LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON

Gabe can’t remember how or when his love affair with karaoke started, but what he can remember with stunning clarity is the way it made him feel. For just a moment he’s able to forget about everything left waiting for him— all his problems, fears, and demons he can’t quite outrun. It’s a thrill he seldom finds nowadays, and so he clings to it like a lifeline as he manages to hit and hold the final note of Journey’s Separate Ways. But as the song fades out, he opens his eyes and spots the barstool he’d been occupying before, and then, suddenly and all at once, there his problems sit— problems he’s hellbent on washing away with the fresh drink he’s already motioning for as he climbs down from the stage and heads back to the bar. Claiming his old barstool with a soft sigh, he eagerly reaches for the whiskey placed in front of him and downs a quick sip. As he drinks, he’s acutely aware of someone seated beside him, “Feel like I owe ya a drink just for endurin’ that,” he laughs, turning to face her. Self deprecating humor has always been his strong suit, especially at karaoke night. Pausing a moment, he looks her over, confident he hasn’t seen her before, and so he extends a large, work-worn hand, “I’m Gabe.”

“oh no, please —”

her soft, manicured hand fits into his larger one, her hold on it delicate. it had been too long since delilah had lived in the prairies, and she’d forgotten all about a good grip.

“delilah. would you still get me a drink if i said i liked it?”

NAME: Delilah Atwood GENDER & PRONOUNS: Cis Woman / She/Her AGE & DATE OF BIRTH: 33 years old / June 20th HOMETOWN: Athens, GA TIME IN GREAT FALLS: 6 weeks RESIDENCE: Forest Hills OCCUPATION: Singer-songwriter & Actress

BACKSTORY —

trigger warnings: hyper-sexuality, domestic abuse.

You’re not a glue baby but an infant with scissors — whatever is left between your parents is slashed through by your existence and the truth of it, revealed at three years old: only one of the people in this home had anything to do with your genetics. You remember almost nothing about the man you’re supposed to have learned to speak for, only that his legacy is violence and the warm colour of your brother’s eyes; but you could swear you recall the day the social workers came to visit. the warmth of being passed from arm to arm, gentle voices spilling down on you as you reach your little hands up — sometimes you think that’s why you are the way you are: that because your first happy memory is being held by so many different people, you’ve never been able to shake the need to be touched by many. To be loved by everyone. 

You and your brother are brushed from Montana to Georgia when your father is incarcerated, swept across the state lines like the mostly unwanted things you are, and left to assimilate with your mother’s new family. This is where the majority of your early memories come from, tinted by yellow sunlight and the sensation of dirt and pebbles embedded into your bare feet. Your brother is too old, too solidly a figure to open up his chest and accept a transplant of circumstance, but you’ve always been too susceptible, even if backwater suburbia was never meant for you — you take to things the way water takes to paper. Even images consume you, leave you sopping and your form changed. The satellite on the TV seems only to connect to stations that had been assembled and abandoned (not unlike yourself) from decades past, black and white reruns on the little screen in the living room that you sit in front of, knees on the floor and teddy bear clutched to your chest. It’s an internalisation you never realize you’re taking in until years later, raised as you are on the remnants of old Hollwyood: that fawnish, vanilla-puff Marilyn Monroe voice and kittenish wiggle; a Bardot wink; the totality of a Lauren Bacall romance, where a heart gives everything or dies trying. 

Perhaps you would’ve had a chance if he hadn’t left, but your brother follows an inheritance set out by the not-father you don’t share, and abandons you to a twenty-five year sentence for poor choices. It’s ten years by the time he proves, with good behaviour, that he’s not his father’s son, but by then it’s too late for you. Despite your ability to part every room you walk into like your profile is a knife’s edge, you’re too soft a girl — everything you brush up against bruises. You’re the prettiest girl in school, and the one over, and probably even the one after that, but like kidskin gloves turned inside out, you give the most vulnerable bits to the world at first glance. You cry for everyone: strangers on the news, friends made in the bathroom at house parties, yourself. You cry a lot for yourself after Solomon is gone, left as you were to nobody who knew how to properly love you (with everything, with all of it, with arms outstretched to catch you when you fell). So you find solace filling those inside-out gloves with any hands that will fit inside them, in cars or restrooms or pulled down in the tall grass. It’s not just about feeling loved, though sometimes it is. Touch is your first drug, and you never quite manage to quit it.

The others are more recreational, your ability to pick them up and put them down bolstered by the transient nature of your interest — you flit to and from pastimes and pursuits like a butterfly, the only thing you chase consistently is a life bigger than the one you’d been squeezed into. You’re meant for it, everyone’s been telling you since you were a little girl — or maybe you’d been the one telling them, you don’t remember — singing on the porch and waving down cars to stop and listen.

Your husband believes it too, when you meet him. 

He’s older and established, with wide-set shoulders and thick-set wallet that between them prove vast enough to pry your heart open. By then you’d already made a living by living with rich men, but by the time he moves you into his house in the hills in the City of Angels and pays for a six-figure wedding, it’s everything you know you deserve — the initial worship, the glamour, the anger. You’re a beautiful thing, but you’re not worth much after all. That’s what you’ve learned with time, what you believe in the endless pit of your soft heart. We accept not only the love we think we deserve, but what we believe to be the price of forever. And you’re a country girl, after all, even if you hide the Southern roots by burying them under the back porch and planting flowers over top — you can weather a storm. You can nod through the condescension, smile after the half-hidden slights he makes in private about what you wear, what you do, and how you do it. So that’s what you do: you stand naked in the rain and wait for sunshine.

Until he finds your eccentricities exasperating rather than charming; your taut sexuality indecent rather than inspiring. Until you find his collar painted in perfume and lipstick that aren’t yours. 

You make the drive from California to Montana by yourself, designer trunks stuffed full of all the inconsequential novelties of your life, a last name you never gave up, and a bank account overflowing with money from a settlement that lands in your favour. You show up not at your brother’s doorstep but on his phone, a call made from the roadside as you’re being written up in a police notepad: Surprise, honey! Could you do me a favour?

“It makes your heart race. It turns the world upside-down.”