The week before I cut off my own finger, I learned that stories reside in the body. It’s easy to think of stories as tapestries of consciousness that we weave using threads from our minds, but this is NOT the case, according to a guy I sat next to on the bus. I don’t even remember how it was that he started talking to me, which is maybe why he felt like someone who’d always been there.
“Did you know that stories reside in the body—that they well up and flow from us like water?” No, I didn’t. I’ve never been all that good at paying attention to my body, which is maybe why no one wanted to read anything I wrote, even though I was trying so hard, which is why I was getting desperate. The guy on the bus wore a jean jacket and a jean shirt tucked into jeans, no belt. He had a sharp bird face and dark circles under his eyes and a bowl cut that was growing out faster in back than elsewhere. It occurred to me he was wearing things that almost made poking fun at him a requirement, but he pulled it off, and even made me think of doing something like that, so I knew he had be an artist. “This is my stop,” I said, and he nodded at me like that was a pretty real thing to say.
I walked through the kitchen door at Trashcans, where I’m a dough thrower. “Fuck yeeeew, Bobby!” is how Rusty always greets me when I walk in. He says it real loud, whether I’m late or early. I don’t like it, but everybody laughs, because Rusty’s funny. Even Mildred laughs, the new girl with the tattoos. Mildred, who I hired even though she had less experience than the other finalist, who is unassailably sexy because all she does is work at pizza shops and save up money for her next delicate and thoughtful and bold tattoo, who doesn’t give a fuck. Mildred, whose buttprint in flour I recently found on the prep table the morning after she and Rusty closed up the shop the night before. Anyway, Mildred laughs too, though when she does there might be a more complex human emotion in her expression than cruel glee. Pity, for example.