Pile On

by Ysavelle Buitrago

He doesn’t know I’m leaving today.

He didn’t realize it when he rolled out of bed this morning and into the shower. He didn’t notice when he defrosted the turkey bacon breakfast sandwiches I made. Not a clue when we discussed when to order the new fridge since our current one has been turning off and on at random. He snow blows the driveway and leaves for work, and I think, This is going to be the last time I see him go. But he doesn’t know.

All I’ve done for the last four days is stare out of windows, willing the exit to reveal itself. Instead, all I find are patches of snow getting dirtier by the day. Frozen shards of grass pierce through the white overlay, reminding me that nothing stays perfect. Everything is touched. And for the last four days, he’s come home and seen me staring. He must notice when he asks about my day and my eyes don’t leave the icy streaks of ground beyond the house, but he checks on our child and refills the air purifier without ever asking what I’m looking at.

I become fully frozen when he kisses me goodnight, even though it’s barely dinner time. He doesn’t want to see; doesn’t want to know.

I hear the cat rustling in the next room, and then Albie awakens and screams like he’s been trampled on. I leave my untouched sandwich and rush into his overflowing nursery, somehow already too small for his one-year-old body and one-year-old possessions. I trip over a mini drum set and three tiny plastic pots and pans before reaching his tear-stained face. With his heaving sobs and bright red pajamas, he looks like a tomato. I push the flat whisps of uncolored hair out of his eyes and bundle him to my heart. “Did you have a bad dream?” I say to him. “Because the noise you make is sometimes uncalled for.” We bounce up and down and I kick a dancing monster doll out of the way.

I’ve packed the bag before. Put in the one pair of jeans that still fit me after losing the baby weight and then some. My college sweatshirt which fits perfectly to the shape of my body. My favorite spatula that can get into the crevices of the pan and get the eggs out just right. The stuffed rabbit I’ve had since I was a baby. The pearl earrings from my grandmother. Surprisingly, all I want from this life fits into a carry-on. My son’s sippy cups took up a quarter of the bag.

And then I’ve tried to leave. I buckled Albie in, threw the bag in the back, and got in the driver’s seat. I turned on the car, found my road trip playlist, then sat in the driveway listening to 80s hair metal and 90s R&B until my husband came home from work and asked what I was doing. Albie’s head lolled to the side, sleeping to the sounds of Whitesnake.

“I just wanted him to sleep,” I said, swallowing my undigested pride. We went inside and ate meal-prep chicken and rice bowls, and I lost sleep over losing my nerve.

Back in the nursery, I hear the roof creak above me and look outside. The snow hasn’t stopped since this morning. If I’m going to leave, I may have to shovel the driveway again.

Albie stops crying, so I take him to the kitchen and put him in his highchair. The cat limps into the room, his cone knocking against the glass door. He eyes the kitchen counter with lust.

“Don’t do it.”

He jumps and barely clears the counter, his back legs slipping to the side as he lands. I know he’s going to break the leg he just had surgery on. I see another $1,200 disappear down his back as his caramel paws pull him onto the windowpane, where he sits and surveys the backyard.

Albie gets banana and toast today because I refuse to restock a fridge in its death throws. His overripe fists smash banana into the sides of the plate, the seat cover, his head. Anywhere but his mouth. I wonder why he doesn’t feel hungry. I feel hungry all the time.

I set to work trying to clean up the endless amounts of cups and bottles that accumulate on our kitchen island, dunking the battered pieces of plastic into the dingy water mechanically. My phone rings and it’s my mom calling about what time we’ll be over for Dad’s birthday on Saturday. The cat howls behind my head, with pain or annoyance, I’m not sure. I scrub coffee rings and turmeric stains out of mugs. Albie knocks all his toast to the ground and the cat goes after it, which I know he’ll puke up later. I remove the filters from the water bottles and tease out the black mold with a toothpick. My mom asks me to make a cake. Albie screams to be let out of his chair, gooey with banana. I scrub, and I scrub, and I scrub.

My hands come out of the soapy water red and bright like I burned them.

My husband doesn’t hit me. He doesn’t hoard our money. He hasn’t told me my body offends him or that he wishes I would dress with him in mind. He doesn’t belittle my opinion when I give it. He’s never called me a bitch or told me to get over something. He hasn’t cheated on me, at least not really. He texted a girl he shouldn’t have once or twice. Made plans that never came to fruition. I let it go. He needed some sort of outlet when I was too depressed to shower. I let my hair grow into clumps and watched how it would change shape every day in the mirror. I don’t blame him for not looking closer, being closer. He tried to hold me on the afternoons I’d lay in bed, wishing the air in the room would thin out and I could sleep for the rest of time. I knew his arms were around me, but I never felt his touch. So, I moved to the edge of the bed, out of his reach. If he could forgive me for wasting eight months of our marriage, I could forgive him for trying to find an escape.

No, I’m not leaving because of him. The truth is I just can’t stay doing this anymore.

The next morning, I set Albie up with his alphabet block trainset and park myself at my desk. I’m still in my fuzzy, maroon bathrobe and haven’t brushed my teeth, but I know my boss will email me incessantly if I haven’t logged on by 8:30. I scroll through the conversations that happened through the night.

     Client wants to customize.

     I’m working on what that package would consist of.

     Could you get it to me by 8:00am?

I sell educational software, but you would think we were the Secret Service based on the work ethic the company expects you to put in. I stare at the screen, willing the computer to combust and give me an easy out.

I look over at my son and imagine what he would experience if I exploded in front of him. Would he remember the blood pattern I left on the carpet? The fragments of my skin hanging from the lamps? What can you remember at seventeen months old? Would he maybe forget the carnage, but the violence would live inside him forever? Would he grow up to recreate it?

My therapist calls this an intrusive thought. I call it having an active imagination.

Albie pulls at a chunk of banana I missed from his hair. “Baaanaaanaaa!” he coos in long vowels.

He’s getting so good at that. I smile, because he’s the only thing that makes me smile anymore. I thought becoming a mother might fix things, might knock me back into place, and it did for a while. Carrying him inside me felt like a purpose bigger than my disillusionment. The feeling lingered even after we were no longer attached, but old patterns are hard to shake. The flat-line monotony returned but this time with a baby mixed into the schedule.

He gives me an anchor though. Something to push against, to propel me forward. I look at him and hear the word ‘go.’ He deserves a mom who is fully alive. I wonder often if that can be me.

The creaking begins again and I look up. It’s like it’s coming from a haunted attic we don’t have. Albie hears it too and looks toward the ceiling. At least I know I’m not crazy.

“Weird sounds today my love.”

I’ve been sitting for five minutes and my hips already ache. The position of my chair has misaligned my pelvis—or so my chiropractor says. I don’t have the energy to change it or look for another chair, so I’ve just started using a memory foam pillow to soften the base. Now the ache migrates throughout the day. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be leaving soon.

I wasn’t always like this. I can still feel the faint outline of the person I was. Hopeful in the way only children can be. I used to like running, and making plates and cups out of clay. I used to go out on weekends and knew where my friends met their partners and where they were going on vacation. I used to have so much time. Now, days feel like a memory that happened last week. I blink my eyes to wake up in the morning and, somehow, it’s already night.

My mom asks me all the time why I don’t come over more often. I wonder why, too.

I look at my calendar and see the appointments for the week coming up: dentist for my extra wisdom tooth, chiropractor for a new ache in my spine, a blood test to figure out why my shower drain is choked with hair, allergy test because I haven’t been able to draw a deep breath for months. On paper, I’m a very sick person, but I’m still expected to show up to the Zoom meeting about which school district will try to fuck us over this quarter.

My therapist wants me to make a list of things I liked to do as a child. She wants me to get back into those hobbies as a way of connecting with myself again. No, Sandra, I don’t think twisting the Eiffel Tower out of string on my fingers or catching ladybugs in a jar will make me forget how every day feels like the one before. To enact real change, I have to leave.

I get up to pack the suitcase but end up staring at its empty form for ten minutes. I realize I don’t want anything. My jeans have become too baggy, the pearl earrings have gone a chemical yellow. I hate the robe I’m wearing. I hate that my life is only about survival and that I keep surviving it. I scoop up Albie from the floor and skip quickly to his room. I stuff tiny sweaters and useless baby shoes into a soft, purple duffle. I throw in the first toys I see on the floor, not checking if they’re part of a set. Albie laughs like we’re playing a game. I start to laugh, too. Maybe I’m connecting to my inner child.

Suddenly, the need to go becomes impossible to ignore. I pull my boots over my pajama pants and throw a coat over the robe. It sticks out the bottom, making me look like an uneven mushroom, but I don’t care. If I don’t leave in the next ten minutes something horrible will happen. I feel it everywhere, like I heard it on last night’s news.

I run past my computer to grab a water bottle from the kitchen and see my boss has sent me seven messages in a row. The last one stands out.

     I don’t know why you have this job if you aren’t going to respond.

I smash the plug with my boot and the computer goes dark. Albie laughs again. “I liked that too,” I say.

I scurry towards the front door, water, baby, and baby stuff in hand. The cat has already puked up his second breakfast in the foray. Bits of banana run toward the carpet, globbing onto the fibers and soaking down to the wood. I step over the smell and shut the door behind me without locking it.

I don’t clean off the car, just let it warm up and melt the pounds of snow piled on the windshield, and then, suddenly, I’m behind the wheel. I have the keys in the ignition, Albie is chewing on a giant rubber cookie, and I’m ready. I turn on the music. This time, Def Leppard doesn’t feel right. I put on Beethoven’s Ninth. Something more inspirational. Triumphant.

I start to pull out of the driveway, my tires making tracks in the powder that fell after my husband cleaned this morning. The sounds of violins and twisting rubber fill the car. I’m not taking a step forward; it feels like more to the side.

I feel an eruption at my center, like I’m being quartered by my new and old life simultaneously. The sound, though, is coming from outside my body. My eyes switch to the house and I see it. Masses of snow topple into a hole on our flat roof, disappearing like it’s melting. When we moved in, they warned us we would have to shovel up there, especially after a big snowstorm. We never have.

I watch as the hole widens like a monster opening its mouth to take in more food. The snow slips in like it’s weightless, filling our living room with ice and debris. It would’ve been right where I sat at my desk. I imagine how it would’ve felt to have it crash onto my head. The snow’s coolness on my body, the crushing pressure on my finally flattened pelvis.

I drive off slowly, hoping the falling snow covers my tracks.

About the Author

A Detroit native with a degree in filmmaking, Ysa Buitrago loves to be anywhere but home. After spending the majority of her twenties teaching English in Colombia and South Korea, she is now backpacking the world one cheap flight at a time. When this Latinx adventurer isn’t hiking to ancient ruins or cooking dinner for everyone at her hostel, she is reading novels about furious women and writing until her head is empty. Her work can also be found on Bright Flash Literary Review. You can follow her on Instagram – @ysalectric and TikTok – @ysawritestheplot.