By Heather Etelamaki
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sexism, abuse
It starts with the burns on your hands. You can’t see them too well in the dark. They came from the coffee. You fell down the stairs in the theater building between classes. The coffee was scalding. Bruce laughed while you cried.
You didn’t quite know then that Bruce was a cad. (Sometimes people laugh when other people fall, maybe he couldn’t help it.) But he took you to the health center. Doing things without unblemished hands was hard for about a week.
Later, Bruce took you to a frat party. Top 40 Hip Hop and the Charlie Daniels Band. Beer cans and cornhole. The brothers beat on the large front windows as sorority sisters walked by. They catcalled and gaped obscenely. Licked the dirty glass in long, wet lines. Bruce made jokes at your expense while his frat brothers laughed. You didn’t know what to say, so you just sipped your Coke with no rum and watched Bruce lose at beer pong.
After the party, you saw him at a coffee shop with another woman. She looked like you, and you flipped Bruce off when he finally saw you across the room. Good riddance.
A few weeks later, you met Tabitha at the laundromat. She’d lost a dollar in a broken machine, while you lost a sock to the laundry void. She wore a Who shirt with her high-rise jeans and Converse, pearl earrings, and diamonds in her eyes. She told you she likes The Beatles. (You are more of a Rolling Stones girlie.) You agreed to disagree on ‘60s British Invasion. You also agreed to a date of coffee and the Konza. Rolling hills and sunny skies. It was still September, so the bugs were out. Bumblebees. Yellow jackets. “Yellow Submarine”. “Lady Madonna”. The song that played on the radio when you and Tabitha said that first hello.
After you made love the first time, Tabitha massaged your hands, traced fingers along the burn scars and your lifelines. The act was so tender that it brought you to tears, and you laid together like that for a long while before you both fell asleep. You’d previously thought that tears were destructive, but what you find is that sometimes, they can be healing.
Now it is morning, and you both get up early to watch the sunrise. Tabitha brings fresh brewed coffee in one of those large, old-fashioned thermoses. It’s a little chilly, but you sit together in lawn chairs next to her Camry, which she parks at the scenic outlook outside of town. Tabitha glows in the starlit sunrise, eyes glittering and smile eternal. She tells you about her favorite songs on Odessey and Oracle. You gush about Who’s Next. “Time of the season”. Tabitha plays Oldies on her phone, and every time you go to refill your mug, the coffee’s still hot, still a boon to staying warm on a cold October morning.
Heather Etelamaki (she/her) is a writer based in the Midwest. She spends much of her spare time trying to keep her cat from knocking things over. Her creative work has previously appeared in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Voyage YA by Uncharted, The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, New South, and Touchstone. She can be found occasionally over on Bluesky: @hetellama83.bsky.social
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