To Be Wet

There’s a rib cage at the bottom of Lake Ontario and I know this because I put it there.

I, twenty-three and glistening, sank my Barbie-pink, almond-fled nails into the fesh of his chest and pulled out his sorry, swollen, unremarkable heart.

It pulsed seven times in the bowl of my left palm before giving itself up.

On the damp earth, patchwork grass unattended to, ravaged by Canadian geese and East End purebred dog piss, he was still, pathetically, trying to breathe.

Fuck, it was funny.

It was funny to me.

He was still trying to breathe as his heart was in my hand and my lips pulled up at the corners and I tasted him through the mere osmosis of air.

It’s funny. How blood can be tasted in air.

His eyes were open and my mouth was open but when I licked the frenzied muscle of his unremarkable heart, he still wasn’t looking at me.

He was looking at something better that he could see, just behind me.

I didn’t know what it was, then. I couldn’t see it. I still can’t see it now.

The vein on his neck that always tensed was tensed again. I licked the muscle like I licked soft-serve vanilla ice cream from the truck that parked by the edge of the same beach every summer of my youth.

But I was twenty-three and a freshly initiated hearteater, so I thought that I knew everything.

I’d ofcially been vegetarian since I was thirteen. But I had only been eating cut-up, deboned, white meat chicken since that day in kindergarten when I learned lamb was the same thing as my small stufed sheep. It’s probably what makes it so easy for me to eat human meat.

It was just a lick, anyway. It’s not like I bit the thing.

Does it count as cannibalism if it’s only a lick?

The sky was the color that told me that the day was either ending or beginning but I couldn’t be sure of which. It was the time of day that wasn’t day but also wasn’t night and everything was a fat and purplish gray and my pupils didn’t know if they should contact or expand which made it hard to see.

I had to rely on my hands.

I’d never broken a wishbone — have still never broken a wishbone — but I imagine it feels something like the snapping of each crescent pointed rib from the frame of his thoracic spine.

Left. Right. Left. Right. Starting at the top of his chest, moving focusedly down the

line. I remember frst understanding that my dog’s chew bones were dead bones.

I remember sitting at the Passover seder table, watching my uncle slurp marrow like soup.

I remember being choked by the stench of rot, of death, walking into the red-velvet-curtained hall of the Palazzo Strozzi at Marina Abramovic’s retrospective show and wanting to leave. But parading down the long room of carcasses was the only way through.

I remember thinking that was the kind of thing that could only happen in Italy. I

remember my grandmother’s silver teapot with a handle carved in bonesmooth ivory.

I remember being surprised when I realized that all bones are wet, until they are not.

Well.

His are still wet.

A diferent kind of wet, now. His ribcage deconstructed like a dessert in an obnoxious restaurant, disassembled, compartmentalized.

He was always so obnoxious.

He tasted obnoxious.

His tongue on my tongue. His fngers in my mouth. His cock at the back of my throat. It was no surprise his heart tasted the same.

Unpleasant. Unbothered. Unaspiring.

Yes, it was full.

But of frivolous things. Silly things. Blood. Oxygen. Cavities.

Nothing of substance. Nothing good.

He was full of nothing, so he tasted of nothing, and I tossed his heart in the ashen, sandy dirt where tired grass bled into beach.

I left it for the expensive East End dogs that still eat roadkill carcasses and shit even though they cost their owners three-thousand dollars for the privilege of being owned.

I left it for the seagulls that steal from picnics, pluck from family fruit platters at toddler birthday gatherings, drag webbed feet through sheet cake icing reading Happy Anniversary, harass girls with popsicle sticks, peck at ankles, scream with glee.

I left it for the sad sand itself. Always too hot or too cold, too dry or too wet. Stufed with dead bugs and cigarette butts and smelling of a collective sweat. Lots of sand, all full of unremarkable, obnoxious things.

I dragged his body to the shore of the sloppy lake. Careful not to wade deeper than a fst’s width from the top of my rubber boots. Only enough to nudge his body into the water with my crescent toe.

I think he might have still been breathing, or trying to. Think I saw him wince twice. Maybe blink.

So I rolled him over, his face down in the water, my boot sole to his shoulder. Watched the water try to spit him back to me for a while.

But Lake Ontario was widely known to be polluted.

Miasmic.

And eventually — however reluctantly — it swallowed him whole.

I learned that it had been night— dawn— because the sky turned to morning. The sun rose over the mourning water and I rode the streetcar to Union, twenty-four ribs cradled in my windbreakered arms.

Well. Forty-eight, technically. But mine were still the right kind of wet.

I boarded the Center Island Ferry, his ribs cradled so tightly to mine.

In my soft, warm hands, I could feel them starting to dry.

I stood on the starboard deck as the Toronto skyline miniaturized into a postcard behind my back.

Somewhere on Lake Ontario, between ashy beach East End beaches and the strip of Center Island, I dropped his twenty-four ribs bones over the railing very neatly. Smiled, because they were all wet again.

I didn’t wipe the blood of the face of my windbreaker. But I licked it of the tips of my fngers and thumbs.

On the island, I waited for the kitschy little amusement park of my youth to open. I bought seven tickets for The Scrambler and rode it seven times. I was the only one there, so the pimply ride attendant let me choose the music that would play while the ancient machine shook me like a soda bottle, begging me to pop.

But I would not pop. Would not fzz or burst or spill. I needed to stay dry.

I sat in the metal carton on the end of the mechanical arm that would raise me up and down as it spun around the center pole.

I pulled the tired rope seatbelt over my hips.

I ran my hands over my ribs.

I smiled very nicely at the attendant as he locked the pathetic excuse for a safety bar into

place. I chose the same song seven times.

In the big, stale warehouse on Center Island, the half-burnt lights went down. The old, sorry speakers bursted back to life.

And I sang along:

Whoa, whoa

Whoa, whoa

Boom, boom, boom, boom

Don’t want you in my room

Let’s spend the night together

From now until forever

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

I’d gotten one of the words wrong. Had always gotten one of those words wrong.

I didn’t know it then. I was twenty-three and glistening and a freshly initiated hearteater— or, at

least, heartlicker— so I thought I knew everything.

I didn’t know everything, I guess.

But I knew the diference between wet and dry bones.