I live in a town that dreams all winter.
The women string clothes on frozen lines at night. The men beat things dead in the snow. What things? They don't know. Their eyes are closed. Their lips twitch. Their trucks are left idling in the intersections. Snowflakes cling to our lashes. The single streetlight blinks red all night. The trees watch a truck ease over a sidewalk. Stopped by a phone pole, its hood slowly crumples.
There is nothing, you might say, unusual in this. But here is how I know they're dreaming: they call me, and the names they use are never mine.
Winter is a dangerous time. Snow banks, looking like graveyards, are full of pick-ups tipped skyward. In spring, they'll find their trucks again, caked in dust, baked in ditches. In spring they'll find their friends in pools or ponds floating face down. Find their families trapped in elevators, attics, intersections. Find their children in rundown diners, dumpsters, parking lots, their hands deep in pockets, eyes loose as wheels on shopping carts.
They'll wonder: why are these mine instead of the others?
I work at a hotel. And so, I know how dislocation makes one's life look like some other's whim, or accident. I clean beds and bathrooms. I wake them in spring and their hands are covered in honey, or grease, or bruised and bloody. All winter they are thieves in kitchens. They are murderous children, escaped convicts. They are dead wives and dead husbands. Their fingers sliding up my aprons. Their mouths closing on my throat. I tuck their bed sheets in. They tear a lamp from a nightstand, aim their shovel for the crack my skull could sound, fire rounds at a softness that could smother them. They gape, and are capable of dropping dead.
I am not above murdering. I kick. I bite. Until they back out the way they came, hands raised to catch them, tumbling down a stairwell. They roll, cracked and fractured, back to the welcome mat.
I am not above affection. Once I loved. For a year, every evening the mail lady came. She touched my hands, my face. She said, "Gertrude, you are looking worse today."
It was late December. I was shoveling the walkway. The name, Gertrude, did not belong to me.
She pealed the cap off my head, felt my heart in my forehead, behind my eyelid, my skin flinching from my pulse like a wall folding around a wrecking ball.
My hair, she said, was matted. She wanted to brush it. She said I loved to have the knots combed out.
Some days I felt like all this had been mine, like I was a ghost, haunting myself back to life. Those days, in winter, I'd shut my eyes and tell myself there is no such thing as deserving this.
© 2013 Jessica Alexander
