Page 38 of The Burning
She looked around, noticing the vendors and customers eavesdropping.
“Don’t count on it. I never want to see you again and I have a lamp to buy, anyway.” She threw her arms to her sides. Her sandal landed on the tip of a branch that snapped up, biting her leg.
She didn’t stop, or even flinch as it cut her skin.
Such was her determination to prove a point to me.
Chapter Seventeen
Karina
It took everything in me not to make a sound when I tripped on that damn stick, and it cut my leg.
Kael was right. I was not appropriately dressed for this place. I moseyed through the market—screw him, I wasn’t leaving just because he was here—but did everything in my power to not run into him again. I kept an eye out for his blue cutoff T-shirt as I went from booth to booth, taking my time to enjoy the place since now I could never come back. This was his territory, not mine.
Ugh, he was so damn obnoxious and rude and now the one time in weeks that I felt relaxed, he had to be there and ruin it.
Good thing he was a complete asshole to me; I was two seconds away from making the mistake of asking him if he wanted to continue to talk it all out. In my head, we could have been walking around, talking about everything, laughing even, like the couple standing next to me, holding hands and sharing a big cup of lemonade with only one straw. It must be so nice to have someone to just be around and share straws with, laugh with. No worry about trust or lies or being abandoned. Watching the relaxed couple made me feel even crazier for thinking I could have that with someone, especially a soldier. Not to mention that Kael was such a dick! I had never been exposed to the massively petty side of him, and never wanted to be again. The silent and steady, involved but inheritably distant Kael was at least tolerable. This Kael who didn’t follow me when I walked away—not tolerable. And his immature little hand wave? Fuck him.
I should just leave. This place had been really fun at first and I’d been convinced I had found my new favorite place, but now knowing this was his stomping ground and that he came here “all the time” ruined it. In reality, I would have been better off sitting in Elodie’s friend’s backyard and pretending that their conversations were interesting and that I cared if they liked me. I mean I guess I did care, but I was too tired lately to keep reassuring myself that not every person secretly hated me or found me annoying. So, I could have just sat there, even if they all hated me and thought I was annoying after all; at least Elodie would’ve been there. And they would’ve had hot dogs and burgers, probably—another plus. This place had Kael, which was worse than hanging out with a bunch of Army wives and faking interest for hours. I didn’t even get to try the tacos or funnel cakes that smelled so good when I entered the market. I had been starving but somehow now lost my appetite. In the last few minutes, this place had become worse than drinking room temperature hot dog water.
It baffled me that a few weeks ago I was letting this man crawl into the dark little spaces of my mind, those I rarely even visited myself, and now my stomach lurched at the thought of how embedded in my life he had become. For fuck’s sake, hadn’t I learned anything from my parents? I needed to learn to cut ties with people who were toxic in my life, instead of yearning for them. While it wasn’t necessarily Kael who was toxic, everything about our circumstances was too full of bad blood; it had accumulated in way too short a time, and he was clearly still hanging out with my brother, choosing loyalty to him over me.
I didn’t know why I felt so shocked, given that literally everyone in my life had always done the same thing.
I kept browsing and time at the market passed in a mysterious way. Eventually I forgot about Austin, Kael, and even my cell phone. I slid my fingertips along the back of a deep-purple satin wingback chair. Bright and exaggerated in its features, it made me feel like Alice in Wonderland. The chair was beautiful and funky, but I couldn’t see it in my house. Even so, I ran my fingers over the metal buttons along the lining and across the smooth fabric of the seat again. The soft pastel color of my nails against its harsher midnight sky shade was beautiful.
While no one was looking, I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture of my hand on the seat of the chair. I used portrait mode so the background was slightly blurry and the light was focused on brightening and deepening the colors of the image. It was actually a really beautiful picture. I immediately looked around to see if anyone had noticed, I felt embarrassed as I tagged #fleamarketfinds. I didn’t really get why I felt so silly taking the pictures when that’s what life was now. Phones were beyond an accessory at this point, and most everything was documented at least a million times throughout the day. Even as I looked around, phones were in over half of the people’s hands.
Glancing at the time on my phone, I realized it was almost 5:00 p.m. That seemed impossible to me, but when I looked about, some of the stalls were packing up their products into lockboxes and carts. At one of the stands toward the back, by all the trees, the guy running it was still talking to customers as he cut his locally famous, fairly priced wooden beams one by one, a line of people waiting their turn. Despite his gregarious approach, I assumed everyone else packing up meant the flea market was getting close to closing.
Kael popped into my mind when I saw Elodie’s name on my screen and over a hundred notifications from Instagram. I tapped the app open and scrolled through my notifications, which were usually one or two a week at max. I had comments from person after person asking where I was, where they could get that chair, and to post more pictures. Estelle, my dad’s wife, even commented that I had a great eye. Weird.
I went away from the notifications screen and typed Kael’s name into the search bar, a newly formed but apparently unbreakable habit. Nothing new. The last picture was one I’d seen a ton of times both here and on Facebook, the one from his deployment with Mendoza and Phillip. The realization that he could sneak up behind me at any time hit me, and I slid my phone back into the pocket of my shorts. I hated the way that once I had opened my thoughts to him, he engulfed them in one passing breath. It was such a different reality than I thought it would be.
Kael was basically a fuckboy. I wanted to pretend he wasn’t, but at the end of the day, he was. Him acting like a total douche today proved it. He wanted to float through my life and not stay, just like everyone else, and I would let him. I wanted nothing to do with him anymore.
Now paranoid, I looked around. The flea market was much less crowded than when I got there. Kael was probably gone; I needed to quit psyching myself out.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a white chair with a huge winged back in the corner of a stall. The upholstery looked like it had oil blotches on it until I walked closer and realized the spots were actually black embroidered roses.
My heart sank when I checked for a price and didn’t see one. Not a good sign.
The saleswoman was sitting on a stool with her face in front of a small pink plastic fan. She had on a Bob Seger T-shirt, and I thought about my mom and how she always wore a shirt from one of his concerts, which my dad had often taken her to when they first got together. My mom used to sing “Against the Wind” in the car with her arm out of the window, rolling it to the sound of the music and the force of the wind. Funny enough, both the chair and the woman working reminded me of my mom. The saleswoman’s hair was styled the same way my mom’s had been, two long braids hanging over her shoulders and wild curls escaping each side, framing her face. Even the chair looked like something my mom would salivate over.
The woman caught me staring at her, and of course I made it awkward and looked away, then right back, as soon as I realized what I’d done. She smiled and told me to tell her if I had any questions, then started rearranging a bowl full of extravagantly detailed doorknobs. I nodded, thanking her, and touched one fingertip to the petal of one of the roses. The black flowers were embroidered with thick, soft yarn. I always yearned for random, cool furniture, but this was calling to me in a different way. It was just so amazing, the shape of the chair and the casual way the roses were scattered across the eggshell-white fabric. It looked both old and new, classic and trendy. It wasn’t too loud, but definitely not subtle.
I sighed and thought about the money in my pocket. I had no way of knowing how much the chair would be, and it was impossible to guess at this flea market. Just today I’d seen an old, cracked cabinet for twelve hundred dollars and a beautiful antique desk for only forty right at the next stand, so there was really no way to gauge without flat-out asking and for some reason, the woman with my mom’s hair intimidated me too much to ask. I was the kind of person who found so many simple things embarrassing, from crossing the street on a busy intersection—the countdown on the traffic light taunting me—to raising my hand in class. I had always been that way.
I noticed that a set of plates on the display table next to me didn’t have a sticker. Most things in the stall didn’t seem to have a price. Again, not a good sign. They were either expensive or she wanted to bargain, which I absolutely dreaded and couldn’t do. I looked at the beautiful chair again. It would go perfectly in my living room; that was a good sign. I could move my couch over a little and turn the other chair to face this one . . .
I bit the bullet. “How much is this chair with the roses?” I asked the woman, my heart racing over the simple question.
She got down from her stool and walked over to me. Her cloth skirt flowed around her, the bottom of the dark linen covered in dusty dirt. I imagined that everyone, including me, would leave this place with a thin layer of dirt on their entire body. Beyond the similarity to my mother, there was something about her face that felt familiar, like someone from an old movie, when you couldn’t recall what you’d seen them in before. Knowing how much of Hollywood had become scattered throughout Georgia, it wouldn’t surprise me if she actually was.
“That chair, the upholstery is handsewn. It came all the way from Missouri. It was my granddad’s and his old mistress hand-sewed the whole thing,” the woman told me, just glazing right over the mistress part with a smile.
Her fingers were decorated with rings, and she had a bunch of long dangly necklaces hanging down and hitting poor Bob Seger in the face as she moved.
