Mitchell Jacobs
My Own Private New Hampshire
I rented a room 53 miles west of Venus so I could be with my college boyfriend who dumped me immediately. He lived next door, in another dimension. To get him to notice me, I took aimless walks in electric blue pants, like some sad horny alien. I would have done anything except call him. The B-52’s sang to me from my hail-pocked Honda’s tape deck about runaway poodles, a bottomless pool, and when to kiss the pineapple between a lover’s legs. Which is to say, after kissing his stomach. Which is to say, never again. My walls were strung with purple constellations, Christmas lights for mood lighting. In case. This was the techno-future, 2014, except I couldn’t afford a smartphone so everyone’s invisible conversations ripped through me like gamma radiation. Instead of raves, I ran around graveyards, imagining the dead in love triangles, love rhombuses, perverted love parabolas. My dad had died that spring, but he didn’t belong to the dead and their interstellar daisy chain. He was in that middle space, a foggy soundstage barren as the moon, knotting and unknotting his paisley necktie on loop. It’s where Ricky taps his foot, rocks his hips and guitar neck back and forth in the video of “Give Me Back My Man” that glared from my laptop screen. Ricky hadn’t died of AIDS yet. That would be in five years, so twenty-nine years ago. Barefoot, Cindy turns around to look at him, her brother, on a riser above her, wearing shades. I’ll give you fish. I’ll give you candy. I’ll give you everything I have in my hand. What my clenched hand could offer was a sweaty clump of Swedish Fish from the planet’s longest candy counter: waxy, melted together, red dye #40 seeping outward along my palm lines. I didn’t want to go bed with a stranger and tie a bow of caution tape around my neck but I did. My shirt with squids on it absorbed my stupid tears, squirts of ink, while I sat on my car’s dented hood and leaned against the windshield’s firework- display of bug guts. I took off my clothes and touched myself beneath a satellite’s slow strobe. On treeless summits, it turned out I could stack a cairn in memory of anything, and somebody would balance their own lopsided rock on top. The air was so sparse. When I finally drove back to Earth, I sprinkled glitter on the highway, only the glitter was that shiny crud that gathers in your eyes from sleep.
Mitchell Jacobs is a writer from Minnesota. His work has appeared in journals such as the Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Willow Springs, as well as on the Slowdown podcast. He is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.