Cinéma Dérangement
After Amy Hempel and Carole Maso
by Molly Fuller
- My Girl
Blue-black hair against skin like milk. She leaves red lipstick prints on all my drinking glasses. Chipped-tooth cherry smile, tattooed wrists, golden-downy-hair on arms and thighs, breasts like apple dumplings. Just look at her. She is mine. I’m trying to fix her with these two hands. I’m trying to put her back together, but my small arms are not enough. She shifts like sand, runs like spilled milk, blurring ink lines in the story.
- Exchange
A man in an expensive suit asks if he can see her feet. She takes off her worn white shoes. The man lifts her heels with his hands, leans over her small feet, which rest in his palms like children’s curled fingers, and slowly rubs each one against his clean-shaven cheek. Her face stays in the shadow. Insects buzz outside the window. There is a faraway sound like a bell.
- Caretaker
She gazes down on him from her perch on the edge of the tub. He needs help to bathe now, to eat, to tie his shoelaces. Often he can’t speak her name. She soaps the cloth and washes his back gently in widening circles. She reaches between his legs, hands slippery with soap, feels hardness and softness. He looks up at her, sees something different about her. She strokes the ripeness she feels there, holding him tenderly in her curled fist, watching the way the cupping of her hand ripples through the water.
- Bitter Soup
Choose a sharp knife. Test the blade on onions. Run the tears across your forehead, smooth away the lines. Watch the water bubble, keep away from the contents of the pot. Stand where there is better information. They were bored, they said, never mentioning the probability of how much they could not be trusted. This could be any person’s lover. Stir. Use a cleaver or, if you are strong, your hands. Imagine the bones you are breaking are their bones. Add the marrow. Let the bitterness from the parsley stew. Think about forgiveness, but then don’t. Your healing is another’s open wound.
- Home Wrecker
When the planet explodes, will I remember everything that was said in the blindness of this big, fat all-consuming love? I have some regret, running with another’s lover. I want to be sorry. Part of me is sorry I was so very happy. Maybe I was a fool. I captured something I wanted, but I knew nothing. Judgments are harsh. The fact that I was not questioned. I shoulder no blame. I fill my arms with emptiness.
- Magnolia Blossoms
The time is for putting away winter sweaters in drawers, mundane details of domesticity. Rice is boiling over on the stove. I wash my stockings in the sink, think of your mouth between my legs. See the bath water has leapt the edges to slick the white porcelain, a galaxy of spilled milk.
- Ennui
She sits on the cement steps in front of the large house, bare feet resting on the sidewalk, her scuffed white shoes beside her. She looks at her left hand, wipes it on the thigh of her white dress, leaving a smudge. She sighs, inhales on her cigarette. Exhales the words, “Housewife, housewife, housewife.”
Molly Fuller is the author of the full-length collection For Girls Forged by Lightning: Prose & Other Poems (All Nations Press) and two chapbooks Tender the Body (Spare Change Press) and The Neighborhood Psycho Dreams of Love (Cutty Wren Press). Her work has appeared in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence, New Poetry from the Midwest, 100 Word Story, Kestrel, NANO Fiction, and Pedestal Magazine. Fuller was a Finalist for the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award. You can find her on Instagram @mollyfulleryeah.