—WE WERE GOOD, WE WERE GOLD, KINDA DREAM THAT CAN’T BE SOLD

 

 

EVERTHING’S CHANGING    /   Chelsea Stickle

 

 

Mom says everyone dies, even ghosts meet an end eventually. Change is the only constant. But we’ve been in this tub for hours and nothing’s changed.

 

Dad says mushrooms are connected, that they communicate through an underground network. Kill one and another will rise in its place.

 

Gretchen whispers the word undying like she’s found her answer.

 

It was like when a high school teacher tried embarrassing me into feeling better about myself. 

 

But then thinking wasn’t a problem anymore. My head lolled off and rolled away, smooth like a honeydew.

 

I felt exposed. I’d been holding myself together with paperclips and a prayer for the last eight months. I was becoming strange.

 

Through a girl’s open window, she told her problems to the moon and stars. No one loved her enough. Her friends replaced her. Her parents ignored her.

 

Sometimes you’re stuck to the place you died. The side of the road can be boring as fuck. But the more you detach from the life you once knew, the more you can move around. Overhearing conversations about pointless shit becomes fascinating.

 

It’s stagnant ghosts who become poltergeists.

 

Only the daughter can see the outline where her skin should end. The clunky chunks where smoothness should reign.

 

The nutcrackers had gone rabid.

 

Watching people talk about you like you’re not there is maddening.

 

I wondered briefly where we would sleep tonight. Whether I had anything to wear tomorrow.

 

Sometimes objects found a second life if you kept them around, and that unexpected life could be even more rewarding.

 

Since everyone refused responsibility for the catastrophic circumstances they lived in, the whole thing was chalked up to bad luck.

 

Now that she was paying attention, she saw all sorts of people from her past.

 

The drunk raccoons are at it again. They know Wednesday is trash day, so the party’s always Tuesday night.

 

Everyone scrambled to remove the bullshit of their lives from garages.

 

When my mother screams at me, I can’t hear anything else. 

 

I wish I could back an live the other life without you.

 

After he left her there, she assumed the worst was over, and she’d survived.

 

When men decide what to do with you, there’s not much you can do. They crush women like you for breakfast.

 

Everyone heard about the girl whose body grew sharp objects.  She cut off the finger of the boy who touched her without asking. It was legendary

 

There is a town at the edge of things where women hold in their screams. So they die young: high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, cancer.

 

Their mouths covered in white dust, their eyes on the road, always searching for a place that doesn’t exist.

 

Up close it was a brown boulder. The kind you’d push up a hill for eternity because you pissed off a god. As I touched its rough, pock-marked exterior, I remembered that the moon was only bright white because it reflected the sun. Without that, it was just a big rock. The only thing that made it special was what he’d taken from it.

 

“it’s time,” I said “Lasso the moon or let it go.”