Super Glue

The small space under Clara’s right eye was red and starting to swell. She was looking off into some distant thought and Jake wondered if he was part of it. The mystery was giving him anxiety. Instead of dwelling on it, he went around to the other side of the car and turned up the radio. The music filled the empty space and Jake felt like he was on fire. Springsteen has one good song, Jake said. Clara lit a cigarette and ignored him.

The night before, Clara had been washing a glass when it dropped and shattered, leaving her wrist bleeding steadily, fat emerging like the stuffing of a pillow. Jake was laying in bed and heard it all. He was stoned and when Clara called to him he knew the night had gotten longer. She stood over the sink holding her wrist and looking at him as he came from the bedroom. The kitchen was doused in orange light and he felt she never looked so beautiful. The blood was part of it but that was something he’d reconcile with later.

Standing next to her in the bathroom, water running, he held a wad of paper towels tightly against the cut and looked at her through the mirror. She was nearly expressionless, like as though they’d done this a hundred times. Perhaps they had. He took out a bottle of alcohol from beneath the sink and she started to pull away, objecting. He held onto her and blocked the door. There is no other way, he said. Hospital is out of the question. Stitches are out of the question.

He kissed her on the cheek and dumped the alcohol over the cut and the clear liquid thinned out the blood and dripped down her forearm. She bit her lip and dug her nails into the flesh between Jake’s thumb and index finger. I feel a lot better about this, Jake said.

He’d found an unopened bottle of super glue in the junk drawer next to the bloody kitchen sink and told Clara to hold her arm straight up. Drain the blood, he said. She held it for awhile and got tired so Jake helped her hold it and they stayed that way for awhile, him standing over her sitting on the toilet. He thought about the golden retriever his family had growing up and the time she got hit by a car and died. Clara asked if she could put her arm down yet and Jake said no.

After awhile he figured it was as good a time as any and Clara seemed to be getting to a point where something needed to be done. Ok, he said, you need to pinch the skin here together and I’m going to put a line of glue there and try and blow it dry. Clara said ok and held the cut together as he applied the glue. It dried surprisingly fast but blood was still oozing out in little globules. He’d pat the the blood but the toilet paper he was using would get stuck to the glue and when he’d pull away the cut would reopen. For fifteen minutes he repeated the process, making sure Clara kept her arm up. He was shivering and she asked if he was ok. Ok? he said. I’m high. Yeah, she said.

Finally the glue dried and the blood stopped and they went to bed but Jake hardly slept. Every movement Clara made caused him to shoot up and make sure she wasn’t bleeding out. He imagined waking up in the middle of the night in a pool of her blood, her skin blue, eyes wide open.

They went for a drive the next morning. Nowhere in particular. The spring letting on into summer so they rode with the windows down. Clara had her good hand on the wheel, the other out the window. Jake kept thinking about all the blood and was trying to remember just how much a person has at any given time. When I was kid, he said, I used to get a cut, like on my finger, and I’d suck the blood. I was afraid I was going to run out. I think I did too, Clara said.

Later, when Bruce was done singing and the radio went to commercial, Jake suggested they get something to eat. Seem’s like some food would do us good, he said. Clara said nothing but got back into the driver’s seat and so Jake jumped in too and they drove off.

On his phone, Jake watched an internet video of a puppy sleeping and said, Sometimes I feel like I could cry for hours. Clara adjusted the rearview mirror and said, I honestly don’t care at all about what you feel or could feel. That’s fine, he said. The sun was coming in and making it hard to see so he put down the visor and sat up straighter in his seat. Clara was squinting into the sun so Jake reached over put her visor down too. She breathed out through her nose but seemed to accept it. A commercial for used cars they loved was playing and Jake started singing along with the jingle until Clara turned the station and Tribe came on. They sat and listened to Q for awhile, heading nowhere.

Jake looked over at Clara and noticed some blue appearing under her eye, mixing into the red. They were at a stoplight and on the corner some men were doing work, filling with gravel a hole they had dug. Every time one would take a shovel-full, the pile of stone would run down itself like a small avalanche. The rocks tumbled but the mound itself never changed. One shovel after another and it seemed like nothing had ever happened, would ever happen.