Addictions and Adverbs by Harmony Neal

The man is a white horse, a tiger, a dragon. I want him the same way I want that cigarette I’m not supposed to smoke. If he was around, I’d sneak out to the porch and light him on fire.

He invades me nightly. Then he’s on the outskirts of my brain all day, spying, following me to fold laundry and wash dishes, trickling through my earbuds while I walk for miles in the same place at the gym, his essence infiltrating Kristin Hersh’s vitriol, every song about him anyway, the two of them merging in my undistracted mind.

Some days, I want to carve his name into my arm with a mercilessly cold straight razor, but there are too many letters. Or maybe get a “property of” tattoo on my back in gothic 60-pt font.

It’s been a year and a half. He is now engaged to someone who is bizarrely attached to adverbs.

An adverb is a word
That modifies a verb
Or modifies an adjective
Or else another adverb
And so you see that it’s absolutely
Very, very necessary.

When I cook, I remember him cooking for me: heart-attack surprise, breakfast burritos as big as my head, plates and plates of food. I eat small handfuls of fruit now, strawberries, green grapes, banana halves, chew, chew, chew.

I get urges to call him or write, to demand that he leave my brain at once, skedaddle, vamoose, get, get, get! I think he might hang up on me. Or really, I don’t think that, but I think he’d tell the harbinger of adverbs, and that is a humiliation I cannot bear.

I’ve even started to miss him spitting in my mouth.

I layer my coat in various perfume samples my mother put in my xmas stocking. Gwen Stefani’s airy and substanceless L blends with Kenzo’s dark and spiced Amour: both are smothered by Ferragamo’s prickly, citrus Dream.

I microwave a can of sweet peas for lunch. The mush is choked down with gulps of Brita water from a Solo cup.

You’re going to need them if you write or read or even think about it!

I moved again. Left the east coast for the west, avoiding the middle region where he resides. It is not enough. I crouch above his home territory, and it haunts me that he could be below me on the map somewhere right now, that they could be in Riverside, holding hands, chatting with the family, unwrapping xmas presents, using adverbs, spitting in each others’ mouths.

Have I mentioned that I am not alone here, halfway across the country again?

An adverb is a word
That modifies a verb
Or modifies an adjective
Or else another adverb
And so you see that it’s absolutely
Very, very necessary.

My rational mind is not bitter, and my logic tells me the reason for this haunting, his constant blurring on the edges of conscious thought, his outright violation of my subconscious, is that addictions are hard to kick, and they will use any means necessary to reinstate themselves.

I wake with that School House Rock song stuck in my head. Parts of it loop and loop, bumping into his hiding places.

If I were alone, I wouldn’t have to sneak around for contraband cigarettes. I could wake up in the morning and cry. I could get through the shakes. But I am not alone.

I send text messages to people all over the country about the nutritional content of peas, I walk three miles for a pack of cigarettes, I blister my thumb trying to ignite a wet lighter, none of this is enough.

You’re going to need them if you write or read or even think about it!

I once put a cigarette out in my palm for a man. I won’t do that again.

I am here with his good twin, vanilla, no resemblance to an animal, something I could quit anytime. The doppelganger tries to addict me to fresh air, hard work. Tries to cut me off from longing.

I sneak the butts inside, put them in the empty pea can in the trash, press the jagged circular end down to cover the contents.

How, when, or where? Obsession or reason? The answer is adverbs?

Vanilla was here this whole time. You wonder where this story exists. Mostly, it exists in dreams and the subconscious, but it also exists in this room I call my own in the basement where he was sleeping as I started typing these words, the faint click click clicking of keys making a staccato rhythm in his dreams. When he wakes, I pull up a web browser page, something of no interest to him, and leave that displayed until he goes. Then I dance on the back porch to the rhythm of Lally’s adverbs, smoke enveloping me like a fog in the damp Oregon air, mixing with the perfumes rising from my coat. I try to remember to wash my hands, but sometimes, I click click click nicotine onto his keys.

Ferragamo’s Dream burns my nose. I try to cover it up with Escada’s Moon Sparkle when I reenter this room, but the glitter smell of Moon Sparkle cannot erode the harsh sting of Dream.

I cannot be myself with craving. That was always the problem. I got lost in the smell of his shirt, in oranges cut into quarters the way I like, in a haze of degradation. I expanded on tuna coated in cheese and bacon bursting from the confines of toasted wheat bread, forgot how to say no, learned to clean my plate, how to cling.

I was always at his disposal.

How, when, or where? Obsession or reason? The answer is adverbs! And so you see that it’s absolutely, very, very necessary!

I quit him many times. Pictured myself at the bottom of a well, he’d block the sun, crying, and I’d return. I’d return. I traveled halfway across the country, found a hole, hid in it. When I resurfaced, he had everything he wanted and I was bloated and empty, craving.

I wanted to win. I wanted to say, you may have a black-haired adverb who smokes with her dark core, but I found a wealthy man who is more Asian than you, who really really likes me. Who actually worships me. Who incidentally treats me like a princess. I’ve finally moved to the West Coast and am blissfully blissful without you.

Of course, it’s hard to accept vanilla when you’re accustomed to spit and blood and smoke, and I don’t speak to him much except in dreams. He finds it hard to speak to me, and I know it’s because he still gets the urge to spit in my mouth and cram bacon down my throat, even though he’s so blissfully blissful now.

I rattle the bars of my cage. I breathe smoke. I scream adverbs derived from my favorite four letter words. There is no one to hear any of this. There is no way for either of them to peer inside my mind and see the needle skipping, the blood flecked gears jamming. No one to lube them with spit.

I cannot see the end to this story. I cannot cut the adverbs out.

Harmony Neal

Harmony Neal is the 2011-2013 fiction Fellow at Emory University. She’s been published in recent issues of New Letters, Hobart web, Cold Mountain Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Storyglossia, and decomP magazine. She spends her spare time playing with her dog, Milkshake, and growing poets in her apartment.

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