Aborted

Karli had been aborting his child for months. It was the result of T shaped surgical steel wrapped in copper like a piece of jewelry found at yuppie art fairs. The IUD prevented carrying a fetus, but not getting pregnant. An abortion once a month.

Andy spent the weekend playing a video game. It had a fleet of cartoon army men– like the dime store, plastic kind she used to have as a kid. The hard, grenade colored ones her father used to step on barefoot and swear, “Fuck! Fucking kids!” She didn’t understand why Andy didn’t buy the real ones. Instead, he lived in an animated backyard with neon green leaves and phony ant hills and tree trunks straight out of a “Winnie the Pooh” book. Manufactured men with machine guns that shot pixilated bullets. They groaned distorted groans like a dying alley cat whose head was shoved into a tin can by some neighborhood toughs. She was aborting his child and all he could do was play video games.

Or watch sports. Smoke pot. Anything but talk to her. “I get sick of talking. It’s not even in my top 100 things to do. We talk enough, really,” he said when she tried to communicate with him. He kept frantically pushing his fingers onto the candy colored buttons of the controller instead.

Years ago, Karli took a Greyhound bus precisely to avoid silence. She left Indiana with the brown, paper bag landscape and water towers she never could climb. She shoved some clothes into a duffle bag of her father’s along with stationary, good pens with smooth, rolling ink, and an address book full of everyone she’d ever met in her young life. Names of people she may or may not write, whose addresses no longer existed, whose phone numbers might be long disconnected. She collected their names written in colored ink like butterflies pinned to felt by their thorax or yellowed stamps carefully pasted in soft covered books.

The people might not even remember her blowing through town, changing high school after high school, changing her hair from brown to jet black to purple. She couldn’t believe how often she moved, how many school desks she sat in when there was only a handful of schools in the Elkhart. But she still fantasized sending one or two of them letters about her travels, how the bus smelled of the Scotchgard they used to huff in junior high, how a boy on leave from the army tried to feel her up in the back seat near Chicago. She’d leave the return address blank just to add a little mystery to their boring, small town life full of crushed beer cans and joints and dead end jobs.

She came to Minneapolis full of the naivety of a small town girl, with a wide eyed glow that reflected off the mirrored sky scrapers towering above the dusty, bum infested bus station. Carcasses of smoked cigarettes lined the sidewalks, flanked tiny, decorative fruit trees intended to spruce up the declining downtown. Instead of long stretches of toll roads and county roads, she saw snaking freeway ramps crowded with commuters.

But her cosmopolitan dream of smoke filled coffee shops with crappy, dumpster couches and forgotten table lamps came crashing down quickly. The icy stillness of Minnesotans stagnated her mind, her hopes of late night literary discussions gave way to staring out coffee shop windows at people bustling around in their boxed in worlds. She discovered the concept of personal space, distance, stand back at least five feet when talking. Smile, nod, but don’t ever show your teeth. She stared out windows just like she used to back home, only with a different landscape.

She left to avoid men in flannels and work boots, swollen bellies and snot nosed kids with nothing to do but huff glue behind the wood shed, boys and girls exploring each others bodies long before puberty waved its wand void of magic. But now she sat in her apartment watching Andy violently tap away on the plastic keypad, tethered to the TV by a plastic umbilical cord, his cigarette butts stamped out in a soap dish instead of an ashtray.

“I am slowly aborting your child again,” she said, this time to herself.