June Martin: SHE'S STILL HERE? • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by June Martin
SHE’S STILL HERE?

For as long as any of us had known her, Jennifer had carried herself with the dignity of someone who was going to die young. She knew it would happen soon, and everyone else agreed, and we used to spend every moment with her like it would be our last chance to appreciate the brief flicker of her vibrant spirit. But the moments kept piling up and her heart beat strong and even on her fifty-fifth birthday her skin flushed red like her blood itself could barely contain all the life that still pulsed inside her. She didn’t look a day older than thirty-five, and what everyone took as tragic beauty back in her twenties now seemed like self-indulgence.

Still, we came together a hundred strong to celebrate her birthday; some of us had been in her life so long—longer than we ever thought—that we remembered when those well-wishes were jokes that all of us, even Jennifer, could laugh at. Others had only come in during her thirties, back when she could have died any day from a car accident, a stray fish bone, or a meteor strike, and the tone was mournful, certain that we would lose our friend any moment. Now, in her fifties, she greeted each person at the door in an apologetic tone. Thanks-for-coming-yeah-I-can’t-believe-it-either.

Dominic, her husband, greeted each of us further inside the house, sitting on his antique leather couch, feet kicked up on his hand-carved coffee table. Jennifer’s paintings crowded the walls around him. In her late twenties, Jennifer had a brief spell of popularity as an artist. Though the paintings were overly cheerful, a Lisa Frank by way of Thomas Kinkade fusion of insipid joy, some gallery owner agreed to show her work once he met her and discovered the effect of her deathly air juxtaposed with the bland optimism of her art. She sold work at increasingly high prices for a few years, but the art community moves on quickly and got tired of waiting for her to die before the rest of us.

When asked about her paintings, Jennifer seemed embarrassed. She said that if it were up to her, they’d sit in a basement until she died, but Dominic insisted on displaying her artwork in the home. This encouragement always surprised us, because Dominic had more right to be angry with the situation than anyone else. He had signed up for a short and tragic marriage, the kind that might propel a man to new emotional depths, to great and terrible insights, to despair so thick it would change the texture of his life forever. Instead, twenty-five years later, he and Jennifer told a few of us about their trip to Niagara Falls, and Dominic revealed his contrarian position that the American side was actually better: more modest, more restrained. When asked about her death, he said, “Every extra day I get with Jennifer is a blessing.” A trite nothing, but all we could expect from a man whose wife was alive.

After a couple drinks, some of us gathered in another room and gossiped about her close calls.

“Did you hear about the lightning storm on the Roman ruins in Croatia? I heard she ignored her guide’s recommendations to cancel the tour and then it zapped right behind her feet.”

“Forget that, she once went swimming in a red tide and didn’t notice until she bumped into a bunch of fish floating on the surface. After she’d accidentally taken a big gulp of the water when she flubbed her breaststroke. And she was fine, not even an upset stomach.”

“That was nothing. Once when she was a teenager, she skateboarded down Rialto Street in Pittsburgh. Super steep hill, she must have been going thirty miles per hour when she hit the bottom just after the light turned red. A car going one way blew past her behind her and another one in front of her, and she didn’t even get grazed.”

“I heard that the art is just a cover for how she really got her money: she used to play Russian roulette once a month, and at the end of the night she would sit alone at a table with a pile of money soaking in a pool of seven other people’s blood.”

Only when Dominic laughed from a chair in the corner did we stop talking and begin to wonder how this man had become so diminished that his presence in the room was no stronger than that of furniture. He clarified that it was his idea to ignore the tour guide in Croatia, that the red tide was Heterosigma akashiwo, which suffocated fish but wasn’t toxic to humans, and that he’d heard the skateboard story from Jennifer before, and that she said it happened at night, with no cars on the road. We only noticed after the party that he didn’t correct the Russian roulette story.

We were chastened after that, and tried to talk to Dominic about his woodworking. All around us were the beautiful fruits of his labors, but whenever he started describing the use of his power tools, he veered off into grisly stories of people who had lost thumbs or hands on the machine, of spurts of blood and screams louder than the whirring blade. None of us wanted to hear that. Death and dismay in general were not our preoccupation. We were interested in only a single instance.

The topic of her continued life seeped through other conversations. When she talked about how she’d taken up cycling as a way to stay fit a while ago, though she had since stopped, one of us asked, “What kind of helmet do you use?”

Jennifer said, “It’s just a cheap one from Target. I fell down a couple times, but I only scraped my knee. I’m just living my life, you know. I’m not being so cautious as all that. And what difference does a helmet make, anyway? They work or they don’t, the rest is aerodynamics. I’m not even doing it anymore because…sorry, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have even brought it up.”

We reassured her that everything was fine, that we were just making conversation. To tell the truth, we weren’t entirely sure whether it was our preoccupation with her death or her own concerns that dragged the subtext of the conversation in that direction so relentlessly. One of us tried to investigate the matter by asking simply, “What have you been thinking about these days?”

It, to us, seemed to be the most anodyne of questions. Maybe a little personal, but what’s some prying between friends? She’d answered that question before, sometimes with a wistful description of a meadow she’d been in, sometimes with a meditation on the futures of her loved ones. A kind of contented melancholy. But this time, she shook her head and left the room.

In the kitchen, we noticed that she didn’t reach for alcohol. Blackberry-flavored seltzer, poured into a glass full of ice. Some of us had known her as a heavy drinker in her college days, and a moderate one in her thirties. The evolution had been from fortified wine wrapped in a paper bag to an old-fashioned enjoyed in a bar with clean bathrooms, but seltzer was a step in a different direction entirely. She started to talk about a recent doctor’s appointment, but stopped as soon as more of us rushed over to hear the details. Instead, she stopped and shook her head, wearing a furious smile and denying us the fulfillment of our curiosity.

Sometimes we wondered if this was all our fault. Maybe we were supposed to kill her, and our affection for her had stayed our hands for too long. But murder is a big commitment, and we liked her too much to kill her.

As the evening went on and Dominic’s cup of beer emptied and filled and emptied and filled, a smile overtook his face like he was enjoying the punchline to a sick joke none of the rest of us had heard. When a college friend of Jennifer’s told the story of the time they partied in an abandoned house and the repeated thumping of dancers in the room above collapsed the ceiling and sent debris tumbling where Jennifer had been standing just seconds before, Dominic laughed and laughed and laughed. He laughed until everyone else around him grew quiet, until all the mirth had drained out of each laugh and they became sharp, furious exhalations that felt like they were meant to punish the storyteller. All subsequent anecdotes were met with the same, but when we stopped telling them he begged for more.

In the other room, two of us were arguing. One, Jennifer’s high school best friend. The other, college. Each had believed at one point in their lives that they would be the one to deliver Jennifer’s eulogy, before she lived long enough to be married and have her love claimed by the law.

The high school best friend had written one that emphasized Jennifer’s talent, the tragedy of all the things that Jennifer would be unable to do: painting, traveling, and even a little exaggeration that she might have become a model or actress thanks to her beauty. This eulogy was rolled up in a drawer in the high school friend’s house, tied with ribbon; the paper had yellowed and dried out much faster than it should have, and now she was afraid to touch it. The college friend, on the other hand, had tried to capture a moment, a beam of pure and transient light that could never have lasted long. It was a good thing, she wrote, that Jennifer’s life was so brief. That was the price of perfection.

The two had never liked each other, and they were reprising an old argument about whether it made sense to reintroduce endangered animal populations from captivity, or to admit that what’s gone is gone and the conditions that drove them to or near extinction were never going to change. The college friend’s embrace of hopelessness had increased in the last decade, and it used to be that Jennifer could reach a hand out and smile and the college friend would let up. But now Jennifer rolled her eyes and left the room when they started, and the two friends bickered for an hour until they got tired and retreated to separate corners of the house.

Later, when we all gathered in the dining room, Jennifer said, “Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to celebrate with me. I know…well, safety measures have improved so much in the last thirty years. Air quality, food safety, assisted driving. You know, these new cars, if you accidentally start to drift into the lane next to yours, they just yank you right back where you’re supposed to be. Incredible technology. It’s really something special…but that’s not why we’re here today, is it? No, I’m fifty-five years old, and it’s really strange, so many strange things can happen. Some of you remember when I was fifteen, drinking stolen rum in the alley behind the movie theater after watching…I don’t remember what movie it was. It was so long ago. It was so long ago. Life is such an incredible gift. It’s one we never ask for, and we don’t even know what we’re getting when it’s given to us. And maybe it’s a bad gift sometimes, but it’s always—”

The lights went dark. Our hearts fluttered, hoping that this darkness was death’s shroud, finally come to enclose Jennifer. But light returned. Fifty-five individual candles blazed like a miniature sun on top of the cake Dominic brought in. We sang, some of us in annoyed half-mutters and others belting out the lyrics like it was their last opportunity. With tears in her eyes, Jennifer approached the cake: it was death by chocolate, with “Happy 55th Birthday!” written on it in blood-red icing. Dominic failed to contain his laughter while she regarded it. Lit by the candles, she looked nothing like the person we’d known for so long, neither daredevil nor delicate, just a healthy woman outshined by the fire. Without any buildup, Jennifer blew out the candles, clasped her hands together over her stomach where—unknown to us at the time—a baby had taken root, and stared out into the distance beyond us, beyond the walls, beyond the bounds of earth into the eyes of what resided, smiling, at the terminus.

June Martin is an Oakland-based writer and comic artist. Her debut novel, Love/Aggression (tRaum Books 2024) was a finalist for the Lambda Award in Transgender Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in X-R-A-Y, BULL, JAKE and other publications, and she has published literary criticism in Heavy Feather Review and Typebar Magazine. She’s the fiction editor for New Session and was a 2024 Lambda Literary fellow.