IN AMERICA
Short story by Ursula Brunetti
Illustration by Charlotte FuMost of all, I didn’t like that you had to take an aeroplane to get there. The fact it was so
far away. There were other things I didn’t like. I didn’t like the guns. The wild teenage
shootings or the star-spangled stadiums with hooting Republicans. I didn’t like the
mass consumption, the pig farms, the brutal distribution of wealth, and I didn’t like the
fatness, the extra large portions and the people who had curtains of flesh swaying heavily
like strung hams beneath their arms. The sickly movies about boys next door and girls
losing their virginity in ruffled prom dresses. I didn’t like the politics either, the whole
circus of ego and the tan man’s face, the whites of his eyes leaking into two pale pockets
below. I didn’t like all that stuff, but at the same time, I loved it all. Every part.
I liked the epic scale. States chaining together, invisible boundaries, the idea of taking
a car from East to West, rolling through highways for weeks, huge vistas opening up like
the pages of an Atlas. Mountains, canyons, city sprawl. I liked the American faces. Faces
that looked as though they were made from chewed bubblegum or rolled tobacco paper.
Faces that looked like singular nouns; neglect, success, excess. Faces with skin the colour
of fear and pride. The strong, white teeth.
The voices too. I loved hearing those. The nasal laments, a loose twang on the vowels,
voices rich like fudge, jokes salty as pretzels. I liked the variety and the whacko ideas –
the cults and clans, the American need for something to shape its humanity into. The fact
people could get away with being mad. It was a crazy person’s world, America.
Maybe that’s why I liked it most of all.
I’d been once – a holiday. But I wanted to live there. There being better than here. Here
being England in a town no one knows. Nondescript; newsagent, chippie, an MOT centre.
Letters missing from shop signs. The same grey brick, roads and sky as everywhere else.
The type you drive through without noticing. Just a house on a satellite estate, on the
periphery. The kind with names like Cherrywood Close, Alder Way, Chaffinch Mews.
My bedroom window pointed toward other people’s parking spaces, their rain-mottled
Minis, their sad front lawns and their children’s rusting basketball hoops.
I was back home after Candice left me. I’d been living at hers prior, out of her two
bottom drawers. Our toothbrushes touched each other in the bathroom. Even our
toothpaste spit had solidified on the sink. We were supposed to be ‘it’ for each other.
The end of dating. She left me though, for some French fuck. Fabien he was called. “Fab.”
He had a face like a bent spoon but all his words sounded good. They came out in that
quintessential French way – struggling yet superior. It was around the time they went
public that I decided I was actually going to do it – live in America.
I thought about it constantly. I swapped pavements for sidewalks, rubbish for trash.
I watched a lot of movies. Binged on series: everything on Netflix, more or less. I wrote
a blog about popular culture. American, of course. Shows about suicide rings and high