Tag Archives: Zana Eliot

This is the last place I would see him in this life.

It was a regular Sunday morning. So early that the soft, white sunrise had yet to crawl around the side of the house, to touch the banisters with gentle fingers, to claw at the window-shade over our bed. He was home for a spell and I was in a slump.

I never deserved him.

I heard him get out of bed and I ignored it, my body still aching with the insistent weight of his presence. I’d regularly gone months, whole seasons, where he’d be out on the road, where he’d be just a voice in the background while I went through the motions—rehearsed, calculated—it didn’t take me but a few moments. But whenever he was home, he’d have me pinned to the bed for what could have been hours. My body tumbling again and again off the edge as he looked at me with eyes darker than a starless night and told me he’d never be able to leave again.

He loved me and I worshiped him. I told him he was my muse once as he laid in bed, his long finger scrolling languidly over his phone screen. He’d looked up at me with those eyes that never failed to catch me by the throat and I felt my breath leave the same way it did on that long ago day. The chill of a November cloud bloomed in my bones as his lips slipped into something of a smile. “Of course I am, my beautiful little poet.” And then he locked his phone and we went to bed.

I hope he never doubted it.

Our life wasn’t what he deserved. He’d settled for me I suppose. We settled for a meager cluster of rooms above the garage in my aunt’s Bar Harbor vacation house. Housing I was able to secure for a very fair price should I occupy year-round. He’d typically be on tour all winter so I’d wait out the bitter months on my own. Christmas had become a few bong hits and a movie marathon. I’d ring in the New Year by dressing in layers of his clothes, saturated in the smell of him, while getting blitzed on the balcony and screaming the love poems I wrote for him into the wind.

I told myself it was spellwork, it was magic, it was the spiritual law of compensation. I suffered through those months because he’d be home in the spring. Then he’d leave again for his other band’s summer run and I’d spend as many evenings as I could tending bar at the inn down the road. The guy who owned it used to work in the industry and every summer he’d look me up and down with the same sneer of disbelief on his lips. “You still with that man of yours?”

If I had my way I’d always be with him.

And so I lived my life in seasons. I kept the four rooms he occasionally lived in the way he liked them. I buried my loneliness in syntax and structure, I openly longed for him in verse. and he always came home to me.

Our life was a spell until we broke.

It was a regular Sunday morning and I woke before the sun.

The room was quiet and she was splayed out on the mattress next to me, her dark curls stuck to her neck where I’d buried my face again and again the night before. I would try to be quiet as I got up, made my coffee, practiced soundlessly at the neat kitchen table she kept under the picture window in the main room. She needed her sleep.

It was almost winter and I’d be gone soon. The first date was in upstate New York, some miserable little venue that would be buried in snow a few weeks after we cleared out. I’d make virtually nothing by the end of the grueling run and would spend Christmas and most of January at my parents’ place in Boston, maybe I’d be home by Valentine’s Day. I tried to convince her to come with me this year as I did every year and she said the same thing as always—her aunt wanted someone in Bar Harbor to watch the house. As if the house was a living thing like a kid or a cat.

The house would be there long after we were both gone. and her aunt would likely beat us out the gate. But she was the kind of woman that kept her promises. I think that’s what first drew me to her. That or the way her gray eyes darted out from under the fringe of her dark hair, flickering over me like I was a threat, like I was trouble. I like to believe that she loved me with abandon, she loved me despite her better nature.

When she became my prevailing thought, I was sure she put me under a spell. Eventually I realized I’d fallen in love. I wanted her always but could settle for whatever we could make work. We were practical in that way—our love was so big it could swallow the sun, but we were creative, we found ways to keep it sated.

The coffee pot gurgled against the silence of the main room. She always found a way to make it cheery despite the state of it—a garland of blood-red poppies hid the place where the wallpaper was peeling away. A salvaged bookshelf had been painted a blearing orange and propped in front of the part of the wall where the plaster was collapsing. She’d spent a whole year gathering scraps and took a class at the community center to create the carefully dyed rag rug that hid the worst of the sagging, splintering floorboards.

I told her that we could live with my parents, that I could take another teaching gig, that maybe I didn’t have to indulge myself so much with the tours, the residencies, the encroaching press of studio time but she wouldn’t hear of it. I deserved my own home, I deserved to chase my dreams. She believed in me.

I didn’t deserve her.

The lights flickered as I poured myself a cup from the carafe. The wiring was rotten, the walls were rotten—I knocked my knuckles briefly against the plaster over the coffee cart and the house answered back with a shudder that caused the panes of the window to click against the crackling grasp of their ancient putty. What the hell could I do? I just rolled my eyes and went on with my morning.

With a mouthful of coffee, I settled into my seat at the table and pulled out my instrument. I let my fingers run expertly over the fretboard, it was mostly muscle memory at this point.

I felt the floorboards tremble under my bare feet as I focused my gaze on the same place on the wall—between the streaky, desilvering mirror and a painting she gave me years ago. My own eyes seemed infinite in her likeness—she always saw the best of me.

I tried to clear my thoughts as the shadows danced at the edges of my vision. Tried not to think about how badly I wanted to crawl back into bed next to her, about how I wished we could have a family, how I wished to see her beautiful body heavy with my child, how I wished she got along with my mother.

But of course she was there—a skeletal woman in a gray nightgown flirted with the corner of my vision as I slid into the bridge, my fingers solid against the blunt slice of  wound metal. I could hear her wish that I played a less insufferable instrument, she wished I played violin so she could replace the strings with razor-wire.

I blinked my eyes and loosened the muscles around them, softening my gaze and everything in the room blurred.

Eventually, I finished the song.

It was a regular Sunday and he thought I couldn’t hear him. He thought I couldn’t hear her. The way they spoke to each other—it cut into me like a blade.

She was always there in the peripheral while I worked my way through my manuscripts, while I cursed at my clumsy hands, painting infinite layers and never finding the right one. The tattered gray silk hovering around her wrists as if it had its own musculature as she reached over to correct my hand.

“You shake too much.” She’d tutted one afternoon between her clenched teeth. I never saw her face but I knew she had to be beautiful, why else would he speak so lovingly to her?

Feeling her presence fill the room, I whispered to her, “He’s leaving again soon.”

She didn’t answer so I closed my eyes and rolled over in bed, blinking away the tears as I settled against my pillow. The smell of coffee and damp overwhelmed my senses as I pushed the blankets that smelled of him off of my body.

“Perhaps I should go with him again this time, leave this place.” Her voice resonated in between my ears like a nest of angry hornets. “You’ll watch the house.”

My heart ached at the thought of another long winter, another season without even the delirious and often irritating company of the bar patrons. I did not care for her company. But the desolateness, the screaming cold, the howl of the wind throated by the shambled roof, was perhaps more unpleasant than the ghostly voice that filled my head, guided my hand, told me stories that came pouring out of my fingers.

I rolled over and eyed the clutter of prescription bottles on my nightstand and shuddered at the thought of winter, of the cold bed, of his voice thin on the speaker while I tried to bring myself to completion, as if the act would draw it all back to me and at least I could work again.

The lady in gray shifted her hips by the window, the light pouring through and off of the shimmering old silk. Her voice was raw honey. “You can do anything for a few months.”

I laid against my pillow and started to sob.

It was a regular Sunday morning and the news was dire. I read half a dozen articles about irreversible damage to the climate, watched a short film about how space junk could potentially change the orbits of satellites, read a thread of posts about a mad gang of wildfires that were consuming the west. It seemed as if all the bad in the world didn’t understand it was overstaying its welcome.

I wondered how many shows we’d play out there anyhow, there were people to fill clubs in California but the Pacific Northwest? It was pretty, but the scene was DOA, the creative core of the cities hollowed out by gentrification, their usual patrons losing their grip on their homes and moving into desert trailer parks or their parents’ basement. Stuck watching their sister’s kids while she worked an extra shift that wouldn’t even amount to a tank of gas.

I heard movement in the bedroom behind me and I shook back to attention, shifted my hand on the fretboard, and thought I should go check on her.

The lady in gray had stopped hovering and I finished my coffee. The mug she’d bought me years ago at a flea market was cracked but I knew not to run my lip over that part. She’d painted my name reverentially across the body of it in soft, leaning silver script. She’d told me she loved me for the first time the night she’d given it to me. But even she would admit that she’d loved me on sight, maybe before that. She loved me before she knew I existed, she loved me beyond this existence. It didn’t know how any of it worked, it was some weird poet shit—time alchemy, transcendental magic. 

I just knew that I never wanted anyone as much as I wanted her. So I carefully set my guitar back in its stand and cleaned up the table. I rinsed the mug before I sat it in the sink. I walked back to the bedroom to find her still splayed out in the bed, the ripe swell of her bare backside emerging from under the quilt.

I thought I could go for another round and so I dropped my pajama bottoms before I crawled back in with her. It would be a sweet way to wake her up—she who loved me beyond the realm of space and time.

I rolled her over gently. “Hey darling, I’m back—” 

But her body was heavier than usual. 

She did not turn at my touch, did not play into my hands, did not melt against me, did not meet me with her gaze, pulling me into the heart of her with her thunderstorm eyes.

I could only see white, a flutter of wings behind her lids, her lips were slack, parting sickly as I rolled her to face me. I felt the air leave my lungs as I noticed she was wearing a gray silk nightgown that had been hiked up over her haunches, that had given her the appearance of being naked as she’d been before. The folds of the quilt obscuring the strange garment that had been buttoned up to her chin, its high neck adorned with bone-white buttons.

I noticed that her skin was bluish in the growing light, its advance revealing that the soft pink of her lips had soured into a deep, angry, purple. I shook her, I begged her, I stumbled out of the bed and fumbled with the phone. I screamed into it as if my panic could resuscitate her.

While I waited for help to arrive, I kept shaking her, kept begging her. I lied and said I understood the poet shit, the magic, that I loved her before I knew she existed and would love her always.

I scrambled for my pants after I heard the paramedics knocking at the door. I let them in with my pajamas clutched in my shaking hands. “Please go to her, save her.” 

I almost didn’t notice when I saw the lead guy stumble in his bag for a mask, his eyes immediately drawn to the ring of mold on the ceiling in the main room.

I slid into my pajamas as I heard  them call the end of her life in the next room and between my sobs I heard the rustle of silk.

She said, “This is the last place you will see her in this life. And I know how hard it is for young people to get on these days. You see, I’m willing to cut you a deal.”

photo by Elena Pak and Avinash Kumar (via pexels and unsplash, respectively)