Felon
What she did, if she had been caught, would have tagged her with this infamous label. Felon means you can’t vote in many states. It means most employers will never hire you. No student loans, no government housing assistance. A legal leper.
They met how? Mutual acquaintances. She was pregnant a month later.
“She is the mother of my child,” he said of another woman. And of another one. No, he didn’t pay child support to either. He had a nervous condition. His family supported him. So when she aborted the pregnancy, they split the costs.
It was at the cheapest clinic they could find in the yellow pages. The doctor was a thick lady with a thick accent. She kept insisting that the woman was beyond three months pregnant, and that the procedure would cost hundreds of dollars more. “But I can only be six weeks pregnant,” the woman explained, “I wasn’t sexually active ‘til then.” The doctor acted surprised, said something about needing to calibrate the ultrasound machine.
Two weeks later, she collapsed at the law office where she was temporarily working in place of an administrative assistant who was on tour with a Christian Gospel group. It was in the desolate hallway near the bathroom. No one found her. She simply awoke with a sore chin, walked back to her cubicle, and called the lawyer who was her boss that week. He was in his office with windows on the outside of the building not far down the hall, but they rarely walked to each other’s workspace, just phoned from their respective stations.
“What do you mean you don’t feel well?” the lawyer barked over the phone. She waited and stared at an amaryllis blooming in a glass container by the phone. “Well, do what you gotta do.”
When she came out of the building she saw him standing beside his parked car at the curb. He had put on his blinkers, fearful that a cop would make him move. Or worse, ask for his license and insurance which he didn’t have. “I’ll take you to the hospital where they treated me,” he told her when she got in the car.
By the time the emergency room doctor examined her, the pain had ceased. She explained the abortion, the tearing pain in her abdomen, the passing out. The doctor said it was a cyst, that her body would absorb the debris, and released her from the hospital with a $5000 bill along with residual bacteria that later would develop into a urinary tract infection from a contaminated catheter leading to another unpayable medical bill.
He met her by way of having mutual friends, by talking about revolution and philosophy. He was a political refugee; she was native born. She liked intellectuals, but wasn’t one herself. Couldn’t ever be. Things hurt too much for her to have the ability to detach enough to try to understand why, and besides, he needed a good-hearted idealistic girl with no filters. They rushed into life.
“I never made or carried any bombs.” Instead his role was to ferry the terrorists from the train station or bus terminal to the safe house. When he was arrested and jailed, he was housed with common criminals who didn’t notice that he wasn’t covered with the gashes and bruises of torture. It wasn’t their concern if he named names, so long as they weren’t their names. His mother brought homemade food to the jail cell, passing it through the barred window. This also helped make him acceptable to his cell mates. His uncle was a senator who knew a judge, and they were able to smuggle him out of the country before the trial.
Reading was such a chore for her. Especially when she was busy and wanted to be distracted. She was a Social Worker at the same agency where her mother had received services forty years before. No one from that time was still there, just the memory of her mother and one historic photo of her mother’s teenage club on the wall in the agency. Instead, she liked to hear her friends talk about what they were reading, listen to his views of politics and society, absorbing it all wholesale, completely believing everything they told her.
He read Spinoza. Marguerite Yourcenar. The Greeks — memorized. Octavio Paz. William James. He refused to let the world distract him. Truth was greater than reality.
They awkwardly kissed at first. And then their embraces consumed them. Their love was exactly like so many other loves that they would feel with other people, and what still others felt for each other. Long kisses. Giggles. Tracing their fingers on one another’s bodies softly. Up all night talking, sharing their ideas about the world. “Capitalism is a terrible inhumane system,” they agreed.
They split up eventually after he slept with one of her friends, and another time with one of his own friends. Then she started spending almost every night out flirting, trying to sleep with someone else. They both acted hurt. Shocked. “Why is this happening to us?” they pleaded with the universe.
She cashed the check she wrote out to herself from his bank account and used the money to pay down the hospital bills. She told him that if he reported it, she would report his brother who was in the country undocumented to the government. Her government. It didn’t matter that she didn’t have the courage to do this.
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Marya Zelli. A dancer by trade, Marya writes fiction, mainly short stories, loosely based on her own experience and what she has witnessed others endure. She smokes and drinks too much, and has traveled widely throughout the Europe and the East Indies.