Six Sixes by Kristen Tsetsi
sixsentences.blogspot.com
2
CONTENTS Sleep …… 5 Maturity …… 6 Job Coaching …… 8 Under Perfect Conditions …… 10 A Profound Man …… 12 Run …… 14
About the Author …… 16 3
sixsentences.blogspot.com
sixsentences.blogspot.com
4
Sleep
She would, if she could. With him. In the half-empty queen-sized bed with 300 thread count cotton sheets. A gift: new sheets for a new bed for a new marriage turned old. Instead, the couch sinks in where she lays, gritty from catwalks with litter-grooved paws. And the television lights up with perky, pretty blonde anchors ready to take him away from her, their hips ripe for childbearing, their breasts leaking onto the news desk.
5
sixsentences.blogspot.com
Maturity
He was on a quest for definitions, milestones, markers, and revelations. Life didn't seem complete without these conscious recognitions. Last week, while pulling a jug of milk from the refrigerator, he was very aware of his arm as an extension of himself, and was then equally aware of his Self. He was this person existing in a kitchen at a very specific time in a very specific place, and in no time at all the existence of both himself and the space as he knew it would be gone. He was a fly, was all, one day buzzing through the trees, and then suddenly, somehow, trespassing through the slightest window crack into new and unfamiliar territory. He would either bang and buzz against the window until he found his way out, occasionally stopping to inspect with his feelers the chipped paint of the windowpane, or he would stick it out and live with the natives, another being taking sixsentences.blogspot.com
6
up just a bit of their space until, for no reason other than because his time was up, he would end up between the glass and the screen, dead on his back with his legs in the air.
7
sixsentences.blogspot.com
Job Coaching
She pushes the vacuum cleaner over white, hallway linoleum because it hurts her back to sweep, the weight of her large breasts, her large body, threatening to pull her down face first. Meds bulge in their plastic containers in the pockets of her yellow velvet shorts, baggy and bunched between her thighs. She says it isn't working, this new cocktail, that everything is worse, but her next doctor's appointment is tomorrow, she says, and then she laughs, her breath — heavy and carrying the logo of generic cigarettes — filtering through her small, tan teeth and plump lips. Her doctor knows her better than anyone and has been on the receiving end of more than one of her fabricated childhood trauma memories. She calls him by his first name, Lionel, when she shares her favorite compliment from him: "No one but you, Hazel, could make me want to laugh one minute and cry the next." sixsentences.blogspot.com
8
Tomorrow, her voices tell her, she will push a steak knife into her heart in Lionel's office bathroom.
9
sixsentences.blogspot.com
Under Perfect Conditions
If that were his car behind mine, if that yellow Renault with the loud muffler were his, and if we left the intersection on green and he flashed his brights at me and signaled me to pull over, I would. And if when I got out of my car and stood in the open door he got out of his own car and walked, not fast but not timidly, up to me and kissed me without asking, without waiting, if he kissed me with soft lips and strong arms and no apology on his tongue — if he did this — I could forgive his doing it. If when he pulled his lips from mine he didn't say a word, and if he didn't try to explain or try to win me with bullshit, if he didn't tell me he was in love with me, and if he didn't ask but just followed me home, I could let him follow. And if he didn't drive too close, if his headlights didn't shine blindingly in my rearview mirror and if at every turn I would have to look to see if he were still there, I sixsentences.blogspot.com
10
could slow down for him. And if he didn't grab me in my doorway, if he didn't pretend we were in a movie where our clothes come off the minute we get in the door, if he didn't think this were a scene that would cut to socks and underwear on the floor, and if he touched my hair without a word, if he just stood there without even touching me at all, I could close the door behind him. I would close the door behind him tonight.
11
sixsentences.blogspot.com
A Profound Man
Greg said, "When I make love, I am making love to God." Syl rolled the avocado under her palm, side to side, side to side. When he got this way, she used to show interest by asking questions, but after trying four or fives times to become part of the conversation, he told her he found her questions quite distracting and said they deflated his energy-aura, that her interjected thoughts were like holes in his ozone, so she stopped. "…and, take that avocado, for instance: I would physically — not metaphorically, mind you — make love to that avocado because you are that avocado, and you are God, too," he said to her and took her avocado. He ran a thumb over the pit — the way characters do in movies with their licking and caressing of vulva-like fruits and vegetables — but he wasn't trying to be seductive, not like that… Syl knew he truly believed she could feel his tongue, his finger. sixsentences.blogspot.com
12
"What does it feel like to make love to God?" she wanted to ask, so much that she had to cover her mouth; she held onto it until after he came, and when he answered, his fingers brushing back his hair, he said, "Like anything else."
13
sixsentences.blogspot.com
Run
Until you reach the place, that place with the comforting coffee smells and the smiling, safe woman behind the counter who remembered your name and his after your first visit two years ago. When you see him through the window, weave past the counter and to the back door, bubbled paint on metal with hinges that screech when you push it open. Run again — maybe this will work off the soft belly from daily mochas, the only kind of weight you want around your middle, if you have to choose; not the weight he would prefer, the kind that will mutate through the seasons and transform into a ball that lands in a playpen on the floor. If you must stop, stop in an alley behind a bar where the nearness of neon and impulsive abandon will hide you — after all, this is what you're running to hold onto. It is there where you'll see him, huffing down the main road past the alley. He'll seem so lost, sixsentences.blogspot.com
14
looking for you, his shirt wet from morning summer humidity, a horseshoe of darkness dipping from his neck to his navel, one hand circled around a cup of semen, the other wielding a $.79 turkey baster.
15
sixsentences.blogspot.com
About the Author
Kristen Tsetsi is the author of Homefront and the founder of Tuesday Shorts. kristentsetsi.com
sixsentences.blogspot.com
16