fish fight at the nail salon

She told me, “It’s a really ‘winter’ winter,” like that meant anything. Med Manor Nail Salon wasn’t  so much a manor as a converted garage behind the Swedish Auto Body club hanging off that  strange corner at Ivy and La Brea where everything felt slightly misaligned. Like the city had  been rebuilt from memory. As teens we’d smoke hookah in a lounge down the street and watch  Armageddon with the Serbian subtitles on. Now I was here to sit and watch betta fish fight while she got her toes done. It was sort of a Mexican thing this time. Red, green, and white, with an  extra green on her pinky toe.  

“I’ll chop it off for you,” I joked. “That way it’s an even number. Copacetic.” 

She hummed Go Put Your Records On the entire drive here. Not speaking. Just that same chorus loop, sanding down her vocal chords. She was mad I was mad about her telling me how  she once swapped spit with Barry from that band Joyce Manor when we were kids. I had a  heart tattoo on my heart (which she gave to me), and it felt like a small but precise betrayal to  drag something so formative, so embarrassingly sacred, through the mud of our timeline. 

“Joyce Manor were named after my apartment building in Torrance,” she said. Like that explained it. Like proximity absolved anything.  

I wasn’t jealous. Not really. Mostly just pouting. A habit I’d been practicing into something  dangerously close to a personality lately.  

Her humming changed once we got into the salon. It lost its melody and turned mechanical.  A receipt unspooling from the mouth of God scoring the mosaic of rotting cars splayed  open in the driveway of the auto shop. Their insides exposed and quietly failing.  

“Wanna hear a poem I wrote?” she asked.  

“What?” I said.  

I was still watching the fish—flashes of color colliding, separating, and unaware of the violence. 

“I wrote you a poem,” she said.  

First thing she’d said all day..  

“Here?” I asked. 

“Yea. Here. Asuka won’t mind. Right, Asuka?” 

Asuka didn’t look up. Just nodded and painted on the green nail, steady, indifferent.  

“Ok. Here goes.” 

“It felt like when Roger and Joan got mugged in Mad Men..  Suddenly faced with the city.  

But the only mugging was on 

our faces, our smiles slipping  

off like cheap makeup in the  

rain. We both knew that come 

March it would all be over.  

There was a plane ticket involved.  

A clean, sliver of an exit wound  

from our old Los Angeles.  

No more hating the way the radiator knocked  

its demands in the dark.  

In the way my sobbing took over the room.  

Not crying, exactly,  

more like an exorcism 

where the demon already has you. 

You said, ‘You know I could never love you that way.’  

As if love were bureaucratic.  

As if we had failed inspection. 

Outside, traffic moved like thoughts  

none of us would finish.  

You told me you’d drink every bitter martini in the city.  

Line them up and swallow them whole.  

You said you’d buy a gun like Warren Zevon,  

hold it in the canyons. Act a rock star.  

You’d point it at a reporter with a question already on his tongue.  and say:  

‘Ask me the questions you want. 

I never got to share the answers.’”  

“That’s it,” she said.  

Asuka fluttered little claps, then moved onto the red toe.  

“What do you think?” she asked.  

“It’s good,” I said. 

“You don’t really like it, then,” she said back. 

I didn’t answer. The fish tank filled the silence, that low, constant bubbling.  “Well,” I said finally. “I guess it is a little reductive.”

MAX TULLIO is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He previously worked as a cook in New York City and has lots of scars from shucking your happy hour oysters.