Erica Plouffe Lazure

Erica Plouffe Lazure

THE RED THREAD

EVEN WITH HER toothache, Natasha Bromley couldn't resist Jonas Jackson Snow when she saw him on the train: skinny in big tan cords with the profile of a boyish tortoise. His eyes were closed, a headset like a pair of folded-down Mickey Mouse ears wrapped around his skull, a microphone in his fist, angled in her direction. She got up from her seat on the train, kneeled on one knee before him, and angled her mouth near the mike.
"So what are you listening to?" she asked. Even before he opened his eyes, he knew she was there, leaning over his lap. He had positioned himself close to her on the train, perpendicular along the bench. His mike was on to amplify her every move. He wanted to hear her breathe. He could hear the jean-on-jean rustle of her massive thighs. She exhaled onto him the scent of lemons, armed with a ready smile of red lipstick.
"I'm listening to you," he said. When she turned away from him to sneeze, the explosion triggered by the itch in her sinuses plucked its way through the mike and ricocheted like a gift through his entire body.
"My jaw is killing me," she said.
By the time they reached the park, Jonas had attached himself to Natasha's hip like a human holster, tapping Morse code messages onto the lip of her collarbone. Natasha was long-haired and big-hipped and packed into her clothes. She was distracted and giddy because of a boiled wool hat she had found on the train. She liked that Jonas had breathed deep into the paper bag that held the lemons from her father's shop. That he insisted on waiting for her at the dentist's. He watched her ease back in the chair, one hand folding into the other on her round stomach, and imagined the warm saliva pooling at the bottom of her mouth, her jaw growing numb from Novocain. He inhaled deeply when the dark, hot scent of drilled tooth filled the cramped room. He turned up his mike to better hear the whir of the drain and the buzz of the drill.
"Do they use fluoride where you live?" he asked.
"It's city water," she said. "I have no idea."
At countless Don't Walk intersections, she'd look at him from under the eyelashes she had painted blue that morning with a small spiral brush. He became the one fixed point in the breezy haze of the city that day, in the cool air that made her molecules Do more Feel more Make more breathing. She took his hand and led him toward the green. And later, away from sidewalks and in a grove deep in the park, her gasps fed trees as carbon dioxide escaped her lungs. Her right foot anchored red jeans at the ankle. Her tan thigh spilled thick over his brown back. She became an overworked accordion, a fast-panting pet with blue smeared across her cheeks, her green shirt unbuttoned on a borrowed wool blanket. The shuddered rush of pulsating blood passed through her on an inhale - a gift from the trees, their atomic scraps her sustenance.
In that instant her black hair turned purple.
"Tell me your name again?" Jonas said, easing into her.
Before this, he had coaxed her, barefoot, into a headstand: boots cast on grass, socks askance. Argyle and sport. Hers and his atop a turntable she had found at a thrift store for ten dollars with three foil-wrapped records: Sun Ra. Page and Plant. And he insisted on a Souza March, too, for patriotic sex.
"I don't have patriotic sex," she had told him, but her words slurred on account of the Novocain. Sex, for example, sounded like shexsh. "I do it for myself."
"You should try it sometime," he had said. "I'll buy it for you." And he did.
Natasha admired from upside down the black lacquer on Jonas' toenails, the point and flex of feet in the sky. Ribbons of birds, curved like half a lasso, pulled her into the world, into his world. She closed her eyes. She breathed in and looked at this compact package of a man. His turnip colored shirt slid past his ribcage, revealing more dark skin. A thin trove of hair bisected his strong body through the navel.

We'll make mittens this winter
Boil wool into yarn
Dye it with Mercurochrome

She said these words aloud as the blood, trapped in their bodies, rushed toward land in liquid stampede. Their eye sockets squeezed tension from the sensation of mixed blood entering new territory. It pooled in the upper lobes of lung and kidney. It saturated the Southern sides of their bones. It reached, finally, into the neglected tips of capillaries and upper heart chambers. Like so many pilgrims to a shrine, each red cell moved toward their respective crowns, the sacred spot of infants. Here sadness seemed to drain out of her. Here it leeched into the lawn. The last of her numbness left her mouth. She breathed it out, into the trees.
"All you needed was a change of perspective," he said.
"Now my legs are numb," she said. "Do you know where we could buy a sheep?"
He tapped her totem-pole shin with his big toe. Quarters and tokens rained from her pockets and their towering bodies collapsed into one another. Legs sizzled with moving blood on the somersault. Red jean straddled tan cord. Tan cord zipper, unzipped, and no underpants and groping dark palms sticky still from the sidewalk lunch and breath spoiled too from boiled meat and mustard. It didn't matter. The coins winked the sun into her eyes when wind parted the leaves of trees and she began to breathe.

Erica Plouffe Lazure is a graduate of East Carolina University's M.A. Creative Writing program and is now enrolled in Bennington College's MFA program in Vermont (but she still lives and works in Greenville, NC). When she is not writing, she sings in the band See You Tuesday. On writing the "The Red Thread," she says: "It started out with a girl on the train carrying a bag of lemons and a boy who liked to eavesdrop. I liked the idea of conveying scent and sound, two sensory experiences that rarely find a home on the page."