Lydia Mathis has an MFA in fiction from New York University. She earned her BA in English literature with a minor in classical civilizations from Agnes Scott College. She has worked as a teacher for Teach for America in Memphis and as a teaching fellow at Coler-Goldwater Hospital in New York City. She is the recipient of A Public Space’s 2023 Editorial Fellowship and is currently an assistant editor at A Public Space. She has stories published in or forthcoming from Stanchion, Southeast Review, Five on the Fifth, oranges journal, and North American Review.
A Body Walks into Public Safety
Her feet were pounding. The slightest pressure sent thumbtacks of pain spiking through her heels. Admin had increased the rounds each public safety officer had to complete because, though the proud private college hated to admit it, the cash flow was stale as all hell. A small all-girls school in the south wasn’t a magnet for donations. The school didn’t even have the redeeming quality of a sports team. This meant cuts to “non-essentials,” which meant fewer officers, which meant Sandra had swollen feet. A body in pain seemed to be Sandra’s reality now.
Instead of four officers for the night shift, it was now only her and Jeffrey. They had to cover longer distances and go on more walkabouts. The office was already on the edge of campus, attached to the school’s parking garage, which made the trek feel even longer. Jeffrey was out patrolling the north side of the campus, and then he’d make his way clockwise around the grounds. He’d left nearly thirty minutes ago, so he’d be gone another hour at least before Sandra had to be back on her feet.
Sandra already had to deal with two lockouts and a lost—probably stolen—bookbag. The girl with the lost bag had given Sandra a headache on top of her aching feet. As if she didn’t hear enough whining from her bed-bound mother, she had to deal with the tears of a child who didn’t know better than not to leave her shit unsupervised in the library. When Sandra asked the girl why she didn’t just take her book bag with her to the bathroom, the girl ended up sobbing, and Sandra had to spend twenty minutes patting the girl’s back and giving her two cups of water to calm her down. Eventually, Sandra convinced the girl that she would keep an eye out for the missing bag and that the girl’s professor would understand why she couldn’t turn her midterm in by the deadline.
Sandra only had a few more hours before she was off work, and then she could go home. She would check on her mother, who by then would be asleep with re-runs of Family Matters or Good Times playing on the television. If Sandra skipped taking a shower, she would have about five hours to sleep before she had to wake up early in the morning to take her mother to her radiation appointment. Actually, she’d have about four and a half after checking the apartment to make sure her mom hadn’t convinced Mr. Jameson, who somehow at seventy-nine still had the energy to chase tail, to bring her a pack of cigarettes. Her mom often flashed a tit or two to get Jameson to go down to the cornerstone and get her “boros.”
Whenever Sandra would raise hell about the cigarettes and her own mother basically prostituting herself, her mom would just say, “let me have my fun while I die, girl.” So, Sandra had given up arguing and settled for crying to herself as she threw away cigarettes her mom tried to hide, and she wondered what she would do when it was just her watching eighties TV shows. She thought she was okay with being alone, never settling down, working to be able to take care of herself and her mom, who was always either recovering or going through a new treatment. But what would she do when she really was alone? Sandra lifted her leg, taking off her sock and shoe aggressively, kneading the pad of her foot. She would get her mom through this cancer treatment too even if she had to put a chastity belt (bra?) on her and chain Mr. Jameson up in his apartment.
Her preoccupation with her own foot might be why the first thing she noticed about the body that walked into the office was its feet. The small room was almost bare. Only having a two-legged desk with a rolling chair for the officers and three folding chairs that were propped against the wall opposite the door. The wide-open space gave Sandra a clear view of the bare toes that walked in.
“Where ya shoes at?” was the first thing Sandra said.
She was still focused on her foot, not bothering to look up.
The feet she could see from her periphery were fair and covered in the reddish Georgia dirt. It was raining earlier, and the mud clung to those pallid little toes.
“Don’t track that mud in here,” Sandra said without emotion.
She pulled her big toe from the smaller ones it had started to crowd against, trying to alleviate the cramping the bunion created in the middle of her foot. She would have to budget for the bunion corrector her doctor recommended she buy from Amazon.
The toes by the door didn’t care for what Sandra said and walked further into the room, disappearing from view as they neared the desk.
Sandra closed her eyes at their approach. The cleaning of the public safety office had become the duty of the officers after admin limited cleaning services to dorms, class buildings, and the cafeteria. If Sandra didn’t whip out the broom and mop every weekend, the white office would turn into a canvas of browns, reds, and greens, and Sandra hated messes.
“Listen here. I said don’t track that m—” Sandra started to say as she looked up.
Sandra’s foot fell from her hand, slapping against the floor. The cold tile barely registered as her eyes walked up the knees that were cross-hatched with thin, almost delicate open wounds. The fluorescent lights caused an awful gleaming of the blood that slid slowly down dirtied legs. Sandra didn’t know how much of that blood was coming from the knees or underneath the skirt, where she noticed a trail that slithered down the inside of the thigh.
Her eyes stopped there.
“Whoa,” Sandra said, breaking the silence engulfing the room.
She sat, eyes unblinking, looking at those thighs. The line of blood made it look as if the thigh had been sliced in half. For thirteen seconds, she did nothing but look at that halved thigh. Then a hand was gently placed on top of hers, pulling her eyes back to attention.
Sandra looked down at the hand. Only the fingertips touched her. The contact was so light it tickled. Sandra almost giggled at the feeling; she was weak to tickling.
“Your nails are filthy,” was the only thing she could think to say.
The hand started to retract, and Sandra realized she was being a fool, a word she loved to call the silly girls around campus. She clutched the hand in hers. The dirt-caked fingers were white and long, and they looked nothing like her mother’s knobby black ones, but for a moment, it was as if she was holding her mother’s hand in her own. Her mom’s hand would tremble when she reached out for Sandra before gripping tight to lift herself out of the tub when Sandra finished bathing her. Just like her mother, the hand trembled before gripping tightly onto hers.
One of Sandra’s only indulgences was her monthly trip to the nail salon. She could only get short nails, but she liked to get a sharp stiletto shape. Sandra released the hand she was holding to take the fingers.
“One second,” she said.
She walked to her desk, pumped some hand sanitizer on her hands and pulled a piece of paper from the printer, and walked back. She sat down and took the fingers of the right hand, using her nails to scrape the dirt onto the paper she’d placed on her lap. Sandra’s nails, painted a deep hunter green, seemed to complement the clumps of brown dirt crowding against the cuticles and hiding underneath the nails of the hand she held. She felt briefly like the whole of nature was being shared between their fingers.
The room was quiet around them. Sandra could hear the sound the dirt made as it fell onto the paper.
Plap, Plap, Plap.
“There you go,” Sandra whispered.
She folded the paper until she was sure none of the dirt would fall out and put it in her pocket, thinking it’d be useful at some point. She looked up and finally noticed the angry red rings around that pale, pale neck. Her stomach rolled and she knew she couldn’t look up any further. She knew she should. She should look the person in the eye and let them know she was there for them, that everything would be okay, that they would call the police, the real ones, give them the paper full of evidence, and go to the hospital. But Sandra felt like she did when she was nine and afraid of the dark and refused to look inside any room that didn’t have the lights on. She’d prefer not to know what she didn’t know, so she kept her eyes focused below the chin.
Before she knew what she was doing, she was bringing her hand to the throat. The flinch back was violent, like the snapping motion of whiplash during a car accident. Sandra was caught off-guard and flew back, nearly falling off the plastic chair.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said softly, trying to calm the trembling body before her.
Sandra moved slowly this time, changing the target of her hands. It was like she was in a stop-motion film, the way her hand advanced, hovered in the air for a beat, then advanced again. It was a film of attempted comfort. Her hand, centimeters away, stopped, and for a second, she was lost as to what she should do. Should she rub or pat or a combination of both? How did she usually touch her mother? Her mom said she always loved how Sandra handled her like she was a grown woman but still special, still someone who needed to be cared for. Her mom was no longer the woman who could lift the couch up by herself to vacuum or spring up to pop a cursing daughter in the mouth. Now she was the woman who had to lean on her daughter to walk up the stairs and who had to grip her daughter’s hands to be pulled out of bed. When Sandra’s hands were pressing into her mother’s waist to keep her upright or holding tight to her hands to lift her up, how did she manage not to break her mom while not making her mom feel breakable? How did she do that?
Right now, her hand seemed to have the potential to destroy this body in front of her, like one brush of her fingers would take the skin off that shoulder, and the flesh would slough off and fall wetly to the floor. Sandra looked at her fingers and knew they would sink into the skin, pass epidermis and dermis, moving like a phantom through muscle and nerve and bone until she got to the heart and ripped through so that it beat and beat and beat, filling the room, bursting her eardrum and the vessels in her eyes, collapsing everything on top of her.
Her hand was a weapon, a detonation, a transgression, and she tried to pull it back quickly, but the body in front of her stopped her, catching Sandra’s hand. Sandra clasped the hand, held on, gripped hard, and squeezed,
and squeezed,
and squeezed.
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