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Issue 2: March 2006.
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Home > Issue 2: March 2006 > Short Short

Jealousy
by Nathan Long

Don’t save your jealousy for too long, for it will turn yellow with time, like old piss, and begin to produce heat and grow gaseous. Jealousy will develop a smell, a sweet, odiferous, bacterial scent that will leak through the tightest container. You cannot contain it in anything, even a mason jar with a new canning lid ratcheted on tight.

And if you keep it long enough, it will eventually take on a life of its own. A darkened cloudy liquid will begin to swirl, forming into something unmistakably solid. You might catch it in the corner of your eye one evening, a thing that is not all dissimilar from a fetus, a tiny, cashew-shaped form drifting in a cloudy miasma of fluids. Just for a moment, you might glimpse it curling into itself. And then it seems to disappear.

But no, it is only gathering strength.

Next, you notice a small distinct head, and–could it actually be?—a quivering tail. You sense something else, too, protruding from the sides of the body—fins perhaps, or scaly arms. The thing is as vague as an image from an ultrasound. You rub your eyes and it seemingly disappears—like the answer cube of the magic eight ball, sinking back into the black ink.

Finally, when you look again, it is all but formed, a small creature too distinct to ignore, too alive now to kill. You wish you’d flushed the whole thing down the toilet months ago, turned the other way as the effluvium of bitter smells hit your face like vipers—but you didn’t. You were too afraid. And now look what squirms in the jar, its tail lashing against the glass, its horned head tapping like a tiny heart against the metal lid. You watch now in infatuation. You ask yourself, is this thing real? Could it really be sitting on that shelf, in your very living room?

In case it is real, you cover it up now when guests stop by. Only when the one you love shows up, by surprise one day, are you tempted to unveil it and show it off—“I made this,” you want to say. “I made it for you.”

But though you are consumed, you are not crazy. You know that your love would run from the house, retreating in fear and disgust. You know this specimen, so animate and fascinating, is not exactly the most magnificent creation of your heart. And so you show it to no one, tell no one.

This silence, in fact, is exactly what it feeds on.

And one morning, you wake feeling transformed, a film of liberation settles on your body, and you wonder, have I shaken it all off? Is that monster finally gone? You walk into the living room to find indeed, the jar is no longer on the shelf. You feel relief, then horror, as you see a thin puddle of gelatinous slime on the carpet holding up triangular shards of glass from the shattered jar. The lid is altogether gone. The thing has not left, it has simply broken free. It now has reign of your house.

You go outside, spend the entire day outdoors, alone, walking through parks, and enter into the fiction of someone else’s life, becoming a character who is without past or future. You buy soft drinks you have never ordered, take a Ferris wheel ride, and drop many shiny coins into a blind man’s hat as he sits in the sun by the edge of the park. You come home late, convincing yourself that everything now is fine. You fill each minute with familiar domestic habits—fixing dinner, clearing off the table, washing and drying the dishes. Then you prepare for bed. You lock the doors, put on your night clothes, turn off all the lights save your bedside lamp, and, finding the most engrossing book, read until you can no longer keep your eyelids from touching.

It’s after you have set the book down and clicked off the lamp, as you stretch your hand up beneath your pillow, that you feel with the edge of one finger the canning lid laying on the corner of the sheet. Jealousy is here with you, somewhere close. But you cannot wrestle yourself awake. Sleep takes you away. Yet you know by morning you’ll wake up, having been eaten alive throughout the night.