SKIMBS

From when I started working in the stacks at night / And I was scared / But now I’m posting old fiction on main / And being brave

The second time Gumshoe saw the rubber woman was the third morning of winter break, four days into her five day extension, one day after the worst of her period and one day after the Dean’s mangled body was found at the watershed by a loose Pomeranian never meant to exist in nature—much less be let off leash—kinda like Gumshoe’s boyfriend, who was a bad, bad kisser and even worse scholar of why great, great men write great books or something that he couldn’t seem to explain to her without the post-nut clarity of a bump and grind, which is to say a shag and a snort, a bang and a long breath in of the good stuff, which Gumshoe supposed was always really good until it really wasn’t.

“Good instincts,” boyfriend said of the dog.

Gumshoe secretly hoped boyfriend could be held responsible for the Dean if only to spare her the confrontation of breaking up IRL. Oh God oh God, she couldn’t handle the confrontation! But then maybe he would be narratively useful, a jailed up bad kisser that no one not even He suspected, or maybe someone better could make a limited HBO ”MAX” MAX mini series and cast someone slightly less attractive than her but still hot enough for an agent so when the Redditors inevitably drag Gumshoe’s name into their webs of sticky fingered conspiracy they would say, oh! The real girl is actually much more gorgeous than the actress, look! Oh, her forehead actually moves. How refreshing to see a woman aging gracefully through her mid twenties! And look at that smile! She probably did kill that stinky old creep to throw boyfriend under the bus. And good for her, perhaps. Yeah, yeah. Good for her!

Seriously not good for her, thought Gumshoe, taking a good look at how from nostril to jaw and through both lips the rubber woman was cut up real bad, lips kissing like Colorado and Arizona and New Mexico and Utah and the little tourists in the middle who still have four limbs and say, look, Mark Zuckerberg & co & forgotten friends from high school! I’m in so many places at once.

That was the first time Gumshoe saw her, hunched over the complete works of a Dutch deconstructivist, entranced and panting like a big dog not meant for nature but still more stately than a Pomeranian, calm at the hearth overseeing Christmas Eve and preparing to die prematurely in some awful way (big truck? foamy seizure?) that really upsets the children.

The cut was deep but the woman was made of rubber! Gumshoe wondered whether rubber skin would make boyfriend love her more or give her cash sometimes for no reason. He loved rubber women and owned several. One, affectionately called Stacey, squealed like a girl. Another, spitefully called Mrs. Hannigan (mee-suss-hahn-ee-gahn) after a mean, mean lady who babysat baby boyfriend and made him eat peas or something equally and supremely super unfair, made no noise because boyfriend took out the voice box to pretend she died by self-infliction, chose silence after a lifetime of simply sucking that bad.

When the rubber woman lifted her rubber head from Rem Koolhaas and opened her rubber mouth to gape at the librarian, Gumshoe could inventory her rubber teeth. The second time Gumshoe saw the rubber woman it had just begun to Mondaymorningrain.

“I’d say you’re a convenient friend to have in times like these,” MondaymorningGumshoe said more to herself than the rubber woman, who was deaf and mute, practically speaking. “What’s so bad about that?”

Gumshoe found the rubber woman’s taste in architecture rather appalling, the glass adorned disco ballish libraries and hotels and daycares for Pacific Northwestern Hullabaloo that defied gravity and seemed plausibly sustainable in whatever way one chooses to interpret the word. But slobber over the quarto the rubber woman must and slobber over she did, moaning with gusto if not intention and gnashing her rubber tongue with her rubber teeth.

On Tuesday Gumshoe read Kincaid to the rubber woman as advice rather than poetry as the process of deciphering meaning felt painful and dumb.

“‘Always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach,’ are you listening? ‘On Sundays-”

Gumshoe slapped the rubber woman’s cheek, playfully, sisterly. She pointed to her own lips that closed cleanly like Kentucky and Tennessee.

“I’m serious! Look at what I’m saying to you. ‘On Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.’”

Gumshoe shook the rubber woman to make sure she was watching. She’s such a slut for Rem Koolhaas, she thought. If she wasn’t so deaf, she would really benefit from this.

Tuesdayeveningboyfriend was needy, real hung up on the Dean, who was apparently a great role model for him as a young boy, or at least the young boyfriend likeness that boyfriend AI-generated to retroactively soothe before he went to sleep with awesome mantras a la David Foster Wallace, Dean, Winston Churchill, “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” in a Nietzsche way not a Kelly Clarkson way, Tom Hardy, boyfriend’s academic advisor, The Decembrists. Tuesdayeveningboyfriend needed Gumshoe to make Tuesdayeveningboyfriend feel good, better, like the best boy.

The rubber woman’s jaw was looser on Wednesday and gritty with silt—too fine, too damp, wrong for the stacks. Did she leave her seated or slumped the day before? Gumshoe pressed the rubber jaw back into place and said his name aloud just to hear how it sounded now. The rubber woman opened her mouth a fraction wider as if accommodating the shape of it. Of course, Gumshoe knew she could not read lips.

In the stacks on Thursday Gumshoe did not mean to hurt her. That was the first thought, which arrived late, way too late, after the sound which was not quite a tear nor a pop but maybe something wetter that suggested a seam like rain penetrating a cheap tent. The cheek split further along a border no state had claimed yet. Expansion, thought Gumshoe. Manifest destiny!

So she covered her face with binding cloth and stuffed her under the folding chairs in the basement supply closet after kissing her rubber head and apologizing for what she had done even if the rubber woman would never forgive, feel, moan, move again.

“Shit,” Gumshoe said aloud, to no one and obviously not to the rubber woman who could not hear nor comprehend expletive.

On Friday they held the Dean’s wife for questioning once it was revealed she kicked him in the balls in a Harris Teeter parking lot one time on a Sunday, two hundred and forty seven Sundays ago. Boyfriend poured screwdrivers to celebrate the development. He thought a lot about inputs and outputs. Gumshoe thought about the rubber woman.

“You just can’t get away with that kind of behavior,” boyfriend cheers’d to the narrative. Gumshoe thought, how nice it must be to believe in sequence.

“Right,” Gumshoe said.

“It tracks,” boyfriend shrugged. It tracks. It tracks. Gumshoe left for work.

The basement greeted her with its refusal to smell like anything at all. Nothing ever happened there, and nothing ever would. She pulled the chairs aside and there she was, of neither flesh nor civility, not even pretending to consider escape. Silly woman!

“Great,” Gumshoe said, because that is what you say when language is decorative. “Everything is going to be fine.”

“They’ve got her,” boyfriend said two miles across town to nobody but his younger self. “You just can’t get away with that kind of thing.”

The face beneath Gumshoe did not move, but the split, she noticed, continued just a little past where she remembered it ending. Gumshoe smiled, too.