<\/p>\n
You are suspended on a pocket of air. The ground moves beneath you, swaying and holding your body aloft over the backseat of the Subaru. You\u2019ve been trying to fall back asleep on the air mattress for a while. I can\u2019t stop all of the winter-wrecked roads from jostling your body around behind me but I try to avoid the nastier bits of pavement. You\u2019ve always been the better driver. We\u2019ve just passed Arrowhead and I\u2019ve lost cell reception but I think if I keep heading west, we\u2019ll make it to San Bernadino by morning. I\u2019ll be able to take a 4-hour nap before the ceremony and then I can pretend that I know anyone there.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I don\u2019t know what to expect for tomorrow. I\u2019ve never been to a Severing before but your family makes them sound so normal. Maybe I\u2019m just not familiar with your fancy West Coast traditions. I\u2019d never even heard about someone I knew having a Severing until a few months ago when the invite came in the mail, all glossy card stock and smiling faces. \u201c<\/span>You are cordially invited to the Severing of John and Jenny Masterson! Join us as we celebrate the transmutation of the heart, body, and mind<\/span><\/i>.\u201d I felt like I\u2019d been invited to join a church or maybe a wedding. Really, to call it a Severing feels like a misnomer, but calling it anything else also feels incorrect. You insisted it was a type of severing, a surgical incision between the Was and the Now, the I and the We (you\u2019d used me as an example).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n You told me it hadn\u2019t been a surprise for you. You\u2019d had your suspicions since Jenny had gotten together with your cousin John. Sometimes when you talk about Jenny, I am unsure if you are actually talking about her husband John or not; it feels as though they are one and the same. But I\u2019ve never known anyone to sever so publicly and to be so accepted, especially when they are so attached to someone. I asked if the partner usually decides to stay with this new person, and you\u2019d told me that, yes, but really, they\u2019re the same person after a certain point. They will be the same. You say it\u2019s different to be there when it happens, to watch the change take someone over like a slow-motion earthquake. You tell me that Jenny (or John) will unzip their skin like a suitcase and something else will take their place. It feels different to be invited to watch it up close.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I pull into the gas station approaching on the road up ahead. You prop yourself up on the air mattress, and we look out at advertisements for the different kinds of jerky inside the rest stop: elk, ostrich, alligator, and a seductive \u201csurprise\u201d flavor. All of the varieties are listed in quotations. Does this imply that the elk might not really be an elk? Despite this, none of the animals are native to the area, and I can\u2019t help but feel a kind of kinship. I am also a stranger and I am about to meet your family so that they can ask me questions and judge me for how different I taste from the other people you are related to. Later they will pull me apart in their memories, limb by limb, and see how I digest:<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n I know your relationship with your mother is strained at the best of times. Your mother has always remarked on how opposite we are, but I have never felt more similar to another person in my life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When I go to step out of the car your hand grabs my forearm. You tell me to wait while you find your wallet. You point out that I paid last time. I try to insist that it doesn\u2019t matter when it\u2019s all <\/span>our<\/span><\/i> money anyway. I begin to suggest that we head inside the rest stop to fill up on snacks, maybe try some mystery jerky, when you realize you are missing your wallet. When I go to help you search, I realize that you are not mistaken. The wallet is gone. This feels strange to us both because losing a wallet is something that I am more frequently guilty of, though neither of us say this out loud. I tell you it\u2019s okay. We agree to retrace our steps. Your wallet is probably at the last rest stop where we found a somewhat clean bathroom, somewhere around Fox Hide. I pay for the gas and I turn the car around. You apologize until you fall back asleep.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Thirty miles down the road I see a sign for a gas station, dimly glowing and sleepy eyed through the rust around the edges. It looks familiar as everything does when you spend too much time in the dark. Eyes begin to cling to objects that might be recognizable and safe. The sign in the window tells me that the rest stop inside is open when it is not. I consider waking you to tell you that I may have found the gas station but think better on it. I decide to wake you if I can\u2019t find your wallet at all, or wake you when I do so that you can be proud of me and tell me what a good job I have done.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n After parking the car, I can take in the full weight of the night sky. It is as oppressive as it is beautiful. The only light in the lot of the station is the faint yellow provided by the sign above and a lonely street light by the intersection. The trees are quiet and the air is colder than I\u2019d like at this elevation. The moment feels suspended. My hiking boots are too loud on the gravel as I walk to the public restroom around the corner of the building. I feel like the noise might wake you, or possibly a sleeping bear. Maybe I will be ripped apart before we even make it to the ceremony tomorrow (I consider this faintly with a grim hope). I have mentioned this before, my fear of bears, and every time you tell me they are like large raccoons. I am still afraid of bears and I hold onto this feeling like a lover.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When I get to the bathroom, I see that the door is open about the width of a fist. I do not like this. The door should be closed, especially one so isolated and cloaked in darkness like perfume. I imagine that someone is still inside and waiting for me with the lights off for some nefarious reason, or that someone is sleeping inside and I will be intruding, or that someone left in a hurry and maybe I should too. I can hear my breathing and it sounds as loud as my footsteps, though that cannot be true. I think about getting you from the car, waking you up so you can come with me to investigate this slightly open door. I make myself open it quickly.<\/span><\/p>\n I see your body, folded in on itself like a bleeding lawn chair, contorted and bent just under the sink. There is no mistaking it. You are wearing the same red hoodie with the stain from the Eggs Benedict you had at breakfast and I can see the small tattoo on the inside of your wrist, the one that matches mine because we got them together. Your body has been beaten and sliced and it is swelling because it must have been hours that you have been lying there. It feels as if I am looking down at my own body. I, too, am collapsing in on myself. How can I breathe when you cannot? The air pulls itself out of my lungs and I stumble down to the floor just outside the puddle you have made. I sit with you and you do not wake.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I get back into the car but do not turn the key in the ignition. When I have begun to breathe normally, I reach my arm into the backseat. I lift up the comforter and your eyes squint up at me. You ask if I am crying, and I tell you that you\u2019ve been murdered. You say that can\u2019t be true, so I take you to see the body. After all, it is yours.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We stand together, shoulder to shoulder in the small doorway, and look down at the crumpled ball of your corpse, the tangle of your arms and legs. Your face becomes vacant as you stare at what has happened to you. One of your hands points at your sweatshirt while the other grabs mine to hold. You tell me that that\u2019s your sweatshirt. I don\u2019t disagree. You reach out a foot and try to touch your dead shoe with the one you have on now. You connect and the dead shoe moves slightly. You cuss, loudly, and it is a statement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The next morning, I call your mother to tell her that we won\u2019t be able to make it to the Severing (it appears you have lost the ability to use a phone, given the nature of your increasingly incorporeal condition, and I have to be the one to deliver the news). We tell her that, in an unexpected turn of events, it appears that you have died and we have been severed. A much less elegant situation when compared to what the Mastersons might be putting on but one cannot always plan for these kinds of things.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On the phone with your mother, we swallow the overwhelming (and darkly unfunny) urge to shout out, \u201cSurprise!\u201d The words don\u2019t quite appear on our breath as it fogs in the air. It turns out your mother is not mad. She sighs at us on the phone and we can feel the disappointment radiated by her breath. Your mother asks what she\u2019s supposed to tell everyone. We suggest she say something about how we got caught up in the moment and couldn\u2019t help ourselves. It\u2019s hard to plan for a murder when you\u2019re on the receiving end.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We sit together on the curb, wrapped up in the comforter from the back of the car. Our legs tangle together in an effort to keep each other warm. The neon blue of the sign by the road outlines the squad cars and the ambulance that blocked both of the exits to the gas station, not that we would have left anyway. Since the police have arrived, the sky has fallen quiet. It is as if the stars and the sky have severed themselves. A police officer comes over and tells us that, he\u2019s sorry, but they didn\u2019t find a wallet. On the phone your mother is saying that if we cared about her half as much as we cared about ourselves we would have told her beforehand, we would have invited her. She isn\u2019t like most mothers. She would have loved to have been there.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
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