Wild Animal Kingdom
by Amandine Williams-Abraham


Maybe his name is John. Maybe he’s more of an outgoing Josh or a mama’s boy named Matt that still writes long letters home during his down time. He’s definitely a Matt. He talks about how he misses home and the way he’s still not used to the rocking of the ship, that he didn’t expect things like this but that he’s made great friends with his shipmates. He got a tattoo in some Costa Rican-esque setting while drinking local Guaro that made him dizzy like he’d just been punched in the face because he is a small man, maybe 5’6’’ or so. He woke up in the morning and ran his shaky fingers over the perfect lines of an anchor on his arm and loved the way it looked like shiny black velvet through the tiny hairs on his bicep. He felt guilty later, thinking of what it will be like to tell and show his mother. He isn’t sure if she’d see the beauty of the velvet tattoo.

He longs for the days when he could drink American rum with his friends around a bonfire from whatever good ol’ state he was raised in where he had everything he needed. He misses the smoothness of his favorite blanket his devoted mother keeps on his bed just the way he left it and loved it, washed in the clean scent of original bleach, ironed to a crisp platform. His uniform is much the same way, worn like a flag of home. For now he is home, drinking in a dim lit bar called Opal during Fleet Week, when all of New York is decorated in outfits of snow. I see them in the street from my office on the tenth floor of my building. The sailors stand out against the gray streets and make a kind of picturesque blend with the yellow taxicabs as the last homage to spring and an introduction to summer.

If he would walk over to me I would talk to him about his mother and the letters he writes home to her and about whether or not she would understand the odd beauty of his tattoo. I pretend he is looking at me, but he is looking at my sister Anna, the kind of girl that acts like a magnet to men by throwing her head back at everything they say with even the slightest hint of humor. While she talks to men she strokes the lines of her collarbone while simultaneously pushing out her chest. If she were an animal she’d be a peacock with huge beautiful feathers you’d see in captivity in a zoo.

I am watching him out of the corner of my eye while trying to follow my friend Holly’s conversation.

“…(annoyed drunken laugh)…and then the stinkin’ fax machine wouldn’t work and I was like c’mon…”

By the end of the night Holly will have drunk much too much of some fruity drink that will make her head ache like she too had been drinking local Guaro because she is too small too like the sailor I have named Matt that is staring at my tall and beautiful younger sister.

I am really staring at the ring of condensation my beer is creating against the wood of this old bar table, pushing it a few centimeters every five minutes or so. I have created circles within a larger circle, my own orbiting universe in water stains on shitty old wood. I drink another beer, occasionally humming whatever song is playing, mostly the kind of music my mother used to force me to listen to in the backseat of her car driving in and out of New Jersey. It isn’t long before Anna has noticed my sailor, zeroed in on him with whatever kind of peacock tracking device she was born with that skipped me along with long legs and any cup size worth mentioning. I am more like a canary, or maybe even a blue jay.

She is walking over to him before I can scream at her,“I saw that snowflake first! His name is Matt!” And just like that he has melted himself into another ring on this shitty wooden table, killing hope like Holly’s horrible story about droning office bullshit that makes me want to poke out my canary or blue jay eyes with a well sharpened number two pencil. I drink another beer and stare at my tiny hands.

"Most women that are part Asian don't show their age with time like Europeans," my younger sister Anna always says, but tiny cracks are appearing in my hands, splitting like the desert floor, tiny lines of sweat occasionally filling them like much needed reservoirs. They were once smooth, with tiny microscopic folds that distributed sweat evenly.

I do not have straight black silk hair like my sister. I have my mother’s hair, thin and wavy, bedraggled by the heat and nature itself with shades of red streaking through it in the sun. My mother’s hands are youthful, covered in a layer of oil that had "Plagued her and the French since birth itself," but skipped me, leaving me with dry, short fingers and petite stubbed nails that resemble what she refers to as, "tiny paws." This "tiny-ness" is widespread throughout my body. Even in sexy heels I am barely 5'1''. Anna towers over me, reaching the height of our mother at 5'10''. Our eyes are the only thing matching us, pairing us as two birds in the same field; they are European and Asian, elongated but wide in the center; like almonds, fat in the middle.

"If you're going to be short like your father was then you need to learn how to walk in heels," my mother would tell me. She had taught me how to walk in red leather sling back stilettos with a 3-inch heel on the hardwood floors of our New Jersey home. I had walked onto the slippery floor, "The best surface to practice on," according to my mother, at the age of fourteen. "Straighten your back!" she would shout from the brown leather couch imported from Italy littered with cigarette burns. "Now straighten your hips to match your back!" The hardwood floor like ice, I had slipped and fallen on it everyday for at least two months during the time allotted for practice after school.

After I learned to walk in heels with my small breasts pushed out and my shoulders pushed back, she made me dance in them. "Now turn faster," she would say. When I could spin like Ginger Rogers she would smile and say, "Good job, Heddy," but only when she meant it and only when I had made her proud. I would go to my room afterward and rub my feet, purple toes with tiny mountains of blisters and then wash my stilettos in the bathroom so they were clean of blood. I would hang them gently on the towel rack to dry, the 3 inches of red leather heel working like a hook.

If I danced well enough that day my mother would come into my bedroom with a red tube of lipstick, holding my chin in her palm bracing the lipstick with her thumb and forefinger, applying it so that my tiny lips look bigger than they really are. She would turn me toward the mirror hanging next to my bed and say with her hands on my shoulders, "That girl with the red heels and red lipstick is going to be a beautiful French woman." Staring at my reflection, the red of my awkward frizzy hair matching the red of the lipstick I would think to myself, 'Maybe, hopefully, I'll grow up to look like Anna.'

I take a cab home knowing that Anna has gone somewhere with my Matt, showing him areas of the city that are magical like that little corner of Central Park where you feel like the entire city was built around you and that you’d lived there all along Swiss Family Robinson style. He’ll be amazed and awestruck by her, the way she spreads her feathers and strokes her collarbone while he starts to forget about the letters to his mother and how much he misses home. She’ll make him feel like he’s been drinking Guaro because that’s the kind of woman she is, intoxicating in a way that will fuck you up so much you wake up with a velvet tattoo in the morning and somehow find the previous fuzzy night oddly beautiful.

I drunkenly fumble with all 4 of my building keys. I drop the keys a few times until my neighbor opens the door, staring at me like I am in the wrong neighborhood and the wrong apartment and the wrong city. All I can really picture in his face is an orbiting system of beer bottle stains and all I can really focus on is the feeling of wanting to crawl into and sleep in just one of those rings away from snow, Asians, gray skies, and peacocks. I stumble past him doing what feels like brushing walls when I know I am actually slamming into them with parts of my body, just trying to reach the apartment I am currently sharing with my sister because she has just broken up with her boyfriend Jason, whom she dumped because he baked her a cookie in the shape of a heart.

After what feels like forever I step into my circle, dropping my bags carelessly in the front hallway of my apartment, throwing my keys on the floor next to my heels that I have kicked off my feet. I open my bedroom door ready to fall onto my bed when I realize that she is in my room and that she is not alone. She has destroyed my circle, pushing her brightly colored peacock feathers in my face trotting along like the paraded spectacle she is. I am tired. Too tired to not sleep in my own bed, beneath my own sheets, next to my own things. I open the door and there she is, the face of the French, skirt up around her waist laying over the side of my bed, on top of my 500 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, being fucked by sweet Matt with the vigor of a hungry homesick soldier.

© 2007 prickofthespindle.com