Page 58 of The Deer and the Dragon
I left Fauna to the bags while I checked into the seedy motel, praying that we wouldn’t get bedbugs. Amid the punching of buttons on an outdated computed, the clerk found the time to leer over my shoulder through the window at Fauna. I shot him a glare.
“Does the motel offer a military discount? My friend is on leave to celebrate her commendation with her family. Top marksman, that one. Better with a gun than anyone on the planet.” I delivered the lie with enough cool believability to take the grimy receptionist’s eyes off her.
Maybe it was that I was too exhausted to shower or washmy face or protest. I’d scarcely been able to shimmy out of my pants and tug the bra off from beneath my shirt. Maybe it was that I’d driven for nine hours and something about being on the road was oddly taxing, akin to running a marathon. Maybe it was that she could smell my dread as thick as any perfume, but Fauna didn’t take the other twin bed. She changed into one of my T-shirts and running shorts, lifted the covers, and tucked herself into the space beside me. Whether or not she could feel the way I trembled at the trauma I’d left behind or what it did to me to be near my parents, she didn’t say. She merely turned off the light, gave me a squeeze in the dark, and, despite ten buckets of sugar coursing through her veins, was soundly asleep within moments.
I hadn’t forgotten the SSRIs that made my life bearable, but the litany of other drugs I used to fall asleep remained untouched on the nightstand. The smell of the sea, the weighed quilt of her kindness, and the steady breathing of someone well on their way to sweet dreams pulled me under. And maybe it was that I knew it might be my last true chance at sleep in a while, I let myself sink beneath the waves and drifted off to join her.
Chapter Nineteen
(Kirby) Are you still with Fauna?
(Nia) You learned her name?! How do you know more than me! I just got one selfie!
(Kirby) I got to video-chat with her. She is a goddess and I am in love with her.
(Nia) Marlow, you’d better be on some awesome bangcation and that’s why you’re ignoring us. If you are: good. we love that for you, happy for you, yay! If you’re not: fuck you, text us back.
(EG) I shouldn’t have to tell you that your chapters are due tomorrow, but my spidey senses are telling me that you don’t have them done. If there’s something going on, you have to tell me.
(EG) Marlow, I’m trying everything I can to let Merit succeed. Let me help you. If we need to spin something, let’s spin it, but you have to clue me in
(EG) Marlow, the deadline is passed. I made an excuse, but it was a lame out. No one bought it. Tell me what’s going on, girl. Are you burned out? Do you need extensions? You just have to communicate
(EG) MERIT FINNEGAN. Your job is not the only one at stake right now. Text me back
I stared at my phone for a while, letting the glow ease me awake while Fauna slept soundly beside me. Part of me wanted to type useless questions into the search engine, likehow long do nymphs sleep, but I knew any answer would be something I’d have to get directly from her.
I couldn’t bring myself to face my editor or my deadlines. I had no idea where to begin explaining the chaos to my friends, but I was quite certain they were better off in the dark.
Instead, I tabbed over to my oldest social media app. I hadn’t used it in years. It was the only one I hadn’t bothered to block my parents on, even if they’d deserved it. Without the app, I wouldn’t have known that my childhood home had flooded, forcing my parents to move into a “blessing” of a new property. The site was how I’d found out Grandma Dagny had died, though I hadn’t been invited to her funeral. The smiling pictures of a girl flashing her diamond band were how I had found out my cousin had gotten married. Without the site, it would be like my family had never existed.
I navigated to the account that my mom and dad shared. It was their way of preempting infidelity, or whatever it was they told each other. My parents, despite their despicable flaws, were frustratingly attractive. It was what had drawn my ageless, graceful mother to a failed salesman whose paychecks barely supported his family. They’d been young, and it would have been sacrilegious to consummate their infatuation without a wedding ring. It hadn’t taken long after doing the deed to realize that she was insane and that he was a deadbeat. He couldn’t stand to be around her, and she didn’t respect him.
But, to all the world, they were madly in love. Divorce was off the table, after all.
Given their belief in the sanctity of marriage, I remember asking my mother once if you could leave your husband if he hit you, and she’d said that no, you couldn’t. If you picked an abusive man, then you made your bed and you hadto lie in it. You could only leave him if he hit the children, and even then, it was only for their safety. God, she said, hated divorce.
It seemed like a pretty violent stance to take, but then again, the god of the Abrahamic religions had always been a pretty violent guy. Sometimes he wanted his righteous soldiers to pillage and destroy cities, leaving no man, woman, or child spared, like in the genocide of Canaan. Sometimes he murdered all of the firstborns just to prove a point. Sometimes he called fire from the sky to burn cities to ash, leaving nothing but salt, embers, and memories as in Sodom. Sometimes he flooded the earth because he was sick of everyone.
Of course, we were taught the deeply contextual literary and canonical concept of righteous anger. For a while, it seemed like an exercise in mental gymnastics to argue one side and clutch the other. Whether or not it was the lesson the pastors and elders and passages had intended to teach me, I accepted that some people had to die. Sometimes violence was okay. Sometimes there were shades of gray, and morality was more complicated than the world liked to believe. Maybe that was why I thought my parents should have gotten divorced. Maybe that’s why I could understand them and keep them out of my lives but not hate them. Maybe that’s why the thing that kept me up at night was never a guilty conscience.
I scrolled through their social media page to look at the evidence of their years. Something about people over the age of fifty came with a distinct inability to use aesthetics when capturing anything. If I had to guess, I’d say that every photo was taken with a tablet in poor lighting. There were a few blurry pictures of them with church members. My ever-youthful mother held a baby goat and smiled in another. My mouth dropped open when I reached an image of them standing proudly in front of a whitewashed brick home, arm in arm, dangling the keys.
So grateful to the Lord that after all these years, God blessed my husband with an excellent job and this beautiful home! Thank you for this answer to prayers! God is good!
I stared at the picture of the trimmed hedges, the new, glossy car in the driveway. It was a three-story home with black shutters on what looked to be at least two acres of property. They looked…rich. A tiny fire burned through me at the glib sentences. The religious community’s fucked-up stances on how privilege equivalated the blessings of the faithful were steeped in problematic issues of supremacy. I wondered if God wasn’t good when we lived in a trailer, when we had to sleep in snowsuits because we couldn’t afford power, or when we crashed on my Grandma Dagny’s couch and floor for six months between homes. Perhaps material possessions defined his goodness. Then again, I had a chip on my shoulder.
Fauna made a small noise upon waking, and I closed the phone. I wasn’t sure why I did it. I wasn’t hiding anything from her. Maybe I didn’t want her first conscious thought to be a glaring phone screen or for me to be distracted. I guess perhaps I felt like she deserved…more.
I slid out of bed in my oversize T-shirt and my underwear and started the tiny hotel coffeepot, wondering as to the wisdom of using something that may or may not have been cleaned in the last six months. I kept it running just for the smell of coffee, which had her yawning, stretching, and smiling in moments. I watched her blink open her enormous eyes and felt equal parts happy and sad. I’d never let my friends sleep over. I occasionally allowed the people I dated to spend the night at my apartment, but more often than not, I would insist we hook up at theirs so I could bow out under the believable, and somewhat true, guise of insomnia. I’d missed out on an entire experience of human existence. Waking up next to someone you loved, making them coffee, watching the sleepiness tumble from their eyes as they rubbed away their dreams with loose fists, it was an intimacy I didn’t even realize I was lacking.
Fauna sat up and realized I was staring at her.
She yawned. “Are you shocked at how ravishing I am first thing in the morning?”
“Kinda,” I answered honestly. “It’s offensive for anyone to look that good when they wake up. Fuck you.”
“You should!” she said, merry despite her grogginess. “I’m fantastic in bed.” She laughed at my slack-jawed surprise before asking, “Is that coffee for me? And what do they have for sweetener?”
