A Flash Essay

Smudge.

I hate that word.

            Smudge.

Do you say it in two syllables, or three?

[My Arkansas friend says it in three. Suh-muh-dge.]

So many consonants, all piled up; clutter. Rolling around. Alphabet soup.

Taste dirt. Taste sad. Taste. Taste—

            Smudge.

_____

“Pinched like a pear,” my mom would say. Mouth closed, a little pucker, sweet sour smooth. But not a kiss; not a real kiss. It was bad, the first kiss. Many others would be.

Andy grabbed me by the collar at the ice rink and I let him. I let him because our friends were watching and we had planned this, right, like he was supposed to do it and oh they’re looking and oh you smell good—

I tried to recreate the feeling of his tongue in my mouth when I got home that night. My mouth morphed into weird shapes in the bathroom mirror. I learned how to unwrap Starburst candies with my tongue, because I heard guys like that. I looked for him there, between the plastic folds and pockets.

Andy gave me strep throat and I never forgave him. He’s married now, Facebook tells me. His page shows lots of vineyard pictures, arms around his new wife.

Sour pucker, tight mouth.

_____

A year after the first kiss a friend of Andy’s shoved my face into loose soil on the outskirts of a building site while he held me down from behind. I remember pine trees and cones and sap but I don’t, won’t, remember anything else.

I hate pine nuts. The smell makes me sick.

“You got smudge on your pants,” my mom told me when I came home for dinner that night. She grabbed a wet sponge soaking in the sink and dabbed at my knees.

I’m thirty now. I adopted a dog, a Siberian husky and Pyrenees mix. A man on the trail told me that puppies take a lot of effort, and money, and work. It’s not all fun and games, you know.

I fucking know. I didn’t speak; I just nodded. I despise this man. I tell my dog, Koda, about mansplaining. She looks perplexed. She usually looks that way.

Missouri is my home now. I run on muddy dirt paths by the river instead of Virginia’s forested, rocky trails. People wave to me. I wave back. They stop to meet the dog. There’s a lot of construction downtown with huge piles of dirt.

He could’ve buried me in it.

I didn’t let him.

You know when I say “he” I mean “they” and there is more than one.

“It’s just a smudge,” mom said. “We’ll get rid of it.”