RAINBOW ROAD
He sat naked in our basement all slimy and shiny on the shards of the jar he just broke out of. It — not he, it.
Upstairs the smiley girl in the video went, “Okay you have the dream juice, so next what you’re going to do is remove your heart. It’ll be beating in your hand. Do not freak! Don’t want to drop it now. Cut a piece off, you have to find like a slice that’s—” when Elena came home.
I locked my phone.
We raced Rainbow Road. Elena’s joystick clacked left and right, then she cackled letting loose a blue shell that would knock my Wario from first place. She always chose Rainbow Road, even though she’d drive Luigi off the edge like every turn.
Elena cackled, and I gave an ice-cold scoff. It wasn’t her, it was me, you know how people say. That is, it was her I couldn’t be in love with. Not anymore. There had been hearts dancing in our eyes, but, Elena, sweet pea, I can’t remember when your kisses started tickling instead of turning me on.
She knew something was up, but not what exactly — that I’d be out the door tomorrow. That I’d leave behind our little red-brick house and its fresh white shutters. That when she headed down the hallway to knit in our room, I went to check on the Husk picking glass shards from its butt. The video hadn’t said anything about shards.
That scoff I took as the last sign I couldn’t pretend anymore. There were a lot. Cause it’s like, how can you tell you’ve told yourself a lie? Well, when it grows and grows and grows into a home and a life, into promises, none you want to keep, then, well, you can tell. Also when that new-relationship smell — some crisp floral like maybe juniper, or vanilla — now is all thick breath most days, then, yea. That sucks, too.
She’d get all sad whenever I was honest. This deep-red sad, where blood rushes from her heart to her cheeks. That same red blesses her face when she’s laughing, too. The difference is a stream of tears, like her heart’s saying, “I am not okay.” Not like — that’s what it’s saying.
I couldn’t face that. So what I did was create the Husk. It was me, but not really. Mostly the thing had trouble getting the bottoms back onto my zip-off hiking pants. They turn into shorts. Otherwise the Husk had my brown-hazel eyes, my hunched shoulders. The bite marks dotting each fingertip matched mine exactly. It even picked out the same knit hat I wore around the house, with the clunky seam in the back that my sweet pea knit from bulky acrylic.
This not-entirely-not-me me could stay. It could take care of Elena. It took a few months, but the Husk was here in our basement picking shards from its ass.
Skipping over the nitty-gritty, what I did was:
Pried my chest open, carefully. Took out my heart. It beat bloody in my hand. I sliced a cross section off, isolating a piece that could be happy here in our little red-brick house. It went into a large pickling jar. I pried my head open too, carefully, to craft a silky suspension of dreams we once shared. Floating around the jar were speckles of late-night conversations: about plucking the juiciest tomatoes from our to-be-started-someday garden, or about the online shop for everything she couldn’t stop herself from knitting.
“I have a lot to knit about, okay?” she’d say. We joked that every inch of every room, and our butts, too, would someday be covered in an alpaca-nylon blend. That made her crack up. Sometimes she’d laugh so hard she’d fart.
Drifting in the jar were chunks of my commitments, specifically to make our house a home. More specifically to rip up its carpet. Even more specifically, burn it in a dumpster and put down darkened maple. I added an image of her smile stored in my mind — that smile she makes when she’s proud, but a special version of it, because this thought is of her being completely, all-the-way proud of herself forever.
That piece of my heart grew, like those dinosaurs in water do, into the Husk.
•
The next night I camped out on the wooded edges of our property in a tree I swore would not grow half as much as it did. It should have been stunted by the chainlink fence it sprouted next to. But the oak absorbed most of a whole section of fence (we always meant to look up what that’s called), towering over our little red-brick house.
Like a sample in a jar, I looked in through the glass porch door on her and the Husk indulging in our moments. They danced to Billy Holiday in the dim evening light. The playlist shuffled to Billy Joel, then Billy Idol, then Billie Eilish. Sweet pea thought it was funny. She’d say, “Let’s put on the Billies,” or “the Michaels,” or “the Franks.” And we would.
The Husk wore its hat, she wore her pea-green cardigan, the first piece of clothing she ever finished. It’s why I called her sweet pea, even knowing it’s a flower that is not the color of peas. Together they looked like loony kindergarten teachers.
She chopped vegetables and the Husk measured water, pouring it on rice in a saucepan. It leaned on the beige countertop to watch the rice get sticky, cause that’s the way she loved her rice. She placed a finished bowl on the table in front of the Husk. Her hand on its back. A kiss on its head. Her cheeks beamed that deep red, the one without a stream of tears.
They took turns losing at Mario Kart, then cuddled under the light of the TV. But when it got late, when Elena would normally nuzzle up close and doze off on my arm, she stood up. In our bedroom she sat in her velvet armchair looping a crimson thread onto needles made of rosewood.
There’s no way of knowing you’ve made the right choice. You just make one. Most days I was going through the motions cause that’s what you’re supposed to do. But life isn’t supposed to be “doing what you’re supposed to” all the time.
I climbed out of the tree, dusted off my new zip-off hiking pants, and left.
•
Leaving, it’s not like what everyone says. Your soul still flutters. The sky is always blue and pink and the prettiest shades of auburn. Love never, ever leaves your side. But that auburn sky reminds me of your rosy cheeks, sweet pea. For a stupidly long time I believed that’s what led me back all those years later.
Our little red-brick house was barely holding it together. Actually, it was the thick, leafy vines cabling the four crumbling faces that held on tightly. The shutters were yellow and cracked.
The front door creaked open to silence, not to the Billies, the Michaels, or the Franks. No one danced in the dim evening light. The house’s facade had decayed, but inside my eyes sparkled at intricate stitchwork draped over everything. The furniture, the walls. Threads draped from the tops of cabinets. Each lamp had its own technicolor sweater. Everything. On the loveseat a lemon-gold lattice blanket invited me, like she once did, to feel at home. But this wasn’t home. Not anymore.
The Husk squirmed, startling me, in the armchair to free its legs. Both knee zippers were caught in the knit cover it was sitting on. Its head was decked in a new beanie with this cool geometric pattern and a pom-pom on top. No seams all the way around.
The Husk hadn’t aged one bit. Aside from the new hat, it hadn’t changed at all. I helped him loose with a clownish wig of thread still stuck in the zippers. He went off to his normal route, throwing out the trash and probably figuring out what’s for dinner; things I used to do that made me feel stuck, plus a formless dread along with that stuckness.
The TV was wrapped where you could make out an image knit in place of the screen: black yarn around the top three edges; from the bottom alternating ROY-G-BIV layers extended upward and winded off into the distance. Rainbow Road. Luigi is center screen, about to overtake Wario a few stitches in front.
Tears puddled under my eyes. Not really from sadness, more the realization that something you held so close is not a thing now. Perhaps that’s just grief. Would I have left if I knew I’d feel this way? Would I have told her I loved her if I knew I’d someday leave?
I said it not knowing how much I meant it. It felt right, but maybe not in the real love way? More in the she-said-it-first-so-I-should-too kind of way. That sounds not great, but who knows what they’re really doing in any given moment. You kind of get carried away in whatever constructs one. Memories and experiences. Fears. Cause whenever we say anything we’re really just fighting rejection. That’s what we’re promised from the light shining at the end of the womb — love and acceptance. And most of the time you get it right there in the NICU but once you’re home you learn love isn’t free or all the time and a baby can get pretty bummed about that. So bummed they carry it into adulthood and take it out a girl who just wants to love you. And then she’s gone, and you grow up but too late.
The vines from outside crept in through the open glass door to the back porch. Tendrils shot off the main vein, spreading over the molding on the ceiling and into cracks across the wall. The planter box we bought hadn’t moved from the far left corner of the patio, where in the day the sun hit strongest but was now bathed in blueish-white and onyx. The bag of soil was still slumped inside. But a single green plant burst from a tear at the top. It was hung with juicy red tomatoes.
That oak tree had gotten big. The fence ran right through the middle of its massive trunk. With my hand on the deck’s railing I leaned back and laughed. We actually had a fight about that thing. I thought we should cut it down, avoid whatever came first: a broken fence or a tree falling on our house.
“Maybe the tree can figure itself out,” Elena said. It was a nice thought. Silly, but nice. But the tree was still there, wasn’t it.
Turning back to the house my hand brushed against the tomato plant. Soft. I grabbed one of the fruit hanging low, giving it a squeeze and a turn. It was made of yarn and stuffing. The whole plant was knit flawlessly.
Weird. Cool? Elena was never this good. And this was like, good good. At the porch door; here the vines were knit, too. They crept out of the house, not into it. I followed one into the kitchen, where yarn succulents sat in smiley-face planters sunning in the window. Four thick tendrils came in through the opposite entrance, cascading across the ceiling with the thickest veins continuing forward. One crashed out the kitchen window.
Muffled sobs echoed from the hallway to the bedroom. I stood right in front, staring down what was less hallway, more reflective-yarn vortex that swallowed the carpet, the eggshell walls, and the ceiling. Like a yarn bomb went off and blasted a rainbow web that went from blue to bluer to dark green and deep red and finally black, stretching infinitely forward the way a hotel floor might on a hefty dose of shrooms. The vortex pulsed. Inched toward me. At this end it morphed into the vines that held these walls together. Or were they breaking it apart?
The crying grew louder, and now a steady thumping -- like a floom floom — as I walked toward our bedroom. It would wilt into sniffles for a sec, then stop altogether. Repeat.
The door was wide open. Beyond the frame an ocean of wool-blend blankets crashed in waves from wall to wall and into the hallway. It floofed like thunder as the walls creaked, threatening to give in. Patterns of spruce, topaz, twilight, and tango thrashed high and wild. Our bed and bureau floated from wave crest to wave crest. The ceiling hid behind a menacing cloud of ash-flecked mohair.
I climbed into the soft yarn sea, afraid of how much one person with enough time can learn from videos on the internet. From the top of a wave, Elena was visible in the distance. She was in her velvet armchair. Her rosewood needles were threaded and those threads like thousands of piano strings ebbed and flowed the sea.
She didn’t see me, whipped back and forth clutching desperately onto loop after loop. She didn’t see me, throwing myself over peaks. She didn’t see me, rolling into deep valleys. Elena’s sobbing got louder and snottier.
There’s another dip, then the struggle to pull myself up the next wall of thread, then the desperate tugging at my left knee zipper caught in the fibers, when a wave swept over me.
Rich and infinite as it was, the moment’s true meaning evaporated in seconds. What glimpses I still have into that supreme experience are fractured: Engulfed in a technicolor womb. Dark. Afraid. Skein floating before me its thread running itself through itself and pulsing. A squirming ball of worms surely there’s a prettier metaphor but a ball of worms threading itself into big crimson heart. Soft yarn-heart beating blood to veins those veins to walls of womb. Unknown where attached but this yarn-heart fuzzy-soft. Not mine. Own heart not soft or fuzzy sometimes feels not there at all. Touch yarn-heart, muscles relax, yarn-heart says, “Stop.”
Yarn-heart says, “Look at light pouring in. See it bounce. See divine wavelengths. See how scarlet brings joy and did you know? There’s a color called naptime. A color called juniper and celeste and stardew. Feel softness, feel chunky merino on calloused skin.”
The blanket womb unraveled and I was on my back gasping for air. I stared up at the ceiling, the blanket ocean calm and a bright sun, the real sun, shone through the window. Sniffling sounded from nearby and I ripped myself from where my pants were caught and crawled, finding sweet pea in her pea-green cardigan.
Elena wouldn’t look me in the eye. She held her knitting needles in one hand, the other wiping tears from her face. I got closer and she still wouldn’t look at me. She sniffed defiantly, as if to say, “I’m fine, just wish you hadn’t seen me like this.”
You practice an apology all these years, but when you finally get through it words seem worthless. Probably cause you can’t give back wasted time. And pity — that was unfair. People should feel the strength of the human soul applies to them, too. Give them space. People figure shit out.
Elena grasped her knitting needles firmly and started to knit again. The storm stirred. I took this as a sign: I wasn’t welcome here. I scrambled over the stirring body of blankets and left the room.
The front door creaked open as I walked out the hallway vortex. Elena stood there, more bold than the version I just saw and wearing a not-pea-green cardigan. This one was more serious, like basil. It was tightknit, seamless, and splendidly cabled from the neck to the bottom edges and down each of the arms.
“You’ve gotten good,” I said, expecting a curt response.
She smiled her deep-red smile, the special proud version, and said, “Had a lot to knit about.”
She insisted there’s no need to apologize, even though there was. That I did what I did and she did what she had to. That she knew, between the third or fourth time the Husk picked Rainbow Road, that it wasn’t me.
“I really thought you’d come back,” she said.
She had to let go. It took her nearly two years, but she made a version of herself that could stay in this place where she just couldn’t anymore.
What she did was:
Pried her chest open, carefully. Took out her heart beating bloody in her hands. One section that had grown calloused she sliced off into a pickling jar brimming with a suspension of thoughts like, “I can’t do this. I’m not ready.” She opened her head, too, and wrung out every ounce of anxiety that her partner was not who he said he was, every drop of doubt that there’d never be another, and every ache bound to their abandoned dreams, their abandoned garden, their decaying home.
She held onto that dream of a garden — she would have one someday — and the fact that, whether or not anyone else would, she thought it was cute when she’d laugh so hard she’d fart. Elena also held onto the frustration she felt when I said a living tree could never overcome a measly chainlink fence. That motivated her more than anything else.
“I looked it up,” she said. “It’s called edaphoecotropism.”
That piece of her heart grew, like a tree through a chainlink fence, into her Husk. A reminder to herself that people grow and grow, and never stop growing.
We hung out that night. It was just like it used to be, except not really. This home we loved so much but could no longer care for, our red-brick home covered in technicolor knitting, would soon collapse. We blasted the Billies and raced Rainbow Road, even though we fell off like every turn.
Jonathan Estepa Ortiz is from the Hudson Valley, New York where he revels in the goodness of life, the outdoors, live music, and close friends and family. His writing explores every day human moments, made grander by the universe's surreal sense of humor.
