Please Eloise

         I had seventeen bills molding on my counter when Eloise called.

         "I have thirteen unpaid bills." Her honey voice stretched across the phone-line and coated the mold. We were twenty-five with tedious jobs. We were bad at saving money and rent in the city was expensive. We were self-involved, as everyone is, and we hated the government for taxing our paychecks.

         "I have you beat. There's seventeen for me." I made some lovesick expression as she screamed the sweet phrase, "Fuck you!" like a prepubescent child. The dumbness in my face deepened with her farewell to the call: "Let's go get high."

         The phone disconnected and I hastily steered the car through the Portland, Oregon rain as if a puppy and a baby were both bleeding out on my leather seats.

         Minutes later, there was Eloise sitting on her sopping porch, reading a book with breasts drawn on the cover. She saw me walking closer and abandoned her book to kiss me.

         Before I could kiss her back, she had already detangled her lips and pulled me to the coffee table where the smelly green herb was sleeping. All I could think to say was "thank god," but I was thanking the invisible nature for Eloise more than the pretty green flower scattered on the glass. She squatted on her flat, bare feet to roll the paper. Her fingers knew the process like it was religion, and I held onto her protruding hips like she was mine.

         It was the end of spring. I'd been in love with Eloise for two years. Still, every time I entered the confines of her haven, I found something new buried in the garden of her décor. Doilies hung from the ceiling, dead flowers were stuffed in cloudy vases, and coffee-stained books were stacked in perfect chaos on antique, "just stable enough" shelves. Her couch was green with hand-sewn lace pillows.

Everything was thrown in a beautiful mess; nothing was in place or out of place. And Eloise floated inside her dark turquoise walls and bohemian rugs like a fairy in a grass house.

~ ~ ~

         I remember the day this haven looked grey for the first time.

Eloise's stick body was hunched over her knees, gasping for air as tears poured from her brown eyes like a storm. It was the day she realized those funny little lumps in her small chest weren't benign. She had breast cancer.

         She said something deadly was flourishing inside her femininity, and that made her sad. That night, it made her so sad that she slept on the living room floor because her muscles couldn't withstand walking to her bed. So, I held her weak nature on the carpet with an obsessive grip, like a child would hold its mother. It was a grip that I hoped could save her from falling off the precipice of life.

         For months, I watched Eloise get thinner, something I thought was impossible for her to accomplish. I watched her squeeze into the role of normalcy. She kept her job, practiced yoga, grocery shopped for her parents. She talked little of her cancer in public, and a lot when we were alone. Daily, I drenched her tiny breasts in lotion; they were always dry, flakey. I sat with her through chemotherapy. One night, we colored her hair with hot pink dye. A week later, we shaved it all off. The bright strands covered the white tile; it was a river of pink tulips that soaked Eloise's tears. I had to arrest my own sadness, suppress the agony tucked inside my tear ducts. So, I kissed her freshly bald head and covered her ears from hearing herself cry.

~ ~ ~

         Since she was diagnosed, we smoked every day. My hands were still on her hips as she finished rolling the joint. We stood together and she set the back of her naked head on my shoulder. I felt her indecipherable thoughts resting on my collar bone. She inhaled, her nose tickling my neck, and said I smelled good. I thanked her and teased that I was surprised she could smell anything other than the "constant burning of incense" on her fireplace mantle. She laughed and turned to kiss me, but again, I didn't have time to kiss her back. She was in search of something new - a lighter - and found one that was dressed in butterfly stickers.

         The sky was still sprinkling, Portland-grey with a haze of light blue, and the golden figure of a dying Eloise—lips to weed, weed to flame—was standing barefoot in the backyard. I stood at a distance watching her roam.

         Then, she took my hand and walked me to the rose garden in her backyard. We laid on a dirt-ridden sheet between the rows of white roses. She had planted these flowers months ago as a practice of keeping something alive, hoping she could do the same for herself. We sat with our backs to the sheet like we were searching for shooting stars, but we were only staring at roses, watering the gentle petals with smoke from our lungs.

         Life began to slow as we smoked, and neither of us remembered the rotting bills on our tables. But I'm sure we remembered the cancer. We must have remembered the irony, the commonplace of a love affair dirtied by uncontrollable cells.

         We loved to get high. The weed numbed Eloise's sore body. For me, it slightly warped my reality, made it easier to pretend that her life wasn't fatal, that she was going to survive. Smoking made the white rose petals look like porcelain, like the pottery that holds Eloise's tea before she sleeps. The melody of her giggle sent my stomach blooming—blooming like the miraculous height of the rose stems, which looked like deep green plinths holding sculptural buds. It seemed like the roses existed miles away from our perception. The flowers smelled good, and it was all so lovely in her backyard.

         "I don't want to leave this place," she said. I knew ambiguity for what it was: her longing to stay alive. Her whisper lingered in swivels between my ears. She reached her hand by the thorns and pruned one of the white roses. Eloise smiled, her eyes like raspberries, red and small. I let several tears slip. They melted into her skin with the nuzzle of her forehead on my dreary face.

         I took another drag and prayed it would fog the pain. Once my face felt fuzzy again, I said, "You won't leave," knowing it meant nothing and hoping it would be enough.

She flickered the lighter running low on fluid and stared at its sick flame. But the wavering light was enough to burn our last bit of weed. Eloise exhaled, her eyelids, softer than petals, closing with her breath.

"I really don't want to leave." And before I could say another useless thing, I kissed the fairy in the sway of the grass, saying only to myself please don't, please don't, please don't.

Published in Brushing Art & Literary Journal 2025