Halved — By Brenna Zanghi
I have two pages to tell my story, two halves to fit the split whole of my life.
This is summer.
The voice of the bonfire licked my toes, whispered heat up my legs as I curled deeper into the lawn chair. I looked nowhere and smiled for everything, utterly absent. Conversation filled the air around me like packing peanuts in a cardboard box—my boredom. Karen glanced at me from across the fire—I remember—she was draped across an arm, melting, and smiled lowly; get through tonight, smile, wade through the dirt to the dust, to our fire. Deal with this bullshit, have fun later. I looked away and pretended to take a sip of my beer. The cup’s plastic rim crunched between my teeth.
That’s when he appeared, a figure of ash rising from the dull flames like fury. “Hey,” he said. “You look miserable. Aidon.” He stuck out a hand. He looked like a mix of moon and flames.
His cup was suspiciously full, so curiosity parted my lips. “Perci,” I said.
“Nice name. You know you’re supposed to drink the beer, right? Not eat the cup.”
“It’s my first party.” I lied. I looked young enough, wide eyes with a thin smile. Aidon revealed his innocence as he seemed to miss the taste of the metallic steel on my breath and settled beside me with an easy smile. I tried to listen to his voice over the false laughter and the echoes of someone vomiting beyond the rim of firelight. “I don’t drink,” I said as a matter of justification. That was true. I didn’t drink. He echoed my statement—offered to take mine for me— “I always dump a bit of mine when I walk, you know? No one realizes, they just think you’ve had too much, but Joey just refilled my fucking cup, and now I have to start all over,” he said.
I nearly asked why crack open a whole Pandora’s box worth of misery and death upon us both so my curiosity could be fulfilled. An alcoholic father? Was he on medication? “Thanks,” I said instead, the weight of that invisible box on my back, pressing against my shoulders, pushing me closer to the fire.
Aidon was a drop of lavender in a poisoned world. At some point, his arm wove around my shoulders—cupping the curve of my neck like an anchor to reality as the night shifted and curled around us. “Hey, you want to get out of here?” He had been staring at me while I stared at the flames. I startled. Those words were always a promise wrapped in coy bows and gravely vocal tones; bundles of abandoned clothes on stained carpet, a night spent pressed awkwardly against the leather seat of a car as I breathed in sweat and cigarette smoke. I studied Aidon, expecting to see the same predatory expression those words had come to make me expect; I saw the bend of his brows instead as they pulled together above his nose, the slight squint of his openly concerned gaze. It was a promise indeed, undisguised by niceties and smirks taped together in a falsely pleasant presentation. An offer made without fully understanding the consequences; he was a soft symphony of trusting warmth and steady percussion that now reached out his conductor’s wand toward me as an offering, too easy to grasp. Temptation and heat raised the hair on my arms as his promise turned over in my mind. Impossibly easy, a quiet opportunity to disappear as just another strand of smoke lost to the sky. My hand slid up my lap, palm raised as my mouth opened—
“Perci,” Karen’s arm appeared, glued back together just enough as she clutched onto someone’s shoulder for support, “Perci—we have to go. The guys are waiting at the pier.”
My hand dropped. Aidon turned to Karen with surprise.
Every rhythm has its final tone.
This is winter.
I stood. Aidon asked for my name, my number—Or, I wish he had, I wish he had the courage to speak up, or I was cruel enough to offer—but the truth of the story is we had spoken only for a few minutes, and Karen had snapped me back—again absent in entirety. Instead, I shrugged past his arm and joined Karen—gripped her hand tightly as we continued on, two girls playacting in the image of purity. We crumbled into the backseat of someone’s car and gave hollow giggles at each sharp turn. I felt empty. Every jostle echoed across our vision like a flurry of butterflies as we pulled into the pier—the ghost of Aidon’s hand soft on my skin.
“Hey, this is Perci,” Karen said. Four patch-work people nodded, absent. The wooden planks of the pier groaned under our weight.
“Weird name.” One said. I couldn’t tell where his knit hat ended and his thick hair began.
“Persephone. My parents were classicists.” I said.
“Your parents hated poor people?”
“No, never mind.” I took Karen’s offered hand, her eyes already wide and body tremoring from everything but the cold. Her shaking hands nearly sent the pills between her fingers scattering onto the dock, where they would have slipped between the wooden slats into the milky water. I caught them, dropped the bright tablets onto my tongue, and let them dissolve me into the pavement of the sea, the water crashing in a chamber of noise and washing, whistling callings. Drums pounded in my ears, overpowering the soft melody that had clung to my skin and hair alongside the bonfire smoke as I heard Aidon’s soft voice blur and morph into formless bubble-speak that popped and crackled in my mind. I dropped through the earth, down to hell—awake, again, as I am every night—the second half of my life, the light of my fire after evenings of dull amber.
Once you try the forbidden fruit, everything else just tastes like memories.
AUTHOR’S BIO
Brenna Zanghi is a writer from Upstate New York. Other works of hers can be found in NAME, a University at Buffalo publication, and in 3 Moon Magazine.
