The letter Sidney got yesterday from his mother lay unopened on his dresser. “My dear,” it read, “every time we talk you treat me like a bathtub—it's always a pithy little liplock between rubber and the drain, but with you removed by a plunger's length. You can push and push at me all you want and never get your fingers in that muck I'm choking on.

“But I forget that it's your skin and your hair and your miserable acerbic soap in my throat, and you say to me, 'Just swallow it, mother.' I’ll present it to you in my anxious mouth, I’ll yell for you to take a look at this mess, my baby I remember everything you've ever been, but you’re so distant, so far above, with your eyes to your own shaven face and your hands on nothing but smooth wooden handle.

“I got the Visa bill today, Sidney. I can’t even open it. I tried to and my fingers wouldn’t do it.

“Love, your mom.”

His mother lived just up the street. She would drop the letters in Sidney's mailbox while he was away at work, unstamped, sometimes unaddressed, sometimes taped up in a manila folder. Today's had a curious bear on the front, cross-eyed, bubbly, lightly chewing its lips. In front of his dresser, Sidney bit on his own lips absentmindedly as he opened a drawer. Sifting through stacks of unfolded shirts he pulled out one, luminous tender pink, and rolled it down his soft sides. It hugged a bit too preciously at him, it creased where his skin did. Tugging at the collar, he discarded it upon his unmade bed. He left the letter there atop the previous two, all unopened, disarmed, remembering then that his mother was coming for dinner that night.

In the kitchen he pulled down the Bisquick. His fingers traced down the recipe at the back of the box. In a metal bowl set regally upon the counter he whipped an earnest batter until the lumps of powder broke. The butter in the skillet smoked, blackened, as Sidney dropped a solid dollop in with a studied crack of his wrist. A spray of batter hot as embers shot from the pan onto the white skin of his chest; the needle of heat swelled, then sank. After flipping his thick pancake and pouring in another to cook, Sidney wiped in quick brushes at his naked chest with a paper towel. A tiny welt rose on his skin where the batter had hit. Looking down, cupping his buttery chest in one hand, he checked to see: the burn was safely below the area that his top would cover.

The pancake was too greasy; he could only eat half of it before feeling a bit pasty. He took a swig of juice and scraped the skillet clean over the trash. In the livingroom he pulled two plastic bins, long as ironing boards, out from under the couch. He took a moment centering them, getting them parallel, hanging over them as if they were glass coffins. He broke his reverie long enough to drop the blinds. Under the yellow light of the bulb Sidney gathered the buttons of his jeans under his fingers, popped them open, then let the jeans wilt to the floor. Sliding to the computer, he hit the on button. The cooling fan whirred against the wall as the welcome screen unfurled on the buzzing monitor.

Folding back the jointed lid of the first bin, he pulled out a plastic shopping bag, holed and crumpled, full of makeup. He knew how to draw his lips out in red, trap them in a cartoon gull with the lip liner, he knew the mix of base and blush that reads even across the cam as heat. But his eyes—he was heavy with the liner still, he looked like a hieroglyph or a linebacker. The cam shot him only from the lips down to the chest. Still he practiced, sitting at his vanity, fingers duplicitous, promising a straight line but returning only jagged teeth of black under his lids, as if he'd already cried.

In its brown paper bag, crammed into the far corner of the plastic bin, the red wig had kinked. Sidney took his fingers to it, combing through, biting his lips. Over the spiky brown stubble of his head, the red hair splayed out in a cowlick. At the mirror he hung his hands from the hair, twisting it forward, just to have it spring back out like a grasshopper's leg. If it were real hair he could spray it down. His head looked shrunken, nestled under too much hair, perched upon his chest as white as coconut. He pinched the few wisps of hair in the middle of his chest between fingernails and jerked them out.

Four squares of masking tape on the carpet marked the chair's proper position. Sidney perched on the edge of the wooden seat and bit at his red lips. Wearing only his wig he signed into the chat site, clicking out SILVIA, then MERINGUE in the password field. He jumped out of the cam's view as if the lens shot bullets, then checked the positioning on the screen. At the foot of the plastic casket he pulled out his vinyl bustier, deep green, the same color as Silvia's eyes. He pressed his soft chest up with his right arm as he pulled the bustier over his hips, then sat it snug upon them. He let his chest fall into the cups, which held him like ice cream dishes.

The piece bound in back with Velcro instead of laces—Sidney knew he would only ever show it from the front. He emptied his breath, imagined a black hole at the center of his chest, then pressed the soft black fuzz into the plastic hooks. His cleavage was still loose, the flat sternum between his breasts still visible, so Sidney peeled the flap free with a huff. He freed more of his flesh from the cups with digging fingers (which left red imprints on his delicate skin) until he'd made a perfect seam. He rebound the corset tighter, then slightly tighter, until he couldn't even force a finger down.

A message had already appeared for him by the time he sat down stiffly, still naked below the waist.

“hey silvia…

“silvia u there?”

SeaBill flashed on the screen in jerky frames, arching his eyebrows, rubbing his chin. His lips flashed from pucker to frown without interloping movement on the cam; Sidney watched him as a bottle of beer, then the back of his hand, suddenly appeared at his lips.

“hi SeaBill whats new?”

“was hoping id find you here today”

“mmm? im usually at work right now” Every breath forced Sidney's chest to spill further out of the vinyl grip of the bustier; he tested the strength of the Velcro, breathing in sharply, inflating himself like a life vest; each made his breasts swell like a yeasted dough, but the flaps held. The webcam above silently grabbed shot after shot of him—he kept the monitor open at the corner of his screen, watched his chest heave under exaggerated breathing.

“yeah i know are u sick?”

“no just a day off… it was nice last time,” Sidney typed, scanning the board for each key and striking it sharply.

“yeah sure was”

“you playin with your pussy Silvia?”

“yeah”

“wanna show me?”

“you know im a lady.” Sidney pouted his painted lips and rubbed his chest.

“your one hot lady, your sure one pretty lady”

Sidney tensed his thighs, then forced his fingers roughly down the vinyl, along his belly. He eyed his image nervously, checking that the cam only captured him from mouth to waist.

The mail slot clattered just then and a manila envelope dropped through. Sidney started, knocked the cam away, and jumped to the kitchen.

Having seen his lady vanish with the change of frame, SeaBill zipped his fly back up. “silvia,” he typed, “you arent leavin me are you?”

The new letter from Sidney's mother had lay unopened on the floor for six hours after she dropped it through the slot that morning. She had drawn a picture of Sidney on the front, but with a head of curly red hair and decorated in stars. “Dear Sidney,” it read, “I know you always think that I've been drinking when I begin a letter to you. But you must trust that I wish to write even when sober.

“I know I’ve romanticized your life, my dear, in order to feed regret. If I think back honestly on my own, I do remember feeling regret myself in youth. But now (at an age that I’m told must be marked by regret) I find I'm inventing a happier, altogether stupider childhood than the one I actually lived through. Oh, I was never happier. Oh, I didn't know the knowledge that paralyzes. Every decision was made for me and sugar never rotted your teeth. Darling, it's not just the masochism of the middle-aged that makes us wish our lives were in decline—you must understand how disheartening it would be to acknowledge… It's never really been that different for me, and I fear for you it will always be the same. The doubts that suck at your heels and blanch your pleasure, they'll be there when you're old too.

“I read once, or maybe saw this on TV, someone had a tumor somewhere that had grown painfully large and heavy that they wanted to get removed. But right at the crease that the tumor made with the healthy skin there was a kernel forming, hard and sharp, and in fact it was a tooth—in some place teeth should never be, maybe on the knee, who knows, maybe the groin, I don't remember even though they said it on the show. Others had grown hair, that’s not so strange… but this man had his tumor (the one with the tooth) removed. But I wondered to myself, how could he do it? How could he cut it off? If he had let it grow, it might have become another mouth for him, one that maybe sang softer, or one in which he could drink wine without the hangover. Or it might have spread, and killed him. But before it went, I imagine, he gave it one guilty kiss, lips to crease, and he said goodbye, and the tumor said goodbye with its one tiny tooth.

“So what I'm saying dear that the very act of growing older is a murder. And every life you take you'll regret, there are permanent corners of your brain devoted to the shades of you who must always pound the floor and ask why they were struck down—you're haunted, already, and more will come.

“I'll be over tonight for dinner.

“Love, your mother.”

As Sidney buttoned his shirt that evening he absentmindedly kicked the folder in which the letter lay. He bent stiffly at the waist to pick it up. His torso, secured under ace bandages, held straight as wood as he swung back up. With his head swimming he tottered to his bedroom and dropped the fourth letter atop the other three. His body was a solid cylinder under the bandages—his sides were hard as resin, his chest flat and blank. He breathed shallowly, and his body registered no heave, no swell. He dialed his boss at the office supply shop and switched to speakerphone; he knew she would already be home for the day.

“Hi Nell, this is Sidney.” He forced some husk into his voice; his name came as a grumble. “I'm sorry for the late notice; I hope it didn't throw a mess into your day…”

The door knob thudded against the wall as he spoke. “Sidney,” his mother called, “who are you talking to?”

“I'm on the phone, Mom.” Sidney wiped at his lips absentmindedly, then checked his fingers for makeup residue. He put his hands to his chest, feeling the course weave of the ace bandages under his shirt. His fingers pressed in turn at the bandages, stretched as taut as a canvas on a frame. “We're having sausage and parsnips and stuffing.”

Sidney found his mother flipping the parsnips, already frying, in the pan. “They look like they're almost finished, Sidney. They're extremely golden.” Her hair wove over her left shoulder, tucking under the collar of her blouse. Flipping the tiny slices with a fork, she smiled hesitantly. “If they're flipped now, they won't burn.”

“Well there's burnt and there's done,” Sidney said.

His mother positioned herself between him and the vegetables. “That's true. But I don't want to eat coal.” She chuckled and looked behind her to her son, who forced a laugh through his constricted chest.

She lifted the skillet to the back burner without a mitt or a rag, nearly throwing the hot handle down. The parsnips jumped in their butter.

“Mom it's good to see you.”

His mother smiled broadly, then wrapped her arms about him. “So how is the moon these days, my little alien? I imagine it gets cold.” Her fingers pinched a bit at his back, digging into the fabric of his shirt. “Are you wearing your girdle again honey?”

“Yeah, it's a bandage.”

She stared at him, pulling back. “A bandage?”

“Not for a cut.” Sidney stiffened further in his tight wrap.

His mother suddenly tucked herself into his chest and took the starched cotton of Sidney's shirt into her whispering mouth. Sidney threw his arms around her wiry shoulders; his fingers jumped dangerously from the strap of her own brassiere and settled blandly on the polyester fabric above an open stretch of her back. The muscles around her eyes clenched shut and released, trying to gather shirt under them, as if her face were a restless sleeper. Under his hands her torso shook, still for long moments, then released again. He listened for sobs, felt for the wet of tears, but could detect neither.

“I know you'll ignore this, honey, so listen or don't, but the body carries tissues in its own specific harmony, and if it asks you to have some fat in certain places it may in fact know better than you. Some plants grow in moss and some plants grow in sand, and some now grow with a bit of Styrofoam mixed in, and plants have the common sense not to wish for something other than their own ideal potting mix.” Pushing off of him gently with a puff of air, she walked to Sidney's cupboards and began thumbing through the boxes she could reach.

“Mom, what are you looking for?”

“The stuffing.” She eyed a box of crackers dubiously. “I hope you'll be able to tolerate your mother in the house. Honey, I must ask you about these—they’re all fat…”

“Yeah, so's the sausage.” Sidney lifted the sausage daintily from the fridge, letting its dripping plastic package sop onto the counter. He pulled a clean pan from the cabinet. He pulled out the four fat fingers of sausage, setting them dry into the pan.

“I guess I’m just confused, darling—if you go through all the trouble of squeezing yourself thin I wonder why you eat all the fat too. You know I love you no matter what you look like, but I must admit I’m confused.”

Sidney coiled himself over the stove as the marbled skin of the sausage sweated oil. He felt as if his entire body were seized in a fist. With a quiet, slow breath, he released his shoulders and unclenched his teeth. “So did the bank call again, mom? Is that why you wanted to come over for dinner? You know they can call the cops on you.”

“Yes I know hon.” Sidney's mother shifted her feet. “I'm trying to be better about all of this money stuff.”

“You know what I think, I think you should sell the house. I don’t think you need all that space any more. That place, that…”

“Assisted living is what it's called.”

“Yeah, it’s only thirty miles away, and it’s a very nice place…”

“Sidney I’ve never been even one mile away from you.”

“I’ve got a car, Mom.”

She took her hair in both hands, twisting it until it tugged at her scalp. “Honey, I have to pee, I'll be back in a second.” She turned quietly, shoulders down, hair tight, and walked down the hall.

Sidney remained standing at the stove. His fingers coiled hard on the metal handle; he rubbed the pads of his thumbs over his fingernails. He clenched the coarse edges of the bandage with his armpit.

After his mother was out of earshot, Sidney huffed and put his hands to his flat sides. “It's not about being fat,” Sidney said quietly, to no one. Men, he knew, were tightly bound creatures, firm, constricted. It was hard to explain to a woman like his mother.

In the bathroom Sid's mom read over the label of each bottle in the medicine cabinet again. None of them had changed since her last night over for dinner. One was antidepressants, at the same dosage, another was sleeping pills, then laxative, then Tums. She peeked beneath the sink, even behind the toilet, but spotted nothing more alarming than an orange spot on the linoleum needing a desperate scrub.

Passing her son's bedroom, she saw the stack of letters she had dropped through his door, atop them the folder from today with the roughly drawn cartoon of starry redhead Sidney. She looked each one over, feeling along the tape that had never been peeled open, gently wedging a fingernail underneath. Biting her lip, clenching her eyes shut, she pulled out the four letters her son had never read and snuck them under her sweater, holding them loosely at her belly. She wadded the manila envelopes into Sidney’s trash, then walked carefully to the kitchen with her hand on her stomach.

Sidney was setting the table in the dining room.

“Sidney, did you say something to me when I was in the bathroom?”

“No mom, just mumbling.” He had placed a loose stack of bills at the edge of the table just past the platter of brown sausage.

Opening the cabinet, she dropped the letters into the trash. She dug her hand in after them, fishing up a few cans and dirty paper towels and burying them further down.

“had a dream about u,” typed SeaBill later that night when Sidney signed on.

Sidney sipped at a cup of coffee. Tilting the mug to show the crisp red crinkle of his lipstick at the brim, he held it at his chest long enough to ensure the cam would capture the shot. “oh really?”

Bill’s heavy hair swung over his eyes. His pink lids, light as onionskin, flickered. In his mind Sidney ran a finger from SeaBill’s graying beard, along his dark cheeks, to his closed eyelids. The lashes brushed against the ridges of Sidney’s fingertips, catching for a moment in the grooves.

“you were poisoning me you were slipping something into my wine and I watched you do it too, but I think you did it in front of me on purpose”

“seabill you like wine?”

“no I cant fuckin stand it but it was a dream”

“what was the poison though?”

“not even im sorry first?” SeaBill held a static wink on his face for a count of two.

“sorry i poisoned you”

“it was a red mineral, it tasted chalky” He pushed back from the cam to show his hand kneading the top of his thigh, suggesting what he would do if she were there, as if his own body stood in for Sylvia's.

“well why did you eat it if you know it was poison? did it taste good?” Sidney imagined the domestic scene, in apron on the phone with Poison Control, SeaBill prone on his kitchen floor, lips caked in red. She would walk over to him, feel his muscles tensing in his arms, his neck jerking in spasm. Her tears would smear her blotchy eyeliner. I’m so sorry SeaBill… Oh baby why did I do this to you?

In the next frame SeaBill reappeared at the keyboard. “no that red shit tasted like shit like Mylanta” He crooked his mouth under his moustache. “silvia what do u look like?”

“you can see… red hair big lips big cheeks, rubenesque” Sidney clenched his hands against his sides.

“what about your eyes”

“theyre green like the bustier”

“they must be beautiful” SeaBill crouched down, craning his head up, as if to stare above the edge of the monitor into Sidney’s face.

“SeaBill i think your eyes are beautiful. they're so soft”

“i wish you were here with me”

“i don’t mean soft, i mean rugged. like a strong man’s eyes.”

“so in the end of the dream i was dead and i fell on the ground and was stuck in my dead body and the worst part was that i couldnt see you, my eyes were open and i could see through them but i think you were behind me, i couldn’t hear you either because i was dead”

“what color were my eyes in the dream?”

“i don’t remember—maybe they were red… but maybe green… i want to see you”

“i said already SeaBill you can see me, you see me every night”

“i see your mouth and your tits in that top every night and sometimes your hands”

“well that’s me”

“you ain't got legs? fuck silvia even your eyes? you seen all of me”

“im sorry SeaBill i cant”

Grimacing, SeaBill gathered his yellowing shirt under his fingers and peeled it from his chest. His dark chest hair swirled on his skin. As the image of the camera jumped he pushed back, pulling his belt from his jeans and tossing it to floor. The image leapt again, and his jeans were around his ankles. His penis already lay enlarged on his leg, prone, as if shot and paralyzed, but still breathing. Seabill gripped his knees, pulled them open, let his penis drop between his legs. In the next still he had one hand on his chest, gripping it hard enough to whiten the skin, and the other digging into the meat of his thigh. Then he was back at the desk, fingers still coarse on his chest, jaw slack.

“come on baby give me a bit more i've given you all i got already”

“SeaBill i don't want you to see”

“why not? Youre not a virgin are you?”

“not really”

“then what is it?”

“i don’t like them, don't like it”

The line stood unanswered for several seconds; SeaBill pursed his lips as his hands gently stroked his shoulders. “i don't understand”

“i don't like my breasts,” Sidney typed, “they look strange on my body, i'm so big and they're so small”

“fuck silvia you know how many times i have told you that i think you are gorgeous”

“its just a square on your screen its not my body in front of you” Sidney considered dropping the connection right then; his chest heaved, his fingers shook. His own skin felt insufficient just then to hold his organs in. Only the grip of his girdle kept his lungs in his chest, kept him from spilling open under the cam's lens. Here would be the real shocker for his distant lover: to see his girl open herself like a jewelry box, to see all the precious green and orange stones set underneath her skin. Her dull penis hanging beneath that gaudy show would be the smallest of surprises.

“show me baby”

The low stubble around Sidney's nipples was still showing. The burn from the Bisquick had grown darker. His skin was creased and red from wearing the bustier twice in the same day.

SeaBill spat on his floor. “fine never mind”

“no no no i'll do it i just need to take my time”

“okay baby no hurry i don't want to rush you.” SeaBill tucked himself in tighter to his desk.

“You have to close your eyes.”

“what the fuck?”

“just for a minute i'm serious!”

“christ just shut off your webcam,” SeaBill typed, huffing.

Sidney spun the cam around to face the kitchen, then collapsed the window of Seabill’s cam so that only their conversation was visible. If he was about to scare the poor man away he didn't to have to see that moment, that realization. He wormed a finger into the Velcro closure on the back of the bustier; the cool scratch of plastic hooks slid over his knuckle as he pressed his finger deeper. The sweat coated his skin beneath the vinyl like another dermis, from plastic to liquid to leather.

“you ready yet baby?”

“no I’ll spin it back when I’m ready”

“feel like a goddamn fool staring at your fucking refridgrator”

“i know i know i'll hurry”

With his other fingers, Sidney tore greedily into the flap and let the bustier fall forward in his lap. His breasts, no longer buttressed, fell weakly onto his stomach. His pale skin shimmered under the monitor glow; above each nipple crested a deep wave of red from the edge of the cup. Sidney resisted the urge to walk away, to switch off the computer, maybe even to stand up, show SeaBill his own penis, end it fast. What in the world is she, Sidney thought, with her breasts hanging out on her white belly—what is she when she is naked? He would like to know. If anything, he would like Seabill to tell him—Seabill was the same naked or clothed.

“okay you can look,” he typed as he twisted the cam back, rubbing his slick skin, watching the expectant cursor pulse. Already he thought this a fitting way to end his obsession with the chat room (really his obsession with SeaBill, the only one he'd ever spoken to for more than a minute or two). Maybe he would sell the computer, maybe he would just give it to his mother, show her how to pay her Visa bill when it was due the next day.

He cupped his hands under his chest, rubbed from the center out, in order to make his breasts look fuller, as if they stood so firm on their own. His red wig seemed to sit on him like a party hat. Gathering both his flat breasts in one harm he typed in a message to his invisible suitor.

“SeaBill are you looking?”

For a few moments more the cursor simply blinked. Sidney pressed his hands in, forming a desperate cleavage. He felt ready to vomit on himself; the sausage sat heavy in his stomach as he waited.

“you are one lovely lady, silvia,” Seabill finally responded. Sidney rushed to reopen the window to Seabill's cam. His computer crackled and stalled, finally opening an empty window, a blank gray beveled square that read SEABILL triumphantly across the top. “I am so happy baby,” Seabill typed as his face appeared. “the shit in the wine was worth it.”

The letter lay unopened on the livingroom floor. On its front was drawn a smiling parsnip with its root tip hanging a bit lewdly. “Sidney,” it read, “I know what you must have turned your mother, your home into, in order to even become an adult of your own, in order to leave me, dear. Nothing monstrous, nothing horrible of course. Barely anything at all—just mildly suffocating routine. All of it had to be dismissed for a time, I know, as the expected. We could have lived anywhere—at the top of a sand dune, in the woods, maybe at the bottom of the ocean—and eventually you’d tire even of the deep sea angler, you’d dream of lures that glowed blue or yellow instead of always greenish white.

“I read today that the fate of the universe has been finally realized, that it shall continue to expand forever—in fact that it is accelerating thanks to the mysterious presence of dark energy, and I thought of you, first inside me, then the next room over, now down the block, and so on.

“Is there not a dark energy at work between those who grow estranged, a force stronger than need, that pushes apart? But I do believe that in life, some may return after a great silence—may it not also be so in physics?

“I wanted to say thank you for the dinner and I'm sorry for all the trouble with the bills, and that the assisted living place is surely a nice place. I know you won't read this anyway darling so it's mostly for my own benefit.

“Love, your mother.”

 

© 2004 Ian Sherman - Contributor's Bio