HOLY ROLLER by Abigail Swoboda

I’m bleeding in the bathroom of the Baltimore roller derby flat track when some maniac pulls the fire alarm. It’s Charm City versus Rocky Mountain and I’m fishing around in my backpack for tampons when the building starts SQUANKSQUANKSQUANKing. And as I’m inserting I’m thinking about Santa Claus chucking oranges off the firetruck every December and about punching buttons on electric train sets in rooms that smell like hardware store. 

It’s Jupiter outside the bathroom as I join the evacuation between the pink plastic pocketbooks and limp piercings pushing toward the exits. I forget Lil and I are fighting until I see her in the red light of the exit sign. She yells something at me, but I can’t hear her over the SQUANKSQUANKSQUANKing of the fire alarm so I mouth something back at her without making any noise, just to participate. Lil thinks she’s Pentecostal now and has been practicing being slain in the Spirit while boning catfish in the kitchen, flinging filet knives to the four corners of the earth. And, being Pentecostal now, Lil thinks we should reconsider being dykes. 

She said so two nights ago after we played at Phantom of the Opera. Lil was Christine; she wore an old Easter dress and tried to look sad and sing opera and we pretended like she was good at it. And I was the Phantom; I slicked my long hair back into a ponytail and wore a table runner like a cape over my arms and we imagined my face was disfigured. We lit long China cabinet candles and filled four foot-soak tubs with water for our feet to stand in so that we would feel like we were in an underground canal because that was important to the plot and because it was romantic. We sloshed toward each other in our boxes in the bouncing candlelight, and I wrapped my Phantom arm around her Christine neck and held her Christine head in the crook of my Phantom elbow and smashed my Phantom face into her Christine face because that was what kissing was. But then she pulled away and told me she had been thinking about sin and suddenly she was Lil again. And suddenly Lil didn’t want to love me anymore.

Now Lil’s throwing jabs and I’m scowling real mean and we’re really getting into the silent argument, Lil and me, when the SQUANKSQUANKSQUANKing stops and an intercom man crackles through the intercom and says that it’s a false alarm and there’s no fire and we can all go back to our seats and I realize that Lil hasn’t been saying anything the whole time, either, just making mouth shapes.

So Lil grabs ahold of the two smallest fingers of my right hand and we join the crowds running the aisles back to our seats. And soon enough the derby girls are off again, wheels chafing like pocket change on the polypropylene. The intercom man’s going nuts on the box and we’re starting to howl along with him. Then it’s the last jam and hollow seashells hold round space in my chest as I hold my breath and practice spelling words like Pontchartrain and Ponchatoula in my head until Lil leans over and breathes down the occult avenue behind my ear.

“Is it over?” Lil asks me.

And I turn to the left and I see the maniac at the fire alarm again, finger poised to pull the trigger. The motherfucker is five.

Abigail Swoboda is a poet and kindergarten teacher who lives in Philadelphia. Their debut poetry chapbook VISCERA AMERICANA is forthcoming from Thirty West Publishing House in 2021. Visit their website abigailswoboda.com or find them on Twitter @orbigail.