An Imposition
by Claire Oleson
Shane was up to his thighs in the pond, moving pressure between his only two feet, thinking about his older brother, who had obliterated his femur to fine bone-snow just a month back. Skiing. Shane was lucky to have two working legs that were so pretty and so easy to use. He shifted his weight and basked in his luckiness. Weird to feel like this: to feel like what happens to your older brother is something that will happen to you eventually, that his whole body is a trailer for yours. This was not true, but Shane could not shake the gratefulness out of his legs. He wasn’t his brother. Shane was careful, borderline neurotic, thigh-deep in pond water, and not a skier. He was not whole because of luck; it was practical. Still: his legs looked good with his navy-blue running shorts hiked until they caught on his thighs and stayed there: bitch, lucky.
He lowered his metal water bottle into the muck, threading it below the skein of duckweed until he was skirting the mud. He lifted the full vessel and screwed the cap back on while a Jeep ad popped up on Sadie’s spotify.
“Cheap, cheap,” He told her, maneuvering back to the scrap of shoreline where she was waiting for him. Waiting because her own nineteen-year-old afternoon was empty. Her phone was saying something about five-wheel drive while he struggled in the mud and looked at her: depressive sophomore, hip shifted to the left, eyes busy in the middle distance, stomach slightly bloated from lactose. Earlier, she’d housed half of a shitty pizza and he’d told her, hey, take a lactaid before you do that, and she’d been angry about this kind of care, how useless it was. Then Shane said that he had to get to the pond before it got any darker. She said she wanted to come. It would have taken energy he did not have in him to swat her back.
Now, on shore, she didn’t offer him a hand. She waited for the music to come back while he dug his heels in in order to move forward. He got up fine. He thought about his brother on his side on a mountain in Switzerland, screaming into the white landscape, needing. There were specks of duckweed bedazzling Shane’s calves. He started wiping them off. Music returned: her rotations of the Silver Jews and Grimes. He stifled comment.
“Is that for the show, or just for you?” she asked while she texted some kind of girl about some other kind of girl.
“It’s for the show, Sadie, I’m not looking to get legionnaire’s disease for kicks. I’ve done enough with the colored soap bubbles on the projector lighting up the band. Time for something else before I get stuck doing one kind of lighting for one show in one place. Anyway, they pay on time. Never have to badger Maggie like I do that improv group. And they let me do what I want. Tonight, I want some algae clouds, some amoebas, some clear and green thrashing microbes to cast up over their bad guitar, and then also, their good guitar. You know, they kinda have a good guitar now.”
“Well, the vocals have really been limping in the performances. The band’s. Ever since Maggie got happy with your… your ex, your guy… that guy. Well, she got worse. If that helps.” Sadie stopped texting and started googling legionnaire’s disease.
“It does help, thank you Sadie.” They began the half mile walk back to Shane’s apartment on the edge of the campus. Spring was making things delirious. Insects reached for him, smelling muck and rot. The lively, smug scent of dying. He kicked, slapped, spat. Sadie put a palm softly over her abdomen. Shane was not interested in explaining to Sadie, again, that he was not gay, but that Dan and he had held something between themselves for a while, not even a month. Not worth the time. She had a liberal mindset, wanted to save him from something structural, but only if she could do it in a personal way. Sadie was not interested in explaining to Shane that she was narrowly swallowing a panic attack. It sat in front of her mouth, inviting her to bite in, to change her day into something worse. She breathed, she waited, she thought about the evening.
“Yeah, Maggie’s not so good on the guitar,” she offered, pausing the music to ride out the low underbelly of a cramp. She bent for a moment and Shane did not change his pace. Did not make even the smallest concession to watch her. Give a little, and she’d turn into a theater. She caught up. It was gross outside. He was being bit by more than one miniature animal at a time. He crushed their bodies onto his. He reached for her hand without meaning to and pulled her into walking faster.
“Could you shave my head before the show?” he asked without looking back.
“I’m not so good on the clippers.”
“Don’t care. I’m just done with this miniscule bleach job. I think I want it down to a one so it can come back black. Come back in as mine again.”
They sat in his dorm-shared kitchen and simply hoped no one would want to use it for like 27 minutes. It worked out. Sadie took slow passes with the razor. Blond sheaved off of him like cut light. Shane’s brother had to be helicoptered out. Stupid. Expensive. His body heaving in the stomach of a huge metal bug while he wrestled with his pain like it was a season. Get through. Throw fists up at cold air. Wait for men to touch him into betterness. Think about how to tell his two older friends that he had failed, curdled, proved to be the woman of the three of them. (That is how they would all feel.) Shane wondered if he was the woman of himself. Shane felt Sadie stop. He touched the landscape of his skull. It was even and well-done. He listened to her spit in the sink.
“Still not good?” he asked, standing.
“Oh, I thought I actually did well this time, really.” She was pointing at him, at his head. She was still bent over.
At the show, they had both guitars out. They were in the basement below the second-preferred dining hall. The ceiling was low. Shane set up his old-ass projector at the back of the room. The microscope was actually new-ass (and not his.) He’d stolen it a day ago. He was waiting to see if that was going to be a problem. Dan was a STEM kid and had pointed out to him that the cameras in the bio lab were broken and too many of their faculty were adjuncts. This was a kind of flirting, an admittance of desperation, of knowledge, of an awareness that no one was watching them except themselves. He had asked Dan what in the room was most dangerous thing. Dan had asked him if he wanted to do an allergy test on his left leg. He held Shane at the ankle. He told him his quads were beautiful. Shane could not remember if he’d said yes to doing the allergy thing. The next morning, he’d seen a grid with six blocks on his skin. Two of the blocks were inflamed. He asked Dan what substances he had failed to handle. Dan had said he’d forgotten. Said he didn’t write them down. Shane had touched the raised red spaces like buttons, wondering what pieces of the world he was overreacting to.
The last thing they’d exchanged: two weeks ago, a stale text from Shane to Dan reading:
“You can’t tell me what I’m allergic to at all? What if it’s real? What if it’s bad?” to which Dan wrote:
“It’s not a problem if it hasn’t been a problem. You would know by now if it mattered.”
Maggie began tuning her good guitar. There was sheet music on her phone, but it was for something else. She flashed Shane a thumbs up and a somber little nod. Her hair was thin. He nodded back, slid the pond-water-prepped slide into place, and threw up light. The band blinked in the glare, but Maggie pushed through. She breathed. She always looked wet to him; thin in a bad way, narrow and weighed down.
“Hi, we’re ‘The Coverups’ and two of us are being mean tonight, so don’t expect a lot.” A grunt from a different body. A few low notes. A balding crowd. People talking. Maggie with tin-bright eyes looking over his left shoulder at the bathroom door. Shane stopped watching her not watch him and bent to his own work.
At first, the projector showed clots of green and black. Out of focus, more disorienting than anything else. Then he got it, the right magnification, the right speed of scroll. Sand and dirt grains gave way to what he was hoping for: a spread of zooplankton wriggling, humming, drifting in their hair-thin world, now pulsing silica over the unimpressive bangs of the girl he got left for. For a little while, she looked good and was playing good. Maggie on the metal of her instrument. Maggie fighting the disinterest of her undergraduate peers, most of whom were trying to sleep with one another or not sleep with one another. Maggie, singing and playing at the same time while Shane moved his finger the smallest distances he could manage while keeping things smooth. Radiolaria began to populate the display. Cells with mineral skeletons. His brother in a hospital bed abroad, drinking protein shakes for meals, waiting for an X-ray to tell him about walking or not walking.
Maggie got close to the mic, basically kissing the netting.
“The bitch is about absence,/
The bitch loves lack, the bitch/
Lives in the off-grid, low-vis, off-black.”
Maggie was bent like Sadie had been with milk-cramps, digging over her strings, gaze still locked on the unlockable bathroom door across the room. Her hair hung in a sheet over her face. A flagellate lashed across it. She was doing well. The band was not. The other guitar slowed and soured where it should have sped. The drum kit was fine, but its drummer found out, yesterday, that his dad ran up debt on a credit card in his name. He was gonna have to sue his dad or sit underneath new weight like a good son. He wasn’t on-tempo.
“Eating in your car, you/
Drunk-drive me home, you/
Get pulled over by the/
Gold teeth in the gibbous moon./
When your mom dies,/
I’ll hand you things slow./
I’ll hand you slow things.”
Shane didn’t know it, but the next thing he saw was a yet-undiscovered, unnamed microbe crossing a lazy route over Maggie’s white t-shirted torso. It lingered near her left breast, a glassy-emerald, a two-limbed floater blessed with a lovely form. Shane spent the rest of the set keeping it in center stage, keeping the slender animal pinned to Maggie, who was trying. Heels deep in mud that wasn’t there, coughing on projected water that could not be inhaled, Maggie ejected the songs from below her diaphragm. Sadie wasn’t with him. She was back in her own dorm room bathing in a flash of cold, processing that something more than lactose intolerance was wrong with her. She felt her stomach for signs of miniature life. It wasn’t as easy as a pregnancy. Something else, something she didn’t have named yet, was making her scared beyond the borders of her one chest. She crawled into the shared closet of her double, pushed her roommate’s clothes aside, and burrowed like a geriatric cat beneath a truck. She was afraid of the pathetic shame of being seen looking pathetic or ashamed. She curled in, shaking in the daze of new sweat. She hummed something in order to soothe someone who was not with her. The hems of dresses swayed against her shoulders softly, mothering. (Sadie had tried a few of these dresses on once, the ones that weren’t hers, to find the difference between bodies, to know something about fat and height and victory. It had been mean.)
Dan also wasn’t there, wasn’t at Maggie’s set. Shane did not know if this was because of him or not. If he could guess, based on how Dan was: a happy person who moved lightly, Shane would assume Dan was at home, comfortable, not aching about minutia. Dan was somewhere not worried about the worry in the room, the water in the air, the iron-dense taste of the basement.
Shane moved the slide a cell over to keep the creature on its singer. Its body, a glowing indent pressing her own. It was quite pretty. She sang about a dog running a gas station and not getting enough business and not understanding state taxes. In the hospital, Shane’s brother’s roommate had something necrotic wrong with him. He’d slept in his bed like a coiled shell with a spoiled center. The snail of him rotting, the blackened smell hanging like drying clothes between them. Shane’s brother tried to jack off one night, imagining a woman on top of him, and ended up fucking up his leg even more. Stupid, expensive. His open mouth had, on accident, let the body of his roommate seep a sweet, decayed feeling onto his tongue before he could come. The beds were only four feet apart. In the morning, when the doctor asked about the new-pain on his face, he had wanted to point to his roommate, but that man had been moved sometime between 4:46 and 4:49 AM.
“What’s on your body that’s/
Not your body, who is home/
For the break-in, the flare up,/
The acne of your shared cup./
Get mono, then call me!/
Get mono, then call me!”
Shane had to laugh. Maggie up there trying so goddamn hard. The undiscovered radiolarian pulsing over her hand like stigmata or a ghost or a hand. It floated. It could make Dan’s career, if he were there and knew enough to know that it was new. No one at the set appreciated it. There was tepid interest in Shane’s idea, in the presentation, in the presumption that his microscope, with the college logo on its clavicle, was stolen, but the interest died there. If Dan could be there, see the animal-angel-bug on the slide on his new girlfriend, and take it from Shane while the set was still going, he could make something of himself. But he wasn’t fucking there. Shane would discard the slide and wipe the microbe to death on a paper towel before packing. If there were more of her, it would be hard to know without testing every drop of the bottle. Then the whole pond. You could spend years looking. Shane left alone. He stretched in front of his unlit mirror and put the stolen microscope under his raised bed. He looked at himself in the glass without a shirt on: a pale blue stroke articulating shadows. He got onto the mattress with his good legs. He texted Maggie “great set” and $25 was pipetted into his paypal. He’d asked her for a venmo and wasn’t even sure how she’d managed to find the right ‘him’ in the wrong app. Whatever, same owner, same $25, same night, same people.
Shane felt bad for how far away his brother was when he’d hurt himself. There was nothing to do about this. Only one of them had dragged their body to Switzerland, and it had not been him. Shane wondered if the stealing of the microscope would warrant his expulsion. He touched it in the dark, wondering if it cost more money than he had in savings.
The microbe Shane found and then killed and then threw away had a penchant for digesting plastics. It would be decades before someone else could find her, name her, get credit, and understand what a godsend she was with her arm-like, leg-like extensions softly funneling forever-chemicals through her dim-green digestion. It was an animal so useful it was basically Jesus if Jesus were a bug and no one knew to give his death any importance, any name. Shane’s musculature and metabolism and height could have made him Olympic, but he never pushed it there. His brother had tried to try to.
Shane’s brother stood up in his own unlit bedroom, states away, and felt his leg. He shifted his weight and felt water moving. He was chocked full of metal now. He’d be able to feel winter before it came. He was no longer the man he needed himself to be. He touched himself on the bones. It would take everything he had not to get so angry that he’d go blind on it. It would take his full capacity to not watch Shane’s body at Christmas, on reunions, (his little brother) and want to put it into his own. The leg. The working. His little brother. Bigger and stronger already, but not from tying to be. The animal in Shane’s brother’s face rising to his skin like a surfacing whale.
Shane woke up in the morning feeling violently dehydrated. He drank from the water by his bed without thinking. He gagged on the taste of scum, dirt, and minerals coming into life in the dark slot of his mouth. He spat, shook, and called Sadie to tell her about everything that had gone wrong: to be able to put it somewhere besides himself.
When Sadie doesn’t answer, it’s nothing new, and it doesn’t scare him. She does this sometimes. Sleeps past 11 AM. Doesn’t offer him complete and perfect devotion. In the dark in the pond in the American Midwest, saviors flourish softly, not yet put to English.
In the hospital Sadie goes to, they do have mirrors, but you have to ask for them. You have to know to ask for them. She is busy making sure her mother is not the emergency contact. She is busy asking them, please, not to call her.
Claire Oleson is a queer writer and 2020 Fiction Fellow at the Center for Fiction. She is an Assistant Editor at the Kenyon Review. Her work has been published by Joyland, the LA Review of Books, Foglifter, and Brink, among other journals. Her chapbook of short stories, “Things from the Creek Bed We Could Have Been” debuted May, 2020 from Newfound Press. More of her work can be found here.