Michele Zimmerman
Ice Water
Revel in a lukewarm shower. The droplets have a metallic scent, but it isn’t often you feel this much warmth.
Dress yourself in a gray sweat suit. Put your wet hair up; let it down when the weight of it starts pulling at your scalp. Fill your bottle of water at the tap. Sip. Breathe. Gather the dirty clothes, shove them into a black garbage bag; haul it down two flights of stairs. Be frustrated with the wet hair sticking lankly to your brow. Tie your hair back up; let it pull on your scalp and accept it as a small unpleasant thing you deserve. Get in the car; sip, breathe.
Wonder, not for the first time, if hurting people is just in your nature.
Leave the motel like a cold wave receding from the heat of the sand.
Let your mother hug you when you arrive home. She’ll place hotcakes and coffee on the kitchen table while you load the washer. Wince at her kindness.
Say you don’t want to talk about the scratch at your temple or the bruise on your forearm when your mother’s blue irises deftly cross your body.
Say it again when your little sister comes downstairs to greet you with one earbud tucked into her left canal and asks where you were last night.
Put your stained clothes in the dryer. Watch them spin while you pretend not to hear your mother and sister whispering, the sound like breaking whitecaps, in the other room.
Convince them to watch a movie. Pick a long one so you can avoid lying to them again.
Jack and Rose get on the Titanic; think of the man you tricked into your sedan last night with the promise of a Sea Breeze at the bar.
Jack freezes to death, the boat sinks. Feel stupid for crying.
Wish you were a love story.
Wish you were a revenge story.
Know your truth once again. Know you are the iceberg, the rushing water come to claim people like your mother and sister. Know you enjoy the churning, the drowning, and know there will be no forgiveness for you.
Take a sip of coffee, cooled by your touch. Breathe. Pull out your phone and open one of the dating apps.
Brace for the storm over the ocean.
Michele Zimmerman
Michele Zimmerman (she/her) is a Queer writer with a BA and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work appears, or is forthcoming, in Catapult’s Tiny Nightmares: Ver Short Tales of Horror, Post Road, Querencia Press’s Not Ghosts, But Spirits, Vol. II anthology, and more. She is a winner of the Fractured Literary Anthology II Contest and the Blood Orange Review 2021 Literary Contest. In the past she has been a Sundress Publications Best of the Net nominee & a two-time finalist for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. By day, she edits and writes for a magazine about illumination and design. Find her work at www.michelezimmerman.com.