Jimmy had the face of a Labrador Retriever all dogless girls know from childhood that belonged to a friend or a neighbor but of course was never theirs so that when the girls looked in Jimmy’s eyes they saw something like home but better, and if they had to guess, they’d say that is probably why they listened to him at all. That, and the MTV-like legitimacy of his camera crew, two guys he bossed around, with their pimply chins and t-shirts that stank of new plastic and under that something like cheese, with the logo on the back that urged the girls on spring break to be wild and free on camera, to be sold late at night for 4 payments of $19.99—the girls themselves received nothing.
The girls were the point and there were so many. With Playboy bunny sticker tans perched above their bikini lines, and dads who mourned Dale Earnhardt, on break from college, on break from waitressing, on break from figuring shit out, who smelled like the mall, like hard candy dissolved in spit, in going out tops and two-pieces, Baby Phat satin or Von Dutch hats, and jeans slung low on their pubic bones, wearing makeup they could witch from day to night, with hope building and bursting like sunburn blisters, and Faith Hill and Christina Aguilera and Whitney Houston CDs that glittered behind polystyrene sleeves like prom dress sequins in their CRVs, Civics, and Jettas.
Jimmy loved them all in the only way he knew how, for the way they made him feel—that’s what his ex said. He had loved her, truly, for a small while —a woman with a Swedish name and blonde hair that covered her wholly like downy fur. He was drawn to that baby animal aspect of her, and the way that she talked like she had recently and greedily drank a big glass of cold milk—thick in the back of her throat, impossible to fully swallow. Before they kissed for the first time, he burned his mouth on a slice of grocery store pizza so that the small, singed continent on the tip of his tongue was deprived of her and the almost medicinal flavor of her jelly lip balm. She moved to New Mexico after he was convicted. Their daughter texts him infrequently and only ever pictures of a cat famous on Instagram for its neurologic disorder.
Jimmy used to come to Florida for spring break but after the lawsuits and the jailtime in LA, he moved there, to a different part, where things with claws live, things with hardened skin, animals science hasn’t answered yet, with a roommate whose night terrors he can hear through the walls so that Jimmy is forced to sleep with a fan on, one louder than it is big, loud enough to give the impression it could power a swamp boat.
Every December he receives a calendar in the mail from the funeral home that buried his mom. His mom loved him and knew how to cook one dish, chicken piccata, really well. His house growing up was so close to the cemetery where she’s buried now that crows would carry the pennies and glass vase filler in their various gemstone hues left as offerings on the graves, and drop them in their front yard. As a kid he imagined they were gifts or good luck tokens and would pocket them, keep them in an old cigar box gifted from his grandfather. As a teenager whose sole summer chore was mowing the lawn he recognized them only as potential shrapnel thrown whip-shot by the blades. The old push mower, something inside of it a little bit corroded, veered right so that the effort to keep it working straight left him with seasonal callouses that thickened the crotch between his thumb and forefinger on his non-dominant hand—when he jacked-off it was different enough to be exciting.
He makes money now stuffing houses with pink fiberglass insulation in attics with temperatures reaching 120 degrees. When he takes off his jeans at night they stand up on their own, salt-starched stiff like one of those bony swans in the Dead Sea. On his days off, Tuesdays and Sundays, he drinks beer in the parking lot of the Winn-Dixie before doing his weekly shop of chicken breasts, broccoli, and more beer. He follows young moms into the cereal aisle. He waits for them to turn their backs, to reach for their kid’s favorite or the diet kind with strawberries as juiceless as cardboard, and he grazes his pelvis over them with a practiced touch, in a way where maybe it could’ve been an accident, but something in the women knows that isn’t true, and whatever was still free in them is now clipped.
When there’s a hard, slapping breeze like today, he packs his roommate’s small fishing boat with a cooler of Michelob Light, steals off to the Loxahatchee. Out on the water, he pulls his dick through the slit of his shorts and leaves it laying, limp— a frozen, pink langostino tail thawing out in the sun. He thinks of the girls and waits for himself to come to life. They appear to him all at once, a horror movie amalgamation, a congealed force of arms and legs and the bread and butter of the in-between too.
Overhead, a large seabird with crisp, bleached feathers rides the dense air that pushes her upwards. Her back and forth body casts a shadow on Jimmy’s face, his eyes are closed to her. Before she was a bird maybe she was something else—a girl with perpetually oily roots, who lived with her nana and wore pajama pants to class, and then, a woman who envisioned a life that could be velvety, kept rose-scented dry shampoo in her purse and read gothic romance paperbacks on the train, bought French bread and Gerber daisies as her weekly treat. Or, maybe she was always just a bird. Either way she is forever hungry, starving, and her eyes are keen to everything that is missing, open to every possibility. She is able to crack woody nuts and crush shells with her beak—80 impressive newtons of force, as recently measured by the scientists trying to find answers. Below, she spots a small, pink thing in the fishing boat just wriggling to life. Her prey in focus, she spreads her wings, needlessly beautiful, before pulling them sharp and tight to her body and diving, cutting straight through the humidity—down, down.
