Take Away the Saints

Life on Mars : Ch. 1-5 || Robyn Marie

DEDICATION

For anyone still living, this is a memoir.

This is how it happened.                                 

                           Fiona Mars

1. VERBS PAST AND PRESENT

There's a fractured second when a choice stops being a backseat passenger and becomes the driver.  At which point, it could be said, that the choice has grown up and flourished into a decision. But my decisions aren't like that. They're not children crossing the bridge into adolescents; they're hijackers, seizing control and accelerating away from that long bridge and off a cliff, instead. One moment, I'm debating what sits on my right and left shoulder and the next I've got a gun—which wasn't sitting on either shoulder—and there's blood on the rug and I'm pointing it at someone I've known my whole life.

I can't blame my subconscious for it; she doesn't have a body. But my body is nothing without me, and sometimes I think it's angry about that arrangement because it was my hand that picked up the gun and my foot that kicked in Door Number Three and I never once thought, "Fiona, now is a good time to be a hero."

My subconscious isn't stupid. If anything she's above average, cultivating the rows of brain matter in my head with guilt and regret and fat hate seeds. But, while it can be said that I act stupid about a lot of things, I know I'm not THAT stupid.

I'm no hero.

Heroes don't get high and kill somebody with their car.

Heroes don't let their daddies lie about it.

I did.

So it wasn't me that kicked in Door Number Three holding a gun from the trunk of a stolen police cruiser.

But my finger pressed the trigger.

Choices become decisions when you change their tense, from choose to chose then bang bang bang. Up and down rotate with the couch cushions. And gray was always white before.

What I do isn't that simple.

If it was, I'd make it stop.

 

2. DISHES

"Dad," I said.

"Fiona." He said it Fee-o-nAH.  He liked to put my name through a juice squeeze when a point was moot and the conversation was over. Mine usually were. And it always was in four minutes flat.

I wrapped the coated phone cord around my finger until the tip paled yellower than the aged linoleum under my bare feet.

"See you when I see you," I said.

And hung up.

Month two of Life After Mom, I stopped calling his desk to ask when he'd come home. Then, the daughters of Nowhere South Dakota started turning up in dumpsters and behind trees with their necks strangled and he never came home. If he did, I never saw him.

I'd called now because "hey, did you know there are veins under my skin the size of train tunnels?" and I wanted to dig them out to hear them echo.

"Fiona, don't waste my time," he'd said.

Gee, sorry Dad, but I noticed them running and now they're chasing me, help.

When you get the yen to hurt yourself: Tear up a phone book instead.  That's the advice the school's grief counselor gave when we lost Busy. But where we lived, where I lived, there weren't that many pages.  Thanks to my yard-sale-whore mother, my house had as many dishes as there were leaves on the arthritic oak tree out back. That's what I did when I was by myself and got the yen, or rather, that's what I didn't do.