Treehouse

Christine Hennessey

Be grateful you never had kids, but wonder who will get the dog. Wonder who the dog would choose, then realize the answer is neither. Dogs are simple creatures but they give what they get and your dog was the first in the family to go on antidepressants. Just living in your house, it turns out, is a form of animal cruelty.

You should have gotten a cat.

Speak in subtext only. Argue about small things – semantics, siblings, supper – and remain silent about all else. Complain to your friends but never your parents. Go to bed late, wake up early, fight over the blankets and, even in sleep, monitor your bodies so they never graze.

You should have gotten a bigger bed.

Your therapist says the problem is communication. That you need to talk to one another, to say what you feel and open your hearts. But your therapist doesn’t know that your chest is a cavity, cavernous and black. Instead, check out all the self-help books in the library, but read none of them. A bookstore is a commitment you cannot make.

You should have gotten a different therapist.

Remember, over a bottle of cheap red wine, how it started. The first dates, the coy smiles, the sex. Remember the time you went bowling and stole the shoes, the anniversary dinner you burned and ate anyway, the day you adopted the dog, a rescue that had been neglected and abused. Pause over that word – rescue.

Remember when your parents staged an intervention during Thanksgiving dinner and made you sit outside in the freezing weather, told you to act like adults and asked why you insisted on ruining everything for everyone? Remember how you stared at each other, refused to speak, until your hands got so cold you lost feeling in your fingers.

Wonder what happened. How something so good could get so bad, how years of not paying attention can turn someone into a stranger. Finish the wine. Pet the dog. Go to bed late, wake up early.

Christine Hennessey is a teaching assistant at UNCW and her fiction has appeared in LIT, Forge, and The Molotov Cocktail.

Christine Hennessey

You bruise easy and always have. I dress you in long pants, shirts with sleeves, socks to your knees, even when it’s ninety-five degrees and humid. I prefer the disapproving looks caused by your sweaty brow and labored breathing to the ones I receive when your skin is exposed, purple patterns on your pale limbs, weaving their way around your ankles and elbows.

I take you to the doctor at least once a month, hoping for a cure, though I’d settle for a reason. The doctor can’t find either, but assures me that the bruises are not life threatening, and do not hurt. “Cosmetic,” he says. “Just wait for them to fade.” You sit in the corner while we talk, playing with your doll, and I can’t help but notice her plastic limbs, smooth and unmarred.

————

When you come home from school with a darkening swath of skin that stretches from your ribs to your right hip, I ask if you remember banging your body against anything at school. No, you say. You don’t. I ask if there is, perhaps, a different route you can take, a path from the chalkboard to your desk that is more direct. Safer. No, you say. There isn’t.

And so I go through the house and wrap the corners of the bookcases, the chairs, the coffee table in bubble wrap, in rubber strips, in soft batting that I take from your favorite quilt. You cry when you find the blanket gutted in the trash, bury your face in the soiled fabric. I try to explain that it’s for your own good, but you won’t listen. You won’t stop crying and I send you to bed, then sit on the couch, chewing my fingernails down to the quick, tearing the skin with my teeth, while I wait for the sound of your sobs to subside. When it’s finally quiet, I come into your room, sit next to your bed, watch you breathing, your arms flung over your head.

And then I see the dark spot on your chest, the edge of it rising from under the collar of your shirt, and I know that it’s my fault. I look away, notice your doll on the floor next to the bed, and then I am holding it, cradling it in my arms. The empty eyes, the cotton hair, the smooth arms and unmarred legs. I sing to the doll, softly so as not to wake you, and in the darkness you slumber on.

Christine Hennessey is a teaching assistant at UNCW and her fiction has appeared in LIT, Forge, and The Molotov Cocktail.