J by Sarah Kaplan
She awoke to find herself tangled up with Jeremiah under a giant beige blanket, his hands running over her exposed breasts. She thought someone had been wrapping her up in wet cloth, like a mummy – her ankles, then her calves, then binding her arms down by her sides. But it must have been a dream; it must have been Jeremiah’s hands all along, rubbing her legs and her stomach, until too many neurons in her brain were firing for sleep to keep hold of her. Can’t men learn to put their junk to bed, she sighed and rolled toward him.
“Are you sleeping?” Jeremiah’s lips grazed her ear.
She pressed her hips tightly against him in response and tilted her head to the side, encouraging his mouth to find its way to the crevice between her neck and her shoulder. Now that she was awake, she did not want him to stop touching her. Soon Jeremiah’s boxers had been shoved down toward her feet and he was on top of her. She felt the subtle pressure of his hands against her lower back.
“Hey,” Jeremiah said suddenly, “do you think I could write my name on you?”
“What?” she pulled away from him a little.
“You know,” he looked at her sheepishly, “when I come.”
“Seriously? Knock yourself out, Jer,” she said. “I bet you won’t even get through the J.”
He positioned himself over her, holding his penis down like a giant crayon, concentrating. Focused and eager, his hand moved and semen dribbled out like melted icing in a little arc. She looked down at her stomach and laughed, the meager beginnings of a capital letter J blobby and looped below her navel.
“That’s just pathetic, babe,” she said. “Get me a tissue?”
She lay there with a teasing smile on her face as Jeremiah stood to admire his handiwork. As he looked down at her belly, her skin started to tingle.
“Tissue!” she squealed.
Jeremiah turned to grab a tissue and she stared in wonder as her skin broke out in a rash. It felt as if someone, or a million someones with two million tiny hands, were scratching at her. The scratches were forming a pattern like words in an odd, slanted script that appeared across her stomach.
“H-how did you do that?” she asked.
“Pretty impressive, huh?” said Jeremiah, his eyes resting on the small letter J.
He tossed her the tissue and she blotted her belly furiously. But when she looked again, the words were still there, crawling all over her stomach like tiny insects, growing, multiplying and stepping on each other, gnawing at her skin. I must be crazy. This will not be here when I wake up, she thought. She pressed her eyelids together tightly, as if trying to squish the image in her brain, and rolled over.
Her sleep was troubled by frustrating dreams where she needed to run, but her legs were too heavy or the air was too thick and when she tried to move it felt like she was running through water. Her arms tried to slice down and her leg muscles clenched in an effort to drive her body forward, but she was bogged down by a strange, invisible weight.
She awoke to see the script glowing on her stomach. She stared at it for a long time, trying to read the little swirling letters that were snaking around on her. And in those still, silent minutes when everything in the apartment was sleeping, she began to hear the low hiss of the stories that were slithering in and out of her skin. They were Jeremiah’s stories, little scenes of his life being acted out on her belly. There was Jeremiah spilling coffee and continuing up the stairs at work. And Jeremiah the child whacking skunk cabbage with a stick. A teenage Jeremiah was lying to a blond girl, urging her to remove her bra, telling her he’d never touched a girl there before. And Jeremiah gently supporting his mother’s elbow as she moved listlessly down the hallway toward the bathroom, his mother’s slippers scratching repeatedly against the carpet, a dim glimmer of resentment in his eyes. She had seen many of these images before – she had smiled at the rosy-cheeked boy who peeked out from the photographs on his parents’ refrigerator and she had squeezed as much warmth as possible into the hand of the broken man who stood tall and brave at his mother’s funeral. But the scenes on her stomach were something new. This was Jeremiah raw and gaping out from her belly. She could taste the sweat from his pores when he was afraid and she could see the tears that collected back up under his eyelids when he was ashamed. She passed the night dreaming and waking, sailing through stories from Jeremiah’s life, all the while trying to make herself go faster. But her legs were like bricks and she could not lift them.
She rose from the bed just before dawn and covered her blazing belly with a T-shirt. She moved silently through the room, gently shifting a pile of boxer briefs aside to grab her sports bra. She reached over a neat row of loafers and high heels, grabbed her Nikes from the back of the closet and slipped out of the bedroom. Rifling through a stack of papers from Jeremiah’s graduate school applications, she found a blank sheet. Out for a run, she wrote in Sharpie.
She left the note on the kitchen counter next to a stack of food stamps, laced an apartment key up into her right shoe and passed out into the chilly Chicago air. The wind whipped up under her T-shirt and soothed the now thousands of irritated little blond men who were clambering around, diving in and out of her belly button and tugging at the tiny hairs that trailed across her stomach. Listen to us, they were calling.
She turned left down 61st Street heading east toward the lake, forcing her stiff legs to kick out and hit the pavement again and again. Everything on the street was hazy as if the telephone poles and garbage cans and parked cars were still asleep. She had given up training for the half marathon a few months after she met Jeremiah, and she had not been on a run in a long time. Now she was rushing by, her whole body alert; she could feel tendons flexing and joints grinding. All the machinery of her body was chugging along, carrying her belly and its small army of Jeremiahs down the sidewalk. She felt a burning in her gut, so she tore away her shirt and let it fall to the ground behind her. The cold air soothed her irritated flesh. As she ran, the words on her skin lapped at the wind, their whispers building to a crescendo and echoing in the streets.
She crossed the Dan Ryan Expressway and ran until she could no longer feel the contractions of every muscle, the tightening of each individual vessel of blood. She lost feeling in her feet and then in her arms past the elbows. The Jeremiahs on her belly stomped and danced and beat down on her like a drum as the numbness crept in on them. Soon she was gloriously numb all over, watching her knees bend and her arms swing and wondering what force was urging them onward. She ran and ran up out of her body and into the sky. She hovered there watching the small woman with levers for legs and pendulum arms, running down off the sidewalk and across the beach, cranking her body forward. Running faster and faster into the water, slicing through the waves with arms like blades, legs churning like propellers. The body of the woman was moving so swiftly, it almost appeared to be running over the surface of the water like a hovercraft. A silvery liquid was pouring out of its belly, leaving a trail behind it like leaking oil that glimmered so dangerously beautiful under the rising sun.
This is Sarah Kaplan’s first published story in a national literary magazine.