“Tell me if you’re game.” You leaned against your rusted-out Mustang wearing ripped jeans, a gray t-shirt, flip-flops, and a smirk. One thumb thrust in the direction of your passenger seat, your invitation. A wrecking ball loomed in the lot behind you like a prophecy.

I stood in the doorway, with my torn black nightie slipping off one shoulder, my feet in the bunny slippers you’d given me as a joke for my birthday, frowning. I leaned against the heavy apartment door and gave you a long look. “I told you to be patient.”

“Get in,” you said.

“Like this?” My voice broke as I pointed to my slippers with my free hand. I rolled my eyes and tried not to cry.

The street began waking up, kids gleeful for yet another sunrise shooting by between us on skateboards, shattering our universe with their screams. The sun glinted off your car and got in my eyes. All these signs of reality, and all I could focus on was the tool of destruction in the background. Construction workers silently sipped coffee at its haunches.

“Who will love you?” you asked.

“I’ll be fine.” My tears broke their surface tension.

Unbidden memories replayed themselves in my blurred vision: Our first date, not a real date, just two hungry people eating, according to me. You sat across from me in our booth, singing me sad songs. Late-night drives out of town, you with only one hand on the wheel.  Our Saturday afternoon beach habit, always followed by furtive sex on sandy towels in your backseat. Sunday morning sing-a-thons in the kitchen. And fighting. Everywhere, always, fighting. Laughing followed by fighting followed by make-up sex followed by more laughing. Relationships are complicated.

“You’re going to love California,” I said. Crying made my voice shrill.

“You’re crying,” you actually sounded surprised. For a moment I believed you; then, that smirk played on your lips. “Wipe those tears off your face.” So quick with a joke.

Truth is, your love shredded me. Even from the start you undid me. You never knew your effect on me.  Standing there on the front stoop, staring at the sunlight in your hair, something shifted inside me and self-preservation won out. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.

“Be kind,” I told you with a sigh.

You shrugged and fussed with something inside the car.

Finally you finished and gave me a little salute before circling around to the driver’s seat. I pretended to smile. My hand hurt where it had been pressed against the door. When I looked, chipped blue paint was stuck to my palm, the first sign of my mistake.

A couple hours later, you called me from the road and told me jokes until my stomach hurt from laughing. Good thing you couldn’t see that I was crying at the same time.

“I love you,” you said as you hung up.

“I love you, too,” I whispered after you were gone.

After the first few weeks, you stopped calling.

I spent the rest of the summer lying around the depressingly bare apartment in my bunny slippers watching the wreckage unfold across the street and waiting for fall to come and start me over. I barely noticed the nausea until the new foundation was in across the street and the leaves began to pile up where your car had once been.

Time’s passed, but she’s never far from my thoughts. It started out small. We dated a year after high school. We fought more than we fucked but just barely. She wasn’t right for me but right from the start I loved her. Thing is, I dumped her. It was complicated and it felt as wrong as it did right. Turns out that breakup left a her-shaped hole inside me.

For a time there I tried not to think of her, but you know how that goes. So I gave in and thought of her. I gave myself Tuesdays. Tuesdays I’d remember her smile, her curly hair, her laugh. Time was Tuesdays were enough. I’d recall our little adventures, remember her outside in the yard, just dumb shit like pushing her on the swings. Hard to believe that we were only kids.

Ours wasn’t the greatest love story ever told. Nah, we were too young, ragged, unformed. Stupid wouldn’t be too much of a stretch. Sometimes I thought that if I could just see her, I’d be able to forget her.

Tuesdays I took to leaving her little notes, a line from a song or a book, just a little hello taped to the door. They were nothing, just some junk to fill up that hole inside me. What can you say to someone who will never love you back?

Wednesdays I’d drown the memories. Cruel day, Wednesday. I’d lock her notes in a drawer and move on. Years passed like that, and six days a week I did what needed to be done. Got outta school, got a job, you know the deal. I even found a wife. It took a while, but I settled down and had a kid, and that’s alright. But Tuesday kept coming around again. Tuesdays I felt alive.

After the kid, Tuesdays stopped cutting it so I gave her Wednesdays too. I thought I deserved it, my two days. Everybody needs a weekend. Years went by and my kid got to be the age I was when I first met her. It got me thinking, you know. I got gutsy and friended her on Facebook. I saw her every day and every day was Tuesday.

I was wrong about seeing her. I loved her all over again. I don’t want to sound callous, but I was waiting on her husband to die. In the meantime I posted jokes for her. I looked for glimpses of unhappiness in her photos. So what if I never found any? I’m not insane.

One week Tuesday came on Monday. I just wanted to talk to her. You’d be surprised how easy it was to figure out her address. I hid out till she got home, and tried to talk to her when she did. I asked how she was, and I asked her to swing for me. I asked her to say yes to me. When she said no, something came over me. I started wanting to drag her outside in the yard and use the chains on the swingset to tie her up, just to get a good look at her. Didn’t do it, though.

Damn if her husband doesn’t come home early Mondays. He called the cops on me and the very next day they had a restraining order. No more Facebook photos. Soon after that I swore off Tuesdays one more time and I found Jesus. Reverend says He saved my soul.

I gotta say, things are better now. Reverend says Jesus loves me, so now I get loved back. Tuesdays are Sundays now, and nobody cares that I see her every time I look at Jesus up there on the cross. Finding Jesus feels right, and it’s kinda like the rightness eclipsed every mistake made along the way.

Winter seemed reluctant to release its hold, Melody thought as she pressed herself against a stone wall on a busy street. On a cold and windy day at the end of April, Melody held her breath as the pain unfurled from her cunt up over her abdomen. She felt the monster pressing himself against her perineum, and in that moment she knew fate could repeat itself. She felt herself unzipping.

Melody braced herself against the wall to ready herself for the next wave. She moaned with resignation but she did not call for help. The waves had been building since long before her perpetrator had buried himself inside her, thrusting all the plans of the universe deep within her. Nine months after the fact Melody still had scars from the recursive tracks the dirty bricks had left on her back.

Nine long months had passed like eons for Melody, who carried this growing seed deep within her. The first month she stared in disbelief into her clean panties. The second she bought a pack of men’s t-shirts to cloak her growing belly against the scorching late summer heat. By the third she began stealing food in the hopes of curbing her superhuman hunger. Then the months tumbled by against her will. Changes came and she accommodated. Melody kept her head and no one ever was the wiser.

Melody sucked in her breath as the jagged teeth of the zipper continued their slow unwrenching. Passersby eyed her curiously but no one interfered. Finally the zipper fell apart and all that remained was the cold, dark nut of fear about to be loosed onto the pavement. Melody hoped for the best as the monster came barreling out of her vagina and hit the ground with a shriek.

The baby left her wide open. Melody couldn’t stop the torrent of humanity funneling into her gaping belly like water spinning down a drain. The elderly black lady zipped by along with a half-dozen yellow taxis, a food truck, and a horse-drawn carriage. It was a busy time of day. Melody was powerless over it.

Without thinking, she bent down and lifted her baby’s small bloody body, his skin thin as parchment, and curled him deep within her black wool coat. She looked into his small face and the scrunched lines revealed a secret message. Melody didn’t want to admit to anyone how much she hated him, so she decided to love him instead. That quickly, her reality flipped inside out.

Melody wiped her tears and looked up at the sky. Swirls of blue were beginning to show among the clouds, the same shade as her baby boy’s eyes. Love wins, she thought as a kind-faced older man stopped in front of her. He looked into her tear-stained face and down into the bundle in her arms and shock radiated from his eyes.

“Miss? May I help?”

How was the gentleman to know those were the wrong words? Surely he didn’t know that a handful of words whispered in just a certain tone could throw her back against a dirty brick wall nine months in the past. Surely he only meant well. But Melody couldn’t make sense of it. Fight or flight took over, and this time Melody chose flight. She ran clutching her baby boy close, reluctant to release her hold on him. This time would be different, Melody resolved. She dashed away, thrilled by the cold April wind and the new life in her arms.