“Where did I find you?” Simon asks me in the midday weekend light, as we lie still inhaling and exhaling at mine. “You look like a painting.”
Panting, I gulp from a mason jar of water.
“A finger painting,” he whispers, and I swat at him, and he yelps like a boy, and I splash water at him, and we’re at it again.
There’s a saying in journalism: to “give oxygen” to news. So, to keep a story alive. As though the news were an aerobic animal like ourselves.
I first met Simon some years ago, an August day at Coney Island. My friend Anne, her boyfriend, Simon-her-boyfriend’s-friend and I packed snacks and beer, then filled a pew of a subway car. An AC-ed hour later: the sand and famous hot dogs.
We patchworked towels and read paperbacks between trips to the crowded water, staggered expeditions to rides and restrooms. The foamy, oily surf.
After the day by the splintering boardwalk, we ducked back underground and zoomed to another friend’s birthday in Queens, all hazy from sun and day- drinking.
Neither Simon nor I knew the host, and we found ourselves eventually sitting on the building’s steps in the relative cool, half-hiding our cans behind our feet.
I was talking about the news. At a pause, Simon made a substantive comment, and I replied.
“I’m just trying to keep up,” he said then, which I found to be a winning remark, because I’m susceptible to flattery.
No doubt he saw this in my face as an opening, because he kissed me, then kissed me again. Escaping party-goers filed their ways around our tableau.
“Come home with me,” he whispered when we broke for air.
I did, and then I never seemed to stop.
At the stadium where the politicians speak, I report out a piece on a proposed change to a law. A series of fresh-skinned girls talk to me about the sanctity of life. The excitement at the convention is the excitement of most celebrity encounters. I write quickly and file from a Waffle House nearby.
Driving back to the motel the way I came, the moon stays inside my window, a silver-white dime picking up brightness as dusk settles.
When it happens, it happens quickly—first the spotting, then confusion, then a test and an appointment. Simon comes with me to the clinic, the ultrasound, then again on the day when they hand me the canisters of pills, the pamphlets. Each article packaged in their own paper and plastic bags, clearly labeled and marked.
In the first weeks after the abortion, summer, I bleed so much I can scarcely get through the day.
I go to a butcher straight from work, pale, and get the cheapest cut of steak, and sear and slice it as soon as I walk through the apartment door, before taking off my coat or shoes.
I develop romantic attachments to the men behind the glass and silver counters—their sure movements, greased hair, and smeared aprons.
“You look tired, sweetheart,” one tells me, concern behind tortoise-frame lenses, the third time in a row I appear. “Get some rest.”
On the way home one rush hour, the subway I’m on is delayed. Fifteen minutes, fine. Twenty-five. I’d thought I could wear a skirt—it’s been so hot, my thighs slick with sweat. I’d thought the bleeding had eased.
Sitting in the delay, heart beating faster, pumping faster, I feel the wet, first warm then cool as I shift. I know, when I stand, there’ll be a sticky mess beneath me—bright red or drying darkly.
As casually as possible, I take a magazine from my bag. When at last we move and reach the stop, and the doors open with their two-tone chime, I stand as fast as pins-and-needles legs can manage, place the magazine down, and run.
Up the stairs, two at a time, I leave a trail of hot, dark marks. Flushed, I hold the ruined skirt bunched behind me in a fist close to one side. Meeting no one’s eyes, I stand in the shade of the subway entrance, deciding whether to run to the restroom of a nearby cafe or home.
“Miss?”
A big-armed man stands in front of me—tank top, baseball cap, silver chain around his neck. In one hand, the hand of his young daughter, who looks curious. In the other a bunch of white paper napkins from a smile-faced THANK YOU FOR YOUR BUSINESS bag his daughter holds. I don’t immediately understand, then see a brilliant streak of blood has run down my bare leg.
“Thank you,” I say, accepting them, wiping up ankle, calf, knee, and thigh, my whole body awash with a single blush.
“I’ll block for you,” he says, turning his body away, standing between me and the passersby, his daughter as well, unfazed in her daisy-printed sundress.
I turn from view and crouch, and put the paper up beneath my skirt, a buffer to get to my next location.
“Thank you so, so much,” I say, though I can’t shake his hand, both my hands dirtied now with drying blood, from my legs and from the skirt.
He nods, and says, “Anytime,” and goes down into the subway. I walk out into the heat and light, the paper lodged semi-comfortably in my crotch, my gait, I think, a fair impersonation of someone stiff from exercise, or maybe sex.
The next day, I chew the ice at the bottom of a plastic diner cup and feel clear- headed. Googling it, I learn it’s a symptom of anemia, often caused by blood loss. The ice makes oxygen-rich blood rush to one’s head, which helps one focus, because anemia reduces the body’s ability to oxygenate blood.
I crave ice for weeks, keep ice in paper cups close at hand at my desk, like a talisman.
Years later, I’ll meet Simon at the diner we always used to go to.
We’ll talk about the almost-kid, being kind to one another. He apologetic, I forgiving. I apologetic, he effusive.
The way we’ll talk about our younger selves, it’s as though we’ll be their parents.
C. D. Lewis is a writer and reporter who previously worked at BuzzFeed News. Her fiction has appeared in the Yale Review, Epiphany, GASHER Journal, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she is currently a Senior Fiction Fellow.