It is a drizzling, despondent Thursday night and I am telling the homeless man standing outside the bar that guilt makes me flexible. Watch, I tell him. I show him how I can almost bend my arm backwards, and how it snaps back when I let go like a sapling. I can feel it when I’m lying in bed at night, I tell him: I can feel it in the stretch and creak of my ligaments.
You got a lighter? He asks me.
Do I, I say. I shuffle my hand through the pocket of my purse and come out with a lighter in my hand, one printed with a warped picture of a cat smoking a cigarette.
Bless, he murmurs, and pulls a joint out of his pocket, holding it still between bared teeth. He lights it with his face tilted down, fireglow on his chin like he’s going to tell a ghost story. He uses his other hand to cup around his face, blocking the wind.
I watch him do this. He’s shorter than me, as if the gravity of the earth has been pushing him down for decades, into a hunched compactness that makes my own bones ache in sympathy. Stringy hair lank and thin against his skull. Can I? I ask.
His eyes glance at me without turning his head, and he breathes smoke out his nose with the joint still clutched between his teeth. After a moment he picks it out with his fingers and hands it to me.
Thank you, I say. I pluck it gently from his hand and breathe carefully through the end of the filter. What’s your name? I ask him.
He shrugs.
I’m a little drunk right now, I admit to him.
He shuffles his feet.
My friends are in there, I say. I point to the bar, a red doorway across the street. The asphalt between us is puddled with city reflections. We – the man and I – stand beside a black metal bench in the strip park between streets. I left to get fresh air. I left because I could feel my body getting too loose, and I needed to coil myself up before I spilled across the floor.
The man nods. I hand him back the joint. I cough a little, into my hand.
It’s too bad, I say. About the rain.
It’s always raining, he tells me.
Still, I say. I look up, at the tree looming above us, and out at the rain falling lightly against the street. A breeze ruffles the surface of the sidewalk puddles like a caress.
What are you getting flexible for? The man asks me.
I look at him, surprised. It’s not for anything, I say. It’s just something that’s happening.
Never heard of that, he says, and he puts the joint back between his teeth.
It’s like the saying, I tell him. My heart drops into my stomach. My stomach twists. My organs get all mixed up; heart jump liver drop kidney beat bones all bendy, jumbled, like this.
What’d you do to get guilty? He asks.
I look back up at the tree. The usual, I tell him. I said something I shouldn’t have.
In the bar? He asks.
Yeah, I say.
Hm, he says.
I play at tying my fingers into knots at the knuckle. My girlfriend says I talk too much, I say.
Is she in there? He asks. We both look at the red doorway.
I nod.
No one’s come out to get you, he says.
No, I agree.
He puffs the joint, which is almost gone. We both look out of our bower shelter at the smeared city around us. The man tucks his hair behind his ear. The ear is swollen; misshapen in the way a wrestler’s might be. I point at it. What happened? I ask.
He squats down and crushes the joint against the sidewalk. I preciate the light, he tells me.
Sure, I say. Keep it.
He pulls his jacket tighter over his shoulders and begins to walk away.
What are you gonna do? I call out to him.
He shrugs, without turning. His hair has thinned on the back of the head enough that I can see a semicircle of pale scalp. Going to find a place to sleep, he says.
I nod. That’s a good plan, I tell his retreating back. I stand there, and I look around, like a broken animatronic. Water falls in clumps off of the tree, fat droplets splashing the grass in front of me. From across the street, three figures leave the bar. My girlfriend is wearing blue. She stops outside the door and looks around, dark head swiveling. She’s not far away, but if I put my hands in front of my face I could crush her between my thumb and pointer. I watch as her friend says something, and she laughs. The three of them walk down the street, and she checks over her shoulder a last time before they’re gone. I put a hand on my pelvis, to hold my stomach in place while it drops. My heart is heavy, too, my whole body melting, drooping off my skeleton like melted frosting.
I turn, and I walk the other way. If I keep on loosening like this I’ll really be able to put my foot in my mouth. Turn myself circular, cyclical, the snake eating its own tail. The rain hits my face now, as I walk. It streaks down my cheeks in familiar patterns. When I reach up to wipe my eyes, the back of my hand comes away streaked black with mascara. This is what I’m saying: body parts in all the wrong places. Pieces of me turning up between couch cushions. God, I think. It’s really raining.
Jessie is a senior student at Lewis and Clark College, where they study English and Creative Writing. As a writer, their work has previously been published in the Palatine Hill Review, Synergia: The Journal of Gender Thought and Expression, Beyond Queer Words, and Mangrove, the undergraduate literary journal at the University of Miami. Living and attending school in Portland, Oregon directly influenced the image of the drizzling, despondently wet city that they paint in this story.
Published 10/30/26