending more and more time in my studio working on the painting. It consumed my every waking moment and sleeping thought. I ordered a cheap, plywood mirror to keep behind my easel and took glances in it between brush strokes, trying to recreate the subtle part of Aleena’s lips, the wild look I’d seen in her eyes. It seemed with each glance my reflection morphed before me. The effect was as arresting as it was nauseating. Disentangling from these parts of her was like pulling strands of hair threaded into my clothes or slithered down the sink. 

Aleena began to call again, but I was declining her invites more. When I did accept them, she’d catch me sneaking peeks at my reflection in my phone or a passing window, my eyes clouding over while she spoke about arrangements for the release. The date was quickly approaching and I wanted nothing more than to stare into my reflection and then back at my canvas, discovering new creases and lines in that hungry, bitter feeling that I’d begun to make a well of.

I took a step back and stared at the painting. The girl looked back at me, alluring, mysterious, and yet too innocent, her open mouth too empty. It felt incomplete somehow.

I pulled stolen pages from the bag I took to Aleena’s. Two were stained by a spilled drink, illegible. The other had a short poem. I don’t know why she kept it all so private from me, but holding them in my hands felt like a betrayal. 

 A fly buzzed in my space and landed on my lip. I let it crawl towards my nostril before swatting it, squishing it dead into my skin. Even after I wiped it away, I was sure its residue remained.

I thought of the flies swarming her legs and soon one appeared on her lip, then her eye, tickling her bottom lashes, and when I stepped back, a whole swarm had appeared. I could hear them buzzing below the canvas, tapping against the glass, begging to be let free.

Aleena

The night before the book release I got a frantic call from Toni. Her breath was heavy and uneven as she explained that she finished—finished it finally and I had to come over right now— and I realized that she frightened me. 

She was waiting for me on her mattress, leg shaking uncontrollably, and shot up. Her back was to the covered canvas, protective.

“Before you see, I need to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“I read your poetry.”

My cheeks burned. “How did you get it?”

“I—uh—stole the manuscript off your counter. But look don't be upset, please, it was just one page, and it helped me. Without it I never  would have finished. 

That thing you wrote? A-about the flies at the beach? It stuck with me, Leena. This—this! It’s all thanks to you.”

With a flourish Toni revealed it to me: the girl was no more than a collection of fervent brush strokes, her face a bruised smudge with bright jade stones watching me between heavy slits. With her head tilted back her blood red mouth filled with flies that swarmed the inside of the mirror. Everything outside of their perimeter blurred at the edges of the canvas, but I couldn’t stop staring at the girl in the mirror. I could hear the bugs buzzing within her cheeks, crawling into her eyes and up her nose searching for rot, until she couldn’t feel herself anymore. I couldn’t feel myself.

My words came out vaporous, barely a whisper. “Is that really how you see me?”

Her maniacal smile thinned. “You don't like it.”

“This.. was all thanks to me? You painted me as some kind of monster.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be... I mean it’s not necessarily you.”

“Don’t lie to yourself Toni, you’re smarter than that.”

As I spoke, the look in her eyes changed, and I wondered what she hadn’t seen before that she was seeing now. I was a slaughtered fish, my chest splayed open for her to consume. She looked back between me and the painting, and like a deep pain stabbed deep into her abdomen, reached out for me as I pulled back.

“Aleena...”

But I was too far gone. I watched her fearful expression disappear behind the closing door and waited for her to open it again, to come after me, but I felt stupid and childish for waiting for something that would never come. My cheeks were hot and wet. And so I left. I think some part of Toni knew what she was doing by showing me that painting. She knew if she did, it’d be the last time she’d see me.

I remember my first steps into the ocean, so scared of the cold and taken aback when waves splashed at my feet. So in awe it happened in slow motion. What were these things? How could someone make me feel this way? Then, the waves sped up, and somehow I was in deeper. 

 I’ll admit, I wanted to fix her, to unravel all the bullshit inside her head, until I realized there was no prize at the end, no reward. Just pain and confusion and a lingering, unsatisfied desire.

But I wanted to believe it, so it was true. I ignored all the red flags and compromised my feelings because at the end of the day that was better than losing her. Not that it worked. I could feel her retreating back to the sand as I swam in deeper and deeper, so deep that my toes couldn't touch the ground.

The wave that came next was so much stronger than I was. What could I do but submit?

Toni

The night that Aleena’s book was meant to be released was the night of the incident. I didn’t get the news until three days later when the curator came by to assess the painting. He loved it, thought it was brilliant and dark and wanted to show it at the gallery next Sunday. As he signed some papers in the corner of my studio I started getting texts from people I hadn’t heard from in months. Old college friends of mine and Aleena’s, coworkers from the publishing company, all asking after her. There was even a message from Paula, one I either hadn’t seen Friday or purposely ignored. The first text linked to a news article: “Local Poet Missing.”

My breath caught in my throat, choked.

Missing. To me Aleena was in her apartment still, flipping through manuscripts, desperately reloading the NY Times Bestseller webpage. Not gone, never gone. The suggestion was too much to face directly, a severing, swift and painful. I had to look away, to spare myself the burden of feeling.

So when Roman asked for my signature, it was as if I'd never seen the text at all.

The showing was a huge success, and Roman was right, everyone loved the painting. It ended up being auctioned at the Delirium for upwards of several thousand, sold to some rich collector, and I became the star of the local art community. People suddenly became interested in my old work and I was invited to every prominent gallery in the area. I did dozens of interviews for local art papers, and even went on to win the Up and Coming Arist’s award. 

And yet, I couldn’t fully enjoy any of it as it became clearer and clearer that Aleena wasn’t coming back. Her apartment remained empty, as strewn apart as the night I left it and, soon, I had to stop visiting in the dead of night because her mother took the place over. 

Theories about Aleena’s disappearance sprouted and spread around. There was a small minority who suspected me, the jealous ex, and attributed my success entirely to her disappearance. But after a pair of her shoes were found washed up at the shore of Seal Beach, the leading suspicion was that she had gone out into the ocean and never came back. This is the one I held onto.

As much as I tried to dispel thoughts of her, she remained always, in the back of my mind.   

I never stopped wondering how she felt that day, why she did what they say she did. Did she go out that day with the intention of vanishing? How did she bear the cold? Why did she push herself out there, deeper and deeper?

I didn’t know for sure until her book was finally released a month later in June, with a foreword from her grieving mother. The hysteria around her disappearance ended up skyrocketing its sales and it made the number one spot after all. 

One cold night in September, months after its release, I found myself walking past the used book store on South and Cherry and found a copy sitting on the front shelf, fifty percent off. On the back cover was a picture of Aleena, the one that I took of her in Santa Barbara, eyes bright and happy—such a departure the image of her burnt into my mind. I took it home and devoured the whole thing.

Then, I went out for myself. I never liked the water, not as much as she did, but something about this swim at Seal beach felt different. I felt a strange warmth inside me despite the cold, and I let Aleena in. 

Eyes closed I shuffled my feet out, seaweed tangling my toes. She pulled me out further, her hand on my waist, a gentle guide. When the water finally reached my chin it felt like a kiss, lapping at my nostrils. And she wanted to enter. So I let her.