from “State Champ”
Hilary Plum | State Champ | Bloomsbury Publishing | May 2025 | 224 Pages
Day 4
Hungry.
No surprise but real sick.
Bored.
Horny?
Don’t you get bored? they’d ask me about like the 5K, 10K, all the distance stuff, 25 laps around the track. I would be so bored. No. I don’t get bored, I was already bored. Pain distracts you from being bored and god do you need that. I think the great runners are all like this, if they talk about focus or a runner’s high they’re lying. Compared to being bored you were less scared of pain. To do something scary you just need to be more scared of something else.
We’re all bored, but I’m fast. Was fast? I’ve been trying to do the old push-up/sit-up thing but this morning I just lay for a while face down on the rug. Mostly I’ve been scrolling Instagram and farting. I have to keep moving rooms. I’d post if I could post a fart.
Right now I’m wanting a hot bowl of those baked beans from a can, lick your finger as you crank the lid off, slices of hot dog cooked up in butter that you tumble on into the bowl of beans, pennies, my mom called them, cooked so the hot dog skin peels away from the meat of the bite. Fuck.
As you can see, John, I got bored with printer paper and I’m using the exam table paper. Scrolling it out on the grimy tile floor. Exam room 1, but I’m going to try them all. Writing with one of our shitty pencils. At around 4 or 5, happy hour, Dr. M might stab a pencil through the thick of her bun, angled like 2 to 8 o’clock in bun-time. Her hair must go down past her waist. If middle age dries it out, you can’t tell. She must oil it, there’s a scent if she leans over the desk and her braid swings at you. She dyes the shit out of it. Unflinchingly black. When does she find the time? Some salon must open at like 3 a.m. Dr. M, we give those pencils to patients, I’d say, it’s not sanitary. This one’s for me, she’d say, but she’d leave it wherever. She’d spin a pencil in her fingers for an hour at staff meetings, bored at a meeting she’d called. I don’t think she ever wrote with one because they suck to write with.
During the trial her roots came in, hard.
Put your hand here, on the belly. I love when the belly retreats from the hips. The world’s gone from you, the world’s left outside you. It’s like a low tide. The skin is sinking, soft and low. You can feel the fine ropey fibers, intricate. Like whatever lies below the sea’s surface, greening the light.
Glow, everyone says that about pregnant women. Lots of people look fucking sick. The baby isn’t some sacred candle lit from the perfect flame of the body. Radiant. The baby is competition, a second call you get while you’re putting out a housefire. To make its bones the baby just sucks out your bones. I’m not against it. But don’t lie about it.
Whenever people say a woman looks good, guaranteed she was puking or shitting her guts out like moments before. Exception for when there’s not enough left in there. Been there, getting there. Beauty means you’re a little too empty and you want to be a little too full, you’re ready for anyone to pack their bullshit back in you. You look so, like, receptive. Walking the runway like sticking your little hand through the cage.
John, I haven’t texted you since day 1. I’m waiting. It’s pathetic. I’m not going to write you like, I know you have a lot going on. Like, I’m actually dying just thought you’d wanna know thx. You didn’t write about Dr. M’s trial so I guess that’s not your beat or whatever. Whoever wrote about her in your cheap paper kept saying abortion doctor. You could just say she’s a doctor. She wasn’t just hosing and scraping uteruses out all day.
To explain how it worked once she made a gesture with her hand in the air. Moved her hand in the air between us like the air was a womb. I can’t tell if my memory’s fucked but I think, right then, I was turned on. For a sec. Or I’m turned on now and that’s like obscuring the record. If she moves her hand in the air, I remember how my hips were propped on your lap in the back of your car. Your whole hand was in me. Usually I don’t know how many fingers—you laughed once when I asked, how many fingers, but how would I know?—but I could feel it this time, your whole hand cupped downward and fingers moving together, a deep wave that went to the heart of each nerve. Like say you’re making a dandelion crown as a kid and you get bored, you split the stem of one dandelion and keep slicing it long all the way up to the blossom, white milk sticky under your nail. I came right into your fist. You showed me your palm when you pulled it out, flicked it half-clean out the car door, onto the asphalt, I guess. You got out to smoke. I lay there for a sec then I joined you. You always gave me my very own cigarette like we hadn’t just fucked. It was bright out. Sometimes you seemed nervous about being seen and I couldn’t tell if that was stage fright or if you had a girlfriend and didn’t want to get caught. I don’t usually ask questions. I’m never sure what I’m supposed to learn.
Angela, if you don’t know how to do something, why don’t you just ask?
Angela, people would like you better if you asked them questions about themselves. You have to show interest.
“Dr. M’s finishing school for lifetime receptionists,” I said. She looked at me calmly, but like it cost her.
“You know, Angela,” she said, “I have worked as a receptionist. For several years, in Pakistan, in a doctor’s office, before I became a doctor myself. I had to use a typewriter.”
I tipped my head to the side. I did not ask a question.
“I bet you were good at it,” I said. “But I bet the other girls didn’t like you.”
She took a long pause, but that doesn’t work on me. I love time.
“You make a good point, Angela,” she said. “No, I would say they did not.”
Ever think of Rose who showed up one year in early spring, I remember snowdrops were blooming along the curb of the parking lot island, and I was feeling good until I walked in late, got yelled at, LATE! and halfway through the day I had to count Rose’s cash out to give back to her, I guess I shouldn’t have taken it in the first place, too late for Rose, I should have known, but how would I know? At the end of her appointment, which was short, I gave back the exact same damp bills she’d brought in. Threshold of viability, crossed. “Sorry I had to change the appointment,” she’d said, when I’d checked her in and she’d handed a wad of bills to me, “I hadn’t finished raising the money yet.” One of those funds had helped her but it’s not enough, and now your money’s no good here, I didn’t say. The price had gone up since we’d first quoted it, weeks and weeks back, she’d crossed into the second trimester. And now, too late, the third. I didn’t ask if she’d have to give the money all back to someone somewhere, probably, or could she keep it to use for the kid or at least the time off to deliver. She didn’t look pissed. I wouldn’t say pissed. She’d zipped her purple fleece up snug against her chin, she nestled her chin in as she watched me fish out the cash. She looked like she’d just learned she’d been totally right about something important, too late, now that it no longer mattered. “I gotta get home,” she said when I finished counting. I don’t think I said anything since none of my preprogrammed speeches—call us with questions, let’s schedule your next appointment—made sense. But I slipped her an extra $20 out of the drawer.