„The downtown exit we’ve been told to take doesn’t really exist.“ – Travel diary entry, New Orleans

Octopi

From either the goodbye party or the dream that had come after, she remembered the following: a Ferris wheel, a broken drumstick, the smell of tulips, and a lot of plural nouns ending on “i”.

En lieu of a hangover with headache, there was that pressure on her lungs. She had had it for several months. The pressure felt as if someone had just casually deposited an imaginary gallon of water on her chest and forgot to pick it up again. “I’ll be back,” the imaginary person said and walked on to the kitchen and the gallon remained there like a heavy souvenir of a stranger’s forgetfulness.

The party had ended seven hours ago and she had been driving for five. She was still looking for exit 235B. She always passed 235A and then at some point ended up at 234B and there was no sign of either 235B or 234A.

She was beginning to think that 235B and 234A were like the strange ugly children of the city that were being kept in the basement during daylight.

At the party she had suddenly been stuck with this woman who was twenty-four and wore too much makeup and frequently used a hand fan to cool down her face. It was her goodbye party and she did not know the woman. The fan was Japanese and the woman had recently had an abortion and everybody knew about it.

She wasn’t sure if it had been the woman who used all the “i”-plurals. For whatever reason, she thought the woman had mentioned the word “foeti”. She couldn’t remember if the woman had actually said a sentence containing that word or whether somebody had told her that the woman aborted more than one baby.

Then she thought how strange it would be for that woman, or anyone, to talk about an abortion using “foeti” instead of “babies.”

What she did remember was that the woman said “octopi.” “This salad is just delightful,” she had said. “It’s like a shrimp cocktail, only with octopi.”

To her drunken ears, octopi sounded like a pie made of octopus.

She left the woman behind and went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She saw the gallon of water on her chest and shifted it very slightly in her head. She put the gallon right where her sternum was.

Then she forced herself to breathe slowly and reminded herself not to panic. It was just a phantom pain after all; just dead nerve ends shooting bouts of stimuli up to her brain.