Sage Marsters
Visual Goals mber finishes her first year of college up at the state university and knows she will not go back, knows she can't, but cannot explain it. "You have to come back," her roommate Heather announces, stomping her tiny white foot like a clean hoof. All year, Heather's kept her closet stocked with rows of white cotton sneakers, cheap, thin-soled, identical. She always has a clean pair; on Sunday mornings she bleaches them in the sink down the hall, rubs at the tongues and the soles with a toothbrush, lines them up across the heater to dry. She has worn a clean and perfect pair every day that Amber has known her, even in the snow, especially in the snow, prancing about. It's the dorm room that's making Amber leave. It's the fake pine furniture that is the color of beery vomit, the way the bunk beds and the desks are bolted snug to the concrete walls, the darkness that comes at 3:30 in the afternoon, the resigned mornings, flat, shy, pale. For months she has been making her muffled way up and down a badly lit corridor, the smell of mildew and perfume clinging at her shoulders. All the ceilings are too low, and there's a rumor that the architect who designed the dorms also designed mental hospitals. There's nowhere high enough to hang yourself from, everything is blunt-edged. She suspects the school has changed her somehow, physically. The roots of her hair sometimes ache, and her teeth feel thick, as though coated in dust. In the bathroom she leans forward into the mirror, smiling like a horse, inspecting herself, pressing a fingertip hard to her gums. She can't remember what she's learned.
A
She goes home, to her town, to her childhood room, unchanged, waiting for her: the wallpaper with violets twisting into a pattern of repeating diamonds; the lamp with the oversized shade; her socks and tights and underwear, the elastics stretched, tangled in her old dresser. She paws through it, pushes it aside. In the pink wicker hamper next to her bed she finds what she left there the last time she was home, winter break, a dirty flannel shirt and under that a warm six-pack of Coors, from when it was Christmas and Desert Storm, fire and sand always on the TV, talk of Nostradamus, something about a man wearing a blue turban coming to end the world. She wraps herself in the flannel shirt. It smells of smoke and the rose o il she got for Christmas. It smells like the mornings she spent in her room then, the snow at the window, the radio on, the weight of blankets at her feet. She lies back in bed, sipping a warm Coors.
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FUGUE #35