The Two Women
- May 21, 2021
- 4 min read
by Kyle Seibel
I am writing this in the car right after it happened because I know how you don’t like embellishments, I know that’s one of our things, so I’m writing it down because I want to make sure it all comes out like it happened and none of the details get lost, which is another one of our things, and I hope that you see this as growth, as me growing.
I am writing this in the parking lot of the grocery store, the one you like, the one with Jason’s fancy turkey, because I’m getting it just for him, I’m making special sandwiches, and I know we talked about gifts, re: overdoing it, etc., but I’m only human, Liz, and they’re just sandwiches, albeit, yes, special.
I am standing in the deli line behind the first woman I’m writing to you about, a woman in an evening gown, one of these wacky ones, and she’s asking me about the meat or whatever like I work there and I tell her, Sorry, I don’t work here, and she has this look on her face like she doesn’t believe me, like I’m the wacky one, like I’m the one wearing the evening gown to the grocery store on a Thursday afternoon.
This woman says she knows things, says she’s a numerologist who has gifts in astrology and that makes her an interpath or exopath or astromorph or ecto something, and she says she knows things about me and honestly, at first, I’m not wild about this interruption because I’m going to be cutting it close picking up Jason and being late is one of our things and I hope you can tell that lately I’ve really been trying.
But this woman says, You’ve recently learned someone’s secret, and then reaches out and grabs my shoulder and she says, You’re a Gemini and you’ve recently learned someone’s secret and you’re going through a lot right now and I can help you, and she gives me a little squeeze with each of those last words so it feels like this: I (squeeze) can (squeeze) help (squeeze) you (long squeeze).
What I haven’t told you is what I found when reviewing footage from my security camera and what I also haven’t told you is that I recently installed a security camera to figure out what is going on with my packages, about how I find them delivered at my door, opened but no items missing, opened but just messed with, somehow.
And what I haven’t told anyone and probably never will outside these words to you is that I saw the old man who lives down the hall come by my door while I was at work and open a package and take out the air-filled plastic bags they use as fillers and put them under his shirt and arrange them like breasts and rub them very tenderly and return them to the box and then clap his hands like, That’s done, and walk away.
I’m looking at the lady in the evening gown and suddenly she doesn’t look so crazy because as it turns out I am a Gemini, I have recently learned someone’s secret, and I am going through a lot right now and so if those things are true, could the other thing also be true, re: helping me, etc.?
The next thing she says is that Barack Obama is a homosexual and Michelle Obama is also a homosexual and do I know what adrenachrome is (I don’t) and would I like to find out (I would not) and my brain is buzzing because I’m starting to feel like the rest of my life, the life I’m living without you, will be a series of events that make less and less sense until I will be completely untethered from the planet.
The concept of it swallows me, a black hole of a thought, and that’s why I don’t notice at first when the other woman approaches me, the other woman I’m writing to you about, the older Hispanic woman who comes up behind me while I’m loading in groceries and touches my elbow and who, when I turn around, motions for me to follow her across the street and softly says, You help me.
It’s like I don’t even have a choice because I follow her to an apartment complex where we walk up three flights of stairs to a room where all the lights are turned off and where there are two suitcases sitting by the door and the woman points to the bigger of the two and then back out to the street and says, You help me.
I pick up the bigger suitcase and follow her down the stairs and we walk half a block to the bus stop and that’s where she motions for me to put the suitcase and then motions for me to bend down and then motions for me to get closer, which I do, which is when she kisses my cheek like the pope and says, You help me.
Between helping the second woman and writing it all down, I know I’m going to be late picking up Jason, but Liz, I feel very strongly about telling you this and what I’m trying to say is that whatever else I’ve done, the person who this happened to is the truest version of who I am, and I have to think there’s some cosmic purpose to it, that you can draw conclusions here, that it balances out, the two women, the old man, the suitcases, the evening gown, that it’s evidence of a universe which seeks harmony with itself, a universe where, please goddamnit, one day, I can come home and for that to mean a place with you and Jason but especially and only you, I promise, this time, forever.
Kyle Seibel is 36 years old and lives in Santa Barbara, CA. He works as a copywriter and his stories have appeared in The Masters Review, Drunk Monkeys, and Barren Magazine.
