Alison Doernberg

HOW I FORGET THE SHAPE OF YOUR MOUTH WHEN YOU ARE DEEP IN THOUGHT

I’ve taken to keeping my Oakland map on the kitchen table so I can study it while I eat breakfast, as though I am preparing for a test on the quickest way to get from Fruitvale to Grand Avenue. Unfamiliar street names root themselves in my mind and gradually form a cadence: Octavia. Bartlett. Deering. Henrietta.

**

Eighteen is the number of extra curtain rings required, in addition to the usual twelve, to hang shower curtains around a claw foot tub. (Three of mine, mismatched.)

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Mason jars have become my water drinking vessels of choice. I have begun to fill the house with them; I also use them to hold pencils and scissors, fistfuls of wildflowers, wispy cotton balls, a spare toothbrush. I arrange the empty ones along the windowsill above the kitchen sink and let them catch the light.

**

I bought the bicycle for the fortune. The former owner was an art student who’d been seduced by a fixie and listed the hybrid for sale. Back in Middletown, I rode around her neighborhood to test the brakes and derailleurs, pedaled up a hill, and looked down. There, taped between the handlebars, was a small, rectangular slip of white paper with red text: Know the right moment.

**

These are the reasons why I want to become a regular at the café at the bottom of the hill: Exposed brick. Handwritten brown paper menu. The owner’s bird tattoos. Perfectly sized red mugs. Free apricots by the tip jar. The way that, on a chilly morning, even twenty minutes spent sitting outside with a steaming cup of tea that warms both my hands at once feels like a slow exhalation that lasts all day.

**

The third drawer below the mixing bowls is full of paint chips in purples and reds. Sometimes I open that drawer by accident when I am looking for the teaspoons, perhaps making the ginger cookies for ice cream sandwiches. The paint chips were part of my Halloween costume this year; I pinned them to my clothes and dressed as Indecision.

**

The olive-scented hand lotion smells nothing like olives.

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Lamplit, I open Unaccustomed Earth to where my place is held by an envelope made from a topo map (contours unfamiliar, stitched together with blue thread). I’ve been deliberately prolonging reading the last story for nearly two weeks now, until tonight, because the book is so good I don’t want it to end.

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As a child, I developed the strange habit of not getting out of bed, or closing my eyes to fall asleep, until the digits on the clock added up to nine. This odd routine still crosses my mind on unhurried mornings when I roll over to look at the clock. 6:08. There are three nature settings on this clock, in addition to usual alarm and radio, and the one I wake to is Ocean. Living so close to the highway now, I am sometimes stirred awake in the middle of the night by the swells of traffic rushing by, and, still half asleep, think that my alarm is going off. 6:12.