{"id":1091,"date":"2019-05-01T01:34:07","date_gmt":"2019-05-01T01:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/?p=1091"},"modified":"2019-04-17T01:47:39","modified_gmt":"2019-04-17T01:47:39","slug":"catching-by-carly-e-husick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/2019\/05\/01\/catching-by-carly-e-husick\/","title":{"rendered":"Catching by Carly E. Husick"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Carly E. Husick is an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire studying fiction. Her favorite activities include watching Queer Eye on Netflix, binge reading YA novels, and playing with her new baby nephew. She has most recently been published in Gravel Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and FlashFiction Magazine. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n


Catching<\/p>\n\n\n\n

           In the bathroom she blacks out sitting on the toilet and when she comes back to the room, doing the one-two-three-triple-I\u2019m-not-an-RA<\/em>-knock she says she dreamed she was Lady Gaga playing a sold out concert at Madison Square Garden. She tips more Vlad into my solo cup half-filled with fizzing peach fresca and when I take a sip the cheap vodka goes down with an after-taste like what nail polish remover mixed with rubbing alcohol smells like. Nina is spiked up black hair and a heart that she\u2019s carved into her own chest where her right breast peaks out under her navy-blue camisole. I\u2019d thought it was a drawing at first, something she could wipe off in the shower down the hall, but then she told me. It\u2019s a tattoo, she said and showed me how she used a razor blade to etch the edges and a balled-up tissue to blot the blood. I reached out and ran my fingers across the surface, it was pebbled and puckered against my skin, a scab forming on soft tissue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

           Nina goes to the gym every day after breakfast. Once I went with her, climbed on the treadmill by hers, and walked while I watched TV on the horizontal screen of my smart phone, cheap earbuds crammed in my ears. Nina set the incline high so she climbed a mountain and dabbed at sweat with a dandelion yellow towel in her black converse high tops and she started to run so she was climbing and running and sweating and I could almost see the bones in her chest and that scar pushing out through her skin. A skeleton running. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            She used to have problems with\neating, she told me when we met the first week of classes. She would come over\nto my room and raid the care packages my grandmother sent \u2013 dried sugared\nstrawberries and Nutella and my roommate\u2019s cartons of goldfish disappearing\nbetween her chapped lips while I sat on my bed and practiced the poem I had to\nperform for my English class. Give it more umph, she said between finger licks\nto free her skin of chocolate, say it like you mean it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            When she started sleeping with my\nfriend Jared he turned down a dark corner and I found him one night on the quad\nsitting with his backpack in his lap, hands buried beneath the zippers, winding\naround the knotted neck of a noose contemplating the worth of his own life\nagainst hers. Nina\u2019s. And I saw how he watched her at meals counting the bites\nshe took from her plate, her fork dancing through angel hair pasta and\ncrunching against frozen lettuce leaves as if the cacophony of silverware\nagainst pottery would distract her captive audience from the food that did not\ntravel past her lips. I watched Jared watch Nina shrink to cellophane wrapped\naround bones and I watched as the heart on her chest sunk down and the\nblistered hardened goose flesh of its healing scar remained an open wound. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            And when I went to my professor\nabout it I said, I\u2019m worried. I sat in a chair across from his desk and said, I\nthink her issues are catching, spreading. And my professor just looked at me\nlike \u2013 what do you want me to do about it? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carly E. Husick is an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire studying fiction. Her favorite activities include watching Queer Eye on Netflix, binge reading YA novels, and playing with her new baby nephew. She has most recently been published in Gravel Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and FlashFiction Magazine. Catching            In the bathroom … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa867U-hB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1091"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1096,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091\/revisions\/1096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}