Circling the Drain

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Authors: Amanda Davis
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sighed at her.
    What is it, lady?
    Ellen had trouble speaking. The man sat on a wooden stool and held a needle casually with one hand, shoving his glasses back on the bridge of his nose with the other. He looked tired.
    What do you want to do?
    It took almost an hour and it hurt a lot, but the tiny Billy , surrounded by small white flowers at the base of her spine, was out of her line of vision—its dull ache the only reminder that Ellen had marked herself, and the moment, forever.
    12.
    She stayed awake on the bus to New York, afraid of the too-friendly or unfriendly passengers, of what could happen while she was sleeping. She had deep bloody welts in the soft flesh at the base of her thumb and on both wrists from digging with her nails to stay alert. Somewhere in easternPennsylvania she couldn’t hold out any longer. Sleep came like a heavy red curtain closing quietly for intermission.
    When she woke, panting, either five minutes or five hours later, she found herself standing in the middle of the aisle when lucidity set in. All those eyes: the fat brown man, the woman in the plaid overcoat, the couple from Iowa like a matched set of bleached gnomes, the young woman with a weepy infant, the tall blond man folded into the small seat behind her. All staring at her as she spun slowly in the aisle and then sank back into her seat. Everything was intact, nothing missing. Billy would be waiting at the other end, at the station. Everything was fine, quiet and fine.
    13.
    While a nurse bathes her, Ellen finds she is encased in white plaster, notices the cast that begins at her wrist and continues up and under the covers. The nurse speaks and Ellen watches as though she is very far away in a tunnel, and then she is in a tunnel. Slowly moving through a metal tube. Light blinking all around her, the table that holds her vibrating slightly.
    Then Ellen is back in her bed, which is lined in pink petals, and a lady holds pictures in front of her. There is a lizard and then a finger. A Band-Aid, a flashlight, a fish. By the time the lady holds up a picture of a farm with a silo like the one she visited as a child, her uncle’s place, Ellen is bawling silently, tears dampening her hair and pillow, eyes swelling into sleep.
    But sleep and awake have become more distinct. There are dreams when Ellen sleeps now, instead of blank space,and while it is often difficult to determine where dreams melt into reality, they feel familiar, which is comforting.
    Sometimes Ellen dreams of Billy’s small room near the river, though Billy himself is never there. Sometimes she dreams of the bridge and sometimes of flying high above the city of Manhattan with her arms outstretched and her hospital gown billowing behind her. In these dreams she is frequently followed by the angel and sometimes that feels wonderful and sometimes it feels like being chased.
    14.
    New York City, life with Billy—Ellen had never known anything like it. It was as though her black-and-white life had been painted, a knob tweaked and color released. Billy colored everything. When she leaned into the chipped mirror on her dresser she saw herself through Billy’s gaze. She saw her straight brown hair, her dimples and her wide eyes as she imagined Billy saw them and sometimes she closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the mirror and she saw Billy. She felt him with her when she went to the bank, when she walked down the humming streets, when she sat on a bench in the park. She felt him as a constant presence that flushed her cheeks and cradled her heart.
    Then the boy sliced her life open and Ellen saw that it was empty.
    After—in the days and weeks before she wandered down to Delancey and out over the water—Ellen felt Billy’s betrayal as a huge gaping hole, a hollow windy cavern in the center of everything she was. And in that time, when sheclosed her eyes and pressed her face against the cool glass, she couldn’t

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