Girl
by Shelly—Age 43—Phoenix, AZ
I wasn’t some messed-up teen trying to earn beer money. I was almost 30, at a weird place in life, and I was on my knees scrubbing the floor of an apartment laundry room with a chemical agent the inhalation of which, the bottle clearly stated in toxically red letters, had been “associated with certain types of brain tumors.” It was a gossamer thin threat when stood up beside the prospect of starvation or homelessness or moving in with my relatives. And it was probably just the fumes from the varnish stripper, but at some point all the little disappearing bubbles of cruddy shellac began to resemble a gallery of oblique eyes in cartoon faces, blinking and searching as they dissolved. I was locked in to keep the residents out, who persisted in coming to the door and banging loudly every so often, dirty clothes fainting in their arms. The higher I got on the smell, the less I noticed these interruptions. The floor folk slowly took more solid form, animating in resistance to my knife—the job required a sort of hand held guillotine blade as ten year old floor finish won’t strip with a squishy little sponge. Maybe that was my hook in this job. I had this idea that I was soft, that I deserved on some padded and flabby level of my soul to spend my life pumicing oven soot, bleaching toilet rust and living on the twelve bucks a week I had left after rent and utility bills. This kind of degradation has its breaking point, but the working poor aren’t just broke—six months of hearing that God gave you fingernails so dripped paint can be scraped off cabinets and the broke parts rattle around when you walk. The faces were still there—roiling around in a pre-Homeric, glorified chorus of oh what the fuck is this. I kept cutting them off, wiping them out in floor faced acts of genocide or sometimes I would just pool the poison and they would macerate like old fruit on fast forward only to reappear again under my shin bones with a deep socketed, slow staring fixation. I got a little obsessed, but I was stoned. Or developing a brain tumor. And then I got fired and I starved, which was one way to finally close their peeping eyes and walk away.
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