American Incubus
by Samantha Styers
Sometimes you wake up before anyone else. Everything is still and quiet in the cold gray light of a predawn Tuesday, every nook and cranny shadowed, and even the colors in the mirror are muted, shades of black and white. Your skin is cold, your eyes are rimmed with red and your hair is greasy and limp. You smell like last night's whiskey and you feel like last week's garbage. There are bruises on your ankle, your shoulders, a green-black imprint on your arm where someone helped you up last night. That was after you accidentally sat down in the middle of the road, beneath the stars, a pillar of ash between your lips, your shirt somewhere in Marin's house, the air like a frigid coffin around you. It was so cold you could see your breath, your cigarette long burnt to the filter and dead. You can't remember who it was that left those marks like rotten fruit, just that whoever it was had big hands and a rough grip.
There's a cut, too, just a little one that runs from the corner of your mouth to the little birthmark on your chin, and you don't remember where that one came from, just that it stung like hell when you spilled your drink on it, and that it left little splotches of red on your pillowcase. Try explaining that to mom and Pilot; or don't, because they don't want to hear it anymore, do they?
Everything in the house is in black and white and shades of gray, just like in I Love Lucy or Gilligan, and it's almost a tragedy when the coffee machine purrs to life, grumbling and bubbling in the kitchen, every spatter of caffeine-laden liquid hissing on the hot glass bottom of the pot. It half-reminds you of a rattlesnake, but not enough to be anything less than the annoyingly pre-modern convenience it is. It ruptures the illusion of tranquility and shatters the bite in the air; the frost lifts, and you're left with nothing but the absolute reality of a Tuesday morning in mid-February, that you have class in an hour and that your mother and Pilot will be waking up soon, an army of two with their Spanish inquisition of where-were-yous and how-late-were-you-outs, still pretending like they're angry when you don't give the right answer, Pilot with his big, sleepy eyes that no matter the safety in them are looking right through you, and mom with her harangued expression of disco-trash-turned-responsible, hanging onto your childhood like it was her last bottle of Jack Daniel's.
It's not too late yet, and you creep back into your bedroom, slip back into the warm, safe haven of your bed and hide beneath the covers the same way you did when you were six years old and you wanted mommy and daddy to stop screaming at each other. The salty, human smells of tears and sweat and dirty hair are still there, ingrained in the pillowcase, mixed with the strange, musk-herb-sewer scent of bad weed, and it's just as comforting as it was twelve years ago, if only for the familiarity of the whole thing.
You can hear them, Pilot first, with his lop-sided gait, thump---thump-thump---thump down the hall, and in your mind you picture him, sweaty and overweight and unselfconsious in his pajama pants and no shirt, a hairy beer gut the size of your mom's old mixing bowl jiggling with every step, but he doesn't care, and really, you don't either. Pilot's not a bad guy; a little bit like a old cow, slow and dumb and harmless. Your mom's behind him, stepping with that instinctive feather's touch, come from living too long with a short-fused drunk - your daddy - her tits small and hard beneath the thin cotton of her nightgown, just like the rest of her, all muscle and bone, because she smokes more than she eats. Bleach-blond, her hair as drab and limp as the rest of her. Back in the seventies, she was bitchin', and now she's just a bitch, full of regret and remorse and bitterness as sharp and tangy as the funk growing in the milk carton.
She curses at that, too, when she goes to pour herself a cup of the coffee that broke your little fantasy; a fucking shit, don't you ever buy milk? and a sleepy, complacent grunt from Pilot that means he's used to mornings with her. There's the sloshing sound of America's favorite drug being poured into twin white coffee mugs, thirty-nine cents at Wal-Mart, and the wet smack of your mother's hand connecting with one of the slabs of meat that make up the two halves of Pilot's back. It's not the same sound as when you were little, the flat hard pack of daddy's fist hitting mommy's cheek, this is a sign of affection, the only way your mother can show it.
A few muted rustling sounds, the paper unfolding, Pilot handing your mother the business section, him opening to sports, and then they're talking about you in those quiet voices, things like should we wake her up and does she have class today? - things like is she still drinking and was that pot you smelled in the bathroom last night are so last year. They've gotten over it, mostly, so long as you keep it out of the house and don't get ticketed or, god forbid, put in the county jail overnight. Not that it hasn't happened before, but you get the feeling that mom can only take so much more before she overdoses on valium and then you'll have to mortgage the house to give her a funeral that's a step up from white-trash, as if anyone would care.
Everything goes quiet again, and it's almost like it was before, cold and gray and still. Close enough that you're falling asleep again, even if it's only for ten minutes, because you have to wash the smell of booze out of your hair and put on some lipstick before you go to class. Your alarm will go off at six, which gives you thirteen minutes of half-sleep and twenty-eight before you have to get out of the house and head to the community college down the road.
Long enough.
Sometimes you wake up, and everyone else is asleep.
Sometimes, it's like you never woke up at all.