The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
“In the Silence – part one” by Kelly Quintana.
Paloma’s hand cramps up from the crushing grip that clutched the apartment key. It had been cold when she first picked it up. Jayla struggled with the key. The ring it was on was old and rusted. The key wouldn’t slip out. Paloma walked over, tried to help. Jayla stepped back. She freed the key with such force that it hit the ground with a bounce. Paloma made no move to chase after Jayla. Instead, she picked up the key. She tightened her fingers around the cold metal and sat at the edge of the bed, staring straight ahead. Now her fingers sting from the strain. The key slips from her grip. She watches it land soundlessly on the carpet.
When they had first moved into the apartment, Jayla had noticed that the carpet in their soon-to-be new bedroom hadn’t been properly cleaned. Paloma had been walking through the kitchen with the leasing person when she was called into the bedroom.
“What’s up amor?” Paloma said, walking into the room.
Jayla stood next a dark spot on the floor. “Look at this, babe. This carpet is disgusting. You have to tell them.”
Paloma called the leasing person into the room and told them no one was signing anything until the apartment was completely ready for move-in. They were settled in, for the most part, after a month. Meaning, they got the big stuff organized but still had a mountain of boxes to unpack. They didn’t completely settle until after a year or so of being in the apartment. They’d lived together for four years and had been dating for eight.
A relationship takes time to build. It takes time to break. It can seem to fall apart from one blow. It might seem like it was that one argument that went too far or that one night someone was careless. The truth is, all those seemingly major blows that break people apart don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re the result of things that lived within the person, or the relationship, for a long time before finally exploding. Theirs was a relationship of silence. And it ended because of it.
Paloma looks up from the key to look back at what she’d been staring at. In place of where a TV would normally be is a painting. Both of them agreed not to put a tv in the bedroom, or maybe Jayla had agreed because Paloma asked her to. She’d heard, once, that it would help people who had trouble sleeping to avoid doing work or anything in bed. Paloma wipes her tears. For a moment she pauses at the dryness of her face. She’d been crying even before Jayla started packing, even before Jayla had admitted something was wrong. The tears are now dried-up streaks on her face.
Both of them enjoyed art fairs and frequented them on the weekends. Especially after her last promotion. But this painting, they got in college. They’d been randomly paired as roommates but decided to be friends. So together they went to their college’s monthly art fair. They walked up and down the small fair, taking care to spend enough time at each stand even if there was nothing of interest to them. Jayla spotted the painting first. The piece was hung without a frame and, therefore, on sale. This was the first time she saw Jayla’s eyes shine. On impulse, Paloma told the artist she wanted it. They hung it right between their beds that they would eventually bring together to make one big bed in the following months. They’d bought it a frame.
Paloma stands. The floor grips her ankles. Her head spins from getting up too quickly. She leans against the dresser for a moment. Once her vision clears, she reaches up and takes a hold of the painting from the sides. Her arms aren’t long enough to grip both sides. Determined to take it down, she switches angles, grips it from the bottom, and lifts it off its hook, forgetting how heavy the frame is. Her arms buckle under the weight, and her fingers are crushed as soon as she loses her grip. A scream of pain and shock breaks through the silence of the room she had been so strictly preserving. She yanks her hands out from the bottom of the painting, peeling up skin in the process. It begins to lean forward; she rushes back, hitting the bed just in time to avoid being crushed. The carpet makes the fall silent. The lack of sound angers her. The glass that contains the painting should have shattered, she needed it to have shattered. It should have been so loud it caused her neighbors to be alarmed. Instead, it had fallen right on top of the key she’d dropped, and now they mocked her.
A dark splatter appears on the blackness of the back of the frame. She looks at her hands. Her fingers are swelling, and they are bleeding at different degrees from her harsh yank. All because she wanted to get rid of that stupid painting. Paloma didn’t even like it. She hated the color palette. It was a dark silhouette of a woman falling into a blackhole surrounded by a galaxy that to Paloma always believed looked like kindergarten art. It’s a cheap painting with a pretentious message. But Jayla loved it and that had been enough.
Paloma’s hand hurts with every movement it takes to turn the bedroom knob. Jayla had slammed the door shut on her way out with the last of her things. How was it that Jayla had packed her things, but her presence remains in the apartment? That painting. The hallway was filled with more paintings they’d collected.
The alcohol tings the moment it touches her fingers. She bites down on her tongue to keep from screaming. It takes her a couple of breaths to muster up the courage to pour it over her other hand. Jayla always made sure they had a first aid kit at home. A quick lesson for her was that Paloma was prone to accidentally hurting herself. Paloma hadn’t noticed early enough that Jayla made a habit of bandaging herself up in silence. Cycling through every moment now, Paloma sees the transcript is mostly her own words. Jayla held her pain, her thoughts, her desire close to herself. She held them so tightly that even eight years hadn’t been enough time for Paloma to know what was going on in her head.
Their therapist leaned forward one day and looked at Jayla. “Why don’t you feel comfortable telling Paloma how you feel?”
Jayla shrugged.
“See what I mean?” Paloma shook her head with frustration. “I try to be here for her, but she won’t let me. Yesterday I offered to stay in with her because she was feeling down, and she kicked me out.”
“I didn’t kick you out,” Jayla said.
“So, what did you do?” their therapist asked.
Jayla looked down at her hands. She’d been picking at loose skin around her fingers. “I told her I’d feel better if I was alone.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know.”
Paloma crossed her arms. “You never know.”