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

longer pretend that it’s the crank that’s got me trembling. When I pull the phone from my ear, somehow I must click the speaker on, because those voices continue, louder, echoing in my room as the light flickers above.

I try to cut off the volume but the song continues. My hands shake so violently that I can just barely hit the power button, holding it in until the phone’s screen goes black, finally cutting off the chorus.

Out in the dark, perhaps thirty yards away in the dappled midnight sea across from my window, I see the figure’s cigarette, cherry bright red upon inhalation.

I slam shut the window and pull the curtains down. My bare legs break out in goosebumps but by the time it occurs to me to find some pants, I’m already in the kitchen again, whiskey sloshing over the rim of the glass, onto the counter, interrupting the roaches nibbling on the rotting detritus from the Chinese takeout I ordered three days ago.

I sit on the couch, the baseball bat’s aluminum surface chilly between my thighs, and I light another cigarette and struggle to pull the whiskey to my lips. I consider calling John, because I assume it was Allison who left that voicemail, but I can’t bring myself to turn the phone back on.

From the corner of my eye, I catch something outside my window, through the stained white linen sheet that’s been serving as a curtain. I try not to look, although I can’t help but glimpse the cigarette’s burning tip as the figure takes another puff.

That wasn’t the first regretful load John deposited into me, nor was it the first time I voiced not a word of protest when I felt him spasm inside me several long seconds before his release. I’ve always blamed the crank for that. Meth has a way of cutting through your ego, leaving bare your id and all your deviant impulses, like plump pale worms squirming from upturned earth. When one is sufficiently tweaked, satiation becomes a priority. Little matters beyond sensation and gratification.

Long story short, when tweakers fuck, we rarely use condoms.

Roughly two years ago, after many an irresponsible load, I began experiencing strange aches and pains my lower abdomen, cramps that felt almost accusatory. Oh, I realized that I hadn’t been getting my period, ditto for my growing pot belly, most noticeable back when I was still working, wearing that awful ill-fitting K-Mart smock.

I convinced myself that my rounded belly was just a sign that I’d been eating too much despite a succession of long meth binges, during which I’d routinely go days without eating.

Denial and ignorance can look awfully similar.

Back then, I still painted, half-convinced that the menial job and borderline homelessness would be worth it when the drooling masses realized my artistic genius. I’d been painting that night, down in the basement as always. At almost the exact moment I cut a red brushstroke across the canvas, I suffered a bad cramp, reflexively violent, a wholesale rejection of whatever was inside me.

This cramp was different from the others. I was scared so I did the only thing I could do: I bent over the small table next to my easel and snorted another line.

My thighs were slick, I noticed, and my sweatpants were soaked with something red and thick. Dead things were slipping out of me, that much was clear, so I clenched my jaw and grimly pushed the rest out. Somehow, I was able to focus on the task at hand. Not a sign of character or bravery; it was all from the meth.

As far as the cleanup went, I cannot get into specifics. When I finished, I wrenched free several floorboards with Gramps’ old prybar and took a spade shovel to the soil beneath.

I did this naked from the waist down, my gore-splattered sweatpants and panties in a pile along with the flesh, wrapped in a trash bag. Calling it flesh might sound needlessly callous but, at the time, I couldn’t refer to it as anything else. Can’t manage to do it today, either.

The basement grew stiflingly hot as I worked. My hair, soaked in sweat, clung to my face and salt stung my eyes, yet I dug, one shovelful at a time, and when I paused to think—which wasn’t often—I told myself I was doing it for John. Had I told him what happened, it could have ruined his life, his marriage, and I simply couldn’t do that to him.

Of all the lies I’ve told in my life, that one was the most brazen.

And though the timeline doesn’t add up, as I finished placing the soiled clothes and flesh into the hole, as I threw the soil upon it, I felt at that moment a pair of charred, blackened lips less than an inch from my ear curving into a smile.

“Broken…cunt…”

I awake lying on the basement floor, staring up at the single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling (wire and socket bringing to mind umbilical and placenta). It appears I’ve been sleepwalking again, as I haven’t come down to this awful room since the night I buried the flesh.

Despite my pulse hammering in my skull and the putrid aroma of last night’s whiskey wafting up my gullet, I’m nevertheless compelled to look at my work.

It’s been two years since I’ve seen my paintings, a dozen completed canvases along with the water-warped remains of the ones I gave up on, haphazardly rolled up and dumped along the back wall.

There’s an issue, though, one that keeps me lingering in the familiar musk of watercolors and oils mixed with the damp, mossy basement stink. My crank habit has made my memory spotty, but I’ve always kept track of my work, and I never finished a twelfth painting.

A bead of sweat trickles down my temple and I’m struck with a sudden nausea as I look upon it. It’s a swirl of black, though the darkness varies by degrees, framing a strange shape in the middle.

Of course,