MARISSA HIGGINS
Instinctual
The squirrels spooked me from the start but with a thousand dollar student loan payment due each month, what was I to say? No, I won’t sit in a room and watch rodents through reinforced glass? No, I won’t take notes old-school-like on yellow lined paper? The man in the sheep mask told me he loved my handwriting and later, when I met the other women who performed my exact function but for other creatures under observation—cows, crows, horses, armadillos—learned their penmanship had sealed the deal too. Men are freaks, one said. Total pigs. Another woman—we weren’t allowed to exchange names, only wore name tags with caricatures of the animals we monitored—said that was too kind a label for men like our hiring manager. Given that she observed hogs all day, I considered her an expert opinion and agreed. The morality of pigs: the things you hypothesize about at 26 before the government controls the sun.
Men in masks scared me less than the squirrels if only because I understood them as evil from the start. Sheep, pig, rhinosnorus, elephant, gerbil. Mask or not I tightened my knees, curled my shoulders, lowered my chin to protect my jugular. What else is there to do in the presence of a beast? It was not until I was asked to keep their secret that I thought of sweet Sandra. As I signed my name to accept the promotion that would change not everything, but the only important thing—my understanding of sun, sun, sun—I imagined Sandra pulling baked cubes of tofu from my oven. We’d been together four months at that time, long enough for playing house to become routine. She loved tanning then.
Squirrels did not mind the dark until the sun became only slivers. They still ate, huddled, hid, fucked, fought. I wrote at length about their maintained ability to adore but my supervisor told me such information was superfluous. From behind his giraffe mask, he instructed me to focus on survival. Breathing, he said. Functioning. You know, he said. What we do. The laugh behind the mask was so pitched, I thought he was a woman, but we were not allowed such roles. I matched it, wondering if I was already dead.
Sandra stopped teaching around the time she got really into making me dinner. Teachers revolted when the union could no longer protect them, though we saw betrayal coming; first the electricians then the firefighters then even the police. Children stayed in school longer than I anticipated. Sandra’s stories were not so bad, I thought, before I learned she fed her first-graders pills. When sun comes in the window, she said, they can’t keep their eyes open. I burned my thumb when she told me students slept through their hour’s worth of honey light.
When the masked men told me I could have the eye surgery, I opted in. See in darkness? Certainly. Who would turn that down, I reassured myself, not telling anyone of the offer I’d received. The surgery, my supervisor reminded me with a studied sheepish shrug, of course, could not solve every problem. As the ophthalmologist informed me from behind a horse mask, this procedure was purely primitive; changing one’s cornea could not reduce one’s longing for a sunny afternoon. You’d be surprised how often I’m asked about that, he told me the morning of my operation, and when I asked what was more primitive than craving sun, he asked me to please hold my eyelids up and relax my brows, so we could both see clearly.
When light peeled into splinters closer to seconds than minutes, Sandra, like most, wanted nothing more than to optimize time outside. On our walks, we revolted in gentle, ordinary ways: wore strap-on harnesses beneath our leggings, melted ice cubes beneath our tongues, touched each other’s nipples at traffic lights gone dark. The world both a sunset and rise and I felt not powerful but pure; only doing my job, only a step in a race, not the master or even the mind, only a woman, only a pile of paper. Then our internal bulletin, to be kept secret from the public until people, if ever, realized. Three minutes of sun each day would transition to three seconds. Who could tell the difference? Who savors seconds enough to notice? I thought: Sandra. I thought: Holy shit.
When pig mask asked about my squirrels I told him the truth: weights were sporadic, feed inconsistent, sleep all over the place. Fighting and screwing with abandon. I said, Their eyes don’t sit right. He said, You mean, they’re gauging at each other? I could hear his raised eyebrows. No, I said, their spirits. He said, Right, right. I thought I recognized empathy but the eyes were glass. Only a trick of the light.
To celebrate nine months, Sandra and I took to the hills for a hike. They’d closed the mountains by then, for safety and for easier monitoring of our movements. Sandra wanted to live colors and I wanted to see her happier. Before we reached the door, I blindfolded her with a silk scarf, all painted fruit against a black backdrop. I love a splash of color, she told me, and as I double-knotted behind her head, she kissed me. Her lips on my nose, I told her I loved her and was sorry. She did not ask what for and for that, I understood she loved me too.
Outside, I asked her what she witnessed. Around us was all dark but she described dancing tangerines and grapes. If I squint just right, she said, I see oranges kissing on the sidewalks. I told her I envied her and admitted I saw only what was real: shuttered windows empty restaurants bickering couples a thin child crying, and she said, If it’s too bright, close your eyes. I kept them open but let her lead us, women in love, afraid and happy, swallowed up and swimming still.
Marissa Higgins is a lesbian writer based in Seattle. Her work appears in The Florida Review, Atlantic, NPR, Best American Food Writing 2018, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, THE WIVES, is out with Catapult in 2024. You can find her on Twitter at marissahiggins_.