“Melancholia” by Dana Levin

Issue 75
Issue 75

Found in Willow Springs 75

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1

Dad and I on a summer motorcycle ride; I'm eleven. It's incredibly hot, already, as we exit the pancake house. I long to ride without my helmet: how cool it will feel, how I will have to close my eyes against the rush--just then Dad says, "Should we wear our helmets?"

 

2

It 's the kind of movie where a rogue planet named Melancholia is bearing down on the earth, but someone's getting married--she's very depressed. At the reception her boss won't stop hounding her to write better ad copy; her mother insults her while giving a toast. Unsurprisingly, she keeps trying to leave her own wedding: once to fuck a co-worker, once, incredibly, to rake a long bath. People keep trying to change other people's feelings. They cite "real scientists" and the broadcasted schematics: "They say Melancholia will just pass us by!"

 

3

Lying in effigy on the couch in the family room, home from work early and not saying a word--after days he'd get up and it'd be a party.

 

4

The first time I saw a picture of King Henry VIII, I couldn't believe he had been my dad. Star Trek's Captain Kirk, actor Brian Keith--one the blowhard Commander rake of space, the other as a diver with a laudanum addiction, sinking in a sea of hallucination as the Krakatoa volcano explodes.

 

5

Sometimes you meet your secret suicidal death wish with bravado and buy a brand new Datsun  280Z. When your wife goes out of town you promise your nine-year-old daughter you'll take her to dinner and you do, strapping your bodies into your rocket ship. You're about to turn left from the cul-de-sac where you live, when a car careens around the corner and nearly hits you. Enraged, you follow it to a driveway, and when it's parked you get out, demanding the teenage driver pay you some mind.

 

6

As if I'd known--not thirty minutes later, bike sliding out from us, taking the gravel in the curve. I blacked out for the bulk of it, but for the sudden apparitions, rushing round-mouthed from an old green car--then I was on the bike again and we were gunning the highway: Dad would have to have his broken shoulder set. In the hospital waiting room I hefted my helmet, turning it around, tracing the deep score and the drag--

 

7

"Yeah," I say. "We should wear our helmets."

 

8

Meanwhile, Melancholia approaches. You stop paying your taxes and soon, without telling her, you stop paying your wife's. You stockpile Leicas and stereo equipment; you bring home a big telescope we only use twice. You're about to die soon and you want it all for you. You're about to die soon because you have just turned fifty and you know you can never outlive your father: fifty-four years old and brained by a tumor. Sometimes it seems like you've quit going to work. Sometimes it seems like you're a traumatized Hansel, stashing candy in bags in a closet. And regarding those taxes: everyone said your father was a saint, but you always knew he was a secret gambler­ you've banked on the moon that blew up in his head.

 

9

What is a father, what is a star? Fathers blaze glorious at the edge of home planets, they explode above islands and boil the sea. Fathers blast in and flatten the forests: you're amazed, in the photographs, how many miles of trees.

 

10

In the dream, the royal family has died. Like all subjects, I'm being ushered into a room where I am to pick liquors from a cabinet: thus we submit to the annihilation of the king and his line. I am careful about what and how much I choose, because I am the father of an ordinary family, and I am deeply unsettled by the death of kings; I want to get out from under the eye of the cabinet functionaries, who stand watchful in their fur-lined cloaks--they flank the cabinet, which is portable and gilded like an altar. I choose two malt 40s for myself, because those are the spirits of the father; mothers receive liquors more delicate. I'm unnerved by the ceremony, by my own

 

curled-toed shoes--

 

11

Meanwhile, your daughter's trapped inside your rocket ship. She's fixed at the window, watching your rage, so private and familiar, batter a stranger. You ram into the kid and he rams you back, until you topple over--then he jumps on your chest and flails at your face. Finally his own dad comes out and pulls the boy off you. He says, "Go home--" pointing his finger just like you're a dog. And when you get back in the car, exuberant, bloodied, breathing hard--

 

12

Fathers get angry if you leave open the screen door or sell weapons to Syria, if you ask for some juice but only drink half. If the sprinklers soak through the morning paper, if there are too many leftovers in the fridge in foil--how then can  the fathers  target the drones? Use the wrong knife on a prime cut of meat and they'll set off the end of the world.

 

13

After the dinner you put on your coats and return to Dad's rocket ship. He's going to keep flying as if no one is shipwrecked, he's going to step on the gas of his disintegrating car--"Let's drive fast!" you cry and he says, " What road?" It's a thrill to accelerate and fly through the night. lt really feels as if you could go up and up, punching through clouds until you hurtle free into the whisk of stars--he slams on the brakes. It's been raining for days in your birthday desert, and there's a flood raging across the road. A giant tractor tire bobs by and sinks in the roil. You climb our of the car and stand next to your father, who says, "Look at chat--" enthralled by the surging water--

 

14

I wake up and decide the dream is stupid. I spend all day not writing it down. "But look," my sister says, when I later tell her about it. "You chose the spirit of the father."

“1978 Buick Station Wagon” by Ed Skoog

Willow Springs 76
Willow Springs 76

Found in Willow Springs 76

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Like a diplomat with an assassin

closing in, I never take

the same way home twice

through Topeka streets,

making string figure, stairstep

and spiral through neighborhoods

split and stitched across railroad

track, highway and river,

a new fugue for each journey.

I've never known anyone's body

as well as I learn those roadways

of the late 1980s, each turn the turn

an idea makes, luck-damaged

and sprawled. Make of that what you will.

I myself have never understood it,

how that unremarkable American grid

compels me to connect each street

with the bouquet of song I understand

clearest through battery-animated

cassettes unspooling

in passenger side boombox. And wider,

beyond the city, I want to hear

the whole concept album of Kansas,

drive to college towns for art and donuts,

remote chapels, the ice cream store north

with its one pinball machine featuring KISS.

I have a travel placemat from before

the interstate recommending stops

along scenic hi-way 24 including Topeka,

where at the Ira Price Cafe

½ mile east of the cloverleaf junction

breakfast is served any hour, and chicken

is a specialty. It closes at 9 p.m. on Saturday

and opens in time for church

but other than that is air-conditioned and modern

24 hours a day. Maps seem earnest,

even though expulsive, and experience

may not corroborate.

The people in the little houses of Kansas

look out windows and nothing

invisible is real. There is, the placemat

assures me, plenty of parking.

 

“Call it a Map” by Carissa Halston

Willow Springs 76
Willow Springs 76

Found in Willow Springs 87

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WHAT I WOULD'VE GIVEN to have been a magician, to say, "Now you see me, now you don't." But Tilly says I would've made the most inept magician the world has never seen. As my sister, she's allowed to make that joke. I tell her that's okay: it's better to be an inept magician than an inept magician's caretaker. I say it expecting her to laugh or to respond, "I think you mean, lovely assistant," but I'm not allowed to joke about ingratitude.

I feel her disapproving gaze on my face. Whenever I know Tilly's looking at me with judgment, my nose twitches. She calls me her little rabbit.

Like me, Tilly has heightened senses. Like me, it took her years to develop them. She learned not to treat me the way our extended family does. She's the template I wish the rest of them would follow.

Cousin Amber: "I want to set you up with my neighbor. You two have so much in common--he's legally blind!"

Aunt Gail: "It's true. I've met him. He's just like you."

Tilly and I tag-team them. She starts. "Is that so? Well, what are we waiting for? Let's call him up. Quick--somebody dial, then hand Liz the phone."

"You know how I get with phones," I say. "I can't even read the numbers."

"Numbers," Tilly says, "make a woman dizzy. But come on. Let's call the neighbor."

"Can I call him that?" I ask. "The Neighbor?"

"Neighb for short."

I hold my hand to my ear."Yes, hello, Neighb. I've heard all about you. I know. I know. It must be fate. Let's meet somewhere public. Somewhere we'll be seen."

"They must be seen. The general public loves the handicapped."

"It's true. You should see me on buses."

Tilly grasps my hand. "You could take the bus to your inevitable meeting!"

"I could. I will. And you come too. Follow us with your phone. Record it so everyone can see."

"We want everyone to see. Everyone."

"Everyone. Everyone should see. And later, each of you can describe it to me. Tell me what we look like. Like grounded bats--"

"Like swollen toddlers-"

"Like crippled dancers-"

"Like shuttered houses--"

"Like marched blinds--"

"Oh!" Tilly laughs, death-gripping my bicep to communicate her hateful glee. "You made a blind joke!"

"I did!" I say too loudly. "I did! I'm allowed to say that! I'm allowed!"

 

TILLY HAS ALWAYS SUPPORTED ME. She supports me most by pushing me to do what she thinks I should want.

"I found you a job," she says.

"I already have a job." A running gag between me and me. Whenever someone says, Liz, what do you do? I respond, Oh, I'm disabled. It's like saying, Oh, I'm retired, only it signals the end of the conversation, instead of the beginning.

"I mean it," she says. "This is a real job."

''I'm through being your taste test poster child."

"How many times do I have to apologize for that."

"How many times do I have to binge eat for attention."

We never ask jokey questions. We always say them. That's how we know they're jokes.

"The job's with NASA," Tilly says.

I have no way to know if she's kidding. "NASA?"

"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration."

"Tilly. I know what NASA stands for." I hear her tap the fingers of her left hand against the table. I hear her thread the fingers of her right hand through her hair. These are the sounds nervous guilt makes.

"You're serious," I say. "About the job."

"Very."

"What is it?"

"A study," she says, "for space research."

I'm reminded of conversations we had growing up--Tilly wanted to be an astronaut, which our father said was perfect since she was such a space cadet. But Mom crushed Tilly's dreams early on, telling her I was the one suited to such a dangerous profession. "Liz would never panic," she said. "She'd remain calm, no matter what happened. Here. There. It's all the same to her."

In response, Tilly wept and I wondered how life tasted on Mars. Tilly later said I'd look great floating through space. "What would I look like?" I said.

"Like you were falling," she replied. "Only you'd never land." She knew I didn't get it. I needed an example. She took me to the kitchen and ran water into a bowl. Then she tore a fistful of hair from my head and put it in my hand.

"What'd you do that for?" I rubbed my scalp with my free hand. "Do you want to float or not?"

I wanted to float.

She put my empty hand in the water. "This water is outer space." Removing my hand from the water, she helped me drop the hair into the bowl, then gently placed my dry hand's fingertip s to the water's surface. "And the hair is you." Eventually, the hair submerged. But it never sank. It wouldn't. No matter how much I pushed, it refused to fall.

I never learned to swim. My parents thought I would get too used to the water, then get careless. Being that hair was the closest I ever got. But my mom was wrong. I knew how to panic. I grew up afraid that I'd become an astronaut and drown before I ever reached the moon.

"A study," I repeat, "for space research."

"You could be disabled and employed."

 

THE OFFICE TILLY LEADS ME TO smells like metal fillings. The office is the end of a tunnel of phone calls Tilly has made and emails she's sent and questionnaires she's filled out for me. Still, we go over them in person. They need to know I can answer the questions on my own.

"Age?"

"Thirty."

"Highest level of education?"

"High school. Homeschooled."

"Are you a smoker?"

"No."

"Do you use birth control?"

I hear Tilly's chest constrict. I laugh. "No."

"Any chance you might be pregnant?"

More laughter. Louder this time. "None at all."

"Any preexisting health conditions?"

"Besides the obvious?" Tilly kicks me under the table. My nose twitches.

"Any family history of heart disease, diabetes, or cancer?"

"My family members tend to die of old age."

''Any history of mental illness?" "Tha nkf ully, no."

"Do you have a routine sleeping schedule?"

"Yes and no. I'm not the soundest sleeper."

"Any allergies?"

"Just dogs."

Here the steady questions lull. "Dogs?"

"Yes."

Another pause. Longer. "Really?"

I hear the pain in her voice. Her pity might as well touch my face. "Really."

 

BEFORE WE LEAVE, I sign my name three times, agreeing that I'm available to stay in the hospital up to thirteen days in exchange for payment of no more than $2,500.

I have three preliminary visits before my inpatient stay, which go well enough, though the doctor says he has doubts about the study. "Regular patients are difficult enough as it is."

"Regular patients?" Tilly says.

"Well-quote-unquote. Sleep studies bring out the worst in people, so you find out that everyone has 'special needs.' It'll be even worse with impediments."

I find Tilly's hands as quick as I can and hold them. I'd worry about the doctor's safety if I hesitated. I thank him for his time. Tilly keeps quiet until we leave.

"Did you hear him? Impediments--"

"I heard."

"I'll brand a fucking impediment in the side of his skull."

"Till." She knows how I feel when she raises her voice. Her anger at someone else sounds the same as her anger at me. It sounds exactly the same.

"I'm sorry, but that is blatant discrimination. Where does he fucking get off?"

"Tilly, I appreciate it and I understand. But I'd like you to lower your voice now."

"I'm sorry."

"I know."

"I am."

"I know."

"I mean it."

"I said I know."

 

TILLY CAN ROAR. She says it's self-defense. She says if anyone ever attacked her, she'd just scream the guy to death. I blame our childhood. It taught us both to yell when we got hurt.

Whenever I fell as a kid, I'd yell out, "I'm okay!" but our mom would always yell back, "Tilly?" which meant Tilly had to check for damage, then file her report. She'd yell, "Check!" or "Good!" or "She's fine!" Unless I wasn't, which was often. I knew impatience well. I'd dart around, then trip, then fall, then yell out, "I'm okay!" I wasn't even running--just walking with intent--but my feet were never ready, nor my hands. I could never figure out where to put them or how to fall down less. I only learned to laugh about it. How else could I respond to breaking falls with my face? So I yelled into the carpet, into the stairs, into the grass: "I'm okay!" That's when Tilly had to roll me. Once she saw my face, that's when she'd yell out, "Blood!" That's when, by necessity, she'd get specific. "Blood! Forehead!" or, "Blood! Eyebrow!" or, "Blood! Chin! Nose! Cheek!"

I eventually, resentfully, learned to slow down. I learned to take it "easy." Years later, I learned that Tilly had grown immune to seeing me bleed. At thirteen, she told me, "We're taking you to the gyno."

She's taken me every year since. "Are you bleeding on time?" she asks. "Are you regular?" And, "Is there pain ?" And, "Is the pain regular?" She strips me like we're still kids, like she's still checking me for damage, so she can help me fill out forms before someone else checks everything again.

The only bladder infection I've ever had, Tilly knew about before I did. "Your underwear's pink. Did you cut yourself?" The nurse practitioner confirmed it. Blood in my urine. "I knew it," Tilly said. Her shrewd little victory.

When I got my wisdom teeth removed, Tilly asked to see them. I gave her the bag from the dentist and in reverent, whispered tones, she cooed, "Gross."

"What?" I said, but it sounded nothing like what because my mouth was gauzy pain.

"The roots are still bloody."

She asked to see the sockets and I felt like saying no. I wanted to keep the wound, if not the blood, to myself. If I couldn't see it, neither could she. I told her I was tired, said I'd show her later. I drifted in and out of sleep, knowing I'd never see her bleed, but fairly certain I could pick the smell out of a lineup.

 

TILLY MAKES TEA when we get home. We sip it tentatively. It smells like a fight.

"Tilly," I say, "why did you set me up for this job?" The tea burns my mouth and throat.

"I think a job would help," she says.

"Help what?"

"Liz." She uses my name as punctuation. "Come on."

"You're tired of me."

"I'm tired in general. A job would give you a chance to get to know other people."

"Who would hire me?"

"Besides NASA?"

"Besides NASA."

"You could come work for the shelter."

"And be Tilly's Blind Sister in title and deed? No thanks."

"You'd have your responsibilities and I'd have mine. It couldn't hurt to try."

"We'd be stuck together day and night."

"Not necessarily." I knew what was coming. I swallowed my tea to block out her voice. Still, I heard her. "You could get your own apartment." I ran out of tea but kept swallowing. I gulped audibly. It sounded like I was force-feeding myself a case of hiccups. "You should see what it's like. A job. An apartment--"

It's always difficult to listen after hearing the phrase, You should see.

But Tilly talks me into it. It only takes one word: Try. That's hows he got me to do a hundred stupid things before she was old enough to know better. Eating something foul, touching something nasty, posing as the butt of some mean, elaborate sight gag.

"Here, try this."

"Try it. You'll like it."

"Try a little."

"Try some."

"Try?"

Tilly fed me grass, aloe, money, nail clippings, and once, a half-dead spider. It started crawling through my mouth, and, too afraid to scream, I fell over, shook and seized until I fainted. When I came to, Tilly was still laughing. She convinced me more than once to touch a series of different dogs, long after we'd discovered my allergy to all things canine. At school, she learned a joke that she never, ever tired of: "I heard if your hand is smaller than your face, you've got a chromosomal imbalance." Or, "There's a study that shows people who can cover their entire faces with one hand are certifiable geniuses." To prove that it was safe, she'd put my hand over her own, then raise it to her face, and say, "You try." So, I'd hold my hand to my face, and she'd punch the back of my hand, hitting me not once, but twice.

I always forgave Tilly, and always right away, because, in a way, I understood. She resented me for not being able to see, just like I resented her for not being blind. I assumed it was no worse than what a stranger would have done, or our parents if they'd ever really tried. At least Tilly bothered. At least she paid attention. At least she showed up to play, even if the game was used against me.

And it wasn't always single-sided. I got to use her too. A side effect of being together all the time--the result of having no one else to play with--was that she let me have my strange, unsightly way. She never corrected me when I called the TV, "the radio." She never minded when I made her pretend for the thousandth time that we weren't who we'd always been: that I was a magician and she was my assistant; that I could destroy her because she was mine; that I could turn her to stone, cut her in half, shove her into a hat or a glove; that reappearance was as easy as disappearance; that even after destruction, we could be sisters again: professional explorers sent to conquer outer space or the jungle or the Arctic, which was always our bedroom but also always somewhere else; that Tilly thought what I thought was true: that it was all those places at once.

She never refused when I needed her help writing on the moon or in the snow or on a tree, We were here. It seemed obvious enough, but I wanted everyone to know. Just because I can't see doesn't mean I'm not here. Blindness doesn't stop me from recognizing absence.

 

WE VISIT THE HOSPITAL where the study will take place. The head doctor is there to greet us. His last name is unpronounceable. He insists I call him by his first name. Hugh.

"Hue," I say and he's suddenly all the things I'm incapable of grasping.

Hugh invites me into his office, but asks Tilly to wait outside. She almost protests. I feel her rebuttal, already crafted, her worry sharp enough to cut out his eyes. I listen as she swallows saliva and nerves and low-grade panic. I listen as she quietly leaves.

Hugh asks if I understand what the study is for. I don't and I say so.

"You'll be staying with us, here in the lab--"

"Lab? I thought we were in a hospital."

"All hospitals are labs in one way or another." His laugh is the sound of humor dying, trying to exit his mouth. "Once you're settled in your room, we can discuss your schedule, which is an important part of the study. At least once a day, you will have a lesson and, afterward, you will rest. Later, we'll run through some exercises to see how alert you are, to test your response speed, and to run some memory trials."

"Can I ask a stupid question?"

"Sure."

"What does this have to do with NASA?"

"We're interested in the role short bursts of sleep play in memory preservation. Astronauts don't always get the most relaxing night's sleep. They sleep when they can, but up there, it's dark a lot of the time. Something you surely know a bit about."

Pride finds its way to my spine. I straighten my posture. My mouth curves up on both ends.

NASA wants my help because I'm blind.

 

HUGH ASKS if I have time for an informal interview.

I have time.

He says, "Tell me about yourself."

I tell him.

I'm completely blind. I don't use a cane. The travel radius I keep around my apartment rarely exceeds the block. My sister is my roommate. Our parents own the building. I often feel useless. I need help all the time.

He makes a mouth noise then, something wet near his teeth. It's the noise I associate with lip-synching. I realize he's talking to himself without actually speaking.

His next question seems written for a talk show.

"What is the most difficult thing about being blind?"

"Is that your way of asking what I hate most?"

"If you'd like to think of it that way."

"I hate small talk. I hate when people change their voices to talk to me. Like I'm a child or an invalid. They ask me what I do as if they're asking what I want to be when I grow up. They assume I couldn't get or keep a real job. They never assume that being blind is a job." I explain my disabled joke to him. "I say it the same way you say, I'm a doctor. They have to accept it."

"Accept it as what?"

"Reality."

The axle of his chair squeaks; he's sitting forward or way back. "Do you suppose the question is ever asked in earnest?" he says.

"Some blind people work."

"Considering the sources, no, I don't think the questions are earnest."

"The sources?"

"My family. Or friends of theirs."

"Mm-hmm." His chair moves in a way that means he's changed position. "Have you ever considered altering the joke?"

This is new.

"How?"

"You could name a different job. Tell them you're a professional sleepwalker."

"If only."

"Or a dog walker."

"For that, I would need a dog."

"No guide dog either?"

"I'm allergic."

"I see."

"You and everybody else."

"Tell me," he says, "what it's like to be blind."

I can't believe we're still talking. He's either really interested or really good at pretending.

"People talk about memory like they're all tongues and noses."

"I don't follow."

"Stop me if you've heard this one. It smells like snow. It smells like autumn. It smells like Christmas morning. It tastes like roses. It tastes like childhood. It tastes like pennies."

"I'm not really sure what that has to do with--"

"I want to join them. I try. But it always comes out wrong."

"Wrong how?"

"It smells like absence. It smells like temper. It smells like envy. It tastes like lying. It tastes like solace. It tastes like nerves."

Hugh asks if I know what synesthesia is. I tell him no, and hear him write something down. "Why doesn't anyone ever talk about what vision's really like?"

"There are all sorts of established facts about sight."

"Name one."

"Strobe lights give you seizures."

"Name another one."

"Looking at computers too long can give you migraines."

"More."

He looks up. I can hear it in his voice. "Fluorescent light is supposedly unflattering."

"But what does that mean?" I say. "What is visual flattery?"

"Imagine shopping malls and elevators."

"Malls are cloying."

"And elevators?"

"Crowded. Anxious."

"That's the opposite of visual flattery."

"Then what's the opposite of that?"

"Prisms."

"Prisms?"

"Rainbows. Colors." Hues. He says, "Your turn now."

"Shut your eyes," I say. "Forget everything you've ever seen." His silence underlines his skepticism. I use Tilly's method. "Try," I say. He tries. Or pretends to. "Are your eyes closed?"

"They are."

"What do you see? Whatever it is, forget it. Replace it with what you'll never see, with things no one will ever see."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Right now, you're sitting in a chair. There's a sensation that goes along with touch--the part of you that physically recognizes that you're in the chair. I always think of that sensation like an image. There's a different sense that goes along with smell. I think of that like reading."

"Like reading Braille?"

"Like reading a person. Like reading tone of voice. Like reading silence." As if on cue, a hush falls. I stifle it with sound. "Being blind is more than a lack of vision."

"Have you ever told anyone else this?"

"You opened your eyes," I say.

"Yes."

I'm suddenly aware of exposure. My nose twitches. "No," I tell him. "I haven't told anyone else."

He asks why we don't go find Tilly.

"I can go with you," I tell him, "but you'll be the one doing the finding."

He makes a thoughtful sound. "What do you do when you've lost something?" Our interview has ended. He's asking because he wants to know, not because he wants to record my answer.

"It depends on how I lost it," I say. "If I dropped it, I can sometimes find it right away. But only if it's big enough. Or, if I put something down and later realize I put it down, I can sometimes remember where I was, but that's rare. Usually, it's just gone. I can't look for it."

"You could ask for help."

"It seems rude to ask for a favor I can't return. Besides, I can't answer any of the normal questions--where did you last see it? Where have you already looked ? Even trying to remember where I was when I last had it is difficult. My memory doesn't work that way. It's like I've built up different means of recall."

"Different or additional?"

"Different. There are ways I have of remembering what places are like and I use them to figure out location."

"Like a map."

"Maybe. But based on touch alone--like a series of connected physical facts. Like it's true that the wall is connected to the ground in an exact way. In an expected way. I reach out and feel the wall and once it becomes a repeated place, it's part of this--system."

"You seem hesitant."

"That's because I don't call it a system. Not in my head. I don't really have a word for it because I never have to talk about it. It's just a thing that I use to get around that I'm calling a system so you won't call it a map. I know its unspoken name. I just can't describe or say it to another person. It doesn't need that sort of label."

"But you find it reliable?"

"I do."

"That's wonderful."

"It feels like you're humoring me."

"I'm not," he says. His voice seems reliable. I wish it were a space. I'd like to touch it like a wall. "When I lose something," he says, "it's always in the worst possible way. I find out it's lost when I want it, then it becomes the thing I want most. It becomes a thing I need. And that moment, when I need it most, it's gone. I curse myself, hate myself, hate my absent-mindedness."

"You don't seem absent-minded."

"I am. Wait and see."

"Wait and see?"

"There you go. An absence of mind. I told you."

I forgive him without effort. But I want to prove my point. I want him to understand my difficulty. "But at least you can look for whatever it is you've lost."

"But I can't. I don't. It's a complete role reversal. Every time, without fail, I become the thing that's gotten lost."

 

WHEN HE FINALLY RETURNS ME to Tilly, Hugh takes my hand in both of his, then positions it in front of me and shakes it. I have no idea if this looks as awkward as it feels.

"I'm looking forward to our work," he tells me. "We'll get started next week."

Then he's gone and Tilly--all-knowing, all-powerful--asks, "Liz, did that good looking doctor make a pass at you?"

"He's good looking?" I say. " How good looking? Movie star or doctor?" This is a game we've played since childhood. The categories never change.

"He's already a doctor."

"So?"

"So nothing."

"But which is it?"

"Doctor Movie Star." I hear a snag in her voice.

"Except?"

"He's older."

"How much older?"

"Dad older."

"Really."

Our father is as tall and wide as an easy chair. Despite his cushion, he's got strength. When I was a kid and not yet used to standing still, he was always righting me after a fall. I'd run around, spilling bits of myself as I went, learning what air smelled like at top speed, tasting the pavement through my knees, through my forehead, through my eyes, which I had to learn to shut before landing. Dad lifted me several times a day, and bandaged my victims--swollen knuckles, bloodied knees, eyelids that Tilly says looked like bloated slugs. He'd set me right and set me rolling. And he told me every time, Be careful. But he never minded when I never minded.

During the drive home, I ask Tilly, "As old as Dad, or older?"

"At least that old," she says.

"Do you disapprove?"

"Liz. Honestly."

"What."

"You were in there for all of thirty minutes. I wasn't aware that anything serious had taken place."

"Define serious."

"Serious enough to warrant my approval."

I keep quiet because I can't deny anything. I can't deny how nice it was to talk about my blindness like a facet instead of a burden. I can't deny that I was relieved when he asked Tilly to wait outside. I can't deny that I liked hearing that Hugh was attractive.

Though, to be fair, Tilly's always had horrible taste in men.

 

TILLY DRAGGED ME OUT even though I told her it would rain. She was fifteen. I was thirteen.

"The skies are clear," she said.

"It's humid as hell," I told her.

"You've never been to hell," she said.

I swallowed my minuscule pride--I begged. "Tilly, please. It's going to rain. Please."

But she wanted out and she wanted me with her because that was our household rule. So we went, despite the way rain upends me. Despite the times I'd been the victim of someone else's poor umbrelling. We got on the bus, held hands the whole way. She talked me through the ride. "How much farther?" I asked at every stop because the driver told the stops to the windshield and the windshield kept each one a secret. I didn't bother trying to listen or asking him to speak up. It would be years before I could ask someone to act on my behalf.

"Four more stops," Tilly said.

Three.

Two.

One--

I knew from the smell, from the sound. The bus doors opened and the people who boarded were damp. Their shoes compressed the water they carried, squeaked it in thin trails that I knew would leave the floor slick. "Tilly--" The windshield wipers hushed me.

"We're here." She squeezed my hand, yanked me left, and we were on our feet. Until we weren't. I fell. I fell again. Fell against. Gravity pushed me into a wall. I groped and felt a hundred limbs. Hair, shoulders, faces, necks. Ears and eyes and elbows.

Watch it!

Look where you're going, wouldja?

"I want to leave," I said. "Right now. We need to leave right now." She tugged me off the bus, her grip tight with anxious misery, our arms an unyielding leash. She barked warnings at me. "Elevator. Three short steps. Rotating doors. Sharp right."

Inside the bus, she'd held me with both hands and guided my clumsy feet, but outside, she let go altogether. "It's just drizzling," she said. Thunder echoed her, laughed at us both. "But I guess it's probably going to get worse."

"Nothing could be worse than what just happened. What are we doing here, Tilly?"

"Getting lunch."

We went to a Burger King and ordered fries and shakes. Strawberry.

A bribe. As soon as we sat down, she said, "I'm sorry."

I started to say, "You should be," when a male voice answered. "No problem. It took me a while, too. I biked over."

I felt Tilly lean away from me, then heard a noise I recognized from movies and TV. A noise that requires two mouths and what our mom called atmosphere.

They did it like I wasn't even there. After I'd begged to stay home, after that bus ride, Tilly acted like she was alone.

"Tilly," I said, "is he in the seat across from me?"

She knew better than to lie. "Yes."

I dropped my hand to the table and felt across it to the edge. It was square. Each side was the length of my arm.

"Uh, Tilly?" the boy said.

Twitching my nose, I stood. I lifted the lid of my milkshake and, before she could stop me, threw it at his voice, at his question and his existence and what I hoped was his face. The shake splashed when it hit him. His chair scraped the floor when he kicked it out to stand. Tilly's arm cracked when she landed beneath me, where she'd thrown herself to break my fall when he knocked me over. I stupidly felt grateful. She'd done that much, at least.

I heard him laugh, but there was fear behind it. Still, he wanted to win. "Easier than tipping a cow."

"Said the kid covered in milk." I didn't get up.

"Stop it," Tilly hissed, either at him for shoving me or at me for smiling or at both of us just because. I kept smiling. I felt powerful. I shook from it.

The manager made us leave. Tilly led me outside where the rain had arrived in full force. She pulled me into it. I shrieked. It felt like I was drowning in slow motion.

"You're covered in milkshake," she said. "We have to get it off before we get home."

The rain was warm. I heard it hit the pavement. I heard it hit my skull. I heard it infiltrate my clothes and drain into my ears and slither its way into my mouth. Under that, I still heard Tilly sniffle. "What's wrong?"

"If you don't know," her breath staggered, "then you really are blind."

"Is that a joke?"

"Of course it's a fucking joke."

"Was he really that cute?"

"Shut up."

"Doctor or movie star?"

"What does that even mean to you? You've never seen a doctor. You've never seen a movie star. You're just blind and you'll always be just blind and I'll always be your idiotic sister."

She stood there and cried, and I stood there and listened. Two kinds of falling water.

"Are you blaming me for being blind?"

"Liz," she grabbed my shoulders, "can there," squeezed them hard, "for once," shook me, "be something that is not about you and your stupid fucking handicap?" Her voice cracked just before the thunder. "Please." She'd said it like a sentence, but really it was a plea. Tilly was asking me for something. She maybe even needed me.

"We have to get dry," I said. She put my hand over her face so I could feel her head shaking. "Stop being stubborn."

"I want to stay," she said. "Just let me stay here."

"No." I yanked her the way I remember my father scooping me up, and nearly fell over. "I want to help you," I said, "but you have to get me to a place where I can help."

She let out a low laugh--a miserable, disjointed sob--then said there was an overhang behind me. I pulled her like a wagon, and she strained to keep up.

Tilly says I gallop instead of run. I can't help it. Running feels strange to me. What do I do with my arms? How can I run when I don't know where to go?

She yelled directions to get us to the overhang. Slight rights and hard lefts. We made it, drenched and panting. Thunder shouted down at us. The roads hissed at our feet. The hems of my clothe s collected the rain, then emptied it into my shoes. Tilly's palm still suctioned mine.

"I'm sorry," she whispered when the rain finally stopped, the apology maybe not just for me.

 

THE NIGHT BEFORE my hospital stay, I sneak into Tilly's room. When one of us can't sleep, has been unsettled, has heard a strange noise, it's expected that she will consult the other and give all the details, no lead-in necessary. I think I heard a burglar or a rapist or an alien. The other reassures the frightened sister and then we curl up together, both sleeping more soundly for it.

So I go to Tilly's room and climb in bed beside her. "I need to ask you something."

"Shoot."

"It's serious."

"Okay."

"You're not allowed to laugh."

"I won't."

"You have to promise." "I promise."

"Seriously. You have to seriously promise."

"Fuck's sake, Liz. Just ask already."

"Do you think I'm pretty?"

"I want to hit you with a pillow right now," she says.

"Would it kill me?"

"You're a hundred percent humorless, you know that?" Her pillow hits my face. I ask her to stop being such a cunt. "What vulgarity," she says, "from such a pretty mouth!"

"Go fuck yourself."

"Liz, you're beautiful. You've got Mom's platinum hair and no worry lines. You'll look seventeen forever."

"Don't you have the same hair?"

"I have Dad's hair," she says.

"So, not platinum?"

"Ashy. And getting wiry by the day."

I reach to touch her head, but Tilly moves out of my grasp. She apologizes and I apologize and she says that it's fine. Her words empty the room. She's making space for her response. Her serious response to my serious question.

"Is this about Dr. Movie Star?"

I don't want to tell her. I want her to already know.

I was lying in bed, nearly asleep, when I realized I have no way of knowing if Hugh finds me physically attractive.

"What if l meet someone and he only stays with me out of pity?"

"Able-bodied people do it all the time."

"I mean it."

"So do I."

"But I'll never know what he really thinks of how I look."

"And what if you meet someone insecure who's afraid the only reason you're with him is because you can't see him?"

"Till. Don't give me more shit to worry about."

"At this point, I think I owe you some shit."

I know what this means.

Tilly's no stranger to stress.

There's very little I can offer her, very little I can do. But I do what I can with the little I have.

"An entire family came in today," she tells me. "A mother and three girls. The youngest was a baby. Yellow and red. Bruised and cut. And swollen, right here." She puts my hand on her forehead, floats it up to her hairline. "There was a lump the size of a robin's egg--" she grabs my fingertips "--the size of a fingerprint." I imagine a man touching my forehead with just a finger, how hard he'd need to press to make an egg. Tilly says the father broke his oldest daughter's wrist, pulled his middle daughter's shoulders from their sockets. Tilly touches my limbs when she tells me these things. Examples. She remembers how I need them. Then her hand is in my hair: "Third degree burns," she says about the mother. "He peeled her scalp away."

The few times I've gone to the shelter with Tilly, it's always been the same. "You're so lucky," her co-workers tell me. Lucky to have Tilly, of course, as a friend and a sister and a caretaker. And I believe them.

 

ONE OF THE LAST THINGS TILLY SAYS before leaving me at the hospital the next morning is that she envies me and my little assignment.

"Thirteen days doesn't feel like an assignment. It feels more like--"

"A job?"

"A sentence."

"You'll be fine," she says, and her footsteps recede. When I think she's gone, I hear her steps returning, fast. I turn and we collide into a hug. She says, "Don't run off with Dr. Movie Star."

"Don't change anything while I'm gone."

"Like you'd even notice."

"Don't go," I tell her. "What if I screw up the study?"

"Like I could stop you."

I say, "Don't forget me," and realize, starkly, that I mean it.

Her voice is already far away by the time I hear it. "Like that's even possible."

 

I CHECK IN and a nurse helps me change into a paper dress.

"Be honest," I say to her. "Does this make me look like deli meat?" She laughs only slightly. I feel alone. I ask what's first.

"First, we get you in your room and give you headphones. Then you'll listen to a series of lists." I must make a face that tells her I'm at sea because she immediately says, "Don't worry. After that, we'll bring you lunch, and after lunch, you'll take a nap."

She fits the headphones to my ears and head. From beneath them, I hear her muffled voice ask, "Ready?"

I am ready to vault.

Or bolt.

Or faint.

I'm ready to be fired. I'm ready to be let go. To go home.

The lists start right away. Words, long strings of them, narrated in a woman's monotone.

Puddle, armoire, sphinx, tumult, igloo.

The voice goes on for fifty-six words,  a slight pause after every fourteenth. The recording ends and repeats and ends.

Lunch is quiche and salad. Everything is cold. Gelatinous egg pie, icy iceberg lettuce, water so cold it's practically a Boe. I force it all down anyway. It might help me sleep.

 

WHEN I SLEEP, I almost always dream--in sounds, in flavors, in scents and temperatures. Good dreams are whispery warm. They smell and taste clean. Bad dreams are rot and mold. I taste them long after, not in my mouth, but in my mind. Nightmares smell charred. Burnt popcorn. Burnt wood. Burnt hair. Nightmares are fire alarms and dial tones. Murderous claps and echoey heartbeats. Horror noises, amplified. The sounds of bodies emptying fast, then slow. Parades of screaming. Shrieks unending. Breathing through sheets of sloughed skin.

Nightmares are unceasingly cold.

But there are dreams worse than freezing and tastes worse than rot. The dreams when I fly are worst of all. Asleep, flying is seeing. What I associate with fight--the feeling of being impervious to gravity--injects me with an unsinkable confidence. When I fly, a part of me understands that that's what it means to see. I'm doing the impossible. I'm lighter than air. I'm a magician. Watch me magic my eyes into seeing. Watch me fly. Watch me see. Watch me look. Watch me watch.

The stratosphere tastes like aerated hope.

But when it's over--when I land--I always wake stultified. I wake and my eyes hurt. I wake in blinding pain.

 

I' M DREAMING OF BURNT STARS when they wake me the first time. I'm dreaming of the thing I'm told is light.

"This is your first test," the nurse says. "Are you ready?" The stars were so close I could smell them.

"We're going to ask you to repeat the words you heard."

"All of them?"

 

"As many as you can."

"In order?"

"If you can remember."

The words fall from my mouth like an avalanche. "Puddle. Armoire. Sphinx . Tumult. Igloo. Asteroid. Detergent. Offbrand. Pliers. Mutton. Drawstring. Uncut. License. Fracture." I pause. "Billfold. Kitten. Jostle. Oxen. Righteous. Venture. Counterpoint." I go on like that. The last word I recall is Doormat. The one before that: Visualize. Visual eyes.

The nurse asks me to do it again. She says please.

I repeat the words, this time slower, and just to see what happens, I invert two words. Her pen is down, like a foot on a brake. She's grading me.

Her handwriting sounds like someone whispering failure.

 

I DREAM ABOUT TILLY on loop.

I smell her scalp. "Your head smells like wax," I tell her.

"Like beeswax?"

"Like candles."

"Like honey?"

"Like crayons."

"Like earwax? Nose wax?"

"Like skin."

"Skin doesn't smell like wax."

"Yours does."

She smells like something warm, a thing about to melt, a thing that will leave an invisible stain.

"All stains are invisible to you," Tilly says.

 

THE NURSE IS IN MY ROOM. She explains the second test-- "lt's tactile"--then lays my hands over a grid of switches. Six columns, three rows.

She walks me through a pattern, says, "Follow me."

With each switch I touch, there comes a click.

Eleven steps. Eleven clicks. She shows me twice.

I count . I count again. She stops. I eat. I sleep.

 

TILLY IS A STAR. A fiery evening star. I tell her she's burning. She tells me I'm floating. Tilly holds a pair of scissors--I hear their metal blades. She clips the air between us. She clips the air apart. She clips the air and clips the air until we fall in two.

 

I WAKE WITH SWITCHES at my fingertips. "Ready?"

I press what I remember. I count to eleven. "Again."

I do it over.

Faster.

Careless.

I count to eleven. Fumble.

Fuck up.

It doesn't matter--no one will ever see.

 

TILLY CUTS MY HAIR the first Sunday of every month. We wake, listen to music, dance a little--she always leads. Then I sit and she cuts.

"You're my favorite doll," she says. "Your hair always grows back."

Our dolls were bald when we were kids. They never started that way, but that was how they ended up. There were paper dolls that wound up headless and plastic dolls whose heads mostly stayed put. But paper or plastic, they all became punk rock babies, chemo babies, Rogaine babies, wigless babies, broken-hearted babies, liberated babies, military babies, babies with cause.

We cut our dolls' hair because of Tilly and her left-handedness.

Her grade school teacher encouraged our parents to get a pair of scissors so she could practice cutting things at home.

Inches of construction paper. Plastic safety scissors.

"Safe from what?" I said.

"Bad haircuts."

I reached for her hand, said, "Let me see!"

"You can't", Tilly laughed. "But if you hold still, we can play with them together."

We played with her scissors only once. She said I'd be so pretty. I bounced around the whole time. She held me still by putting her free hand on my neck. I woke the next morning with bruises on my throat, and hair in my sheets, my nightgown, my eyes. My hair felt like a punch line; my face, a lonely jigsaw.

Our mother screamed.

"Tilly, honestly. There's nothing wrong with your eyes."

Tilly kicked me later that night for telling. "You could've said you did it to yourself. She would've believed you."

I thought about that for years. Not the idea that I could've lied, but the fact that I could do something on my own, something to or for myself.

When Tilly curs my hair now, she uses special left-handed shears.

They snap so cleanly. Even. Sharp. My head feels lighter when she's finished. She never cuts more than an inch. Just the dead ends. It turns out dead ends are pretty weighty.

The first Sunday of the month, I learn a third lesson: arranging pegs in certain slots to create a specific pattern. As my fingers graze the model--as I learn what I'll eventually ruin--I become aware of my hair's unhurried growth.

I hear it unraveling from my skin.

 

HUGH VISITS AT the end of the first week. I expect him to break it to me gently.

This isn't working out. You understand, of course. Don't take it personally.

Or not so gently.

It's not you. We should've known it couldn't have worked. I mean, you're handicapped. You understand, of course.

Or, really, not gently at all.

We're through. Your scores are abysmal. We've garnished your wages to pay for your cab fare home. You understand, of course.

He asks how it's going.

I'm thrown off. I babble half-truths.

"I'm spending a lot of time talking to myself and making a list of reliable things in the room."

"Reliable things?"

"Things that make the room mine." Familiarity allays fear. "The pillowcase's tag. I fidget with it after tests. One side's coarse; the other, smooth."

''Show me what you mean by fidget."

I pinch the tag, loosely, between the edge of my index finger and my thumb, then rub. "It helps me relax. Gives me something physical to do." I stroke the tag until my fingertips feel warm. "I might be developing a callus."

I hear his smile. "What else?"

"The smell of my sheets. More than one smell, actually. Really clean plastic weds really clean metal. It's surprisingly unmedicinal. Under that--just barely noticeable--the smell of sweat. Mine, definitely, but other patients' too." Sweat is deeply personal, but easy to recognize. Compelling and repellent, anonymous and warm. When I wake with the sheets below my nose, it's as if everyone who's ever slept here is shaking me awake, saying, Don't forget me.

I cry to ignore how much I miss Tilly.

"And the machine," I point to my left, "the one that plays the word lists. It makes reliable sounds." Sounds that spell out my existence during the study, sounds that remind me, under the recording, to remember. Its steady words remind me, or warn me, that I'm still here. "It's very dependable, this machine."

"It must be. You remembered seventy-five percent of the words on checklist."

"Maybe I'm just good with lists."

"Or maybe that can be your job: listmaker."

Hugh pats my hand and holds it and I add him to the list.

Maybe it's compulsive, what I'm doing. I memorize the lists they give me, then make up other lists. But I do other things--I sleep and dream and sometimes fly and sometimes even see. That muse count for something.

I don't tell Hugh that I keep trying to pretend I'm home. Or that I need to force myself to remember and believe I really am helping NASA, or maybe even helping him, because when I forget or doubt, I don't know what I'm doing here other than resting my mother's theory about blind astronauts.

I need to try to find all the ways that here is the same as there.

 

THE FOURTH TEST involves typing. An alarm will sound. I will wake up. I will type three sentences.

The guide reconciles the grip. The sign categorizes the war.

The building quotes the architect.

 

I SLEEP AND I DREAM, but not of Tilly.

I dream of dinner with Hugh.

He shows up with four kinds of bread. Two wheels of cheese. He brings fish. He brings fruit. He brings cider.

We sit. He cuts everything that needs cutting, then loads each cut onto a fork. I tell him, between bites, that I can feed myself. He says yes, he knows, but sets the fork again in my mouth. His words don't smell or taste of condescension. My would-be anger, much like the food, dissolves against my tongue.

"Tell me what this tastes like," Hugh says.

It tastes like attention, like success. "Sale."

"Have another." The second cut.

It tastes like flirting and foreplay. "Citrus."

He plops a grape in my mouth.

Grapes taste like the sun. They taste like something overcome.

After the grape, there's a thing that might be muenster, a thing that could be tuna, a thing that's more than very likely bread.

"It tastes like esteem," I tell him.

"And respect," I say. "And honesty. And relief." And fear.

I slip my foot under my thigh, massage it as a means of distraction.

It's distracting enough for the both of us.

"Give it here," he takes my foot and does things to my arches, things that feel like the thaw. I am won over. I am taken over. I am wooed and unwoven and remade. I am asleep.

 

THE ALARM IS A BELL. Its ring is loud and long. I wake and type.

The guide reconciles the grip. The sign categorizes the war.

The building quotes the architect. The subject conjures the doctor.

 

"WHEN YOU WERE LITTLE," Hugh says, "what did you want to be?"

"Why?"

"You said your sister wanted to be an astronaut. What did you want to be?"

I wanted to be a rabbit. I wanted to live in a hat and disappear until I was desperately needed or wanted. I wanted to go away until my presence would cause nothing short of delight.

"I wanted to be a magician."

"And what do you want to be now?"

Hugh's voice is sturdy. He knows what to ask and how to ask it, but it's the sound of his voice that does it. Like a firm mattress. I want to sleep against his voice.

"Right now, I just want to be able to sleep." I say this instead of asking him to sit by my bed while I nap. Instead of asking if he'll stay and talk and let me collapse into his questions. I tell him, "I'm dreaming." An understatement. "Having bad dreams."

"Do you want to talk about them?"

Yes, I do. No, I don't.

"Most of them seem harmless. They're like my regular dreams. But you're in some of them. And Tilly's in some of them. The one I had yesterday--Tilly wants me to find my own apartment. I had a dream where I tried to talk to her about it."

"What happened?"

"It didn't go well."

 

WE FLOATED SIDE BY SIDE, two fearsome, burning stars. "You need me," I told her. "We need each other."

"Liz, what do you call a contortionist who can't see?" Tilly's voice got younger when she responded--she spoke with a child's voice and said, "A blindfold."

She laughed. I laughed. I laughed and felt afraid. I'd never been afraid of Tilly. It made my eyes burn.

Revolving toward me, she started again, "What do you call an alcoholic who wears sunglasses and walks with a cane?" Her voice barreled past me. Heat singed my face. I stopped laughing. She shouted, "Blind drunk!"

I heard my blood burning. I smelled Tilly's. Perennial, dueling scents: overripe fruit and burning impatience, smoking match heads and unanswered questions, blazing faults and vinegary pain sweat, metal and unshakable blame. She kept spinning toward me, and the faster she spun, the harder she burned; the harder she burned, the smaller she got; the smaller she got, the stronger she smelled. And then there was next to nothing at all. Tilly fumed until a fume was all there was.

I inhaled the little that was left of her. She tasted like she smelled.

And when she spoke, she used the tip of my tongue. "How do you make a Venetian blind?"

I tried to spit or swallow. "Cut out his eyes."

Her fingers on my eyebrows, she said, "I love blind jokes." Her nails under my eyelids.

"You never see them coming." She unscrewed both my eyes.

"I robbed you. I robbed you blind."

I blinked and the world remained dark. I told her, "I'm still here."

"Are you? Really?"

I wake with wet eyes.

 

NOTHING WEARS ME OUT like crying. I sleep for a day and a half, waking only for lessons, meals, and exams.

Hugh doesn't visit again until the last day of the study.

He holds my elbow and steers me through the hospital. "I have some people I want you to meet." I lock up and he senses it. "It's all right. The exams are over now."

The corridors smell of visiting hours. The air is cold but familiar. We go through a set of doors and the space ahead hollows out. There are voices that stop when we arrive.

"Everyone, meet Liz. Liz, meet your fellow subjects."

I hear them introduce themselves. They say their names. They speak toward me or toward where they think I am.

"Hugh."

"Yes?"

"You're the only person here who can see."

"Yes."

"And they all know that everyone else is blind."

"Yes."

I listen to them talk and gesture. I listen to them feel useful and among. I hear them but I don't know how to find them. I wonder if they do this all the time.

There's a person at my side. A blind person next to a blind person next to a blind person. A solid echo.

"So, Liz," one of them says, "what do you do?" Part of me falls off. I don't know how to answer.

"Liz?" Hugh's voice now.

"Yes?"

"Are you all right?"

"Yes."

"You're crying."

"Yes."

"What's wrong?"

My nose twitches.

"It's nothing. Just my eyes."

"Your eyes?"

"They hurt."

 

*

 

TILLY MAKES DINNER to celebrate my homecoming. She fills the apartment with scents she knows will linger. Garlic. Butter. Rosemary.

She asks about the study. "Did you get to fly a rocket ship? Did you drink the Milky Way?"

"I slept a lot."

"You slept a lot? Wait. Are you being coy? Did you and Dr. Movie Star--?"

"No."

I let her cooking scents fill my mouth. It stops me from talking too soon. I ask her if she missed me.

"Of course I did." She holds a wooden spoon to my mouth, says, "Taste this."

I tell her, "More garlic."

We sit across from each other and I smell every object in the room. The dinner and my sister and every thing we own. I lift my plate to my face and the food steams my cheeks. I close my eyes and inhale.

I want to smell only this. I want to dismantle this memory. Tilly says, "They starved you at that hospital, didn't they."

"Cold quiche. Spare lettuce."

"Senseless."

"Scentless."

"Look at you with the sharp wit."

"How did you find the study?"

"What?"

"What did the ad say? What were they looking for?"

"There wasn't any ad. They called me."

"Who did?"

"Your doctor called first, said she'd gotten a notice, that they were looking for blind subjects for a study. Once I said okay, the other doctors contacted me directly."

My plate is still in my hands, but my cheeks are chilled and damp.

"You didn't tell me."

"Tell you what?"

"That everyone was blind."

"I knew you wouldn't have gone."

"You didn't give me the chance to say no."

Tilly pauses long enough for my nose to twitch. "Well. Now you know how it feels."

I put my plate down and hold the table's edge. I'm reminded of Hugh. At some point since arriving home, I've become the thing that's gotten lost.

"They asked me what I did."

"Who?"

"The other subjects."

"You met them?"

"At the end."

"What did you say?"

"I said I was a living statue."

"You didn't say that."

"I said I was Lady Justice."

"Liz."

"I know why you left me there."

"Really."

"Yes."

"So tell me."

"You want me to leave."

"I want you to have your own life."

"Which means I have to leave."

Tilly's barefoot, so I don't hear her walk toward me. But I feel the air make room for her. She reaches for my face. I pull away. I leave the table. Her voice follows me.

"Come work at the shelter. Answer phones. Play with the kids. At least give it a try. If you hate it, you can leave."

"Do I have to get my own apartment?"

"No." A part of me that had fallen comes floating back my way. "But I do."

"Why?"

"Because you already know this place. It's familiar and it's yours. And it's time."

"You decided while I was away."

"I decided before that."

"Did you actually miss me while I was gone?"

"I told you I did."

"But you didn't even think about it."

"I didn't have to. I missed talking to you--really talking, without all the bullshit that goes along with talking to sighted people. Things like eye contact and respect."

I collapse into an armchair. Tilly stays near the table. I tell her I'm sorry. I don't say that I'm lost.

She apologizes, her voice thrown against the wall.

"You sound far away," I tell her. I don't ask where she went. "It's snowing," she says. "I'm looking at the snow."

We share a silence I don't know how to translate.

"Tell me what it looks like." The silence carries on. I ask again. "Say it like I might know what you mean."

l wait for her refusal. l wait for her judgment. l wait, but my nose moves not at all.

She says, "It's falling like ticker tape. The ground has thick white fur. Soft but jagged." She knows I'm confused. l need an example. "Come on. I'll show you."

I hear her grab her keys. She leads me through the living room. She opens the front door and we go out.

The air outside tastes smooth as a marble. The snow is pliable against my feet, but stings my skin.

"You're right," l say. "lt is soft. But also kind of--"

"Jagged."

"Yeah."

Tilly asks me what it feels like.

"The snow?" l say.

"Being blind in the snow. What is that like?"

Snow and words collect at the corners of my mouth.

"lt feels like gravity."

"I have no idea what that means."

She needs an example. I ask for her hands. She gives them to me. "Follow my lead."

l tighten my grip, fall to my right. We're down in the snow. We stay there.

"See?" l ask.

She's shaking. From laughter or shivering or shaking her head. "The snow burns my face," she says.

"But the fall didn't hurt."

"No. It didn't hurt at all."

"And it doesn't feel solid--the ground."

"No. It almost feels like air. Like when you're under a blanket with someone in winter, and they roll over, and the cold comes in like the wind."

"What'll I do in the middle of the night when I can't sleep after you're gone?"

"You could take out an ad. Woman Seeks Companion to Ward off Aliens and Rapists."

"Sisters Need Not Apply."

"You could call me."

I could. But I won't.

I sit up and pat around to find the surface of the snow. I push it down to test its depth.

"If you're thinking about pelting me with a snowball," Tilly says, "you should know I'm not above retaliation." I tell her I'm testing something. "Testing what?"

"You'll see."

"Very funny."

I feel for a flat patch. Finding it, I say, "Give me your hand."

I hold my left hand over Tilly's and pull out her index finger. I make a wand. I'm a magician. I poke her wand-finger through the snow and make a series of formulaic holes.

We're finished, but she doesn't know it. I say to her: "We're done."

"What is it?"

"We left a note."

"What does it say?"

In actual Braille, the cells would be embossed. I'd feel them rise to meet my fingertips. The ones I made are depressed, technically illegible. Still, I pull Tilly's finger across it, simultaneously reading and destroying the message.

"It says, were here."

Two Poems by Colin Pope

Issue 75
Issue 75

Found in Willow Springs 75

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Phone Call to Plan Abortion, as Flood

 

She says she's lost so much weight

since our breakup that she can see it,

she can feel her hips spreading out

as though her womb were a river

and the water was rising around

a lump of clay caught in its path.

She can't keep from crying. She tries,

 

knowing how hard it is for me to hear

her pain, but her levies are broke and gone:

waterlogged-teddy-bear gone,

family-photo-album gone, gone

as the christening gown blown

into a tree two towns away, gone. She says

 

in Texas, now, they make you listen

to the heartbeat. They take your ultrasound

and show it to you and make you hear

the twice-quickened rhythm against

the backdrop of yourself. She says

 

what hurts most is that it's a piece

of me she's losing, the last piece, and if

there was any part of me that wanted

to pull from the wreckage this family,

I should do something. I should do

 

something, but I can't. If you need

any help, I say, let me know. If you need

any, any help, anything at all, I'm here.

I am so artful in my evil, it takes

three of me to keep myself

 

from running back into the house

and lying down on the linoleum

to wait for her to swallow me alive.

Okay, she says. Okay. It's like searching

 

for bodies. Out there, somewhere,

the ragged corpse of goodbye

is waiting for us to find it, but instead

we stay on the line, petrified

that when we hang up it will be the last time

we'll ever hear each other breathe.

 

Suspect

 

Now I remember how the policeman

asked me where I was

at the time of your death, and I thought

how nice of him to try

to cheer me up,  joking that way

as the waves in his shoulder radio

crashed and whispered.

And then I listened to the frequency

of his lips and there wasn't a quiver,

not a single crest in the flatline

of his face and I knew he was seriously asking

whether I had killed my girlfriend.

 

lf l had been a smarter man, a man

whose grip on the exposed wiring

of shock had not been so tight,

I would've seen it coming.

I would've inhaled and swallowed

the rotten, sulfuric taste of the entire

administrative holocaust to come,

papers exchanging hands

in distant offices, workers flitting

through the safety of their honeycomb

with their dirty feelers scraping our names,

and folders, finally, eating us whole.

"Why?" I asked instead,

 

knowing why, but wanting

to hear him say why. "We're just trying

to get all our ducks in a row," he said. "We

only want to understand."

Oh, officer, I never knew his name

but what a gift he was.

There was only so much understanding

to go around, and he wanted to drink

every drop of it, he wanted

to pound nails through the feet

of those ducks and drown them. "Home,"

 

I kept saying. Home, home, home.

He seemed to believe me,

which was funny because I knew

you were on the loose out there, fresh

as a cyclone crossing a prairie,

hovering, splitting and replicating, and

wherever I went or whatever I told him,

home had run away, dissolved, the way a word can,

the way a person can, the way facts and dates

and places end up blaming us, stupid us,

the ones who took the trouble to make them.

 

Four Stories by J. Robert Lennon

Issue 75
Issue 75

Found in Willow Springs 75

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Owl

HIS SON WOULDN'T TAKE the garbage out to the barn because there was a bat, the boy said, flapping around out there; so he muttered an oath, cinched the bag shut, and crunched across to the gravel driveway and through the dusk-darkened open door, only to find that the boy was right, there was something out there, not a bat, he realized as the thing swooped over his head and came to rest on the seat of a disused bicycle leaning against the rear window- not a bat but a small gray owl, its back to the gloom, batting itself futilely and halfheartedly against the still faintly lambent glass. It's confused, he thought, confused and lost, so he set down the sack of trash and took the owl gently into his two hands, planning to release it through the open door, which he would have done immediately had the owl not dug its claws into his fingers and puffed itself up inside his cupped hands and said, in a high, strangled croak like a sick old woman's, I'm not lost or confused and I'm not an owl, I'm the  part of your son you don't understand, and I beat myself against the glass not because I want to escape but because I want to know how it feels; and while this little speech from the owl gave him pause, he walked the rest of the way across the barn to the door and freed the thing into the night air, because he didn't know what else to do and because it frightened him to have the creature in his hands; then he dropped the bag of trash into the garbage can as planned and went back into the house to apologize to his son.

 

Marriage (Sick)

SHE'S LYING ON THE SOFA. She says, I think I feel sick.

You think? he says. How can you think you feel sick? Either you feel sick or you don't feel sick.

I don't know if I feel sick, she says.

He says, You don't know if you are sick. But surely you know if you feel sick.

I feel something, she says. And I don't like it. But I don't know what it is.

Well, again, he says. How do you know you don't like it if you don't know what it is?

She says, Fine. It's a bodily unease. It's the vaguest hint of nausea, coupled with the faintest headache, which might be the result of my posture, or not getting enough sleep. Or it could be the first sign of illness. These sensation s are unclear. They fade in and out of perception as the patterns of my thoughts and actions change. Okay?

Maybe it's all in your head, he says.

I just told you it isn't. I just told you it is in my body.

Well, he says, you think it's your body. But it could be that it's your mind planting ideas in your body.

In other words, she says, it's my fucking body.

If you were really sick, he says, you'd know it. Believe me. There's no mistaking it when it comes on.

I've been sick before, you idiot, she says.

Well, he says, remember what that was like. Are you feeling that now? I might be.

He makes a face.

You make me sick, she says.

He says, I get that as a rhetorical tactic. But in truth, it's pretty unlikely that--

She vomits. It takes a while. A minute, at least. She makes no apparent effort to move to the toilet or to contain it to a small area.

She says, I'm sick.

You're sick, he says. He leaves the room and comes back with a wet washcloth, a roll of paper towels, and a bottle of spray cleaner. He cleans off her face and then the furniture and floor. He leaves the room and comes back with a cup of tea and a blanket. He sets the tea on the coffee table and covers her with the blanket.

I'm sorry, he says.

She says, Are you sure? Yes.

Maybe you're feeling something but you don't know what it is. That's a real phenomenon, she says, weakly. Maybe you're saying you're sorry because it's socially appropriate, but you're feeling something very different. Something you are too dense to have bothered to examine. Maybe you are feeling nothing at all.

He says nothing.

You're sorry, she says, making quotation marks with her fingers.

After a while, he goes upstairs. After a while, she starts to cry. She doesn't know why.

 

Eleven

ELEVEN: THE NUMBER of days until he'll see her again; the number of times he says her name into his pillow every night and again when he wakes; the number of letters in her full name, spread over four syllables, one three four three; the number of steps from his bedroom to the bathroom where he balls eleven Kleenex in his fist, one by one, and sails them across the room and into the wastebasket, starting over at one if he misses, and in the morning his father asks who in the hell is using all the goddam Kleenex, and his mother says shush, don't make him feel bad; eleven times he touches the light switch when he leaves the bathroom to return to bed, eleven seconds he counts before he can roll over in the bed, eleven scratches on his itchy ankle, eleven insert ions of his finger in each nostril when he gets the urge to pick his nose. Eleven is his age, and hers, and when she asked him, during math, what was with the tapping, because he had been making himself tap his desk eleven times on each corner with a pencil every time he imagined reaching across the space between them and stroking the dark skin of her resting hand, he said, it's a project I'm working on; and instead of rolling her eyes and turning away as most girls would she looked straight at him and said, with the faintest hint of a smile, Well that has got to be some project; and before the teacher yelled at the two of them to stop talking--the two of them, reprimanded together!--he thought, Oh, God, why tomorrow, why does winter break begin tomorrow , because when they returned in January she would be twelve and the one thing that connected them, the one thing that was real to him, would be gone, and she would never speak to or smile at him again; she would be part of a new world, the world of twelve, which at this moment as he lay in bed on the first dreadful night of Christmas vacation , seemed as distant to him, as cold and imaginary, as the North Pole.

 

Marriage (Love)

SHE SAYS, DO YOU LOVE ME?

He appears to consider the question.

Well? she says.

I'm thinking about it, he says.

She says, We're married! What the fuck is there to think about?

You're rather difficult, he says.

So what! So are you!

He appears surprised. I'm difficult? In what way?

Are you kidding? she says. Your passivity. Your stubbornness. The way you pretend that things are simple when they're not. Like right now. You're acting like I just asked you a simple question. You're sitting there trying to actually answer it!

But you're the one who wants it to be simple, he says. You just want me to say yes. I'm acknowledging the complexity of the issue.

She says, No, see, that's the simpleton's idea of complexity. It's actually not complexity, it's oversimplification. If you were smart, you would have answered the question as though complexity wasn't even a thing, and kept your idiot notions to yourself.

So, he says, when you say you love me, you're lying?

No, you moron. I do love you, but I'm privately acknowledging, to myself, that love is not simple. Then I am vaulting over that layer of complexity and giving the rhetorically appropriate reply, because I am a higher fucking mammal capable of complex fucking reasoning.

Hmm, he says.

Okay, she says, how about this. Do you think I'm fat?

No, he says.

All right then.

I mean, he says, you're fatter than when we­--

No, no, no, she says.

But I like a woman who--

No! No. You haven't heard a thing I said.

I can only be myself, he says.

False, she says.

I don't see what other choices I have.

False.

I love you, he says.

I hate you, she says.

He strokes his chin for a little while. What layer is that? he says, finally.

I'm not at liberty to say.

I was right about your being difficult, he says. Admit that.

Saying that I am difficult is an insidious form of flattery to yourself, she says. By saying that I am difficult, you are saying that you are man enough to handle me. When in fact you are a fucking pussy.

He says, By saying that you hate me, you are flattering yourself You are saying that you are woman enough to be married to someone you hate. Who is a fucking pussy.

Touche, she says, four days later.

“Fire Artist” by Karl Zuelke

Issue 79
Issue 79

Found in Willow Springs 87

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OUR FATHER and one of his buddies burned down the lumberyard back in the forties. Grandma told the story a hundred times: "The whole neighborhood was headed up the street toward the commo­tion, and here come Vernon and Richard moving the other way. I knew they was mixed up in it right then." She thought it was funny.

So maybe it's been running in the family. My brother, Phil, the fire artist. Dad the adolescent arsonist.

WE WERE LIGHTING little grass fires, seeing how big we could get them and still stomp them out. One got away, of course, and some­body called the Fire Department. Flames thirty feet high, smoke in brown coils racing for the blue, sirens on the way. It burned itself out in five minutes. A minute before the trucks rounded the corner, Phil lit the field again and we took off. "Shame if they come running all the way over here with nothing to show for it," he told me. We hid out in a tree house peeling open wet Playboys and drying them in front of the fire built on flagstones we hoisted up there. Phil could control a fire when he meant to. We both knew how to do that.

IN THE PORCUPINE MOUNTAINS the bears were thick. One walked through the middle of camp and crapped in front of Curt's tent. There were peanuts and a purple foil granola bar wrapper in it. So we took care and hung the packs properly, and the bears were up the trees all night, swiping at the packs and grunting, frustrated. We saw where they tried to bite through the rope. They watched us from the woods, red eyes sparking back the firelight.

PHIL GOT IN A WRECK on a motorcycle and graduated high school in the ICU. His friend died in that wreck, a good kid too young to be heading off in that fashion. It still hasn't left, that vision of my brother's face—I mean smashed—the wires and tubes, the equipment all whistling. Phil got a pile of money from the settlement. The plas­tic surgeon rebuilt him, and he looked the same. That in itself was amazing. He and Curt went backpacking down a canyon in Medicine Bow that August. Dad couldn't believe it, couldn't think of a thing to say. I don't remember why I missed that trip. An elk tripped over their tent rope and bugled. The stream had deep, clear pools crowded with trout they could see but couldn't catch, so Phil tied an M-80 to a rock. Ethical angling was hardly my brother's forte, but he and Curt had cutthroat trout every meal for six days. They buried the fish in icy patches of old snow that kept them fresh.

WE DID THE SMOKIES A LOT, and once a big sphinx moth flew into the circle of the firelight, eyes glowing like they had electric filaments. It got too close and went down in flames like a little fighter plane. It was dramatic and terrible because it was heavy-bodied and five inches across, and the smell wasn't good. After it happened again, we learned how to pull them away from the flames. We'd see their little red eyes shining as they buzzed in from the woods, then we'd grab them with a flashlight beam and park them safely on our shirts. They sat like gray corsages, vibrating. We each had four or five. Once the fire died down they flew off, one by one.

PHIL DID THE GRILL at Mom and Dad's barbeques and was good at salting and seasoning the roast and cooking it to perfection. He had a feel for how flesh and fire work together. Cooking is the con­trolled breakdown of the molecular structure of food, so it’s all about destruction from the beginning. The art of it is permitting the disin­tegration to only progress so far.

THE THREE OF US MET some Lakota guys in the Black Hills, same age as us. Everyone you meet in mountain country is friendly. East or West, almost always. We hung out a couple days, shared their vodka and our bourbon and cigars and each other's food, and it was great fun. Caught fish, and one guy was deadly on squirrels with a pellet pistol, so there was fresh red meat and plenty of it. Phil cooked up those squirrels, and our Indian friends had to admit that here was a guy with the touch. They told us their tribe's white buffalo woman story around the fire one night, and the moral basically was that you should have a good heart and be respectful of the things that come your way. These dudes could party, but they weren't joking about this. It was easy enough on that night. Spicy pine-roasted squirrel, good company, taking turns sipping a bottle of Four Roses, around and around. The fire all lively, spitting and popping.

WE TRIED OUT TAR HOLLOW in Ohio because we didn't feel like driving so far and we heard it was worth a look, and it was. Great woods, lots of genuine backcountry in the middle of nowhere, good trails, and hills not so high but rugged. And no people. We had good topo maps and needed them. There were spider webs every six feet, the spiders so thick we hiked with branched sticks waving in front of our faces, and they clogged up with the webs, studded with all these thorny little spiders you couldn't flick off because they were buried in the web mass. We stuck the sticks in the fire, and there was this siz­zling white flash for about a second, then the webs melted into goop. When we were hiking Curt pointed to something on a rock and said, "That moss has taken a lichen to that rock," and we heard it five hun­dred times more on that trip, and on every trip after. I still think it's funny. "That moss has taken a lichen to that rock." You'd think you'd get sick of it but somehow you don't.

ONE SPRING just before the leaves opened, me and Phil did a weekend in Red River Gorge, in Kentucky, and it snowed this heavy, wet spring snow. It was beautiful, the soft clumps of snowflakes drop­ping fast, piling up on the heavy evergreen rhododendron leaves next to the lacy green hemlock needles and the cliffs. So lovely, but it did completely soak everything, and it was the one time I ever saw when he couldn't get a fire lit. We tried every trick. Everything was wet. Nothing burned. It was that five inches of warm, soggy snow. He hated that trip and always talked about how sopping wet and miserable it was—we were equipped, it wasn't that bad—but I know it was because he couldn't start a fire. Nothing would catch. I finally said fuck the fire. I walked down to the bank of Swift Camp Creek as it was getting dark, and he was back in camp carving up all these wet sticks with a knife to expose the dry wood inside. I took off my glasses and closed my eyes and put my face up into the strip of quiet gray sky narrowed by canyon walls and let the warm snow sifting down through the tangle of twigs and branches fall all over me. My fleece and Gore-Tex shell were warm, and my feet were dry in my boots, and there was the chill tickle of snowflakes melting on my face, and it was one of those moments you get sometimes when you're out there. Just happy. Blood flowing through your ears.

IT WAS A DRY HOT SUMMER at home, and when you're a fool you assume that's how it's going to stay everywhere. Well, it rained. It always rains in the Smokies. It's the wettest place in North Amer­ica outside of the Pacific Northwest. Curt couldn't find his rain suit because all his stuff was in boxes from moving and getting evicted all the time, so he cut a hole in a garbage bag for his head and two more holes for his arms and that was his rain suit. He went sloshing up the trail in his ludicrous green garbage bag, and he got soaked, and his lips turned dark purple, and he got even slower and denser than nor­mal. We stopped early, stuffed Curt in his tent and sleeping bag, and he was down there shivering like a poodle and getting all sleepy and delirious, worried about Shawnee Indian attacks, then slipping into fog, and it didn't look too good for Curt. Hypothermia is no joke. We got a roaring fire going in the rain and spooned hot instant chicken soup down him and saved his life.

ALL OF US WENT TO COLLEGE, but Curt didn't last. He met a girl and married her with no warning. There was no hope he would graduate. She had grown up in some mean-ass trailer park and want­ed to accomplish more with her life than eight kids before thirty and another trailer. I give her some credit. So why did she marry Curt? Bad judgment. Delusions. Look, he didn't wear a tie at his wedding. He had never worn one in his life, and it's not like it was some kind of statement or anything; it just never occurred to him. One time she hosted a dinner party for all three of us, with our wives, and it was nice, and silly, and there were too many candles on the table, and I felt bad for her. The cooking was unbelievable, but the whole night was still one long la-de-dah until we started telling camping stories. The women rolled their eyes at each other but at least it wasn't Zom­bieland anymore. I'm happy for her sake their marriage didn't last more than a year and a half. She has some good-looking husband now whose whole life she arranges like a vase of chrysanthemums. I see her around now and then and she's nice to me and seems happy to talk. Her daughter is so pretty you have to deliberately drag your eyes away.

BACKCOUNTRY RANGERS in the Smokies carry shotguns they use to shoot feral sows and razorbacks on sight. We were struggling up Eagle Creek, and near the top—boom!—a gun went off and the slug tore through the brush not thirty feet from us. Guns have a bad sound when they're aimed in your direction. Something extra in it. It'll turn your spine to jelly. Before we could yell, a second shot hit its mark, and here this squealing pregnant sow came rolling down the moun­tain and died right next to us. The ranger was a good guy, and he was embarrassed about a near miss with hikers, so he pulled a knife from the sheath on his belt and carved both back straps out of the dead pig, washed the blood off with his canteen, and wrapped them for us in a clean cotton bandanna. That night we were careful to choose maple and hickory for the fire, and we dug up some wild ramps, boiled sas­safras roots for tea, and I hiked halfway back down the mountain and gathered the colony of chicken of the woods mushrooms we had spot­ted earlier. Phil knew exactly how to treat those straps. That was a feast!

PHIL MAJORED IN FINANCE. I majored in biology, then English, then both. We took turns studying in France. We didn't see much of Curt in those years.

THE MOSQUITOES ON ISLE ROYALE were fast, aggressive bit­ers and thick as smoke. Repellent, gloves, and head nets kept them at bay, but you had to lift the net to eat, and you can't put 98% DEET on your lips and eyelids. That’s where they found to bite. Some wolves were after a moose calf. We heard them talking as they hunted in the woods near and around us but couldn't get so much as a glimpse. A great brown gangly cow moose burst out of the pines onto the trail above us, and swung that big long head around, with her red calf trembling between her legs, and it would have been magnificent except that you could see the fear in her eyes, and the poor calf quiv­ering in terror. Do you try to run the wolves off? Good luck with that. The spruce wood campfire that night was bright and flamy and crackly, and we could hear wolves howling.

AFTER HIS MBA, Phil got a position in the finance department of one of the big oil companies and moved to New York, then New Or­leans, then Wyoming, then back to New York, then to Atlanta, then Houston, then New York for the third time.

"What's with fucking New York?" I asked him.

"I hate it. But you go where they tell you." He used his power to fire people. Responsibilities got reallocated according to him. He had a great track record and got noticed.

THE TOURISTY ATTRACTIONS in Yellowstone are ringed with fences, warning signs, and wooden walkways, partly to keep the vacationers safe, partly to keep them from filling the pools with pen­nies and cigarette butts, but most of the fences and warnings were designed by attorneys to preempt lawsuits. Hike fifteen minutes into the back country and there's plenty more hot water, without the fences and boardwalks—geysers, clear hot blue pools, sulfur vapors hissing out of a little hole in a rock. It takes a special kind of crazy to stand at the edge of a thousand-foot cliff with your toes hanging over, but standing at the edge of a hot spring is easy. It doesn't matter that falling into it will cook you as dead as a jump off a canyon wall. Curt was lucky that the stream he tripped into had cooled a bit after flowing a quarter mile across a meadow. His boot protected his foot, but the skin on his lower leg above his ankle turned red and blistered. Phil had tossed a couple plump aloe leaves into the first aid kit, like always, and their juice kept the pain away. In the pool where the hot stream joined the cold one, a dead snake floated, its meat boiled by the volcanic heat it had blundered into.

WE WERE IN THE MOUNTAINS in Montana, and Phil wouldn't pay attention to the plants—these tall parallel-veined plants in the lily family with tiny green flowers. Looked like they grew out of spots where patches of snow had recently melted. He kept knocking the ones in camp over, not on purpose, just didn't notice. "Be careful with those, man."

"Oh, you're right, yeah." But he didn't care. It was just me and him that week because Curt couldn't afford the flight. I needed a break because we hadn't seen a single other person in four days, and wreck­ing those tall fragile lily plants was pissing me off. So I climbed way up the side of the cirque and lay down in the thin grass and watched the shadow of the mountain behind me crawl up the mountain in front of me as the sun set. When it got dark the stars fizzed over the silent sky. I lay for hours just digging them, whirling slow around the black dome of the firmament when suddenly they popped into three dimensions. I wasn't looking at them like paint splattered on a ceiling but was in their midst, in the stars and of them. It was totally mystical. Although I expect anyone with the patience and attention span to lie on his back for three hours in the mountains zoning out on the stars can have this experience. Hardy has Tess talk about the same thing, which is when Angel first notices her. There's nothing special about it and yet there's everything special about it. We're not observers, we're part of it, that's all it means. The wind shifted and some clouds blew in, and I caught a whiff of the cigar my brother was smoking. I worked my way back down to camp in the dark guided by the strange orange glow of the fire five hundred feet below. A cold misty rain started, but he had camp squared away tight. "Where you been?" he said.

HE ORGANIZED TRIPS to Iceland, Italy, Patagonia, and he climbed to the summit of Grand Teton, all while I was grinding my way through graduate school. I went to Alaska with him, charging the expense. You’d think with all the time off he took that he'd get in trouble, but apparently a guy with the know-how and cojones to organize expeditions for the money boys, and sometimes with the power to fire them, and who looks good in a suit in New York City, a guy like that will thrive in an oil company. We hiked up  this valley to a glacier, and there was no color: no green plants, no red plants, no blue sky. No flowers. Just rock, scud, ice, shadow: infinite gradations between dense black and dazzling white. A spruce tree in Denali at­tains a diameter of three inches after a century of growth, but that night he found wood enough for a small, clean fire.

IF YOU ASK A RANGER anywhere in southeast Ohio about moun­tain lions in those big stretches of national forest, they'll clam up and shrug and act like you're dreaming. The rangers know they're there, but it's not official so they won't acknowledge it. There's plenty of deer, surprising miles and miles and miles of nothing but low, rough hills, and vast endless trees, and hardly any people. They're there, though. One followed us all day. We never saw it. Just heard it rustling in the leaves always about the same distance behind, way too close for com­ fort, heard its belly gurgling once, heard something like a cat purring but two octaves deeper, got a ghostly whiff of its dense, musky meat-­breath. And there's that feeling you can't put your finger on, you just know something's back there, your neck hackles tell you. If a cougar doesn't want you to see it, you don't see it. Doesn't mean it's not there. Them eyes burning a hole through your shirt.

CURT HAD A JOB with a tree-trimming company. He was pushing a wheelbarrow piled full of leaves and sticks to the chipper and the wheel caught a branch on the ground. He kept coming, just enough time for a long thin stick to work its way just like that up his shorts, through the flaps of his underwear and right down deep through the slit at the tip of his penis. A one-in-a-million shot. It broke off. He had no health insurance. It took him a year before it hurt bad enough to go to the ER. The laser procedures, surgery, recovery in the hospi­tal, ran him a bill of forty-five thousand dollars. I'd have paid that bill for Curt myself, but I didn't have it. 

PHIL'S WIFE, Rachel—beautiful, intelligent, supportive, accom­plished in watercolors, plays the piano. Willing to move half a dozen times in ten years. When she took the girls and left him, for the usual reason, it was a week after a major promotion. He came clean with me after the divorce." So I burn through women," he said. “Can’t help it." Both his daughters seemed fine with it. I wonder if they knew him better than I did.

SUMMERS WHEN WE WERE STILL KIDS, we'd carry our gear to the big park across the road and set up the old pup tent in the woods where we knew it wouldn't be seen. It was dark green canvas, and had a smoky, mushroomy smell and wooden poles. We would sleep there, sometimes for weeks on end, often with our heads out watching for meteors or inside with rain pattering on the taut fabric. Curt would climb out his bedroom window and join us. We smoked cigarettes, sipped warm beer and bourbon we stole from garages, ate through bags of donuts, and read our Playboys by firelight, comparing what­ ever scant information we could gather about what it meant to be men. I would retell stories from the books I'd been reading. Huck and Jim on the raft. Captain Nemo using treasure for ballast. Boys cast away on an island, the emergence of humankind's innate savagery. All kinds of stuff gets shot at you like flaming arrows, and what they carry ranges from saintly and wholesome to venal and violent. It all hits. What spreads will depend on what's flammable in the target. While those fires lit in him way back then were contained, they kept on smoldering.

CURT NEEDED A SHOT, but the nurse felt there wasn't meat enough on his ass to hold it, so she tried his upper arm, which was worse. She had to run the needle into his thigh.

CLIMBING UP THE VALLEY of Hazel Creek, we were amazed at the height of the trees, eighty, ninety feet before the first branches. We hit this spot where the creek plunged over a waterfall, and it was hot, and we hadn't seen a soul in three days, so we dropped our packs and stripped our clothes off, put our water-shoes on, and waded in the pool below the falls. It was all very sylvan and frolicsome. I looked up, saw this young bear looking down on us, and it walked around the falls and stood next to the pool we were splashing in. Something happened right there. Like, something crossed through the air be­ tween me and that bear, a psychic wind, and I knew the bear wanted to come swimming with us. I was going to let him if he behaved. There's way more to animals than we give them credit for, and I think if you have the capacity for it, the empathy or whatever you might call it, you'll see, and once you catch sight of the spirit for the first time there's no going back. That was my first time. You'd think living with cats and dogs would show most people, but most people either really don't care about them, or they turn their pets into cutesy-poo, so they're blind forever after. My brother turned around, saw this bear standing not fifteen feet away, staring at him, and he about leaped out of his shoes. It’s understandable. He fell backward into the icy water and got up spluttering, and the bear ran off. It looked over its shoulder at us before it was gone, and this is going to sound flaky, but I don't care: That bear's feelings were hurt. It was the funniest thing ever, but there was also a sadness to it. In your whole life you only get a handful of openings like that, and that's if you’re lucky.

YOU DEVELOP A LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP with your pack, but Curt lost his. We had all bought them when we were sixteen and seventeen, used them for almost forty years. We got him a new one, set him up with our spare gear, paid his share of the food. He wasn't sick with anything specific, but I'd known him since we were nine. Seemed like he was withering. Lost his thump. We had to take his load on, he barely carried anything. The big wildlife stayed hid, but the little creatures of the Smoky Mountains were there like always, the tiger swallowtails, the Diana fritillaries, the salamanders, the big pink and gray millipedes and the smaller yellow and black ones that give off a sweet smell of cyanide, and there were the same streams clogged with downed trees and round, dark, wet rocks with bright patches of moss, the gurgle of tumbling water, the warm air fragrant with sap and mushrooms, the endless dark and bright shades of concentrated green. Curt got nostalgic about this trip before it was halfway over, and it had to be because he sort of figured it was the last one. He dropped dead at work a month later with a rake in his hands. Just fell over dead. As a memorial gesture, my brother paid off all his bills.

WE WERE IN COLORADO, too high for me. I was sick with the altitude on top of a two-thousand-foot drop off, with the wind blow­ing straight at us but deflected straight up by the cliff face. Here came an eagle from way below riding that wind, wings spread, not flapping, rising straight up and fast. He went tearing by and saw us, and it was one of those moments you can get when you know to stay open for it: absolute astonishment on the face of an eagle. We didn't belong there. But as he rose, my spirit, I suppose you might say, followed after, and the eagle was looking down at me like, sure, come on. You can do this too. I snapped back when I started losing my balance, and he and Curt grabbed me and probably kept me from going over the edge. But, oh gosh. I flew with an eagle—just for a second, but I did it. Anyone can. Eagles fly with their bodies, and we can't do that, but it's all about the spirit, really. The eagle showed me that. I tried to share it, but they just listened politely and shook their heads at me. They both thought I was an airhead anyway, but it's okay. I am. I didn't expect anything different.

HE CAMPED ALONE MORE OFTEN. He still led exotic trips with the execs, but fewer, and he was pulling down more money than ever. But so what? All we know is that he should never have built that fire where he did. If you use these places and don't try to under­ stand them, you make mistakes. The Coast Range in August is not the soggy Appalachians. I try to make myself believe that smoke did the work, not the flames. You can't control where smoke goes. To one with fire in his heart, flame is loyal.

OUR FIRST TRIP EVER was with our dad, in a canoe. I was maybe ten. It rained like crazy, and I can't forget one moment: 4:00 a.m., the worst of the thunder moving past but with lightning still flick­ering above a heavy downpour, the tent leaking like it was made of rice paper, the three of us sitting up shivering at each other through the last of the storm flashes in our wet sleeping bags, miserable as cats in a washtub, and our old beagle dead asleep and snoring like a lumberjack. It was so ridiculous we started laughing. In the morning, eight-year-old Phil took it on himself to get the fire going. He found dry tinder someplace, after a long night of rain, and some live coals under the main log in the fire circle. It was a timid, smoky fire, but he already knew the life of flame and nursed it to strength enough to fry three full pounds of bacon and a whole box of Bisquick pancakes for us and the dog. Thirty years later, Dad said it was still the finest breakfast he ever ate.

THERE WERE THOUSANDS of sassafras seedlings scattered through the understory, so I suggested we might make tea. I told my nieces that since the little plants kept breaking off when we tried to pull them up, it was probably because we hadn't asked the tree for its root, shown it proper respect, and given it proper thanks. If you do that, I said, one might just offer up a root.

Your dad would have been proud to take you camping, I told them. Young women, both. Filled like brooks with the laughter of waters. A nice fat root had given itself up. It was plenty for a pot of tea. We washed it off in the creek and put a pan of water on the fire.

Issue 79: Karl Zuelke

Karl-Zuelke-150x150

About Karl Zuelke

I, Karl Zuelke, earned a BS in biology and BA in English literature at the University of Cincinnati. I attended the writing program at Indiana University and earned an MFA in fiction. My doctorate is from UC as well, in American lit. with an ecocritical focus on nature writing and science writing as literature. I moved to Budapest, Hungary for awhile with my wife, Elizabeth, where we taught English at the Közgazdaságtudományi Egyetem (Budapest Economics University). I have also taught at Northern Kentucky University and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Currently I am the Director of the Writing Center and the Math & Science Center at Mount St. Joseph University, in Cincinnati, where I also teach literature, writing, and environmental studies.

I have a Facebook page but no Web site yet, and I haven’t tweeted in years.

I have critical work published or forthcoming on Terry Tempest Williams, Peter Matthiessen, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and more.

My creative work has been published in The Antioch Review, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, Willow Springs, ISLE, and elsewhere.

A major project I took on two years ago was the blog Dreaming, Singing: Meditations on The Dream Songs. It features creative and critical responses to 385 Dream Songs by the poet John Berryman. I responded to one Dream Song a day for 385 days, plus an introduction and a reflection. These responses varied widely from day to day, depending on the material the day’s poem brought, my mood, my interests, the news, and the weather. They range from close analysis and literary criticism to poems, political rants, anecdotes, and stories. Sometimes I gripe at Berryman and call him a loser (it’s okay—he treated himself the same way). These meditations are mostly brilliant and I highly recommend them, especially if you start at day one and read all 385 subsequent entries in one sitting, plus the reflection.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Fire Artist”

I have backpacked for years, so some scenes from this story are lifted from experience. The bear under the waterfall is told much as I lived it, including that ancient perception of communicating with an animal through what the story’s narrator calls a “psychic wind.” The scene with the moths and the campfire is written exactly as we experienced it. The moose and her terrified calf on Isle Royale bursting through the trees above as they were pursued by wolves is another unforgettable image straight out of my experience. Other scenes began in experience but were altered, others were a retelling of stories I’ve heard, and others are pure fiction. Curt is an invented character. Phil’s rule-breaking personality began in my own brother’s individualist tendencies, but grew beyond them in a way surprising to me. Ultimately, his rule-breaking is not what does him in. It’s the more profound diminishment of his respect—for himself and his loved ones, and for the natural world that had such a defining presence for him but toward which he turned to conquer. His career choices may have tempted him down that path.

Most of the time when I write a story, it takes effort—I have to push, I get tired, my brain feels hollow. On a just a few rare occasions, a story has simply fallen into place. This was one of those. The plot, which develops over a span of forty years, was not preordained. The narrator’s self-aware mysticism and Phil’s rise in influence and wealth, as his character diminishes, all developed out of the characters as their adventures back and forth through time unfolded. The story was a pleasure to write.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

Beach Boys. Steely Dan. Joni Mitchell. Bluegrass. I love a cold beer as much as anyone, but I I’m allergic to hops; I suffer for it—the hoppier the beer, the worse it makes me feel. I stick with red wine, and since I live in Kentucky, I also like a finger or two of good bourbon now and then, out of a sense of community-building and cultural solidarity. Horses, bluegrass music and bourbon lend a richness to the culture of Kentucky which I’m proud to associate with. I’m a pretty good painter in watercolors and acrylics, and I have some skill in woodworking. I can cook. I love cats and understand them, and while I never had one of my own, I grew up around horses. I love and admire them as well. But bees have my attention and heart these days. You wouldn’t think bees would evoke an emotional attachment. I’m just getting started and didn’t expect that. It’s not the individual bees, which are cute but expendable—the bees themselves would tell you that. It’s the hive, this pulsating collective of 30,000 fuzzy insects snugged into their warm, comfortable box. It’s consistently fascinating watching them. A couple weeks ago the temperature in December was in the 60s—too cold for foraging, but there were a few dead bees on the landing, dragged out the day before which had been even warmer. I flicked them away, and the colony heard me, gave off a deep, intimidating collective buzz, then sent out a single scout to see what was up. It was a drone. He hung in my face for a few seconds, decided, I guess, that it was only me, and went back inside. That was it—one scout to check out the disturbance and make a report. Amazing!

 

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“B.Y.O.B.” by Lilly Schneider

Issue 79
Issue 79

Found in Willow Springs 79

Back to Author Profile

THE HOUSE

 

The house is not too near the university. No buses come this way. In the garage, on any given day, anywhere from one to a dozen bicycles lean unlocked against the wall, and instruments––acoustic and elec­tric guitars, hand drums, a black varnished ukulele, a dented trumpet, plastic kazoos––lie on the sagging couches, on the squares of dirty, dis­embodied carpet. Tom's drum set, worth two thousand bucks, gleams gold and silver and glitter-flecked pearly white. The house is tucked back from the road in the rain forest––cedar trees and slick maples, blackberry brambles and ferns––and the garage door is always open, even in the constant rain; in the rain the open garage door makes a convenient roof under which it's pleasant to smoke. This is Olympia, Washington, and though bikes get stolen downtown, though laptops and smartphones are lifted from unattended bags on campus, the five residents of this large rental house believe no one would think to steal out here in the hills, where it's so peaceful, so green. When they have a party they move the bikes and clean the garage and divide the space into private hangout cells by tacking brightly printed textiles from the ceiling, gifts from those who've gone backpacking through Asia over school breaks. Someone will bake something to offer around, and it will be either delicious and decadent, or made from beets and seeds and not very good. Everyone will be generous with their drugs. Three of the residents are in a psychedelic rock band, and when they play they take the textiles down so the garage is open. They hand out the kazoos to the crowd, and the street outside is lined with cars a quarter mile in either direction.

Here the parties are always B.Y.O.B. That way everyone can have their preferred beverage; in this group, kegs, their connotations, are considered cheesy. The current residents are not responsible for the silver kegs tossed in the woods behind the house, half-sunk into dirt under toupees of thick moss. They all keep saying they're going to bring them to  the recycling center to see if  they're worth  money, but so far no one has because everyone is drunk when they say that and hungover when they remember having said it. Everyone thinks someone else should do it.

Inside the house, in the living room by the door, a watercolor sign reads, "No Shoes Please!!" Still, the sherbet-pink carpet is studded with pine needles, mottled with mud. A huge afghan knit in yellow, green, and red sags over a scuffed leather couch with smooshy cushions.

On this couch  sit  four  of the  house's  residents.  Rose  is weeping into a balled up sweatshirt. Kyle has his head in his hands. Mikey stands and leans against the wall by the door as if he's guarding it, pulling at his lower lip. Gilda stares at the coffee table, at the bright remnants of packaged snacks, Ho-Ho wrappers, Twinkie wrappers. A friendship bracelet, half finished, is taped to one end of the table, hanging off it like a tail. The three-foot bong that belongs to every­ one, sooty red glass swirled with clouded veins of yellow like fatty arteries, rises like the Washington Monument from a dirty city. If the EMTs saw it, they didn't care. They were in a hurry, pounding through the house, shouting into walkie-talkies strapped across their chests. One of the police officers definitely saw it; he gave them all a look. But the EMTs and police officers are in Tom's bedroom now, talking quietly.

Mikey speaks up. "Does anyone even have his parents' number?" He is tall and leanly muscular. All his clothes have holes in them. He is the singer and lead guitarist of the psychedelic rock band. He makes speeches at the beginning of each show about letting the music enter you, flow through you, take you into the beyond. At the end of the show he makes speeches about how lucky they in the band feel to be part of this community, how music brings people together, music reminds us that we are in fact One, swaying to the same rhythm, a shared heartbeat.

No one has the number, but Rose raises her face to say that it's probably stored in Tom's cellphone.

"Will they call them for us?" Kyle asks.

"I'll call them," says Mikey.

"Mikey," Gilda says without looking at him, "just shut up, for once."

I'm offering––"

"This isn't about you."

"I––"

"Shut up,"Gilda says, "please," and Rose wails for everyone to shut up, and everyone does.

One of the policemen comes out, the one who had given the look before when he barged in and saw the bong. Now he holds his body carefully, stepping over a pair of dirty canvas shoes tossed on the floor, respecting the space of this house that is, for the moment, their home. His shoes squeak as he squats on the other side of the coffee table. He clears his throat.

And the look he wears now is far more frightening than the look he wore before. No police officer has ever looked at them like this, as a man in a war zone might look at his children: like he would do anything for life not to be as hard for them as it's about to become.

 

GILDA

 

They move out of the house later that month. Gilda moves in with a couple of girls from around, Emma and Lu, whose last roommate dropped out to work on a farm. Emma's kind of boring. She's really into school, wants to be a social worker. Lu's main thing is that she's beautiful. Her black hair hangs to her waist. She wears short shorts even in winter, with ripped black tights and combat boots onto which she's painted cherry blossoms. Emma and Lu feel terrible for Gilda, that is clear, and they will not speak against her when she leaves her dishes in the sink, the trash overflowing, loose papers all over the living room. When they speak, Gilda forgets what they say as soon as they've said it. When, from the nest of her bedroom, she hears movement in the apartment, she does not give a thought as to who it might be, what they might be doing. When she makes herself a bowl of brownie batter and eats the whole thing without a spoon, sitting dazed in front of Sesame Street, they observe her, concerned, skinny, healthy, both of them, and she doesn't care. She cares that she gets each drop of batter. She scrapes the side of her hand along the curve of the mixing bowl and licks it on all sides, like a cartoon bear with a pawful of honey.

They are mysterious to her, or they are boring. She doesn't under­stand how anyone with the means to eat constantly could possibly stop themselves. They must go around, she sees now, in constant hun­ger and suffering. Every day she recognizes and takes her opportu­nities for relief: Emma makes a pie, or it's free guacamole Monday at Mama's Taqueria, or she's too tired after class to cook and ends up ordering a pizza and frosted dessert sticks. Emma's lactose intolerant, and Lu doesn't eat anything but rice and fruit. Gilda eats it all.

Gilda wears sweeping skirts, Egyptian eyeliner. Her combat boots are without cherry blossoms but she has threaded them with shoelac­es coated in purple sparkles. Her hair, for the moment , is pink. She has dressed like this since high school, and it has not cured her from feeling chronically overlooked. By her teachers, by her parents, by people she wants as friends, and by men she'd like to sleep with. There is some plainness to her, she fears, that cannot be disguised with any amount of color or flash.

Now she sees that death has put a flash upon her, but she doesn't want it like this. People staring, whispering to their friends. Or not whispering. "She lived with that guy who OD'd on pills," someone shouts in the middle of a crowd during a house show, and though ev­eryone who hears it looks around like something awful has been said, Gilda feels a flicker of rightness that might be called satisfaction. It's true, is it not? Truer than the looks on their faces.

Gilda gives a book report to her publishing class with a ramen noodle snuggled like a pale worm against the chest of her brown sweater. After class, in the hallway, a boy takes her by the arm and quietly, with self-conscious gentleness, tells her about the noodle. Gilda looks down, picks the noodle off and flings it at a trash can, but it won't come off of her fingers. She is still flinging as he walks away, but as soon as he turns the corner, she stops trying to get rid of it and puts it in her mouth, sweater fuzz and all, and swallows it.

The more Gilda eats, the more invisible she feels, safer. After a few months, her face looks different. This feels fitting, because a few months ago, Gilda knows,she was an entirely different person.

She walks down the hill in the afternoon to get ice cream at the by-the-ounce place. She will get all the toppings she likes. She  will get gummy worms that will turn hard from the cold and require tough chewing to release their sweetness. Oreo crumbles, hopefully chunky with white frosting. She will dig through the bowl with a spoon to the bottom where those good pieces are. Walnuts, peanuts, and strawberry syrup bright red and sticky like stage blood. The bay rolls out far below her, the tall bare trees like toothpicks in the dark water, waiting to be driven away on the trucks that are like a rainbow of hard candies flung along the shore. She knows it smells like diesel fuel down there, and dead fish, and wet wood, and stagnant salt water. Not very beautiful. But a young couple in windbreakers, seeing Gilda, crosses to her side of the street, and they want to know how to get down there, to the beach, to look at the big cut trees.

Gilda knows how to get there, but she peers at them as if they've asked directions to Jupiter, astonished by their eagerness, by the firm­ness of their desire to undertake this useless journey. What can they expect to find down there? What do they think will happen? What will change? How simple they are, she thinks, and as the directions fall from her mouth she looks at their hands, entwined and playing a game while they nod to her, fingers rolling around each other before interlacing, squeezing, and rolling over again. She watches as they stumble down the hill, their movement compromised by their refusal to let go of each other's hands, their laughter when they almost trip and tumble, headed to the beach, which as far as she is concerned is as terrible as any place, and smells of death, and doesn't have any shelter, and besides, there is no food there, and you will leave hungry.

 

KYLE

 

Dear Mike,

 

Hello and I hope you're doing good man. You are probably surprised to hear from me, or maybe not haha. First off let me say that I really hope you are doing well down there. Before I came here I was seeing your art on facebook––stuff's awesome man and I'm really proud of you going for it like that. I keep meaning to give your album a listen and I will soon when I get out of here! (Theres no internet here) anyway I miss you guys and have been thinking a lot about the Atlas Street days. Its been a long time. Well three times the charm haha. The people are ok here and this time my therapist is actually really cool. His name's Mel, and he's pretty young and a really awesome guy. He suggested I write apologies to people and everything but obviously I've done that before, but he suggested something new and I hope its ok with you, and if its not you can stop reading this letter and that's ok with me, I understand. Since I wrote you already last time you are probably wondering why I am writing again (besides because we go way back.)

Well this was Mel's idea like I said. If its ok with you I would like to write out some apologies I have to make to Tom. Like I said, no pressure if this seems weird to you and you can just throw this letter away. But people don't write letters very much these days so maybe you would want to keep it. I guess I'll just make a list. Thanks again if you read it (and ok if not.) If l am to be honest this is a hard thing to do. But if there is one dude who could maybe read it and maybe actually not judge me for this shit it would be you. So here goes.

 

  1. (The worst one) When you died I went into your bedroom and took your whole stash. Your hiding spot worked man. The cops didn't find it. But I didn't do them, in fact I sold them (for like $300.) But I did probably buy a bunch of the same shit back with the money, so I guess it 's all the same. I'm really so sorry and I felt like such a piece of shit about that for so long and still do. Like I was disturbing your peace and it wasn't right.

 

  1. Well maybe this is worst, hooking up with Rose after you died. Like nine months after, we were both all fucked up on coke too. Even though you weren't there I felt really bad and I know she did too. If it would make you feel any better we basically stopped being friends after that and that is something I really regret. I should have been strong and been a friend to her. That was one of the times when I se­riously wanted to kill myself, I'm so sorry. Its possible you don't know this (but maybe you do) that when you died so much shit happened, our community was in pain and lots of people were really bad, and even though I am not half the person you are and people wouldn't miss me as much I kept knowing that I couldn't do that and that's why I am back here now trying to get clean. I know you would nev­er have left all of us behind on purpose man. Some people think it wasn't a mistake, Rose for example. But I know you would never do that to your friends. It was one mistake that could have been avoided, and I was your roommate and should have been more careful. I feel so fucking bad about that now. I didn't pull you out of it or notice you were out of control. I miss you so fucking much I don't know what to do.

I guess I sort of forgot about the list I was making haha. I guess I have a lot to be sorry for. So 2 is actually 2 through 6 or something. I don't know. I hope you can hear me man. I bet you're skinny dipping with some really hot angels up there!

Ok well I  better go. Thanks Mikey for reading this (if you did.) I thought I would be out of here in 6 wks. but it looks like actually longer this time, oh well. Maybe I will see you on the other side. I hope you are doing good man.

 

Much love, your friend,

 

K-Money

 

ROSE 

 

From the front yard where he is on his knees planting tulips, his rap-blasting headphones clamped to the sides of his head, he can see Rose's mother washing dishes through the kitchen window. She works steadily, with an almost remarkable lack of expression on her face, as if she has not a thought in her head, nor a feeling in her heart. She is still like this when he finishes getting the tulip bulbs in the ground and goes to the side of the house to sit on the weathered bench there, a church pew they pulled out of some historic neigh­borhood church before it got destroyed. He smokes a cigarette in the late August heat. Rose's mother doesn't love that he smokes cigarettes on the property, but after all it's not against the law. Rose's black Saab is in the driveway, and on windless days like today there's a strong chance the smoke will sail right up into her open window. Sure enough, in less than a minute she comes trotting around the corner in a toothpaste-green terrycloth onesie, her pale legs long and slim as lily stems, her shining dark hair pulled back and so much lively yearning in her face it is impossible to believe she's the daughter of that woman in the house.

She is quitting cigarettes, which means she doesn't buy them but will smoke his freely. She is twenty-eight years old and has lived in her parents' house since she dropped out of college. He is nineteen. She amazes him. She has done so many interesting things. She has worked in coffee shops across Seattle. She has worked at the baseball stadium , ferrying cocktails and prime rib to rich people in the private boxes above home plate. She has had an internship, something about graphic design, in the second-tallest building in Seattle: the view was incredible, and she was so disappointed when the internship did not turn into an even part-time job. She can hula-hoop indefinitely; she'd show him, she teases, except that the hula hoops are absolutely buried in the garage. In college she played bass in a psychedelic rock band. After she dropped out, her parents bought her a two-week trip to Paris. She loved it and said fuck it to the return ticket and spent three months backpacking in  Europe, living on wine and shoplifted candy bars. For a skinny girl her breasts are enormous, and he wonders if her parents bought those for her, too. He tries not to stare at them. He watches how she makes the smoke come out of her mouth slow and thick, sort of holding it in place with her lips, as if the smoke is a cottony piece of something he could pick from the air and stow in his pocket to look at later. He's kind of seeing this other chick more his own age right now, but Rose is his number one jack-off fantasy of the summer.

But there is a man in her life, of course, already. Stupid Steven. He's never seen the guy, but Rose talks about him a lot.

She is talking about him today. Complaining. Tapping her ciga­rette constantly, even when there's barely a lash of ash over its glow­ing orange eye.

Apparently she and Steven were supposed to meet at this Thai place last night, but Steven was half an hour late, and then when he got there, he was all pissy because he'd already eaten, and he kept complaining about how much time she was taking eating her Buddha Bowl. When she finished he insisted on paying, but later that night, he said how stupid it was for him to pay when he didn't even eat anything, and she said well she never asked him to pay, did she, and why did he eat before in the first place, when they had dinner plans? And then he said, so sorry, he didn't realize he had to check in with her every time he felt like eating something . . . and it ended up the way all their arguments end up, with Steven yelling that he might as well go ahead and kill himself because he knows, he knows  he's such a piece of shit.

She asks for another cigarette. When she leans towards the light­er, her jutting collarbones are so close to him he could take them between his lips without hardly moving.

"So what did you do?" he asks her.

"About Steven?"she says. She doesn't continue. She leans back on the bench, looking like someone who has resigned herself to a long wait at a bus stop.

The tulips are planted, the privet hedge pruned. The flower garden is in good shape for fall and the lawn is mowed and  weeded. They will need his services less and less as the days get colder, and when the October rains come they won't need him at all. The afternoon is weighted with the finality of the summer, and every living creature feels it, the hopping birds, the squirrels streaming up and down the tree trunks, the children madly pedaling their bikes under the yel­lowing leaves of the maple trees on the sidewalk. This is perhaps why today he is finally brave enough to say, "Why do you waste your time with that guy?"

She turns to him, shocked. "You've never even met him,"she says.

"I know he doesn't treat you like you deserve, though."

Rose bites her lip.

"He's bullying you," he says. "He's bluffing."

The chick he's kind of seeing would definitely never put up with that shit, and she's not even as hot as you are, he wants to add. You're way too sensitive, he wants to say, but she starts crying before he can say it. Shit!

"Man. I'm sorry," he says.

"It's fine."

"I didn't mean to get you all sad."

"No," she says, wiping her eyes. "I made him sound way worse than he is. I was just venting. He's really great, actually."

"Okay," he says.

"But we can make out if you want."

He cannot believe this.

She takes his face in her hands and pulls him toward her.

He bikes home that evening in the first true dark of twilight, the bag of gardening tools strapped above the tire clattering when he goes over bumps in the road. As he pedals across the Fremont Bridge, all the colored lights of the city scattered around the land below him, he feels wonderfully free. If the mother calls him again for his ser­vices he will say he's going back to school, or he broke his leg, or something.

You don't have to live that long to know when a kiss isn't right. It was technically good, but it wasn't anything special. Not like he'd dreamed it would be. When they pulled apart after a minute, some thread between them had broken. Both could feel it. He looked at her and he thought, this girl is a headcase. Nothing bad has ever hap­pened to her in her whole life, but she's nuts.

He bombs down the hills of the city. He's gotta go home and text that girl of his, see if she's in the mood to kill time.

 

MIKEY

 

This new sculpture: it's the most exciting piece of art he's ever made. He's hard and good in love with it, and he's scared, because what if it doesn't work out, and he's left sprawling, stupid, again? But he's more scared not to cling to a love so hard and good, and everything else is falling into place, in the way it almost never does, the way he's hoped it could forever, so he falls with it. He pulls the blinds in his studio and forgets about time. Sometimes he flings himself onto the futon in the back of the room for a mangled rest. He takes one long sleep and several short. Wonders how many days is that. Sometime between the long sleep and the granite stage, when he stares for an hour at a sample piece of polished, richly glittering granite from the collection amassed in remodeling the kitchen, he is aware, in a state of ecstatic vagueness, of the face of his wife, her round hips rolling under the tightly knotted red silk robe she wears in the late evenings, but he cannot look away from his sculpture. Later, wearing daytime clothes, she brings him some green tea. He doesn't touch it because he doesn't need it for his sculpture. He is rolling eight hundred little terracotta spikes and he feels fantastic. Now he stands in the middle of the room biting his nails and putting the spikes around the smaller spire of the thing in his head. He can't think about this sculpture another minute. He should have hated it all along, never should have loved––yes, now he hates the thing completely.

Searching for a window of escape, he locates a slip of paper he has scribbled something on: "Heat broken Heart broken." God, what is this shit? What has he been doing with his life? Then he discovers the mug of green tea. It's long gone cold but he bolts it like a tonic, and runs down the stairs into the street and all the way to Merceda Beach, which is just the sort of trashy, smelly, end-of-the-line place he feels he belongs.

But it's beautiful––sunset and beautiful––one of those really orange sunsets, the people glowing like plums and peaches in the sun, so soft, ripely alive in the golden light of a sky of creamed fire. A surfer standing stoned in the sand scratches  at his wet­ly tangled head. He is as old as the sky and as new as the clouds splashed across it. Mikey perceives that he is not as soft and sweet and creamsicle-colored as all these beautiful people out here, to say nothing of the sky. He feels like if someone were to bend down and remind him he doesn't belong out here in all this heartbreaking beauty, he would believe them. He would hurry home and kiss his children and crawl into bed with his wife, a woman he doesn't de­serve. Because he has been so foolish. He's fallen into believing he can actually offer something of value to a world with a sky like this. Mikey turns his back to the sea. The street side hotels rear up face­lessly white before him, and before them the boardwalk, the shops that sell sarongs and T-shirts, the jugglers and the painted people who stand like statues for small change, the hot dog stands and ice cream shacks, the busking musicians, the waddling gulls, and all the people, and all the new shadows sprouting up in the floodlit night.

A tall girl about college age, blonde, in red-framed sunglasses, sits in a lawn chair on the boardwalk, so absorbed in plunking at a ukulele it seems as if she doesn't know she's in public. She doesn't have a cup out in front of her or anything. She's just messing around. She's not playing music, she's playing with music. Mikey is amazed to witness how apparently pleasant and peaceful her art-making is. Music can be like that, he remembers. He hasn't played in a long time.

He stops and watches her, the river of people streaming behind him, the tide rolling out before him, the sun a brilliant drop of hot wax sliding down to the edge of the horizon. She doesn't notice him. He doesn't want her to. The sun is ready to disappear.

And just as it slips out of reach over the ocean he hears her play a song of his own, a song he and Tom wrote long ago.

His nose floods with the smells of the garage: mildew, incense, ashtrays, weed, the sweetly aged sweat of his guitar strap. He can feel the strap cutting into his shoulder, the good, hard bite of the steel strings sinking into his callused fingers. Rose nods as she plays, that funny bouffant headband she wears bobbing like a quail feather on her head, the familiar wrinkle of concentration on her lovely face. Like an accompanying choir the hush of rain sings to them with love in the woods outside, raindrops clatter on the open garage door, and beneath the door a few figures stand with hoods up or hats on, shiver­ing, smoking, watching them rehearse. Gilda is dancing, shaking her green and blue hair all around, and Kyle is trying to get a short girl to dance with him, and Mikey is goo, melted into the music, safe to melt with the steady heartbeat of Tom on drums behind him, Tom twisting and thrashing and gasping on his gold and silver throne. Mikey looks back at Tom to smile at him and see the reassurance of that broad smile, and there is a boy sitting there at the drums, but it isn't Tom. It's some stranger with a face as plain as pudding.

And then he remembers.

The chords change. The air smells of hot dogs, of salt. The girl is playing something entirely different now. A song of her own, or someone else's, but not his. It was just those few seconds, a few notes played just so, not the whole song, but a mystically reclaimed shred of it. The girl has somehow conducted the notes right through her, like some kind of bizarre cosmic lightning rod. He used to believe in stuff like this. Now he doesn't believe or disbelieve. Either way he will forget again, will possibly never feel this loss again––it's closing over already, like mud over a dropped stone, and he lets this happen, being both the mud and the stone, being helpless.

The sun is gone and Mikey is exhausted. It's time to give up and go home. Right now his wife will be making dinner for him and the kids. It could be Mongolian beef. Or corn chowder. Before dinner his children take turns setting the table and sweeping the floor, and it's his job to make the salad. How many dinners  has he missed? Who has made the salad for his family? His noblest work will be this salad. He won't go to the sculpture tonight. Tonight he will make nothing more than salad. He does that very well. Tom is not stuck in a grid of days anymore, but Mikey is. The best he can do is go home.

He moves back down the boardwalk. The air will grow colder. The girl will leave for her own home, wherever that is. There's beer for sale, and cocktails in plastic cups you can take along with you, anything you like. The  mood is changing. The boardwalk will fill with strang­ers sharing this narrow plank that extends along the brightly lighted beach until it ends somewhere in darkness, and they may smile and say Sorry and Beautiful night isn't it and Whoops! when they brush elbows, but they will keep going. They must. It is a strange and dis­comfiting miracle to all be here together, right here, right now, living, thirsting creatures with nowhere to go but on.

“Sunday Morning Coming Down” by Jessie van Eerden

Issue 79
Issue 79

Found in Willow Springs 79

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WRITE THE WHOLE PAINTING and do not stop. Sunday is bitter cabbage and the glimpse of shapes down a brief hallway, involved and intent shapes. I am more cognizant of breath on Sunday–the way, as bodies lying on our sides like long-legged fetuses, we are aware of the heart thudding in the ear. On Sunday (a day welled up with the week past and the week to come, such that you experience all the days at once like a person set down, weary, before a painting) breath feels like the respiration of time, like God's breath. I am losing my morning heat from the down-pocket of bed, enclosing myself in sweaters, but still I cool and require the space heater this day early in Lent. Sunday is breath and chill and stillness, the bitter salted cabbage as I help make the kraut, its tangy smell hazing the hallway.

The directive is to write the whole painting.

My boyfriend R recently gave a point of view lecture on whole-painting writing: Give the story all at once as if you're trying to confront someone with an acrylic on the wall–can someone receive a story on all levels, not in narrative sequence, not in sequestered mo­ments of time, not from one point of view but a roving one? During the lecture a student in the front row yessed like a Baptist who has read the Scripture the night before and so already knows the parable, yes, how the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that grows into the largest tree in the garden, with all the loud birds roosting there as they might roost in the tree in his chest, so, yes, he said while each downbeat syllable of parable fell from the preacher's mouth, which was the lecturer's mouth, R's mouth, reading excerpts from Lawrence Durrell and Kay Boyle and William Goyen that traversed time and perspective in shock-color layers. Try to write the whole painting, R said, even though we can't ever write the painting, for all we have is language, but, yes, the student already knew the struggle that each writer in the room knew, the impossibility, and the insistence that we go forward, marching, toward failure, amen and amen.

The directive made me want to write about Sunday.

Perhaps it's because, as a child, Sunday was the day I felt an in­tersection of currents and a simultaneity of layers, I felt the eternal within time, a press of eternity's hand, because of the habit of church where all forms and patterns and braiding-back of my hair were in­tended as poor representations of realities timeless and glorious. The Sunday moment is sharp and prismatic in my mind: stepping a penny loafer down from the Dodge to the gravel, decked out in my moth­er-made plum jumper with flowers on it, with wooden buttons I'd picked out myself at Jo-Ann Fabrics, in the store-bought lavender shirt underneath and a jean jacket over top, a cheap silver locket se­creted against my chest bone. And of all Sundays, it is Easter Sun­day–so there is the sleepy shock of the Sunrise Service beginning in the dark, and somebody's lilacs slouch wetly and everyone's daffodils have either nodded or upturned their faces to the sting of frost and the  soak of its melting to follow. Maybe that childhood storehouse of Easter Sunday strikes brightly now, like red and yellow acrylic, because of today's cold Lenten air, though I don't know that a Sunday in Lent is any different from one in Ordinary Time. It seems, in our cyclical week, Sunday is a measure, a ritual of reckoning, an end, a be­ginning, full-bodied and populated. Things come to bear on Sunday, things you have borne, how things will bear out. All is with you, all you have loved, hated, vowed to never leave and yet left.

 

I HATE SUNDAYS, I TELL R. I dread Sundays.

 

SUNDAY SEATS YOU CLOSE TO A PORTAL. It's very like stomping the cabbage each year for the  kraut. A child is engaged in a chore that pins her to the kitchen bench facing the brief hallway of motion  and sound. Time moves more slowly here, or more quickly, or both. She turns to see her mother come through that front screen door portal with even more cut cabbages mounding in the granite washbasin propped on her hip, cabbages sliced from the stalks, from among the big blanket-furled leaves. The mother cuts out each core then shreds the cabbages, for a few years, with the  manual kraut-cut­ter that looks like a washboard only with blades, like an oversized cheese grater, then, in time, with the electric food processor in batch­es, then she dumps it all into the crock on the floor between the benched girl's knees. The mother salts a layer, dumps another–salt, sift, dump, salt.

 

I DON'T THINK IT'S LOGICAL, R says, not unkindly–it's just a day like any other. (And it's true that I am sometimes quite illogical­ly unmade on Sunday, in tears and wadded up with my dog on the couch. This is baffling.)

I say, But the past is always with us, like Faulkner said, you always quote Faulkner, it's like that, the days are always with us, and on Sun­day somehow you can feel the days well up.

Dreading two back-to-back, seventy-five minute gen-ed classes is logical, he says, which is why he dreads Tuesdays and Thursdays.

But he wrote to me once: Life of course is the whole story at once and our frustrations with it are the tiny boxes we try to force it into. In both writing and life we have weak artificial mediums to work with, words and time. So he does understand.

Should we have a baby? I say.

What?

I'm nearly thirty-seven, I remind him–my window of time is circumscribed, biological clock and so forth.

So that's what this is about. Logically, yes.

 

R READ EVERYTHING William Goyen wrote, read the newly re­ leased biography and included in his lecture how Goyen didn't write for self-expression but for the communal voice, in multiple frames, multiply nested tales, his words and paragraphs stick figures–black letters upon white pages–but flesh hangs from them like jellyfish skin, translucent sheets billowing, flesh and dress ballooning into color and light. Goyen's stories are festooned with other stories, or infested–it's like traveling down someone's  throat lined with  ru­bies. This is the Goyen who wrote inside a parenthetical in House of Breath–a book in which sentences sometimes don't stop for pages, or maybe never stop–who knows the unseen frescoes on the private walls of the skull? l don't know who knows, but he tried to write them, to catch the brightest color right when the fresco went up on the lime plaster, before it could dry.

 

IT'S TRUE THE BABY QUESTION troubles me with a louder clang of longing on Sundays. A baby's tiny skull and heat and light and hair, do I want to try? Lots of women turning thirty-seven this year are fearing they will regret not having children, but is fear reason enough to have them? My friend K writes in a letter, Is the pang of knowing you will not know the profundity of that kind of love any reason to have a baby? Out of desire for profundity? K is a friend to whom I often write on Sundays, the practice of a Sunday letter being one of my coping strategies.

Ought I to have a baby, as though it were completely up to me and a matter of my will, like donating to Mothers Against Drunk Driv­ing when they call? And why do we say "window of time?" It  makes me think of Madeleine L'Engle's young adult fantasy A Wrinkle in Time, her lovely powerful Charles Wallace, the little boy ready to travel through time. I remember the word tesseract and my broth­er's science project on black holes, the model he built from a coffee can and a Yahtzee box, aimed just so at the mirror hanging on our parents' wardrobe that held things like our handwritten immuniza­tion records and Murphy's Mart bags full of material scraps for quilts Mom would make over the next forty years, preferring to sew them by hand. I suppose we say "window of time" because of the frame of   limitation. But what if it's another part of the metaphor's vehicle bearing forth a different tenor; what if it's because of the window glass to see through, to be seen through, like a portal? Like a passage? Like a hallway of time: What I am talking about is being a mem­ory for a child who looks into the passage of time, the memory mak­ing an imprint. Back to that same screen door, for instance, portal from indoor to outdoor, the girl child-me watching her mother who has boiled water for ear corn, now that kraut-making is done, remov­ing the corn then carrying the pot through the screen door that closes with its soft slap upon its spring, and tossing the silk-littered water off the side of the porch instead of in the sink, and standing a few beats after, listening to the  supper hour shift and adjust. The image of it through the screen mesh in the greening light will be forever recycled in the girl's mind by dream by dozing by grief by time.

So who will see and know me in that way? That is the question to catch in my throat. I am creating no tableaux of oddity and rit­ual upon a porch floor to wake in the mind of a child after me–I will disappear. I will have to be okay with disappearing. Or try to be recalled another way, and this is maybe why I'm writing a novel in which a woman remembers her mother just so, with the pot in her hands emptied of all but a few corn silks, so still. And if l can write in a way that comes up off the page in translucent sheets of flesh and color, billowing from the letter-bones, like absurd and wondrous jel­lyfish, like a slow ornate pop-up book, or full-face like a painting, all in acrylic of searing brightness–then maybe that is enough. Maybe that is how to spend my window of time.

I wonder, do I sit on a cold Lenten Sunday to simply write against my own disappearing?

 

TO THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MALE, R says, Sunday means one thing.

Sex.

No. Professional sports.

 

Right, I say. R may not understand the dread of Sunday, but my friend A understands. Another fucking Sunday, she says, AFS, we coin, Happy AFS! Here is a Ziploc of cookies to get you through AFS, I had AFS on Monday this week–so go our texts and emails in be­tween the classes we teach. PMS on AFS, double whammy. She gets the Sunday New York Times delivered and reads it all as palliative. And my friend SB understands, she's in favor of our new acronym, she's Pentecostal after all, she understands the kit of things needed for AFS survival. Sometimes she goes sailing.

At its most basic, it's the smeary weight of a sinner's penance, or, with the weekend almost over, it's Monday creeping close with its job-gloom. It's the knowledge that Friday's buried memory of failures will be Monday's pert reality, or it's the nostalgic chime of a church bell calling because you once wavered hot like a mirage with the rest of the faithful through the hymns and it 's been awhile. It's the mem­ory of family time, all the Sunday dinners, and now your siblings flung far across the world calling home on Sunday, if there's time. It's concomitance of vague emotions, sentiments layered together like filo dough.

At its utmost basic, it's the terror of one's annihilation.

 

JOHNNY CASH UNDERSTOOD, as he understood everything. I sometimes YouTube his hangover song, his cover of Kris Kristoffer­son's "Sunday Morning Coming Down." In the song, the speaker is on the "Sunday morning sidewalk" wishing he was stoned: "'Cause there's something in a Sunday/That makes a body feel alone," as alone as the dying almost, Sunday morning coming down like a fog, a cur­tain, a crumbling ceiling, an axe.

 

I LOVE "SUNDAY MORNING, 1950," a poem by Irene McKin­ney, the way I can slip into the background in my plum jumper from the 1980s:

In the clean sun before the doors,
the flounces and flowered prints,
the naked hands. We bring
what we can–some coins,
our faces.

 

I LOVE ROBERT HAYDEN'S POEM "Those Winter Sundays," which I have taught in several classes and which falls flat against the students' ears each time:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather
made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

Sundays too, in class always emphasizing that tiny adverb that's so heavy, for there was no reprieve for him from the cold that cracked his skin. Fires must be built on Sunday morning too, ashes must be shaken down; it is a day that is no different from any other but it was the  day on which he noticed the lack of gratitude. It was the day he was lonely. And the day his son remarked, memorialized, as having a palpable difference.

 

SUNDAY IS THE KRAUT-STOMPING because when you're stomping the salted shredded cabbage with a thick cherry branch, shaved and sanded smooth, you watch the patterns in the linoleum and wait. You have a sense that it will be the others' turn soon, later, long later it seems, because, as you lift your head, they–two brothers and a sister–blur through the short hallway to the bedrooms and bathroom and back out. The space swells with their bodies. They pass by to move through the screen door portal, out to the porch floor, then to circle the house on bikes on the path grooved and grassless. Time swells with their movement and faces and teeth come in crook­ed and hair curly like the Brillo pad your mom will use to make the floorboards shine, the whole floor, on hands and knees, once all her kids have left, still scrubbing at the years of drifting-down  skin cells and dirt. Now you smell the clean foam of the bitter cabbage and foresee the banded linen towel or old pillow slip that will shroud the crock for six months in the basement corner. Six months of waiting under a thick layer of mold and souring, almost rotting.

Stomp-stomp with the sanded stout branch, preparing the salted cabbage for waiting. Waiting too for your life to start, to join the blur of motion. Plunging the kraut stomper between  your knees down into the crock untapered, the sound of the screen door slapping shut. There is dread in the waiting, for you feel you will run out of time.

 

l'M NOT SURE YOU WANT TO HAVE A BABY. He tries to say this not unkindly.

Maybe desire and dread are the same thing.

 

IT HELPS SOMETIMES to write letters on Sunday. It' s a hopeful stutter of voice sounded before working on the novel. Today I answer my friend J's six dense pages of lovely longhand, all her news about the new rooster–He is all colors a rooster can be and looks hand paint­ed–and about Iris the feral cat, and Beloved the horse not yet trained well enough to ride, and J's own blurring eyesight.

Then novel work because part of my survival plan is to write on Sundays all the way through until noon. This time is demarcated on my weekly schedule color-coded with Prismacolor pencils from my childhood desk cubby, pencils that once shaded the eyes of a lamb on a newsprint Easter kite. Why noon, as though something magic shifted at noon? Because it indicates a fully committed morning, to give it everything, everything you remember and half remember and inexplicably love. Beside me hangs a painting–Georgia O'Keeffe's Cow's Skull with Calico Roses–a canvas replica I ordered online. I wanted to see the longhorn skull better because the section in the novel in which the character has a conversation with a cow skull was growing more and more confusing. I wanted to see the whole skull before me and I felt it important to get the one she painted with fake flowers as garland, and I felt it important that the skull look like a womb, and some of her longhorn skulls look shredded down to­ ward the nostrils, like pulverized cabbage. Why, I'm wondering, does my novel's main character miscarry, and why does another character throw her babies away? Why the thwarted womb like a portal, all banded in suffocating gauze? Why not write a mother? I don't know why. I'm writing in half dream, that is all a novel really is.

 

I  LOVE ABRAHAM HESCHEL'S 1951 BOOK The Sabbath. In Judaism, the Sabbath is Saturday and not Sunday morning like it is for the Baptists and Methodists, parking trucks at a slant in ditches beside overfull gravel lots, but the principle of the day of rest, the set-apart holy day, is the same. I remember dressing for Sunday ser­vice once and asking my mother, Why do we dress up for Sunday? Because it should be a different day, she said.

Heschel writes about the Sabbath as though it were something we go out to the porch to see in all its loveliness. It's a day released from labor, but its spirit is a reality we meet rather than an empty span of time which we choose to set aside for comfort or recuperation. It's a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time. It's a palace in time which we build. Time's passage again taking spatial di­mension: a stone passageway of ornate carvings and tile work as part of a palace. In the atmosphere of such a palace, Heschel writes, a dis­cipline is a reminder of adjacency to eternity. It's discipline and absten­tions are what it's known for–and so is the traditional Christian's Sunday Sabbath, never stopping at the grocery store to spend money after worship, never cranking up the Weed Eater. Reading Heschel on my Sunday Sabbath, an icy Sunday during Lent–the very season of abstentions–I feel a strong desire to run out to Go-Mart to buy some peanut M&M's, just to slip out from under the weight of all that beautiful principle. But I keep reading about Sabbath as a pres­ence, felt and arresting and palatial.

It's calming.

 

ON SUNDAY I FEEL the unbearable welling-up of time and see what the kraut-making girl sees: her mother and sister and  brothers in a blur of color as she stomp-stomps the crock floor and the abra­sion of the tough leaves makes them give way to juices that foam up rabid. What I see from the kitchen bench is  my mother's longing, my siblings' movement out into the world, as if the image of that hallway off the kitchen is a breach of time, an image conjured on a day, Sunday, which is a day when  time being culled out from eternity is understood as illusion. On Sunday maybe we see for a moment how God sees, without illusion. Maybe we try on the timeless gaze of God and try to breathe and bear it. What a dreadful, awful gift, to lose time's blinders.

There is the story in the Book of Genesis about Hagar, Abram and Sarai's servant turned concubine, turned surrogate. Pregnant with Abram's child, she flees the barren Sarai's jealousy and cruelty. Out to the wilderness Hagar goes, loosed and flapping in the wind, pregnant with the shifting blood of her boy Ishmael who will be cursed into terror like a wild donkey. She slumps by a spring seeping up from the dust. She is weary, but she is visited, and she calls the spring Beer-lahai-roi, Well of the Living One Who Sees Me. I have seen the one who sees me, she says, as though she suddenly understands what it means to be seen by such a gaze as God's. Hagar becomes one of the few to understand what God's gaze takes in: fetus unfurling, woman with a tooth aching at the root, for it's loosening, hair falling out, pelvic bones reconfiguring in the third trimester from marrow to foam rubber, and also her last gasp, burial, and lilacs on her grave. The whole painting, all layers at once, every window of time.

It is not really imaginable, that kind of gaze. Even on a reflective, moody day like Sunday, we can feel only the overwhelming layers of our own lives. The past is with us (said R to me, said Faulkner, said the experience of divorce, said the body returned home and sleeping in the childhood bed–I remember when it was the four of us, a heap of breathing, anxious and fertile and unstoppered  breath, and how our mother's voice now echoes, just once more, can it be that way, as she runs clothes through the wringer and the house thickens up with voicelessness, and she scrubs the floor boards to luminous glow with a Brillo pad to be in close proximity to the paths traveled upon them through time). Even just our own lives are unimaginable–think of all the others: maybe what the girl making kraut sees in the brief hallway is the blur of motion of the others, not only brother and sister but all the others, the eternal within time, the story nested in story, and the attempt she would one day make to write it down, the whole of it.

 

I DO NOT KNOW ABOUT A BABY. Sometimes the confused longing gets to be too much.

Sometimes it's just about wanting what we don't have, R says, and this helps.

I picture my heart opening–how wide it can open if l let it. That wideness is what gratitude is, and I think, on this cold Sunday, that practice of a Sabbath is a fight for gratitude in the midst of quiet pan­ic, in the face of your window closing or going dark. And gratitude is the stuff of eternity since it trains our eyes on time's abundance instead of on the illusion of time's scarcity. It's as if gratitude cre­ates time, lays it the way a hen lays eggs, little minute-chicks wide­ mouthed when hatched in the nest, and they trill and cry, try to add sound to the painting, for it should have sound too. Heschel writes about running to the Sabbath with sprigs of myrtle, as if to a bride. Wear your most beautiful robes, sing your most beautiful songs, bring your most beautiful acrylics.

Who knows whether it's true that, in the end, all we have are these minutes and hours to measure our lives, that all we have are these poor marks to work with, black symbols on white pages? It could be that we have everything.

“The Pleasures of Ruin” by Maya Jewell Zeller

Issue 79
Issue 79

Found in Willow Springs 79

Back to Author Profile

is one of the easiest kinds

of pleasure. Take this stack

 

of colored blocks built

 

by one child, rectangular green

on a red square with a yellow

 

triangle on top: crash,

 

the younger child comes

like a storm into a picnic,

 

like a story. Now someone

 

wants something to put

in the mouth: a small fruit,

 

perhaps, like a plum or just

 

the branches of a plum,

gathered into some girl's

 

arms. Now something

 

cannot be had. Oh, dear, and

some whole trees, and some more

 

trees, and water, oh, a baby,

 

or a lost job. A hangnail, a day

moon. A bowl of oranges,

 

molding. And the most acute

 

pleasure of some girl losing

her flowers in the stream,

 

she throws in those white stars

 

one by one, even the stems,

even the leafage,

 

the unopened ones, too,

 

she can hardly wait to forget them,

to begin the whole thing over.