You cultivate negativity like it’s a fucking garden plant, I tell you. Not everyone can grow things, you say, calmly. Some people don’t have green thumbs at all. They can’t grow shit. You are addressing envelopes, stamping a return address, sticking forever stamps on the corners.
Soon after I lost the baby, you began to collect lint from the dryer in a shoebox. Then those balls of hair that look like desiccated spiders. On the windowsill, you lined them up with seashells and pieces of sea glass we had collected from trips in the before times. But now, you’re mailing the lint and hairballs to everyone on the spreadsheet entitled “wedding list B.” You say they didn’t send presents. I tell you we didn’t end up moving onto list B and they weren’t invited to the wedding; they didn’t have to give us gifts.
Still.
You’re angry, I say.
Should I not be?
I don’t look at you and spill into the couch. Swipe through my feed. Death, destruction, violence, bigotry, death again. Murder sprees again. Plagues still. My thumb fatigues from brushing over all the corpses. I click to another social media app. Congrats! I type on a post where a friend announces she is pregnant. I add three balloons, one red heart, and a big yellow smile.
I can feel your eyes boring into me. It is sunny out and it reflects in the blues and greens of the sea glass on the sill, I can see it in my peripheral vision. The color of lakes, the color of envy.
The sun hides behind a cloud, the sea glass grows opaque again. The light and the dark live so close together. You’ve rearranged the shells and sea glass and packaged up all the lint and all the hairballs. You are stuffing, sealing, stamping. These will be dispersed around the globe, these pieces of us.
I toss my phone aside and head upstairs. Step into the shower smelling that overripe peachy mildew smell. Pink splotches color the ceiling. I collect the hair clinging to the walls that I’d left there. Proof of life maybe. I bunch it up into a big brown lump, it’s so light, my dead cells. Downstairs, I hand it over to you and I grab a pen. Address the next envelope.
We are all beachcombing for something, you say.
Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer whose writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, including the 2019 Best Short Fiction anthology. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.