Astray

Delphi is a closet dominatrix, enthralled by an EDM beat, one of those test tube babies of the nineties. She’s a vulpine predator gnashing her teeth in the steaming rank of the Fleetwood Fitness mirror.

And she’s rowing over the weight rack next to you for the fifth time this month.

That can’t be coincidence. She knows when you lift. She can feel your pheromonal fear like an elephant.

She’s not just another bronzed bikini bulker with crow’s feet. She’s a butterfly busting free from that green-gold chrysalis of a low-cut lululemon top. Her earbuds screaming pre-Dre Slim Shady, she has the bawdy, teasing tendency of flashing chiseled obliques when she uses her top to wipe her face. Delphi isn’t defined by the men in her life, nor feminism, nor her post-gym gig selling supplements, her pungent musk boasting hygiene disdain. She’s defined by the iron in her blood, one of those Amazonian sentries with popping veins and saline tits.

You can’t really look at her because you’re too much a coward to make eye contact, but peripherally you know she rests between sets, perched on a sweat-stained leather incline bench. Her head’s cast at her phone, watching YouTube videos of new trap exercises, her shoulders hunched and legs pressed together, her body and mind closed to the world. She feels at home in a dark theater or tucked reading in a calm glen, the fake bake only a facade shielding her from the crowded ammonia-snorting meathead courtship of Saint Louis. To the casual observer she’s a spray-tanned mannequin with excess testosterone: A golden age jumbo raisin from a vintage Women’s Health mag. But in the quiet dark, free of her protective pec-pulsing shell, she’s a nimble hippy goddess, picking up litter between passages of Hemmingway and Thoreau. She’s a gentle giver, a deep listener, and a singular kisser.

From recent dreams she’s introduced herself as Delphi, but you’re not sure why. Maybe since it sounds like “stealthy,” like her personality. You know her favorite time of year is spring. She likes rain when it rains, sun when it shines. She accepts the world as it comes.

You hope she ends with cardio and gets on the treadmill in front of you. You can’t bring yourself to talk to her, but you need another chance to see her move, to hear the hot huffs of air her lungs make as they smuggle oxygen to the pistoning tree-trunk legs propelling her in place. You’d be crushed if she shook her protein shake and retreated back into the jungle of low-browed mass gainer thugs.

Her voice must be farm thick, or stretched thin with the “Hoi Toider” brogue of Chesapeake Bay. Either way she’s still articulate with a mouthful of unseasoned sirloin.

She must’ve offed her family after they tried to get her to down some creedish kool-aid, or if not she disowned them because they were Trumplican. With the radiation mask, she’s her own shredded-up sovereign, but beneath the sun-hardened lichen lies a community college dropout with a forged personal training certificate.

All this cover-up, it’s why there’s not a pint of Rocky Road or a season of 13 Reasons Why waiting to binge at home, because her whole life, Delphi’s slaved to polish what people see.

The walls so solid and caked in muscle, the ramparts so high with silicon modifiers and mammoth foam lip implants, the hawkish profile so thick with makeup and tattooed eyebrows, Delphi’s spent her life learning to protect herself. She became so well-protected, so armored in juice, so cooked in ultraviolet rays and nip-tuck upgrades that she forgot to leave something to protect, her copper camouflage bleeding right thru. What’s inside stopped mattering, and for all her swells and bulges and gains, she feels more hollow and exposed each day. She needs love but forgot how to let herself be rescued.

A few times a month you’ll see her walk in from the bus stop, but only because the city repo-ed her car for missed payments. She works to live, and if you asked what she was, she wouldn’t belt out a job position. She wouldn’t exclaim her zodiac sign. She’s not a mother, a daughter, a sister. She’d describe herself as indescribable, and she’d assure you she’s done trying to be what she isn’t. She’ll never be a model, won’t change others’ lives, doesn’t give a shit about your license to practice law, but if you showed her your left-nippled gynecomastia from tossing too much D-ball, she’d raise you the cluster of varicose veins trying to breach her right calf after last week’s deadlift PR.

Each time she sits, you look without looking to see if she’s packing up.

Even if you had the cajones to ask her out, Delphi would never stay with you. She’d try you on out of pity. Or boredom. She’d shit on your bros. Her protein-puffed gal pals would shit on you. The futility of dangerous attractions. All power forfeited.

Your mom would loathe her.

You’d take Delphi to meet her and your dad for dinner. Delphi would glute-push Anadrol while she ate, on the off-chance she ate. Your mom and dad cooking what mom and dad’s cook, Delphi would pine about her tight pre-competition macro profile.

She’d check her teeth in her phone screen, worrying how letting food settle on your teeth speeds plaque growth, fussing about a stage-ready Colgate beam, saying, “Elon,” tonguing her teeth, saying, “I love your parents.”

Your mom pulling her antidepressant-filled too-wide smile, desperate to be wanted, ravenous to accept the remark, Delphi would watch them clean, holding hostage their courtesy, taking advantage their inability to ask her help, her hawk eyes worming inside your thoughts.

“Aren’t you going to help?” she’d ask, tonguing her teeth in the shine of a spoon, saying, “You haven’t been able to hear how they feel about me. You want to.”

“Of all the girls in all the gyms…” Your mom would say as you loaded the dishwasher.

“She isn’t so bad,” you’d fib with surprising difficulty.

Digesting dinner around a small patio bonfire, your dad would try to engage in careful shop talk as Delphi stared back, really staring, all whites, the Winstrol she knocked back for dessert surging, making her irises vibrate. Without warning, she’d bark something resembling a laugh at the most somber point in his golden gloves story. She’d bolt up real close, getting inside his personal space to brandish the Deca tracks in her deltoids. “Brothers had the heroin trails,” your dad would exasperate, looking between you and her, pleading for an olive branch.

Weeks after, after your mom and dad stopped returning your calls and you’d been disbarred for selling Enanthate to undergrads, trying to help pay her competition fees, that’s when the trapped feeling would kick in. When you’d finally realize there was no damsel in Delphi, when you’d accept her being named not after stealth, but emptiness, when you’d tell her this thing had run its course, Delphi wouldn’t hurt herself, but she’d sure threaten her juiced-up coven on you. A butch band of jilted barbell bitches. Leave and get ground to chalk, feel me? You’d go to splash cold water on your face, and coming back after one of those nervous shits, the place would be empty. Instead of Delphi there’d just be a dumbbell half hanging out of your flat screen.

Something whips against your wrist as you walk on a 25 degree incline at 3.5 miles per hour.

You flounder, both hands going up in terror imagining she’d already somehow come to collect on the beatdown, a braided sap wielded by one of her curb-stomping clit crew, slamming home the first blow.

“Hey..” someone calls from the treadmill to your left. You turn and it’s her.

This is it. Your fantasy made real. The moment you tell your friends about after narrowly escaping the femme fatale of your fleeting fitness fling. That moment that in the moment is everything you’ve built it up to be. The moment in your head, both your dilated pupils locking, Minnie Riperton’s 1975 “Lovin’ You” spouting from every speaker in sight, you and her shaking hands, holding on longer than necessary, both awaiting the proverbial spark of love-disguised limerence.

You take her in, and she looks like Delphi, but not. Her sweat’s run streaks in her bronzer, making her face resemble a wet, dirty window. You can’t tell where she’s looking because all the blood vessels in her eyes are burst from bearing down.

“I’m trying to sweat out a cheat meal and your fan is fucking me up,” she says in playful, semi-bashful amusement.

She pats the towel you thought was a weapon onto her throat, it coming away with clumps of brown and highlighting the web work of throbbing veins under her chin. You see beads of red against the brown of her forearms, little spots of dried blood welled up from over-waxing as you stand stock still, waiting for her overdeveloped saline tatas to spill out of her too-tight teasing top.

“Delphi?”

“What’s that, sweetie?” She says, squinting through what must be blood, her crow’s feet deepening into folds and crevices as the contours of her face shift. She looks like an unwound muscle mummy.

“Delphi. Is that your name?”

The wrinkles of her cracked lips peel back to reveal teeth that will never be Colgate stage-ready. They’re the color of worn bathroom tile and just as smooth, all cracked and poorly stuffed in. Her hacked-up face doing its best version of pleasant redress, her left hand sweeping up to anchor loose, bleached hair from her face, a before-unseen wedding ring blinding you, her voice gravelly and old, so unlike the silky smooth sound you gave her in your head, she says, “No, I’m Gina.”

“Oh. My bad,” you mumble, stepping off the human hamster wheel and averting your eyes, wondering why we can’t help but write others’ stories. “For a second I thought you were someone else.”