The Way Saturn Tastes

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It’s the rich umami Marmite of grief that chokes her first, the sticky coating of sadness over everything after her grandmother dies suddenly and far away and is buried too quickly for any kind of goodbye. Then the burn of margaritas smears over the bile and damps it down for a while. Until she wakes half-naked in her teetotal friend’s bed. Then it’s the deceptive sweetness of tequila she adds to a list of flavours to avoid, followed by the bitterness of lime and the sting of salt.

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Graduation day, she sits at a table on the edge, their distance measured by a constellation of mutual friends patting him on the back over what he’s achieved, what a good guy he is. She only drinks bottled beer now, and only if she’s watched it being opened.  People stare at her clompy boots and buttoned-up shirts and mutter about exam stress and how much she’s changed. He turns and smiles at her, slowly, exposing his canines. She holds her throat and remembers his fingers brushing across the jumping pulse in her neck, wonders if biting into glass would taste like crushed sulphur. There are other women on the fringes but they all stare at their drinks, Lucie scraping at a half-moon of lemon with sullen teeth, Rachael scratching off a label with a ragged fingernail. None of them can look up.

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An old friend from college invites her to a 25th birthday party/someone’s engagement/impromptu reunion. She wears lipstick again now, mostly for the creamy glide of perfumed grease when she bites her lip, but it’s enough to make her feel she could risk being around those people for an hour. Of course, he’s there, in Armani jeans, under a halo from an antique brass lamp, the light caressing his cheekbones and bleaching out his freckles. He’s talking about his new business, communications or cell phones or networks. Something insidious that will make itself necessary. She stalks off to the bar to hide her flushed face, his musky aftershave sneaks up behind her and smacks her like roadkill, she pours her Budweiser over his head. Everyone asks why, but she can’t say why because she doesn’t really know why. The thin neck of that slick and shiny light-fitting needed tearing into, the sleek metal and tangy slender wires deserved chomping into tiny pieces, and watching him blink through yeasty droplets was easier. Everyone agrees she drinks too much now. She’s the one that leaves early, adds the smell of bread to the list.

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His business soars, his picture on the alumni magazine, then the tech magazines, then gossip magazines. She sits alone on the balcony of her tiny 10th floor flat, stares at the awkward top-heavy bodies of communication satellites, imagining a nickel-cadmium surface sparking on her tongue like wet batteries. Sucking on pure AA’s from the back of the margarita-deprived portable blender she bought an innocence ago helps dulls the ache in her jaw, that craving in the mandible for something to replace the tally of flavours and smells that make her vomit.  He gets married, all their mutual friends are invited but not her. Or Racheal or Lucie. She knows he remembers then. The planets are not on her list, and the swirling cloud of vapours smothering Saturn attracts her questing tongue. Rolling harsh ammonia and flammable methane through the liquid fire flowing through her throat and gut might finally be enough to cut through all the whispers that choke her, and all the structures she needs to smash to be whole again.