Emma Robin Paxson

Short Fiction

Naz, like Nazareth, was her name. I saw her on a trip back to Sully, the place where I was born, a small half- strip mall city outside of Des Moines. She was working at Kmart. I borrowed my grandparents’ dirt brown Honda Civic and drove through Rockford, through Cedar Rapids, through the plains where the buffalo used to run. It’s all dried up now. I didn’t stop, drove straight for 6 hours with one hand loosely pressed against the steering wheel and the other wrapped around my stomach. I smelled terrible, like stale cigarette smoke, corn chips, and urine. I stopped at Kmart to get Irish Spring to use in a bathroom somewhere along the way. 

I assessed my situation. I had a dollar left at the bottom of my coin purse, crumbled and brown. There were sticky coins in the cupholder, leftover from grandpa’s futile attempts to prepare for the tolls. One quarter, three nickels, a penny covered in dirt. Just enough for the soap. Behind the Kmart was a cemetery. The sun was setting. The sky was indigo. On the way to the door, I stopped to smoke.  

Once inside, the blinding fluorescent lights reminded me of the fact that I reeked. I was not embarrassed enough. I had matted, bleached blonde hair and a suede, purple jacket that I stole from a department store in Chicago. The people in here stunk worse, I thought. Of weary death and apples just slightly browned.  

There were calendars with kittens on them at the front of one of the aisles. I ran my fingers over them as I walked by and imagined that they were alive; that the stiff, plasticky paper was actually fur. An older man was standing at the end of the soap aisle next to the Irish Spring. His back looked like a ruler snapped in half. It made me feel like my ears were heavy with mud. He cleared his throat and walked away. I grabbed the soap.  

Naz was at the counter near the dressing rooms, I caught her on my way to the checkout. Her black slacks were too tight on the ass and flared out awkwardly at the bottom. She was unassuming. I liked her and followed her closely, but slyly, out of the corner of my eye.

 Her job it seemed was to keep one eye slightly shifted towards the feet under the doors of the rooms to make sure no one was trying to shove Hanes underwear or nursing bras into their bags. She kept yanking little fine hairs out of her eyebrows and blowing them onto the counter. She disgusted and enchanted me. I wanted to eat her alive.  

I felt her come up behind me. But no, that’s not true. I smelled her first. Before she was diagnosed, Gramee used to steal me green apple gel from the department store she worked at. My hair was bad hair, she used to say. Unruly, unkempt, not like any of her children, especially not like mom. “Where did you get this hair from?” she used to say to me, at 5, at 9, at 15.  

When she started forgetting who I was, she would shove her small and aching body into the corner of the room and stare at me bewildered, pulling little gray sprouts of hair from her head until mom grabbed her by the wrist and told her to stop. I hated her, and mom too. I am a piece of rotting meat and they brought the flys, the worms, and the maggots to finish me off. Naz smelled like that green apple gel, to a T. I shifted slightly to my left where she had glided over to. She was restocking the red wool socks with blue cuffs, in big orange letters on the  package it said, “Perfect for yard work!” I read her name tag, “Naz” and looked at her hair; chestnut brown, gelled down in the front with perfect coils spurting out of a ponytail in the back like a fountain of spun gold.  

I started to cry, loud and unabashedly, then slapped my hand over my mouth. And for some reason Naz is reaching for my hand, and then I’m grabbing her, my skin on hers, and then even more suddenly I’m smelling the green apple gel but more importantly I’m smelling the skin. And then I’m biting her shoulder because I can feel she’s alive, and I want to take it from her. And then I’m running under indigo sky like I’m being hunted by men with arrows.

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Emma Robin Paxson is a recent graduate of Bard College, a writer, photographer, and video maker based in Chicago.