We’re Strangers, Really
Samantha Sewell
I’ve been intimate with a few too many people on Facebook Marketplace. It started with Peter. He bought my twenty-one speed Trek bike. When we met, he asked why I was selling the bike, and I half-heartedly referenced an existential crisis. He seemed surprised by my honesty because he stared at me blankly. Then, he offered to fill the tires. He reached for the pump, but I grabbed his wrist. His sneakers were brand new, a bright white. I had been sensitive to the value of a possession. Rusty red water trickled from the bike pump. I felt inclined to protect his shoes.
“My crisis. It’s just about nothingness. How quickly we head into it,” I explained, as I hooked the nozzle of the pump onto the valve stem. “It’s silly, really—to hyperventilate over nothing.”
The tires were very flat. It took fifteen minutes to fill them. So, Peter and I spent our time toward nothing really getting to know one another. I learned he was an actor, visiting Los Angeles for a play entitled, “The Immigrant.” He learned I was moving back to Connecticut, that I had been living here since seventeen. I didn’t want to get into why I was leaving, so I asked him what the play was about. Apparently, it follows the life of an immigrant, who is smuggled from Venezuela into America as a child to “live the dream,” only to encounter a devastating series of unfortunate events, such as molestation, homelessness, and police brutality. It culminates in deportation.
“Based in truth,” he said. We dropped our gazes and shared a few stiff nods of condolence for the Venezuelan man.
“I suppose the tragic ending isn’t exactly the deportation then. In a way it ends on exploitation,” I said, impressed by myself. I expected an additional set of knowing nods, but instead Peter crossed his arms and cocked his head.
“How do you mean?” he asked.
My mind went blank. I shook my head and ripped a chunk of skin from my inner cheek. I continued pumping Peter’s tires in silence, glancing every-so-often at his very white shoes. “So, who do you play?” I asked.
“I’m actually the main role—the Venezuelan boy, but obviously as an adult,” he said.
I nodded again, not really knowing what to say. His tires were getting harder. Our time together approached completion. When I stood up, my vision spotted.
“I know I don’t look very Latino,” Peter continued, “I’m mostly British and German, but my mom’s mom was from Spain originally. The play’s in English anyway—for obvious reasons.”
“What reasons?” I blinked. My head ached for blood. My heart invaded my ears, dragging me under water. I wondered if he could tell I was edging death.
“Well, I mean, our audience is mostly English speaking, right? We’re in California not Mexico,” he said.
“Right,” I squeaked. Then, I fainted. I didn’t feel my body hit the driveway, but I could hear the smack it made against the concrete. When my eyes fluttered open a few seconds later, Peter was perched above me, asking if I was okay. I mumbled an apology. My face burned hot with shame. Peter played the good citizen and demanded my number so that he could check in later, making sure I wasn’t concussed. I gave him my email. A couple hours later I received an email from him with a link to a few tickets for opening night of “The Immigrant.”
#
The following week, I sold my console table to Susan for seventy-five dollars. She sneezed her way down my staircase.
“Pollen allergy,” she explained.
“I might be anemic,” I responded, hoping she’d feel less alone in her experience.
“What makes you say that?” Susan asked, genuinely concerned.
“Oh.” Suddenly, I felt very close to her. “You know, I’ve been fainting a lot.”
Susan grunted as we hoisted the console into the trunk of her Subaru. I decided I liked her, so I gave her a discount. After she paid me, I rambled on about how I was moving, and how she seemed cool, and how it would have been nice to have met her earlier. Then, I asked if we should hug. When Susan messaged me later, I felt cornered by myself. A careless charm had paved a path of obligation. I was just trying to be friendly to those buying up my belongings. I wanted the furniture to live on in good health without me.
We picnicked that following Friday. She brought the wine, and I brought the strawberries. I wanted to explain that I only dated men, but instead I got too tipsy, and I asked her if she wouldn’t mind hugging me like before. At her apartment, we undressed slowly, stumbling over our own ankles, and I laughed a lot. She took my laughs as nervous bursts, when really, I was out of my mind over how I had gotten into her bed. I had all of the control and also none of it. It was me and it wasn’t me. My body had been a doll at the whim of a much larger hand. The hand still belonged to me, but it lacked a nervous system. It didn’t operate under logic.
While we fucked, I left myself and wandered into the living room. I crouched in front of the console table and pressed my face against the light wood. My lips folded into a bow from the pressure on my cheek. I rubbed my palm over the wax finish and traced my pinky along the chestnut rings. When I heard Susan finish, I returned to the bedroom. I told her I was too drunk to come, and I asked her to hold me again.
“When can I see you next?” she asked. Her right hand massaged my head while her left hand squeezed my shoulder, my bicep, down to my elbow and forearm. She pulled at my fingers, rubbed the pads of my fingertips. I wanted to recoil and go back to the living room with the console table, but also I wanted to spend the rest of eternity wrapped up in Susan.
Eventually, I said something that I suspect was accidentally offensive because she frowned in response. Her hold on me weakened. She got up off the bed. I watched her dress. When she tossed me my shirt, I did the same. We didn’t say much. My chest ached and I thought about asking her for one last hug. I think at some point I apologized. On the way out I glanced at the console table. I felt a sting of betrayal. It looked good in her space. There was nothing I could do but accept it and move on.
#
My mattress was the last item to sell. Geoff had the words “Fuck it” in cursive on his collar bone, his body decorated up to his chin. He showed up with his girlfriend. She wore gold spandex and a gold bandeau bra and silver Ugg boots. The mismatched boots bothered me. I stood in the doorway to my empty bedroom while they cozied up in my duvet. I watched Geoff’s girlfriend dip into the crater on the left side of the mattress.
“Ooh,” she squealed, “It’s a little uneven.”
Geoff had his eyes closed, his legs crossed, and his arms behind his head, fingers clasped at his neck. When she squealed, he didn’t respond. For a moment, I thought he had fallen asleep. I worried about what I was going to do, how I might have to carry him out. Then, he popped an eye open at his crooked girlfriend. “Seems like you favor the left side,” he said to me. “Maybe we can get a bit of a discount for that?” he asked, closing his eyes once again.
When I didn’t respond, he looked over at me. I must have seemed ghostly or something because his face fell when he saw me.
“What?” I asked. Geoff’s girlfriend looked over at me and sat up abruptly.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Why?” I responded.
“You’re crying,” Geoff said.
“No, I’m not.” I wiped my face. Denying what was happening made me cry harder. “Sorry,” I coughed out.
Geoff looked somberly at his girlfriend. She nodded and he scooted a little to the side, then patted a spot on the mattress in between them. I hesitated at first. Geoff rubbed the spot again. I looked at his collar bone, then crawled up next to them.
We assumed the fetal position. I spooned Geoff’s girlfriend and Geoff spooned me. After a little while our breaths synced, and we became one, multi-bodied organism. My body shook violently between them, and they shook with me. When I deflated into stillness, they did too. Geoff kept shushing me, his heavy hand stroking my back, while Geoff’s girlfriend had both of my hands wrapped up in hers and pressed against her chest. Her cleavage was pillowy and warm.
Eventually, it was dark in the room. I asked if they wanted to stay for dinner. I didn’t mention my lack of kitchenware. But the more I thought about it, the more impossible dinner became. Then, I remembered “The Immigrant.”
“Actually, I’m supposed to see a play tonight,” I said. “I have a couple spare tickets.”
#
Geoff drove us into Culver City later that night with my lopsided mattress in the bed of his truck. When we arrived, I saw Peter’s new bike (which used to be my bike) locked up outside the Blackbox theater with a lock (which used to be my lock). I almost didn’t recognize it. He had spraypainted it pink. I was furious.
I thought of the console table. Then, I whipped out my phone and texted Susan. I just wanted to check in—to make sure it was adjusting well. I asked her if she wouldn’t mind sending me a picture. But my texts didn’t deliver. She must have blocked me. My heart broke. On our way into the theater, I turned to Geoff, pained and frantic, and I asked him if he was planning on buying a mattress cover.
For the first half of the play, I sat in between Geoff and his girlfriend. We watched Peter act like a Venezuelan immigrant, feigning a Latin American accent, but speaking only in English, except for the occasional “Hola amigo” and “Ay dios mío.” His performance made all of the old people in the audience weep, but it had the opposite effect on me. Instead of illuminating the harrowing sorrows of the Venezualan man’s life in America, Peter’s performance was flattened by the absurdity of reenacting trauma for entertainment. By intermission I was giggling and wondering how I could get someone to exploit me, to make a play about my emigration to Los Angeles. If only I could watch all my failures and all my bad behaviors played out in a theater, perhaps I wouldn’t feel so disturbed by the decaying façade of this home.
During intermission, I told Geoff and Geoff’s girlfriend that I was going to the bathroom. Then, I unlocked Peter’s pink bike and rode it all the way from Culver City to Venice Beach.
When I got to the beach, my phone buzzed. It was Susan. I wasn’t blocked. Her phone had just been dead. I opened the image. The console table looked just as it did when I left her apartment. A knot swelled in my throat. I dialed her number and put the phone to my ear.
“Hello?” she answered.
“Hey,” I said. “It looks really great. Thanks for not, like, painting on it or anything,” I choked. The cool ocean wind struck my tired eyes. “I’m sorry about what went down between us.”
“It’s cool dude,” she said.
“I really wanted to make this work. I thought I could, you know?” I closed my eyes and brought my hand to my throat. I tried to massage the knot away. I listened to the waves, and I thought of all the times I had listened to the waves, all the versions of the lives I had lived, all the people I had met and all the moments we had shared that fell just short of close enough to keep me here.
“Don’t worry about it,” Susan said. “We’re strangers, really. It’s no big deal.”
I am a film and literary writer from New York City. My fiction and prose has appeared/is forthcoming in Cult Magazine, Currant Jam, Sybil Journal and Cringe Magazine, among others. In January 2024, I published a small book of short fiction under Mother Mercury press entitled, "There Is No Escape." My film writing has received accolades from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, BlueCat Screenplay, The Ron A. Baham Memorial Fellowship, and others. In addition to writing, I make experimental videos. I hold a B.A. in Psychology and an M.F.A. in Film from UCLA.