Waste Not, Want

 by Genevieve Arlie

1
Paris was made for poor young pedestrians to drink on street corners and in alleyways, to amble to the riverside and drink on the embankment. So what is there for me here? The suburbs: that’s where she would have sent me. Straight to pioneer suburbia, land of deserted strip malls and discarded Styrofoam cups plinking along in the breeze. Bald peels of tires discarded along the desiccated highways. Next rest stop, sixty miles. Take Helsinki, the biggest city in her country. An elk recently ran rampant through the streets, and when they failed to herd it into the sea from where it could swim away to safety, the police were forced to shoot it for disturbing the peace. Afterward there was plenty of fresh meat. Too bad she was vegan. I hate to waste any part of an animal.

2
I was on a sort of caveman diet, so we didn’t share many protein sources. One evening we made the most elaborate portobello sandwiches for dinner. I seared the mushrooms while she stewed up a plum chutney with nutmeg and cayenne from scratch. Her inspiration in the kitchen put my proficiency to shame. When we transferred the kale from sink to skillet, a teensy chartreuse caterpillar dropped from the curly leaves and shriveled on the hot stovetop. “Oh no!” she cried. “The poor thing!” So he should not have died in vain, she resolved to eat him with our meal. As the only human in whom she tolerated meat-eating, I protested it should be me, but she insisted. The dressings prepared, she layered his little body into her sandwich and took a bite. A grimace flashed across her perfect face. “I hope I didn’t bite him in half!” Days later, she bemoaned the lapsed state of her veganism. “Since I met you, I’ve eaten a whole animal.” Like I made her do it.

3
On a daily basis, she’d say something that really bowled me over, totally knocked me out, like she’d sat there all morning composing it, like Oscar Wilde did overnight. Take the time we went to buy some whiskey, our house liquor. “You eat turkey, right?” she asked as she reached for the Wild Turkey bourbon. “And it’s got a bird on it!,” all hipster artisanal. “Oh, but it’s straight. We can’t drink that.” She abandoned it with a giggle and scanned the next shelf. We left the shop with a fifth of American rye.

Another time we bought Hitachino Nest Brews: one spiced, one ginger. Charmed by the woodcut owl logos with their red goggle eyes and white bellies, we decided to keep the bottles as bud vases. “Do you think they’ll get lonely without each other?” So we set them side by side on her dresser.

When it was all over, I asked what she’d done with them. “Oh, I don’t know. Probably threw them away.” Didn’t even recycle.

4
Cottontails abound in Iowa like squirrels do on the coasts. Before they hopped across my lawn, I’d never seen one wild near civilization. They freeze the instant you appear, a wide-set eye locked on your binocular threat, and wordlessly pray that your visual acuity, like that of the T. rex in Jurassic Park, relies on motion. Nothing says tasty like starting at the least sound. To me she was a total Arctic fox, but in the aftermath she texted me, after we were trying to cut contact, that she’d found the place in her journal where she described how it felt to walk the strange Manhattan streets her first few weeks in the States before we met, and then again at the end: “I feel like a rabbit. Like a hunted rabbit.” And I, like a wolf before the alpha of New York.

5
The last time we saw each other, at our one and only chance run-in, as I sat there over cold coffee pouring out my unchanged heart, she burst into tears anew: “I just want to be happy! A year and a half ago, I was so happy!” So what was I, an instrument to her sense of her own luck, her own good life? You don’t beg fortune of an indifferent universe! Ever since, I’ve resented the word and all casual use of it, all culturally obsessive search for it—until today. Today at the nature center I saw dragonflies playing in the winds above the prairie marsh: drafting, hovering, leaping. In elemental balance. Happiness! Years later, my love, I understand you: you hated your own consciousness in that moment. I just want to be a sea turtle, I wailed under the blankets, longing in my acute desolation for solitude in silent depths, for slow motion in cold currents. I know.

Genevieve Arlie is a tree-hugging Californian with chronic fatigue. She holds literature degrees from Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Iowa, where she was an Arts Fellow in translation. A poetry finalist for the 2016 Disquiet Literary Prize and an inaugural Zoeglossia Fellow for poets with disabilities, she’s now a PhD student in English—creative writing and Presidential Fellow at the University of Georgia. Her recent work appears in the Beyond Resilience folio of Nat. Brut and on The Adroit Journal blog.