I Want to Save Us by Jean Marie
Editor-in-chief Jennifer A Howard on this week’s short: “I Want to Save Us” by Jean Marie is an experience. Read this one out loud. Challenge yourself to keep going even when a line hits, when you feel that insight, that loveliness, in the waver of your own voice. Good luck. Or: read it aloud in a room with people, and listen, pause, in the moments when somebody nods or sighs or says say that again please. This story will linger in the air around you, and probably in your heart too, for a good while.
i want to save us
The last time I saw you, Graham, I thought we should have filmed it, the last time, remember, the time we realized that whatever this is has a life of its own, Graham, and we should’ve filmed it, that time, God, Graham, the position we were in, that time you came to me after being away and barely messaging me, Graham, and you were never like that, never one of those goblins, God, Graham, you are not an apparition, and then we texted back and forth, and I said I could push you away since what do I look like, you texting me a set of schedules and coordinates like a fuckin Uber driver, so I held you back, I didn’t confirm the ride, I didn’t open the door to your dash, and I did something I never did before, I talked back, I told – oh God, Graham, we should’ve filmed it– I told you I was upset and I didn’t like it, and you didn’t respond the way I thought you would, Graham, you didn’t call me names, you didn’t throw cruel at me, the way he would have, he would have called me a spoiled brat, he would have said worse than that, and I saved that, I saved cruel, Graham, why did I save that, a hurt in my bag, Graham, so when you came back and back again, it was a stun in my system, a flowering one, like a bullet blooming, cause God, Graham, it hurts to feel love when all you’ve gotten is harsh, when all you’ve got left in the face of touch is a flinch— so I held you back, but then we were going to meet again, finally, that time, in my room, I mean, God, Graham, we should’ve filmed it, and we said around seven but then you didn’t come and later I got a message, because you weren’t a ghost, Graham, the one where you used my name, you said Jane, I am so sorry. I fell asleep. I am so sorry and all I saw, Graham, was my name in your thumbs, God, in all those texts all these months—how long has it been, Graham— I don’t think you’d ever typed the letters of my name before and I felt it, I felt your thumbprints drum my tongue, I felt my name rest in your palms, I felt you echolocate me, reach through and shake something loose, and then you came over, Graham, and God, what is this, what are we, but I mean, God, Graham we should’ve filmed it, God, I wish we’d filmed it, Graham, my face over yours and I can’t even say the position without being obscene, which means you only know it when you see it, God, and I know you worry, Graham, that I feel things you don’t and of course I do, but I just want whatever this vibration is, parasitizing me, the sound, like a pop of bubble wrap, and maybe a partner is not this, a partner is death and taxes, all flattened, and you are topography, the snap of yeses, and when you finally came over, Graham, it was like inhaling a map and— God, Graham we should’ve filmed it— your nose in my eyelashes, the hum in our crumbs, and you worry about my feelings but then you keep coming back, we keep coming back like a breath we have to gasp, and you can’t have that without something of a cosmos thrumming between us, and God, Graham, I just wish we’d captured it, our human, recorded it like this, like the button birth leaves behind on a belly, like my mother left on me, because God, Graham, you know I erased them all, I eradicated all her voicemails, Graham, I erased them, I deleted them and then emptied the trash I put my mother’s voice into the garbage can of a device and lost it forever, because then she lost her own voice and then she lost her breath too, and even though I knew that was going to happen I didn’t keep any of them, I tossed her vocal artifacts and I had to ask my sister, Graham, for her voicemails from our mother, I have to pretend they are recordings of my mother talking to me, but it’s not my name she says, she says, Oh hi, Sarah, it’s Mom, because God Graham, I wiped them all to make space on my phone for games, Graham, God, Graham, they say nothing can be erased, the internet has traces of everything but it’s not true, Graham, what isn’t recorded isn’t recorded and what we do not save is not saved and I want to save us, Graham: because I want to hear it, because you can’t pull the voice of your mother back once it’s swallowed, I closed the door, deleted all those messages, I rolled my eyes for years at the ringing and held the phone away from my ears, it’s like I never answered at all and I didn’t, a lot of the time, I let her go, to a box and then I scrapped the pieces, Graham, God— this life, it’s just losing things— and I didn’t keep anything, you can’t find wisps of her anywhere, not in nubby shreds of pink eraser not even that residue, it’s gone, and I’ll say I don’t love you Graham, because maybe I do, so even if we’re all heading towards cosmic extinction I want the artifact of us, our phoneme, Graham, before the abyss; if the universe ends with us I want evidence, proof that we were, once: here, feral—ferocious with love— so God Graham, the last time I saw you, I mean, Goddamn it, Graham, we should’ve filmed it.
Jean Marie is a recovered litigator turned writer and yoga teacher in Park City, Utah. She recently graduated with an MFA in fiction from Bennington. In 2022 she won First Place in the Short Fiction category of the Utah Original Writing Competition, and her work has appeared in Five on the Fifth. She tweets @jeanmarieyoga
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