Alayna Becker

At nine years old, I sit at the bathroom mirror and open both sides of the medicine cabinet to reveal my infinity self. In a long identical row, I am transfixed by the other mes. We are in the same stretched-neck candy striped shirt, our mouths full of the same funny shaped teeth, topped by the same blunt bowl cut. When I blink, they blink. When I stick out my tongue, theirs follow. Until, in the back row, one stands up confidently. In my own reflection me and all the other mes lock on her as she stands, pulls her shirt over her head and wraps it around her fist. She cocks back and with one hit, shatters the mirror. She crawls out of the cabinet, bare chested and bloody, leading all of my mirrorselves, running like hell out of the bathroom and down the street. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to find where they’ve gone, wondering if I should be there too.

 for the first time. In it, the concept is explained: a ghost haunts a place and a poltergeist haunts a person. 

I ask the blurred being who has been following me for the past year, suddenly embarrassed I hadn’t thought to ask until now. 

, the blur nodded. Interesting, I thought, we still have so much to learn about each other.

 boys. They catch me in the pine woods between school and home, me, still in my uniform. The seven of them, impenetrable in their pointy toed boots, armed with key fobs to cars which cost more than our house. The mothers circle me, take hands and begin to chant. Perhaps it’s Latin. Words that sound like words but aren’t, as far as I know. Their voices are beautiful together until I cannot hear them any longer because my ears disappear. Then, my lips are gone, my clothes, my hair, my breasts all dissolve into the air. Their chanting becomes louder. From my feet up I fade into a mist and then nothing at all. Suddenly invisible, I finally understood all those weird Catholic rituals. How simple it is to make an inconvenient girl disappear.

There is a potted succulent garden on my kitchen windowsill which has been there for many years. I water it once a month or when it occurs to me that it may need a drink. The plant was a gift from my boss who wrote in the accompanying card how much I meant to her and how I had helped us all to grow. It’s fake, it turns out, the plant I was watering. I watched it stay small for years.

It occurs to me that the blur can see me naked and so I begin to buy better underwear.

At her funeral, I sit in the front row of the cavernous brick church. Outside, a man on a mower, mowing. At the altar, tall flower arrangements frame a giant foam core photo of her from years ago, perched next to her closed coffin. In it, her eyes are suddenly taut, eyes no longer cloudy, nothing like the woman whose body is slumped over my lap in the front pew. I wear her shearling lined moccasin slippers while her feet go bare. Grievers, most of whom I don’t know, say things like, 

. Nobody seems to notice her body is not in the casket, but is heavy and icy on top of me. 

. When the minister begins speaking, the body’s little crispy lips seek the shape of words. The minister continues. The body lets out a thunderous burp which rings off all sides of the pitched roof and pings through the pies of the organ. I have no choice but to howl with laughter, This dead woman, burping. I laugh sharp and high at first then I lose all control and begin rolling on the floor, crying from how hard I am laughing. All the faces in the pews are on me, some necks crane to find me down here on the floor. I can’t help but pee a little. The minister stops mid-prayer. Some man in a black suit, I’m not sure who, rushes down to me from the back. 

, he whispers sharply. I pick myself up, and in the silence my heels make a pleasant horse trot echo. I pick up my mother and toss her over my shoulder like a firefighter. I lug her down the front steps, into my car and back in time.

Bullfrog Out There Lookin’ for a Girlfriend

One day a year, the frogs come for Meridian. They rain from the sky fat, wet and green for a full 24-hours, as if god took a straw and cleared the lakes and lowlands of bullfrogs by suckin’em up and spitting them out all over town. The frogs splash into bird baths and drop with a splat into baby strollers, and occasionally, they’ll fall on street signs which slices them in half, spilling their rich, red blood down the pole until it puddles on the sidewalk. When the survivors land, the frogs croon a bellowing song. After a while, their voices begin to sound like men in a beerhall, a cacophony of shit talk and eerie intonation. Each year there is an election. The surviving frogs choose one girl. Last year it was the Jamison girl, still in braids. They vote by lining themselves up in long rows in front of the girl of their choosing. The girls, unsuspecting but willing, understand the importance of their job. Our whole town depends on it.

When it’s just us alone, the blur and I can sit together silently for hours. It sits on my dresser and I do different things. I read on the couch, but I do so in my underwear. I scrub the kitchen floor on my hands and knees. I suck in my stomach and tuck my chin. I want to feel like a painting, and I want the blur to want me more than it’s ever wanted anything. Why else would it be here, like this? Lurking.

The goldfish in my therapist’s office has these enormous bulging eyes. They’re so huge, its orange body looks like it's on the brink of explosion. It struggles to keep itself upright, always sinking on its side unless it paddles along with its bitty fins. I wonder what my therapist could offer by way of comfort if this is how her fish feels.

I am also a fish with bulging eyes, holding my breath, building up pressure to the point my eyes and butthole are going to give out any second. She motions for me to sit on the couch. The room is 100 degrees. The second I sit down, I detonate. My intestines hang from her floor lamp. The spray of my blood colors her bookshelf a sort of trendy monochrome. My brain sits, fully intact, on the couch.

This is the version of the story where nothing happens.

I predicted the death of the boy who tried to obliterate me. Two days after I thought it, he was dead, dead, dead. I read about it in the paper. His obituary was a single line. A sentence more devastating than anything he could ever do to me.

I devolve into obsession. My tongue is trapped on their name: 

blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur blur

I wake up: blur. I sleep: dream of blur. I have lost my own name.

I was born in a phone booth, if you can believe it. It’s where my passion for telecommunications began. The phone rang and rang while my mother, caught on the street between work and home, labored. I always wondered who it was on the other end, dialing and redialing as she forced me into this world. It’s one thing I’m sure I’ll never find out, but the closest thing would be for me to work here, at the phone company. Does that answer your question?

It’s brains in those jars, puckered like pickled sharks in the aquarium gift shop. The jars, lined up on shelves, row by row,  make a lovely retirement community. Here’s mine, bobbing in its special juice. I was glad to find a receptacle for it, the burden had become too great.

After his second week in the psych ward, my twin brother got a hall pass to have dinner with our parents and me. Rather than eating at home, the scene of the incident, we went out and my brother was given his choice of restaurant. He picked his favorite spot, a hibachi restaurant usually reserved for birthdays and anniversaries. We were greeted by a woman in a cheap kimono, her blonde hair wrenched into a bun with a Bic pen. My family sat in a line in front of the grill while the white guy chef with dyed black hair and a Japanese rising sun headband clicked on the heat. 

He asked. It was a good question. I looked to my dad to hear the answers. 

 he said pointing to us. It was not our birthday and I resented the suggestion. The chef made a stack of onion rings into a spewing volcano. He turned the strobe light on and shook sesame seeds like a rave. I watched my brother’s face through the strobes and thought about how deeply and truly I hated him. The chef began to sweat a thick river of black dye from his sideburns down his neck. At the end of the meal, every employee lined up behind the blonde woman who was trying to bang the melody of 

 into a gong. They delivered a half a pineapple carved into the shape of a boat with lit sparklers, spewing. They placed a black rubber Geisha wig on mine and my brother’s head and wrapped us in a robe. From behind a camera, the woman frames us up.

The days I spend in the office are wasted. I spend them sketching my blur with charcoal and colored pencil. In one, we are on vacation, lounging in one of those open-air huts. In one, we feed each other mashed potatoes and peas. In another, I am bound to the bed splay legged with the blur deep between my thighs. I decide it's best I quit. I need to spend my time doing something that matters.

I always wanted a big group of friends. The types who sit in circles on lawns and laugh with their heads back, the sun glinting line reality is shot in 35 millimeter and it’s always golden hour. The group doesn’t need to be too large, just a few, maybe six people. I want the friend who is the funniest one, who we all know will die first. I want the mom of the group, always willing us to suckle her teats, slick, hot, and full of milk. I want the friend who is always dissecting something: a cockroach or everything I say. I want to be the friend who brings the cake, tall and white, with six red cherries on top, I want us to claw into it. Feeding each other till we’re sick.

Sure, I can keep the books. Though I’ll admit I never committed myself to learning math. I gave up on it entirely when I was certain I would die before my sixteenth birthday. I just couldn’t picture my life beyond that. What a betrayal, you know? Death feels promised. My right. And yet, here I am begging you for a job.

I cleaned out the medicine cabinet. Ancient cures for god knows what: warts, cold sores, bumps. I placed their dishes in the free pile outside their apartment. In my grandmother's filing cabinet, I packaged up her tax documents, bank receipts, and their wills. One folder was full of receipts from the grocery store, the liquor store, the 76. The last manilla folder was thicker at the bottom. When I opened it, hundreds of old Polaroids fell to the carpet. In them, she is on top. She is face deep in some muff. She’s lost her hand in someone. Laughed, at first. How uncanny to see this body I have known, belonging to nobody but herself. My dad would be livid, hurt, destroyed to know. Me, on the other hand, I am glad she once, at least for a moment, felt good.

My mother’s husband was a photographer. If you want to look at my life, you’ll have to see it through his eyes. Does it ever bother you that the phrase man made means it isn’t real?

The medium arrives, politely says hello, and goes right to work rearranging my living room. This was not the service I requested, but what do I know about the other side? I watch as she stacks the coffee table on the couch, the chairs on the coffee table, and the throw pillows on the chairs. Beneath the chairs, she reveals all the things I was hiding down there: a discarded bra, one sad sock, self-help books, a pocket-sized vibrator crusted in couch dust, and the plastic bowl of a freezer mac and cheese I had licked clean and left. She gathers these items and adds them to the pile. She lights a stick of cinnamon on fire until it smokes in a sweet and spicy swirl.

 She says wagging her finger in a circle, pointing at my face.

My blur, who I’d hoped would be here, is not. The whole reason for the medium is to find out what the blur wants so I can give it to them.

The session goes on like this, back and forth until our hour is up, and the medium walks out the door.

The first time I am alone with my girlfriend’s father, he reaches behind his cigar store Indian and pulls out a green grenade with the pin still in it. The mounted five-point buck watches with his glassy eye as the grenade is placed in my hands and I try to hold still. 

? I ask. He cocks a gator grin and hisses 

When we arrive, they line us up and stick thermometers into our mouths and take a small amount of blood for a pregnancy test. Then, they place us in our own exam rooms, lay us out on crinkle paper and begin to ask us questions.

The form doesn’t define the word queer, please answer to the best of your ability.

The truth is, since I started these injections, everything is different. I am hungry only for meatballs. My nipples have become the size and shape of martini olives. My wife suddenly resembles a goat with a bone to pick. My mind has become a security camera flashing between images of people I know doing things they shouldn’t. My uncle loading a handgun. My best friend in the car with the guy she said she was over. My sister’s kid slipping a five from her purse. Perhaps the strangest is when I bathe, I create an oil slick on the water. Under low light the sheen spreads like a rainbow and leaves a pink ring around the tub. I never ask what the medication is supposed to do, they only ask me to note my symptoms and they cut a check. A job’s a job.

The day I turned 21 my whole town collapsed into a sinkhole. The bank went first and took with it the post office, beauty salon, the shoe store, and the restaurant. They all fell like a tablecloth dragging a perfectly set table into the underworld. A clamoring of clinking and shattering. The rumble could be felt all the way out to the Sawtooths, and the mountains sent the rumble right back, like a wave with nowhere to crash.

It was a convenient and well-timed death of a town whose darkness was palpable. With everything I ever knew suddenly on its way to hell, I could simply pick up and leave.

The fat dentist offered his thick hand, and I took it even though I would do just about anything to avoid touching a man. Resonate heat. 

 he says, as he reclines my exam chair and flicks on the overhead light, 

Some women pay a lot of money to look like you

I squirm inside but open my mouth for the exam. He runs his fingers on the inside of my cheeks, over my bony gum beds and stands up and leaves the cramped room. In walks a dental hygienist in floral scrubs with a tray of implements. “Good morning sweetie,” she said like a diner waitress. “Your turn is coming!” I don’t know what to say to that, but I figure this is what government dental is, you have to take what you can get. “Hop up” the diner hygienist instructed. The dentist returned and took my place in the chair. “Have you ever done this before?” she asks. I am not sure what 

 is. She grabs pliers and has me hold the suction tube in his mouth. “It’s easy once you get popping,” she says, the pliers deep in the dark of his mouth, she yanks, and comes out with a thick molar, root intact, dripping in his blood. The dentist moans and giggles, but a creepy little titter that reminds me of this guy I knew who laughed every time he came. She hands me a pair of latex gloves and pliers. I figure why not? I find the next molar in line and give it a tug. It's harder than it looks, to separate a man from his bone. I tug and slip, tug and slip, tug and slip until pop. Satisfying in a way I cannot describe. Pop, pop, pop, I take three more. The tray becomes a pile of blood and bone. I wonder if I can keep one tooth when I leave, but I decide not to ask and to pocket it when the time comes.

After the medium came and went, the blur knew their power. They started knocking things off shelves and blowing on my eyelashes in my sleep. Unspooling the toilet paper into a puddle. Turning off lights. They appear, hovering in front of my face, then disappear for days. 

 My obsession is fire. I decide my only option is to join them, to kill myself, to be on the right side.

At 16, I get my first job and need a copy of my birth certificate. I go to county records and fill out the request form. I drop it—along with my last and only $20—into the intake tray where I was instructed to place it and ring the little bell. An older lady works the desk, her big glasses chain swings violently as she waddles from the tray to the ancient desk computer.

I can’t release this record to you. Someone was born to your parents on your birthday but it wasn’t you

She gives me options: create a new birth certificate for myself which will cost or call my parents and see if they named me something else and forgot.

My parents deny having any idea of who I really am so I spend the next few days considering who I could be. I stare at my reflection and whisper new names to myself. Sitka, Margeaux, John. I try new faces. I grow a mustache and shave it. I shave my head and grow it back. I become the type of person who smacks their gum. I stop. I watch every possible kind of porn. I eat eggs cooked every way.

When I return to Vital Records, I drop the affidavit and my money into the tray and ding the bell. She waddles back and retrieves my original birth certificate. When she holds it up in the light, I can see through the paper. On the other side: a bloody handprint, child sized.

Alayna Becker is an essayist, fiction writer, multimedia producer and stand-up comedian in Portland, OR. Her work can be found in the 

 among others. She is the managing editor of 

. She has been named one of the ‘Best of PDX’ by Helium Comedy Club and is the host of 

, an abortion comedy show. She is at work on her first full-length essay collection, 

Alayna Becker

Alayna Becker

Fiction

Spring 2023 - Decoy

Mirrorselves

Mirrorselves