Tracy Morin: AIR SUPPLY • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Tracy Morin
AIR SUPPLY

Love and Other Bruises
I lived with a man, Barry, just before they enacted, after a lengthy period of contention in the usual government palaces, the Intercontinental Rationing of Oxygen Decree (IROD). Two days before the deliveries started, Barry hit the road, sporting his final fresh haircut, believing he could go off to the forest and rely on the trees to provide air. I was used to men leaving, and Barry was always looking for a loophole. Going off-grid was a dream of mine too, but that was when you could count on breathing. Getting out there and dying was too much for me. Barry and I had been together six months and I’d never loved anyone more, mostly because of his erotically charged front-tooth gap. Two days later my first shipment of oxygen arrived, marked SINGLE on the box, and I turned on the radio to DJ Daddy Sixx playing “Love and Other Bruises,”* and I cried and cried.

*To commemorate the government starting to ration oxygen, Official United States Radio created a channel called Air Supply Airplay, with their impotent soft rock ’round the clock on endless loop. After a day or two, everyone realized that the word Love was in every other Air Supply song title, and some of us after a spell of listening fell sick to our stomachs, like what happens when you eat too much candy in a dark movie theater.

Mumbo Jumbo
The local businesses started adding an oxygen surcharge to everyone’s bills, or you could BYOA (bring your own air), but it wasn’t long before certain nightspots decided to boost their profits by offering different flavors of air for an inflated price. Federal Oxygen-Monitor Officers (FOMO) warned us about the renegade owners who started selling “relaxation blends,” which were advertised as having “natural and artificial additives” not approved or regulated by the FDA, but everyone suspected they’d been juiced with some amount of nitrous oxide, since these made you loopy and light-headed. The peddlers loved it, because customers in this altered state were more likely to keep pressing the button that kept the air flowing into their tube and, without exception, racked up higher bills than those who stuck with just the original air or even the premium-priced flavored kind. They also never complained.

Tell Me of Spring
When the weather started to warm, I met a man at one of the new oxygen nightclubs in town where it was all-you-could-inhale for a fixed cover charge. I figured it was time to get out and meet someone again, what with Barry probably dead in a forest somewhere, the birds of prey pecking past his freshly cut hair, because I don’t think even scavengers are that desperate to where they bother eating hair. The man at the nightclub was named Sid. He might’ve been high on the club’s most potent blend, Maxin’ Relaxin’ (which was not included in the AYCI offer, or customers would’ve taken advantage), but his eyes looked melty and unfocused—the kind of man who catches my eye. He introduced himself and offered me a pull from his tube. “No, thank you,” I said. I gestured to my tube, labeled Vanilla in red cursive lettering. That was one of their bestsellers, according to the airtender. “The ladies seem to like it,” he told me.

I Remember Love, Kiss Me Like You Mean It, Goodbye, I’ll Be Thinking of You
I brought Sid home that night. The radio was playing Air Supply’s 1993 album The Vanishing Race from start to finish.* Sid fused his skin to mine, our tubes knocking awkwardly together as our usage rates accelerated (every government-supplied dispenser projected holographic numbers on the wall—they said for tracking purposes, though some suspected it was a covert shaming tactic). My bill’s gonna be crazy this month, I thought, before deciding on the next inhale that I didn’t care. “Hasn’t the world changed?” I asked Sid afterward. Our breathing rates had returned to normal; we lay in bed, not touching anymore. “What do you mean?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said, even though I knew. We were all goners, faster than we thought—how did he not know? But one study I read predicted that men were going to assimilate under the IROD more rapidly than women. “I guess that life seems so precarious now,” I said. Sid’s laugh was short and grunty. “Pr-what?” He rolled away from me, sat at the edge of my bed, and reached for his boots and clothes, scrambled all around my room like he shimmied them off while dancing.

*At this point we’d all realized that not one of Air Supply’s songs sounded different than any others, and the band somehow managed to maintain this homogeneity across several decades of music-making. Sometimes you overheard strangers discussing this in coffee shops while waiting in line—the new small talk, alongside weather and the price of oxygen.

Bread and Blood
I wondered how many suicides and homicides would go undetected now, unnoticed. Mysteriously malfunctioning tubes or tanks, missed deliveries, carbon monoxide contamination. Every year our world seemed a place where accountability was harder to come by. That slide had been happening my whole life. Look at Barry—I thought he’d marry me one day, and off he fled to death in the woods. Sid never showed again. In the absence of men, I researched how to make bread and learned that oxygen is not required for fermentation. The hobby would not cut into my budget, wouldn’t raise my bills or FOMO suspicion. My first loaf emerged from the oven brown and crusty, like magic, the bread still warm when I bit into it. I pulled apart the crust, examined the loaf’s insides while I chewed: entire caverns carved out. It was the first time I understood that the holes inside were necessary to make bread delicious, even though they don’t look like anything but empty spaces.

Tracy Morin is a Mississippi-based writer and editor who has been a hand model, rock-and-roll drummer and boxing ringside reporter. Her work has previously appeared in The Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, Bending Genres and elsewhere. She posts photography highlighting the beauty of the crumbling, aging, forgotten, imperfect and “unsightly” at www.instagram.com/tracymorin88/. Find more of her writing and photos at www.tracymorin.com.
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