Paper Bag

A short story by Marcela Santos Brigida

E.T. Parris (1793 - 1873)

I saw your brother yesterday, and he had lost all his hair. Not a strand on his shiny head and traces of your smile hanging onto the creases at the corner of his eyes. I felt very much like a wild fox, hungry for flesh and thirsty for blood, scared by its own shadow while lurking, unloved and unlovable, on somebody’s lawn. Paralysed but electrified; a gut reaction that comes before the brain has time to filter and process it, a tingling sensation in the spine that is like seeing you again. That one feeling, dormant for fifteen years, utterly forgotten, comes alive and transports me to those days, that one particular evening, you know the one. Exactly.

I saw him, but he never saw me, and as I pushed the cart aimlessly forward, stricken by an anxiety of coming upon him again in the household essentials aisle; the fear of being seen by him, old and bloated, greasy and sad. Would he even recognise me? What does one even say? I could not bear the sound of hello. I marched straight to the self-checkout lanes impersonating a normal person, scanning my biscuits and tea with dry, shaking hands, looking ridiculous, feeling absurd. One of my cuticles was bloody.

Of course, I didn’t see him again. Maybe I never saw him at all. Maybe it was, like the invisible silverfish my cats chase in the nooks and crannies of my home, both the pestilence of small-town living and the hauntings of a neurotic mind. It was his bald head but also the hint of your thinning hair, sliding off-camera to the side, a wrinkly elbow, a sagging stomach, some discolouration around the eyes, the oldness I can infer but never see.

I saw your brother yesterday, and it brought it all back again, this never-ending revisiting of the same old places, making them looser, duller with each new tour, terrified because I cannot stop. If I grasp one memory, I must gorge on my hoard, each smile faded, the scenes two-dimensional like a period drama filmed in the 1980s, big hair and flashy make-up somehow all wrong, sensation but no feeling, nothing more. Your hands replaced perhaps with someone else’s, a wrong impression from a dream or your brother’s frowning forehead as he double-checks a shopping list on his iPhone.

I carry my things home in a paper bag, my legs stiff all the way. Cross the road, reach for the keys. Upstairs neighbour kindly holds the lift door open for me, thank you, have a lovely day, a dark grey sweat stain on the collar of her t-shirt. Two apples. One bottle of cranberry juice for Lar. Flour, a stick of butter, and a pound of sugar for the cookies Jemima will probably not even bake. Normal, glorious life. Chores, appointments, and get-togethers. I’m still safe. Safe and alive, and alive, and alive.