Shedding Emerald
An incomplete first draft- an exploration of the contrast between suburbia and the city.
Suddenly, I am a twenty-year-old woman living in the city. Atlanta is neither comfortable nor foreign; I had always lived close by. My hometown was tucked in a verdant-colored suburbia. Everything was green: the plaid Catholic uniforms, the crisp papers of money, and the puddles of backyard forests. My mother's eyes were jagged shards of emerald. I moused in the outskirts of the city.
Occasionally, my grade school took the students on a field trip downtown. I remember peering out of the school bus with the sun dripping from my eyes. Homeless men surrendered on the horizon’s line. The men’s bodies scorched in the southern heat. Their freckled limbs hung motionless, a Jesus on a concrete cross. Their bellies protruded with cheap liquor, floating upwards to the places where heaven is not. Brown sludge sagged off the skyscrapers like thick mucus. Historic statues peeled copper in the places that were worshiped too harshly. Strangers strode with their heads anchored to their ribcage, slipping into unknown destinations. On the bus, my teacher held out a Bible worksheet on Matthew 25:30. As the teacher's jeweled cross necklace bobbed from potholes, a grimy woman trembled a Styrofoam cup to the tinted windows.
Atlanta was the city I called home to outsiders. My natural home was manufactured. The air felt like melted plastic on my skin. The women woke up at seven a.m. to feed their purebred dogs- a brown crust shaded around their eyelids. Mothers would fold their children in Pottery Barn comforters, creep down the marble staircase, and gulp white wine from crystal glasses. On Sunday mornings, most families kneeled on wooden pews, pressing into the glossed wood until their knees splinted pink. The young daughters wore dainty, pastel yellow dresses that frilled lace at the rims. The men suffocated with polka dot bow ties that snaked around their necks. The s
ounds of an off-tune choir reverberated through the gates of the neighborhoods. Scrambled worship oozed through the slits of their mouths- that menthol breath clung to their front teeth.
God could not hear their prayers, but I could. I hid in the lonely spaces within the McMansions and listened. My ears mashed up against the floral wallpaper. I heard bated breaths gurgling in their oldest son's bong. The flooding of their father's sermon with leafy poisons- the deep sobs gargled out with beer—the rustling affairs between the silk of the sheets. I heard the rape of the lawn mower and the neon grass screeching through the machine.
The girl who first hated me blotted the vomit off her mother's lips on Friday nights—bubblegum-flavored lip gloss smeared against the napkins. God stopped listening when she heard the squeeze of limes and bubbled tonic water. God stopped listening when her father smashed the porcelain china over the marbled countertop. I could hear the laughs, the pale-blue eyes rolling to the pink of their brains. Their words punctured me. I listened till I could not hear my heart drum- until I bathed with cold holy water.
I moved to Atlanta on my nineteenth May. As I drove further away from girlhood, the green woodland of my town abated into a damp slate. Lofty buildings tarnished with bodily saps blocked out the sunlight. All the noises muffled to a mashed static. Police sirens wailed into the distance, and the tarnished club-goer chains jingled in the alleyways. I not only witnessed corruption, I smelt it. Men sobbed on the pavement- their snot congealed on the sidewalk. The woman of suburbia sermonized to love their neighbors until they smelled the sweat off the impoverished- the zingy odor of mildewed flesh. They thought the scent of human suffering would linger on the threads of their cashmere. Pain panted at their Dior sneakers; the businessmen stepped over the limp bodies of misery- their tailored suit legs hopscotched around leaking needles and melted dreams.
My prep school uniform decomposed in my closet; the mouths of moths gnawed the olive fabric into small tunnels of forgotten histories. My grandmother's scarlet-beaded rosary hung like a noose in my jewelry box. Jesus sprawled unconscious in the slimy gutter- his palms were nailed with flier staples- stigmata's wounds blistered fermented grape juice.
Adulthood eroded God from my back molars- the sickly, sweet toothache of faith. Atlanta's summer gloom haloed over the skyline, exposing the clouded underbelly of everything I was trained to ignore. Twelve miles north, the women with leather skin continued to whisper in the tennis courts, the designer poodles squealed in their cages, school children planted whiskey bottles under Tempurpedic mattresses, and the preachers moaned profanity in their dreams. The men continued to fist-fight in the streets, their fangs snared out like wild bears. That swarthy, verdant snakeskin of nativity shed off my fair, blushed body.