I Think He Might

Callie Collins
· in ,

When my sister’s husband and I get drunk, we get grandiose about Texas. We’re drinking Lone Star Light tallboys, even though I’m ditching gluten and he’s too fat to begin with, and I’m standing in the kiddle pool. The radio DJ reminds us that it’s White Girl Wednesday three times in twenty minutes. The water is hot and my ankles are simmering. We stopped looking for my sister about a month ago, and now it’s summer and I itch all over.

My sister’s husband is mooning around a little, his hips going in their own directions, and he’s telling me how he feels about Seattle, where he lives now, and I’d characterize his feelings and general demeanor as just flat not good, not good at all, and as if on cue, he says, “Not good at all,” and I lick the sides of the top of my beer. “White Girl Wednesday,” he says. He spills some beer on his boot.

He’d taken the late flight the night before and doesn’t seem to have recovered yet. His eyes are kind of flickering red, and when I look at him I can feel his exhaustion lapping at the edges, getting close to me. When he looks at me, he sees almost nothing, he says. A sliver of a person. A little bit of crazy.

Later, inside, when the kids are asleep and we are standing in the living room and things are starting up again, he wedges two big sausage fingers into the space between my shoulder blade and my back, and it feels like he could pick me clean off the ground. It’s possible he will.

Callie Collins lives and writes in Austin, TX. Her work has most recently appeared in the Rumpus and the Collagist, among others. She is the co- director of A Strange Object, a small press and literary collective based in Austin.