So young you learn to crave the cold. All those strangers’ houses, crowded with strangers’ bodies. The air thick with burning: cigarettes, incense, ditchweed joints, the smoke searing your lungs, which you picture becoming medium-rare like the photos in your mother’s forsaken cookbook. Someone is leaning on a wall asking how old you are anyway and you are wondering what your lungs would taste like. You are wondering if your father’s body will sound like a roast in the oven, popping and sizzling, when he is finally sent to the crematorium. The room spins around the axis of liquid sloshing in a chipped glass, the surface a broken mirror. Your guts grow too hot beneath your skin, blood all but boiling through the folds of your brain. There are hands reaching for you, boys’ hands, usually, but you don’t want them, can’t stand the unbearable warmth of their touch, so you slip from their grasp with a breathy laugh, and they’re too far gone to know the difference between you and the next girl they reach for, and she will not ghost away like you do. The breath of winter from an open window is a saving grace. You seek refuge against the cool tile of unfamiliar bathtubs. Behind the nicotine-stained curtain of your own home, dawn will find you under the damp cold touch of a makeup wipe, cold because there’s no money for heat in your mother’s apartment, and the cold wetness will turn your hard-earned pink smoky eye and winged liner into something resembling conjunctivitis and a suckerpunch, respectively, red lipstick smeared to blood across your mouth. It will be barely sunrise when your mother finds you on the couch, half dressed, face splotched in shades of a gory valentine. You will wait for her to ask you what’s wrong. But she will only flash you a thin impatient smile before she disappears out the door with her work bag over her shoulder. And then you will have all the cold you want and more in her absence, in the empty freezing apartment with frost curling against the one and only window which faces the brick-bound alleyway, and by evening the cold will have reached marrow-deep into your bones and you will be eager, no, heartsick for the oppressive heat of too many bodies and searing smoke and reaching hands.
Eleri Denham writes fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. Their work has appeared in Fruitslice, The Ilanot Review, Ghost Parachute, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Chicago, Eleri now lives in Oregon with their partner. Find out more at eleridenham.com or eleridenham.bsky.social.