Three New Years

★ by Mar Wolf, image by Marina Monaco ★

At eight o’clock, my cheeks had been flushed for three hours, like a perfectly ill baby, yet I’d only taken one sip of wine from my hand glass. By ten o’clock, I was crumpled and moaning. At one-fifteen, I checked the stove for the time as I walked blindly back to my bed from the bathroom floor. I told Bee, ‘Haven’t I ever said that I only throw up if I’m really sick?’ He hadn’t heard me say that before. I used to never burn fevers. I would get sick, but my temperature would remain. My junk earring dug into my neck, and I ripped it out. This morning, I saw Bee’s matching earring resting on the chicken coop. I didn’t remember him taking his out, but the sharp edges of the stars naturally made sleeping comfortably an impossibility. Part of me wished we had slept with them on for the turn of the decade.

My jaw was swollen, primarily on the left side, and the bruises were just finally beginning to heal. I was still on a liquid diet. Applesauce mixed with hydrocodone made my stomach flip, and anything less knocked the wind out of me again. I started to feel depressed again in the morning. I remembered I was an adult, and that usually the holiday was celebrated with kazoos and booze, as I held a sleeping nine-month-old baby to my chest, watching Coco with a bruise forming on my temple. She could barely teethe words, and I felt for her. Sharp little chiclets were beading through her gums, and she hadn’t the words to complain about it. I drove home at 12:30, and cried in the car. I had already moved into myself away from home, and the rush of accomplishment overwhelmed me again.

“I wanted to get in my car and go home, but I had to be kissed at midnight. How fucking stupid.” 

I played dead. I was so reluctant to speak, I played dead, and convinced him I was dying. It wasn’t very believable. I was cramping, from the dryness of the sex, from the pounding too wide for my hips, from not peeing. I wanted to get in my car and go home, but I had to be kissed at midnight. How fucking stupid. I never cared for New Years, for spending them with someone special, for the emotional dip. Finally, I rolled out of bed and into the Subaru. I called him from home to break up. I got a case of the chillies, and fell asleep stained to the carpet of my bedroom floor. I had jet lag from an hour long flight, I had a sore lung, I had fake synthetic eyelashes ripping my real ones off by the root. I was fighting off the last of the year like the final leg of a chest cold.