Trapped in Forever

9 ~ Evan Dillinger

Print out pieces of paper, some of them still warm from being expelled from the printer, blinking down the number of sheets it still had to print, stalling every other four print outs and stopping mid-paper, laid and were scattered on the marbled counter by the sink, crowded with beige shaded dishes and clear, glass cups with juice lining the bottom, and all of the papers with the word agencystamped over them. On top of a printed out homepage for Brooklyn and Land modeling agency, my mom’s reading glasses, with black rims, unlike Dad’s constant pair of rimless glasses that sunk a little too far down his thin nose, were resting there beside a half-filled cup of a coffee, going cold.

I blinked, fingering through some of the agencies print outs, seeing the bright, bleached teeth of the tall, thin models photographed as the agencies successes and the bright, bold lettering describing what their agency was the best. Some offered traveling, others offered fame, a few offered a couple of commercials, and one or two offered runaway modeling competitions. As I brushed away a few sheets of paper, my fingers grazing along the cool surface of the counter, the name of an agency caught my eye and when I saw it, I couldn’t look away.

“Oh good, your awake.” I heard her bare feet slapping against the tiles covering the floor and then saw her hand reach for her glasses out of the corner of my eye, but I kept my gaze on the print outs. “I wanted you to look over some of these. These are the somewhat local agencies that I thought we could look into.”

Slowly, I reached my fingers around the corner of the paper, crumpling the edge, and I lifted it up as she slipped on her glasses with one hand. She eyed it for a moment before I said, “I don’t want to work for them.”

Her lips, naked without her dark red lipstick, frowned. “Why not?” she inquired, taking the sheet away from me, adjusting her glasses, and looking it over, her irises darting across her eyes as she read. “It’s a good agency and it’s local too.”

I was quiet for a moment while she overlooked it a little more, as if there were some visible flaw that she couldn’t see, even with the reading glasses she hated wearing in front of her eyes, giving her a look that was lessened her perfection. I noticed that there was a triangle shaped chip in her blood red nail polish on her thumb at the edge as she turned the print out over, her eyes scanning over the words written in a cursive font. Just as her lips twisted in a way that told me she was getting ready to say something, I looked away, running my fingertips over the smooth, cool surface of the counter, occasionally grazing the corners and edges of the print out pieces of paper for the other agencies. From the names I glimpsed written at the bottom of each paper, I realized that most of the agencies my mom printed out were run by women, all of them promising success for whoever stumbled across them on Google hoping for a modeling career. They seemed weightless and auspicious, freeing, that little piece of perfection that was so hard to find that you couldn’t even touch it. But perhaps that was because the agency, whose print out was grasped in my mother’s slightly flawed manicured fingers, was weighed down with rocks. Trapped with memories that couldn’t be washed away or forgotten.

Trapped with her.

“Amanda,” my mother said as she shook her head, furrowing her thinly, dark, plucked eyebrows until they were adjacent to each other, and then she tore away her brown eyes from the paper and lifted them up to me, glinting with confusion. “I don’t see anything wrong with this agency.” She dropped the paper on the counter, face up, so that the name stared up at me and even though it said The Lilly, Blue and Larson firm, I kept seeing Roxanne instead. Mom gestured to it. “If anything, it looks like the best out of the bunch.”

I brought the words up to my throat to say but they tumbled together into knots and laid there, stuck, and suffocating.  Slowly, they died there, and I cleared my throat to brush them away but it still like they were still there, building a home there in my throat.  “I just don’t want to go there,” I said after a moment of silence, my eyes beginning to feel hot like a fire that lived inside of you. “That’s all.”