Cleveland by Masha Stenina (primary phonics books txt) 📕

The swoosh of denim of outdated wide legged jeans soothes the air. Synthetic drums build up in echoes and droplets in a dank basement on West 75th and Detroit Avenue. They vibrate out onto the street traveling through the grit in the bitumen and crushed glass particles that dance with ice dust from the lake. Beats homemade in dilapidation of the Midwest and with hope of resurrection of scratched vinyl and rewound crinkled tapes and iridescent cds and any form of clamor to drown out the white noise silence of this grave city. She steps up onto the curb.
Lifts her chin until her neck pinches in the coat zipper and examines the sky and it has no perceivable distance. Instead of stars orange streetlights conduct their disco over top, dusty and crooked. Her body shakes, maybe in dance, maybe in fear, maybe in sickness. She thinks they've all become one since the white men went to die in hospitals. Some didn't go anywhere. They just died where they sat, leaving neighbors and strangers to sweep at their remains. These bodies, dry in patches and filled with tumors, expired while the sun's unseen death was soaked up by their skins and the air supply began to stink like burns. The white men who survived were the judged, locked in prison cages and cement houses: crazy, sick, perverted, guilty. White women orphans abandoned by their protectors and oppressors all at once, left to sort through watches still ticking and underwear and legal papers.


Coming back, she held her head up into the air crisp as printer paper and heavy with the color grey. This place like a catapult- the longer you stay, the further out you go. But no one speaks of how people boomerang back ravenous for simplicity and wanting the lake to bite back. Zombies, leftovers, hobos, white trash and hoodlums. She thinks about how this beast is being gutted, how its skeleton is mummified beneath the ice. Even when the glaciers melt, its bones will stab through fast food cups and pink slim tampon applicators. The ribs will come off their cage, wrapping up sheets of plastic and indestructible Styrofoam. Screams and gasps ring above her. The birds don't migrate or make choices and she finds a restless comfort in that. Her irises rise and fall with the smooth swell of the two waves of currents keeping their spread bodies trembling like poorly made paper planes over the highway.
The living room, too spacious, is burdened with synthetically woven orange carpet and in the low light she catches lime green threads within it. Like a virus creeping back for its epidemic resurrection. She dreams often of disease now and this carpet reminds her of the cancer. She tastes it in her mouth, on the surface of her teeth. Tacky film of fear. The party is all circles and piles. Round gatherings of young ghosts touching ridged green bottlenecks to their warm mouths. Pensively watching froth crawl back down like spit into the pool of piss beer at the bottom. Nicking at the labels with dirty fingernails.

They don't leave and feast with ravenous eyes over each other, savoring the glimpse of a tailbone in low rise jeans, of a jutting hip, of inappropriately large wet lips. The wallpaper obscured by swollen shadows of dancers spinning awkwardly over the sitting circles, is cherries. With blossoms. Bubbled from smoke, it gives the gigantic room a funhouse effect. She scans the bodies with hunger she won't admit to. Lusty moist tentacles enveloping curves, testing peaks and lines of separation between torsos and legs. Parking herself in front of the fridge she waits for the parting of backs to see her way in. Bony hips in corduroys and a flat narrow back block the yellow light and the wafting smell of defrosting. A light head lifts and turns swiftly.
He is a survivor and this oddly embarrasses her enough to reach back into the fridge grasping at the yellow stale cold nothing. She hasn't seen a white man in enough time to make her instinctively reach for her camera. She instantly stops herself and tugs her shirt's edge down over her hip. Thin, translucent skin is stretched over a lean frame and for some reason she thinks he is knobby kneed. Wire frame glasses, something out of the early 2000s, balanced on the bridge of his nose- rigid in its arch and square at the tip. Hair on his head is a whirlwind of strawberry tufts, some magnetized to his round forehead with sweat and stuck there pathetically.
Embarrassment washes over her and she fingers the steel casing of her point and shoot lodged in the sag of the front of her sweatshirt. Her nail scrapes the folds of the shutter and she imagines prying open its eye to save the translucent glow of the man's flesh in its memory. Parchment. Something vulnerable and sick. The cancer had likely spared him somehow, but she couldn't help but see how small he was and how faded his body seemed in this enormously useless house.
He smiles sideways averting his eyes. Extends his long arm to her with a cup of tea. I can't believe this is true she says looking to an empty spot on the kitchen counter. I don't believe in truths he says and bobs a bag of tea neurotically in the cup. It's a zinger he says and it tastes to her sickeningly of sour berries but it's nice and acidic. Still, she says, I do. He guides her hand out of her front pocket where she is squeezing her camera. Turns it on and scrolls. These corrected? For color?
Nah she answers.
Right he laughs that wouldn't be the truth would it? These are just so grey and empty, but in a good way he is quick to add. I guess don't see much of that even though it's everything.
But that's why she says. Everything IS like that now and there IS nothing else, so these are just proof of what you don't notice. The truth. See?
There IS something else, though, he says. There really is.
Yeah? She snickers. You found it?
I have, maybe, he answers a little hurt.

Well, cheers he sneers and she sees how sharp his teeth are. He lifts his heavy ceramic earthenware mug and clanks it against her immobile one. Cheers.

Outside of the window below, an ugly green church had gothic windows. He was like a baby bird pushed and dropped by the wind. He had hung his head and the tips of his curls were touching the air around the white curtains and seemed to end in little flames. Shame. She felt it on him, sensed its weight on his angled shoulders. Like one of those eunuchs in marble at the museum by an Italian sculptor- a name no one remembers. A castrated boy of sexless beauty. A freak, made not by nature but by people. A white man somehow alive. Frail, but alive. So she obliged him. Sauntered to the grimy window, craned her neck. Waited. Not long. He pressed into her with need, not lust or desire like she'd had before, but a need to be a part of someone else, to force his sad skin into her rich one, lifting her thighs up above the floor. His splayed feet planting into the boards of the ground like ginger roots, toes grabbing for traction. Her own hands tangled objects below her, nails scraping the cornice, rubbery fingertips doing push ups to steady her large body in the spotted light. She stood silently, losing her footing, being a raft for the survivor.

Hey.
Hey she says right into his head above his neck. Her nose is barely touching his skull at the bottom and the strawberry wisps surround her face on all sides. His pink skin gives off a hint of pepper and something medicinal that makes her think of root beer.
Hey. His face crawls to a smile half drowned in the pillow. Hey. It comes out raspy.
I want to go there she says into his scalp. You have to take me there with the camera. With you. His mouth drowns into yellowed pillowcase.
I can't he says.
What's it like there?
It's not going to work for your truth quest he mumbles and buries his face in the pillow again. She pulls it from under him cruelly. Pulls her shirt on.
Sorry he mumbles but they're really serious there. They're in denial you know and they fuck and dance and sleep in all kinds of tents. They see freedom where there is nothing. You see the nothing, right?
Right. But I can't photograph nothing. She slides into her shoes.
You have your ways you know he says and nods just enough that she lets a hint of anticipation push up.

We have to keep on he says tapping the small of her back with anxiety. When he offers her his hand it is wet with a pallor of skin and it doesn't melt into her palm, just sits in it. They are on a highway that winds in a threatening spiral along the lakeshore somewhere below them. Two West, the drive along the lakeshore. Her eyes get used to the heather boundaries of the sky and continuously trace the charcoal skin of the road stretched thinly over the white broken divider line, like a scoliotic spine shattered in a horrible collision.
He leads her down off the highway at an exit for West Forty Ninth Street, where the spine takes another curve to the right. She senses the void of the paved hill where the soapbox derby was held all those years ago and thinks the asphalt must now be scarred with cornflowers fighting their way through the broken lines. The grey changes to a peach, only enough to be a small spray of light at the edges. Sunrise and she feels terrified inexplicably.
They lower themselves to the beach. Shit shit shit he spits. I was hoping we'd make it before this and guess I'd forgotten what time the sun comes up. Soon the lake wraps around to the right with its perpetual coldness and the aroma of rotting fish. Its pulse takes her by surprise: it is still very much alive breathing out stench against their cheeks.
To the right and ahead are four destroyed walkways leading broken lines into the foaming water. Jagged cement limbs floating threateningly over the surface. Threaded metal bent and beaten reaching like sprouts to the morning sky. At the fourth pier, in the distance, she sees silhouettes balanced like birds on the cement pillars. The sleeves of the figures up on top allow the sun to obliterate them and they glow. She thinks of light bulbs turned on in daylight. They are watching the sun she whispers to him. His own hair glows in front of her filtering a sheath of fresh light through the strawberry curls and gathering on her forehead.
White goose-pimpled legs woven over dark warm thighs, huddled into a tapestry of chill of the morning. Something inside of her lifts and beats against her throat. He is staring past the huddled bodies into the sun itself and in his pink-highlighted pallor he looks like a displaced ghost. She loves these people so suddenly and so violently that she is frozen by their iridescence. Women lay dreamily sprawled in the laps of their lovers dunking their foreheads and eyes in the first sun.
The woman in front