"The Landshark" by Dani Blackman
Jill’s girlfriend is an inflatable shark. I don’t know she’s Jill’s girlfriend. I won’t know for months. In a few hours, I’ll be crying, but not because the shark is a threat. Right now the shark is pure parachute, with wind blowing up her body to round her out, and there’s no way she can really shake my hand or even say hello. An inflatable shark, like those T-Rex costumes that arrived a couple of years ago. She calls herself a landshark and she is the hit of this year’s Halloween, the cool kid on the block. The dinosaur is done.
Jill’s new friends, all at least twenty years older than Jill and me, crowd the front porch. They’re poorly dressed for the occasion, in witches’ hats and clown wigs, and must give the shark all the space, which the shark gladly takes. Cannon knows these women well. He spins in his werewolf costume and they applaud. Jill doesn’t say hello. She holds the shark’s fin and I stand in the grass and feel a fall breeze, a cool on its way to cold, which I welcome to the heavy makeup on my face. Under the wig and blood and cape, I sweat. “I’m a vampire,” I say to these women, because Jill is the only mother they know. To them Cannon is hers.
A woman dressed in flannel and overalls, a farmer, arrives with a plate of Jell-O shots and I grab two before anyone tells me I don’t belong. Jill unlatches the landshark’s plastic window that covers the face and squeezes a shot into the shark’s mouth. There’s a gentleness here, a lingering of fingers, a mouth taking the whole thing in. Cannon rubs his stiff fur against me and says he’s ready for candy. He doesn’t ask me what’s wrong.
I think of the me I can already see in Cannon, the relentless and in-your-face pushing forward, what made Jill run. From now until forever, Jill will still have me. And maybe that’s why she has to hate me. I had no intention of hating her either, but that’s what I do. I didn’t expect to be at war, but warring is the most accurate word for what we are. War has time and space, and reasons. War has a story.
We played house, that’s our story. Jill and I pulled socks to our already thickening calves and popped champagne and slid across the new, waxed wooden floors. Through the thin walls, the neighbors must’ve heard everything – the determined settling of ourselves, all the mornings we danced and sang to simple chords, country pain. One night, when Jill’s hippie friend showed up with her fat stick of sage and a broomstick to jump over in order to bring good things into our new home, I didn’t back down. I jumped and said love and sex and happiness and laughter and it was all so painfully silly, and still true to what I conjured to become --- a wife, a partner, and beyond that not much else. Most days, there were few choices to be made: the color contrast of the walls, whether the bookcase should stand horizontally or vertically, the meat to be used in the next night’s dinner. A movie to see. Which movie? There were always at least three.
That me is far from what you know. That me is dead. There’s no comfort in this. And there’s the fear that this me you see, raging and electric, will be dead someday, too.
I am dizzy from the strobe lights, but I love the ways these houses outdo the holiday. Wine and whole chocolate bars and haunted tunnels and ghost projections and a real chrome coffin. There are so many children. I walk too fast for Jill and the landshark, who Jill has to lead in small steps from one house to the next. Cannon and Jill yell to slow down, but I can’t look at the landshark. This world is alive and there is happiness here. There are families like we’re trying to be, but Jill is someone I no longer know. I can’t remember her skin.
Cannon will not remember this Halloween or my leaving early. Bye Mom, Cannon says in one last roar and then runs for more. I drive home through deep breaths.
My block is bored and open, an empty hallway. There are no lights or close squeals. The candy is gone from the bowl. The bowl is in three pieces at the bottom of my front steps. I imagine the hard knocks I hear throughout the next couple of hours is someone here because there’s still so much they can take.
I leave my makeup on.
Dani Blackman received an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her short fiction has appeared in CutBank, Witness, Fourteen Hills, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. She has received two Pushcart Prize nominations. She teaches composition and creative writing in Seattle.
