excerpt from “The Land of Uz” by Aleyna Rentz

It’s the first night I’ve slept over at Gerald’s. Yes, I am dating someone named Gerald. I asked if I could come up with a cooler name for him, something modern, geometric, all sharp angles and dangerous overtones—Axel, Gunner, Blaze—but he declined. Gerald’s cute in an awkward way, wears rectangular glasses and ties patterned with the kinds of animals people shoo from their garages: hedgehogs and raccoons, neon-colored lizards if he’s feeling a little feisty. He works in strategic data solutions. I have no idea what this means. I’m just a high-school English teacher, a recent college graduate with poems languishing in obscure literary journals. For whatever reason, Gerald loves this about me. He was impressed when my short poem about pain relievers (My heart has been broken / by so many men, / each night I fall asleep with / acetaminophen) appeared in Paper Fan Quarterly. He swoons whenever I tell him things like “we’re all islands unto ourselves” or “metaphor is just a writer’s way of imposing meaning on a chaotic universe.” Instead of dirty words, I whisper literary terms in his ear. Climax. Euphemism. He thinks this is clever. His name is fucking Gerald. We had our third date tonight. He took me to Olive Garden, ordered both appetizers and dessert. Certain amorous activities transpired afterward. I guess you could say things are getting serious.

We settle into his bed, holding each other. This should be a tender moment, but all I can think about is the spaghetti I ate earlier, all that tomato sauce that just got jostled around my stomach. I’d specifically asked for no sauce, but they put it on anyway, and I didn’t want to make a scene. Even though Gerald wears goofy ties and is named Gerald, I still can’t bring myself to tell him I’ve got severe acid-reflux disease, and unless he’s got an extra pillow somewhere to keep my head elevated, there’s no way I can spend the night.

“Hey, Ava,” he breathes into my ear. “Say something sexy. Just one more word before we go to sleep.”

I shrug. I’m trying not to burp, or anything worse. “Zeugma.”

“Zeugma,” he repeats slowly, relishing each syllable. “What’s zeugma?”

“It’s like . . . well, an example would be . . . ‘she stole his heart and his wallet.’”

“Ha ha,” he says. Poor Gerald. He’s genuinely amused.

“So, basically only one of the objects of the sentence is semantically suited for the verb. See? One’s figurative, the other literal.”

“Do another.”

“Um . . . let’s see . . . he swallowed an aspirin . . . and his pride.” A certain enchanted look in his eyes prompts me to keep going. I can’t remember the last time a man looked at me like this. “He buried his hopes and his father. She regurgitated useless facts and last night’s dinner.”

“Genius.”

I disentangle myself from him and raise myself up against my single pillow. “I’m not a genius,” I tell him, and this is true. Not a genius, but smart. Smart enough, at least, to have won a Fulbright to study literature at Trinity College in Dublin. If I were a genius, I would’ve admitted to myself I was too sick to apply. My senior year at Duke was a blur of mock interviews and missed classes, résumé workshops and doctor visits, the sickest I’d been since my diagnosis at seventeen. A month after winning my Fulbright, I was informed I didn’t pass the medical clearance. Even though I was accepted into a handful of master’s programs, my gastroenterologist said I needed to come home, stay in a low-stress environment for a while. I asked him how long a while was, but he didn’t say.

Physically, I’m in Georgia, but my brain’s stuck overseas. I should be there now, hiking verdant cliffs, sending home tacky leprechaun postcards, stumbling home from pubs with dark-haired boys named Cillian and Fergus. I could’ve been that mysterious, bookish girl sitting in the corner of a small café, enjoying a glass of milk (never tea or coffee) and a volume of Beckett.

Really, I’m not in Georgia or Ireland but holed up inside my belly, nestled there like some hibernating animal. Sickness is its own terrain, its own country.

“Okay,” he says, “I’m gonna try one.”

“Try one what?”

“A zeugma.” Scrunching up his face, he stares across the room, his eyes landing on a nondescript painting of a fisherman—yellow raincoat, white beard: a misplaced Captain Ahab—standing on a dock at sunset. This is the kind of art Gerald hangs in his apartment. “He sunk his boat and his, his . . .”

“His credit score.”

He smiles at me as if I’ve just told him I love him. “Brilliant. Do another.”

Something that tastes like tiramisu coated in parmesan cheese creeps up my throat. “I’m afraid I’m zeugma’d out for the evening.”

“Something wrong?” he asks.

“Do you have an extra pillow?”

“I’ve got that one throw pillow in the living room, but . . .” My face must cause him to trail off. “No, no pillows for, like, actual sleeping.”

“Oh.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Well, uh—um, sorry, this is a bit gross—I get bad acid reflux if I don’t have two pillows. I need my head elevated or else it just kind of . . .”

“Oh, well, these are all I’ve got, but maybe—”

I’m already up, getting dressed. This is how it always goes. My therapist told me it might be best not to date until I had my symptoms more under control, but I met Gerald in line at Walmart (he was buying a large book of sudoku puzzles) and thought it’d feel good to contradict her. Empowering, maybe.

“You don’t have to leave,” he says as I sling my purse over my shoulder. “You can have my pillow, if you want. I can just use the throw pillow.”

Earlier this evening, he showed it to me. Cross-stitched by his grandmother, the pillow depicts two nuzzling bunnies, a heart floating above their heads. He told me he put it out only due to a sense of familial duty. I have my doubts, though. Picturing him tossing and turning all night on that throw pillow, a tortured, sleepless martyr, makes me feel even worse. Dizzy. Nauseous.

I can’t hold it in anymore. I throw up all over his bedroom floor.

“Oh, goodness,” he exclaims softly. This is really what he says: goodness.

. . .