Janie's Old Shells

a short story

---

Janie sat with her chin on the windowsill, nosetip frigid against the glass, watching the people down in the street scrape snow and ice from the windshields of cars. With very little in her stomach the sound of plastic on glass, the rigid crunching of sheeted ice, was more than irritating—rather it was unsettling each individual bone in her body from its mooring, setting her teeth against one another with sharp force. She was not enjoying the act of watching in the slightest but found that when she left her window place she would only wander back moments later to see how close they were to being done, so it was much easier in the end to resign herself to this useless stakeout facing the wrong way in the armchair, legs tucked and deprived of blood. It’s not as though she was getting anything important done anyway. The thick fingers of a departing illness were still clinging for life to the grey matter of her brain and were seemingly intent on taking all her available energy and cognition with them. It hadn’t been a terrible illness, in fact it passed rather quickly over the previous night, but its timing had been wretchedly inopportune, forcing her to miss the New Year’s Eve party that all of her friends and potential lovers had attended together, steeping in one another’s drunken body heat and looking to the future with arms around shoulders and a loving twinkle in the eye.

Today is New Year’s Day—this is how it is going to be.

People had been coming and going all morning but it was a couple below the window now, him handsome and her pretty the way couples are supposed to be. They each had a scraper and were working hard and probably proud of themselves for doing the thing together like a modern beacon of partnership and sexual equality. Maybe she even made more money than him and neither was insecure about it. Maybe he let her put stuff up his ass. This was what their scraping said about them. All Janie could do was despise them and make note.

A feeling had come over Janie the night before, not at the solitary stroke of midnight but long after when even the people still out celebrating were probably ordering their cars or walking against the wind to find their welcoming beds. The feeling had a grip to it, the purpose of which seemed then to be only to squeeze tears from her eyes in choking gasps and snotty yelps. The feeling came to overwhelm and overpower and make Janie fear the capacity for her own body to act without reason, without her volition. The bedsheets were still strewn and twisted as evidence of this crime, pillows rumpled out of shape on the floor with the discarded tissues and empty mugs.

In the snowy daylight, the feeling had grown small enough to be plated on a petri dish and observed a bit more critically, a science which grew quickly boring and obvious like a repeating motif. Janie had spent the last several years making a series of uninteresting lateral career moves which seemed at least half-wise at the time but now showed how like a crab she’d become skittering left and right out of instinct while all her friends and potential lovers were more like, oh, koalas or somesuch creature, giving the appearance of slow, impossibly cautious movement but all the while ascending at their own pace in their respective careers as Janie remained down in the sand kicking up granules and hoping some part of her crab self might fundamentally and unexpectedly change allowing for sudden and easy new egress. Somehow all of these poor decisions seemed to her to have led directly to this illness and all of her friends and potential lovers having fun without her. This was silly but she could not shake the silliness with this hunger in her stomach which she could not sate while the windshields screeched so the people could drive, beguilingly, to Target. All of this–her entire life and the current day–somehow managed to be all Janie’s fault and entirely out of her control at the same time.

The couple below the window scraped off the last bits of ice and shared a deep kiss across the car’s hood as though having just completed a rather intense and loving bout of coitus. They couldn’t even wait to get into the car to do it, grimy little perverts. Janie let out a long sigh like a tired dog and let it frost over the window. Car doors thudded and seemed to echo out, the way winter air feels both terribly empty and full of something almost inhuman and ancient, some left over horror from the last Ice Age. The engine started up, snow crunched beneath tires and then the perverts were off, kicking up road salt behind them. Then, blissful silence, finally. Snow skittering on asphalt. Wind whispering on brick. Pale clouds diffusing light. She’d only just risen to go be lazy and annoyed somewhere else for some other reason when another scraping cautiously started up again, pointed like all of god’s torture plans. The window place beckoned again in spite of her stomach’s tantrum and she took up her post once more. This time an older man, more puffy jacket than human body, was jabbing ineffectively at his windshield with arms too short and not nearly enough force to separate the ice from its tight hold. It was going to take him a while but he appeared determined beneath the trapper hat swallowing his small head and boots sinking impossibly deep into the snow. Entirely unequipped to handle the situation but doing it anyway.

Janie used to like figure skating in middle school. She and the other girls put on matching sequined leotards—and the one brave boy who donned his gaudy suit with saucily flared pants—and they danced their routines to Cher or The Rolling Stones or ABBA, these songs that seemed to be more for the benefit of entertaining the parents than the kids, and no one was ever the star, each person followed the routine to the very tiniest movement. Synchronicity was essential, difference brought the whole thing to a grinding halt. She skated for two years but like everything else she’d tried—Girl Scouts, acoustic guitar, jelly bracelets—it fit snugly until it didn’t. The shell cracked and she was off to find another; restless, transitory, sure that there was a better shell out there somewhere, one she would not outgrow. In high school, there was debate club which gave her a new sense of power until the reality of disagreement seemed to crop up everywhere she looked and turned the world hostile. Then lacrosse which required more cooperation than she seemed capable of. In college she donned the shell of an orientation leader but found it nauseating to interact with students only a year or two younger than her and see her old stupidity and naivety reflected in their wide open eyes. Her major changed, as if of its own accord, four separate times until her only option was to graduate with a degree in gender studies with the hindsight understanding that she’d done practically everything wrong since birth and would be forced to live someone else’s life until she died someone else’s death. Janie accepted discomfort as her inheritance from then on. Whether a shell fit snugly or not, whether it reflected her internal sense of being or loose ambition was no longer any of her business. So long as she stepped outside each day and was not naked, that was enough.

She imagined her friends and potential lovers still fast asleep in bed recovering from the debauchery of a calendar change. Her coupled friends she saw waking in one big (unrealistic) orgiastic pile, comfortable in their unteachable secret of simple love, the ease with which they stepped away from and back toward each other. Janie’s past lovers were as fleeting as her hobbies and career choices. The first kiss arrived like a key fitting with a gasp into its lock, then the following revelations of self which revealed that maybe she’d just picked the lock or there was more than one lock, each more difficult than the last, or her lover became uncomfortable with just how insistent she was on acquiring keys to open them with so they felt like a cadaver under her dull bronze knife and slipped away in the night to avoid being further dissected. Those potential lovers though—who might have been waiting for her in that party house with cartoonish fountains of champagne and funky glasses making shared silly fashion—fell into one another easily and possibly with a sort of relief knowing that it could have been Janie they slotted into and thank god they avoided that. No one wants a person wearing someone else’s skin. It is a presence felt and barely understood, but felt and disliked nonetheless.

The old man was still struggling down there, like a koala’s first encounter with a banana. Janie was still watching, sort of a pervert herself. Unbidden, dredged up by those terrible fingers of illness, she recalled a few years prior that pandemic thing that she’d taken so seriously in spite of so many people having no regard for it at all. When her mother got sick, in the early days before the fear turned to numbness, all Janie could do was sit six feet from her hospital bedside breathing her own hot air and watch her mother’s body struggle and deflate and shiver and fail to shed this sickliness from the blood. She’d watched for as long as they let her with the sounds of coughing and fear and dying all around and then she’d go home and lay in her bed as still as possible, try to imagine what it was like to have a machine breathe for you, to be a body that cannot sustain itself, to be completely helpless. Then she’d remember she was not helpless by some divine hand, that she refused to help herself and accept help from others and any distress she owned was completely solvable but left untouched by choice.

This watching went on for two or so weeks, a scope of time that felt long as an Ice Age, an awful paralysis of the heart in which she thought only of how with each new shell she’d tried out as a child there was her mother with her arms hanging over the lip of the ice rink, a crimson bouquet of roses spilling forth just for Janie; on the sidelines of the field out back the high school, unsure of the rules of lacrosse but jumping and cheering and disagreeing with the referees anyhow; the withheld confusion each time Janie came home from college with a new major and the resolute encouragement to keep working toward herself no matter the winding journey. Always her mother let her scuttle and wander, never forced her hand or slipped her into a casing which did not fit. She let Janie be Janie, even when Janie felt like something that could never possibly be Janie.

When her mother finally woke up and her body reinstated its tenure on this earth it felt somehow still like a personal failing that Janie hadn’t healed the woman with her own two hands. It was a terrible, selfish feeling that resonated too deeply, too closely. Then she’d hugged the frail woman close and whispered I love you so much into her mother’s unwashed hair and her mother had sighed with a newfound honesty and said I worried about you, I worry about you all the time.

Can it really be that every day another day begins? It seemed cruel to Janie that god would present so many opportunities for failure. Her stomach clawed at itself. She needed to call her mother. There were dozens of well wishes from friends and potential lovers to accept as true, to respond to with gratitude. Tomorrow she would scuttle to work again and wonder what it was all for, how she can stop blaming herself for the present and look warmly toward the future. But today, today is still new. The old man still had a long while to go, reaching and thumping and struggling toward clarity. With one final sigh, Janie rose and gathered the important items. Her little legs into snow boots, her big pincers into wool gloves, gangly antennae smooshed down under a big pom pom hat. Her coat like a shell atop it all.

The body protested–it often does. The heart said, oh, quiet, you. Let’s be good for once.

Janie zipped herself up against the cold, trudged down the stairs to the sidewalk below with all the snow and noise and struggle and she made herself useful today, the only day.

---

Did I fuck it up? Did I go too far? / I can learn something because I've been here before

---

old fictions, perhaps new to you

The Runner

With Love

Possible Lives

---

thank you for a beautifully strange year. here’s to moving in whatever direction feels right. all the love in the world. jw