The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

into the backyard around three in the morning just a few nights ago. The kids told him that Mommy was saying some real whacko shit, to boot, all while she held a cigarette lighter to her forearm until a quarter-sized patch of skin was charred black.

I curl up on the couch, spark a Marlboro Red, feeling the loose phlegm rumble in my chest as I take a drag. I’m not really listening to him; his once-weekly monologues about his wife are both rambling and redundant. Aside from Allison’s backyard witching hour shenanigans, it’s nothing I haven’t heard before.

Instead, I’m calculating John’s chances of maintaining an erection later. When his tolerance is low, the meth hits him too hard and he can’t keep a hard-on.

When his speech takes on a staccato stutter, so bad that he can only finish half his sentences, I resign myself to a night without an orgasm. It will consist of John bitching about Allison, John attempting to jam his flaccid cock into me, John failing.

I’d say I’m disappointed but I still get free crank out of the deal, so I’m not complaining.

During the course of his monologue, John steps under the ceiling fan. It’s connected to a light fixture, three bare bulbs, only one of which works, and barely at that. In that flickering light, the alternating shadows hit him at the right angle and he looks fifteen years younger.

His small but inexorably growing double chin seems to recede. His widow’s peak vanishes and, though I know it’s only the shadows playing tricks, I can almost see the small, beginner’s gauges stretching out his earlobes.

A familiar bit of flotsam drifts through my stream of consciousness. I laugh, and for a moment he glares at me, assuming that I’m laughing at his marital woes. I can and do laugh at him, by the way, but not now.

“I’d love to be homeless with you,” I say to him.

His scowl turns to a smile. That was his big line, a lifetime ago, as we sat in a darkened corner in the community college cafeteria, half-assing the comic book we planned to create. We never completed a single page, hardly even outlined a plot, but it was enough for us to brag about on Myspace.

Anyway, that night, ten minutes before the overnight janitors would boot us from our corner, I mentioned that our big, grand artistic endeavors just might never pan out, that we’d be starving artists living on the street.

Then he said it. Not the greatest pick-up line I ever heard, but it made me realize I liked him, that he liked me back.

“We kissed for the first time that night,” John says, looking on wistfully as he lights a cigarette.

“Fucked for the first time, too.”

“We never did finish the comic though.”

We laugh, not because the crank’s got us tweaking, although we are. We laugh like we laughed fifteen years ago. And just like that night fifteen years ago, John manages to keep his erection.

We fuck to unspoken memories of our youth, to our vague, unfounded hopefulness. My thighs snap shut around him, like a spring-loaded animal trap snaring the last vestige of our youth. And, for a moment, we’re not just fucking, though I wouldn’t dare say we’re making love. Then again, it feels like something more than two former scene kids using crank and sex to lubricate their passage into middle age.

He pushes into me, grunts; I dig my fingernails into his back. I run my fingers through his thinning hair. We look into each other’s eyes and I want to tell him that this is more than meth and sex, that he is the only other person who has a key to my house, that during my last doctor’s visit, I listed him as my emergency contact.

For that moment, I choose to forget that our relationship is, at its core, transactional. Call us what you will, but when I inevitably snort one line over my limit, when my heart shudders and the myocardial tissue turns brown and I gasp my last ragged breath, it’ll be John who finds me the next morning, who’ll dial 911 when he discovers my corpse. That’s gotta be worth something.

I shudder with orgasm just as John climaxes inside me. Then he groans in that worried way of his and, that quickly, we return to the reality of our sometimes-weekly trysts in my isolated North Philly hovel where, at our very best, John can stay hard long enough to regret dumping his load into me.

I sit up, turn my back to him, aware that a new roll of fat is forming around my ribcage when I bend over, but I hide that as quickly as I notice it when I pull a ratty Against Me concert tee over my bare frame.

John’s exit is unceremonious. I’m staring out my window smoking when I hear him struggling to button his jeans; it gets a little harder for him each week.

“Want me to leave you a bump?” he asks.

He knows that I want him to but I just shrug and stare out into the dark. His keys jangle as he heads to the door. He opens it, shuts it, and descends to the living room. Only then do I turn around. The fucker didn’t leave me a bump.

I manage to sleep at some point, though not for long. It’s been a while since I’ve been bothered by sleep deprivation. With a meth habit, fractured sleep just comes with the territory.

It’s almost four in the morning. I awake standing at the kitchen counter with a fresh whiskey and ginger ale in my hand. Drinking it is probably a bad idea but I see that the whiskey bottle is nearly empty. It had been full, last I remembered.

Still, sleepwalking my way through the bottle is preferable to sleepwalking out into the backyard, kids in tow, in a poor attempt at self-immolation.

“A toast to crazy bitches,” I say and guzzle what remains in my glass.

I sigh