Bradland

Brad’s arguing with his girlfriend when she turns into him. It’s a Sunday evening and they’ve driven to the rocky outcrop a mile out of town, to watch the sunset and listen out for the coyote with the banshee-howl, and to pretend that suburbia isn’t making their lungs collapse in on themselves like a neutron star. It’s the same argument as ever. 

‘You can’t live there forever.’

‘I can’t just leave her either, Emily.’ 

Etc. etc. ad infinitum. She knows she’ll never win. Brad and his Mother make a horribly co-dependent and comfortably depressed pair. They’re peas in a pod that shrivelled up a long time ago, if one pea had crippling arthritis and the other no backbone, and their pod was an ugly 70s orange-and-brown and its walls were peeling and it had one bed which creaked more than Eileen’s joints and it was in a neighbourhood where all the other fucking peas were killing themselves. 

Brad watches Emily’s forehead, too scared to meet her eyes when she gets emotional. He can’t stand tears or piercing gazes any more than he can stand the thought of letting his mother deteriorate. Her silence is deafening. There goes the coyote, the one she used to be scared of so she nicknamed him Jeff from HR. She begins to breathe heavily, shuddery, as if this time it’s really just too much for her. The skin around that freckle on her hairline reddens, new creases appear and she struggles for words, when suddenly her colour drains, and he meets his eyes.
His eyes? 

‘You’re right, of course, Brad.’ 

Brad blinks. He’s not just meeting his own eyes but his whole face. It’s no longer an exasperated girlfriend staring back at him but himself, another Brad, even that eyebrow scar from when he hit his head on the garage door when he was seven — 

‘Mom needs us. We can’t leave her.’ 

Brad gulps, nods. Brad-Emily starts fiddling with the car’s music player, as if to ease the weirdness of the situation.  Brad’s favourite Coldplay album starts playing. 

The hush in the air settles and spreads until it becomes a light haze of comfortable silence, the kind that feels like when Brad sits with his thoughts on the wonky kitchen stool for hours on end. He doesn’t have to argue with himself. He thinks about Chris Martin talking about skin and bones turning into something beautiful and that maybe this is it, maybe he’s beautiful and silence is golden or All Yellow, and so he switches on the ignition and just drives. 

 

Words by Aimee Dixson. Artwork by Molly Lugsden.