Somewhere, Filed Away

Catherine Shukle

 

The boy in the knit hat had pinched her nipple. No, he’d pinched and twisted her nipple. The right one, the one that had been sucked askew by her son, Geoff, twenty years prior. In fact, for a moment, after he’d reached his arm across the small space between them, she thought he was indeed Geoff, slouching there in his red and black hat, the brim pulled down to his eyebrows, the top pom dirty at the fringes.

She’d swatted his hand. Said, “No, that hurts Mommy.” She’d said that, hadn’t she?

Even though he wasn’t Geoff, of course. Geoff was grown now, living with a woman forty years older than him, a woman older than her, in a condo in Galveston, Texas.  From cornfields to coastline, brown barn house to Pleasure Pier. Home now was an upside down place, beautiful but all backwards, with the bedrooms downstairs and the kitchen up. “In case of flooding, Aileen,” he’d said over the phone, his voice whispery, muffled. He’d called her by her first name though, not even Mother, certainly not Mommy, and so her chest cracked open a slit and something slipped in. 

But this boy was Conner, or Charlie, or something with a C, and he was enrolled in her Dance History class, only one of two boys in the class, which was why she had remembered him when he came to her office that day. Conner, she’d called him, and she thought that was right, and he didn’t correct her, just smiled out the side of his eyes and sat down in her chair. He folded his legs up in his lap. Stretched them back out. Snow warmed on the tips of his shoes. She’d taken the chair across from him, the one that rolled, the one normally meant for her students.

In the background, her colleague, Bart, creaked his seat. He chanted, low and rhythmic. My sister sleeps with her tongue between her legs. Outside the window they didn’t have, snow settled like smoke.

This was a new office arrangement the college was trying out, a “professor pod,” really just a wide-open room with four desks, eight chairs, computer screens they tilted away from each other. And, so, two desks sat empty, but there was always Bart, the prose poet, incanting chunks of words like sun butter—melty in the mouth. My brother eats antonyms of love. 

When he pinched her—had she yelped?—Bart stilled. Lowered his voice. My children lie with their toothbrushes behind their ears. We worship our bodies of change.

She imagined the studio she used to teach in before she was relegated to Dance History: bright girl bodies in blue leotards and clean tights and braided buns. Glissade, echappe, changement, changement. Before her knees went stiff. Before the course evaluations and their slightly-wicked comments: “She doesn’t demonstrate.  She doesn’t smile. She smells like old lady.” But, what was she supposed to do about that? 

When she smacked his hand, so lightly it didn’t even make a sound, his face scrunched up sour, like Geoff’s face had done so many times, so many years ago. She’d never slapped her baby of course, but he’d needed to be told he was too old to put his face to her breast, that his little teeth could smart, that she couldn’t bear the touch of his mouth to her body any longer.  A flick to the cheek, maybe, a tiny tap to his head.

We thud into regrets like tears. 

But Conner didn’t cry. 

He didn’t swoop her up into the crook of his arm, sweaty with mom-guilt, and shush her. He didn’t kiss that part of her forehead right between the brows, thumb her cheek up and down, up and down. He didn’t relent and bring her back to the breast, back to the right breast that was warped with weary and inflated with milk, a breast that rejected white bras and underwire and uplifting, a breast that was his now and no longer hers.

Her body offered up because she thought it was all she had to give him. And then, just like that, it was gone. And loneliness became sadness became darkness became shame.

“Can you tell me more about Nureyev?” he’d asked, pulling his hat over his eyes. She’d rolled her chair forward, then back.  It creaked. We disappear into each other’s faults. Like it had never happened at all.

 

 

Catherine Shukle teaches English at Purdue University. Her writing has appeared in journals such as From the Depths, Brushfire, Unbroken, and Hoxie Gorge Review, among others. She lives in Indiana with her husband and three kids, Jack, Max, and Eleanor.

Clarissa Cervantes is a researcher photographer. Clarissa also supplies freelance articles on a variety of topics for newspaper, blogs, websites, and magazines such as USA Today. Clarissa’s photo gallery includes images from all over the world, where she finds inspiration to share her photographs with others through her creative lens, inviting the viewer to question the present, look closer, explore more the array of emotions, and follow the sunlight towards a brighter future.

 

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