I ain't miss them kids much last night, but I wish I did. Feel like it'll be right if I try to feel something for them. Like I'm supposed to, but I can’t. I watch them chase each other across the tall grass and try to remember playing in the yard when I was little. I shouldn't.
Read MoreBy LaToya Watkins
I been sitting here, waiting for them to lead you in. Fifteen minutes feel like fifty. I distract myself by counting the number of water stains on the ceiling. Then I figure how many women in the room. How many men? Children? The brother and sister that were carrying on during the bus ride up here are now begging their momma for money. Banging on the glass of the vending machine again and again. They stop when one of the guards finally stomps over and motions for them to sit. Stay. Some folks are pacing now. Others holding up the wall. We all waiting. Waiting for the sound of locks to spring open.
I study the women in the room with fresh make-up and fresh dollars. I have neither. There was no time to stop at Phillips 66 this morning, not after Mr. Bodee took sick. So I wait for you with two crumpled bills in one pocket and a folded up piece of paper in the other. The sea of orange jumpsuits will soon roll in like some rip tide. I stare at the big metal door you will walk through, and hope I can find the words this time before they are swept away. My eyes go back to the vending machine, to the rows of salted chips in C6 and the rows of Reese’s in B4. You always had a thing for peanut butter. That’s about the one thing that hasn’t changed in all this.
There is no line at the candy machine when the men file in. They are all serious until they scan the room and see their families. Then their faces light up. Finally, I see you. You are being led in my direction by a guard who looks like he’s still in high school, his face dotted with pus pimples.
You start talking fast before you sit down. We got two and a half hours.
“Hey, sis,” you say as you start drumming on the table between us. “How you been?”
I study you long and hard. This visit has to last. You are only thirty, and already balding at the top. Your eyes are like hard rust on an old penny. Before all this, they were brown.
“How’s Grandma? you say. “She still giving you a hard time?”
Grandma has never been here to see you. Not once in the eleven years you been in Lamesa. Neither has Momma for that matter. I open my mouth, but the words are swept away. I want to tell you that Grandma put a lock on the refrigerator door last week. She was always like some sentry on watch when it came to food. At three hundred pounds she can stand to miss a meal or two. The thought of a padlocked ice box makes me bust out laughing, especially since I know she hid the key in the bottom of her shoe. She should have put a lock on Uncle Elroy’s door. Kept him away from you. I think about Elroy now and my stomach knots up.
“She fine, Calvin,” I say. “I know how to stay out her way.”
You nod. Smile. Look away. Your eyes dart around the room. A long line has formed at the vending machine. One by one they feed fresh dollars and loose change into the slot. You shift in your seat before turning back to me.
“How are things out there, G? What’s going on?”
You are the only one who calls me G. On his good days, Mr. Bodee calls me Gem. Short for Gemini. He tells me that I’m a jewel. I start to tell you about Mr. Bodee ending up in the hospital and my being up all night waiting for his family to come in from Dallas. I have only known Mr. Bodee for about a year, but already he feel like family.
“Remember the man I work for?” I say. “Had to rush him to the ER late last night.”
Calvin laughs out loud. “What you do to that old man, G?”
I want to tell you that I button his shirt and cook his potatoes, and that we read together. But the words leave me again. Before I know it, someone else catches your eye. You follow a tall skinny gal walking towards the long wall for a telephone visit. She is carrying her bra in her hand and all the men are staring at her. Women too. Her breasts look like they'll bring her to the floor. I have nothing to speak of, so I can get by with a boy’s tee-shirt most of the time.
“Look at her,” you say.
I saw her pacing before, but I look again. She sits down in front of bullet proof glass and picks up the receiver. The man opposite her touches the scratched glass and she follows suit. It is as close to a contact visit as they will get.
Their raised hands remind me of Momma, waving at me. I saw her from the bus this morning. First time in years. I don’t know whether I should share the news everybody been whispering about since Uncle Elroy and your trial became the gossip of the day. Momma’s not your favorite subject. But then I decide to just come out and say it.
“I saw Momma from the bus on my up,” I say.
You look back without a word.
I don’t tell you the rest. That it was at least one hundred and ten degrees in the shade and she had on a purple turtle-neck sweater and denim shorts. I was embarrassed for her at first. Then Mr. Bodee’s words came into my head and I tried to remember who Momma was before the track marks and before the state took us. All I can come up with is how she smelled like Blue Magic pomade whenever she hugged me. Mr. Bodee says that’s a start. He was a sixth grade teacher for thirty-seven years before he started forgetting stuff, like how to button his shirt and find his way home. But he still knows a lot.
Your penny eyes grow harder. Still, you say nothing. I take advantage of the silence and say one last thing.
“She waved at me. She knew who I was and waved at me.”
You are disgusted. You roll your penny eyes. “Yeah,” you say. “She call you out by name?”
You don’t wait for me to answer. You shift in your seat and breathe in deep. I bite my lip and wish I could call the words back. But it’s too late. We sit stone faced.
We are saved by the children laughing at the next table, reading with their father. It is the sister and brother from before. I wonder if they are teaching their father how to read the way Mr. Bodee is teaching me. Me and Mr. B. use picture books too. The little girl is doing the reading. She helps me find the words to tell you.
“Calvin, I can’t come Saturdays no more,” I say fast. “At least for awhile.”
“Why? You sick or something?”
“No. Not sick.” I pull the folded up paper from my pocket and push it towards you.
“What’s this?”
“I’m starting classes at community college. Saturdays. My free day.”
You look at the paper. Then you stare at me with your hard penny eyes as if you are trying to place my face. I am your only family.
“Good for you, G,” is all you say before you look away from me. There is another long line at the vending machine.
“You bring change with you?”
I shake my head. I think about Archie, the white guy who opens up Phillips 66 on Saturday mornings. He was probably waiting at the register with my ninety-nine cents bean burrito and five crisp dollar bills, the way he does every Saturday. But I missed him this morning.
I stretch out my leg and stuff my hands deep into the pocket of my second hand jeans. I fish around until I find the dollar I’ve been searching for and pull the crumpled thing out. You look down at the dollar and frown.
“Awh, Gemini. What I tell you about them raggedy dollars? You know that machine be tripping. You better hope it works or you owe me two next week.”
It’s as if you didn’t hear one word I said about college. I try to remind you, but you cut me off.
“Yeah, whatever. Just remember for next time. Straight dollars or loose change. And get some money together to put on my books for commissary.”
“Sure, next week,” I say as I nod my head. Then I get up and make my way to the end of the line. I can feel you stare hard at me, like Mr. Boddie do sometimes. I look your way and see you drop your pennies to the floor like so much loose change.
Originally published in Kweli Journal.
Vashti read the bear policy posted at the start of the trail twice before she decided to walk with us. She made one command. "If we gone do this shit, y'all can't pull out no snacks, no water, no nothing. Ain't no bear bout to fuck with me. Y'all asses gone follow these policies."
I think she came along because she's curious about the nature of bears, but her fear is what drives us. She's almost ours in this place. In these mountains, so near where I hunted with my father as a boy. She's been our girl for the past couple of days. It's been nice. It’s a change. We've been her boys for such a long time. But now, on this mountain, things are right in the universe as long as she fears the bear.
I watch her wiggle her fingers through water trickling down the opening of the shallow cave. I'm bored. I want to climb. I watch her for a little while longer and then take a look at my wrist. We've been waiting for more than twenty minutes now, and it's starting to bother me that she won't go ahead.
"Tree cracking up there above your head, Vash," I say. "You probably ought to move away from that water. If a bear's on his way down here, I'm sure that's where he's heading." I try to sound concerned. A husband should be.
"Nuh, uh. You lying," she says, still crouching but turning her head to face me. The way she's twisting her face like a question makes me think about all the old photos hidden in a box in our garage. She almost looks beautiful. Young.
She captured me in a drunken and desperate one-night stand. I've been what she likes to call "hers" ever since. And she is content with things this way. She's okay with me not loving her. My cop money is like a gold mine to her. Our arrangement is not okay with me.
I turn my head. I want her to know I'm serious. There is a rustling above us. I can't be serious looking into her dark eyes. They're smooth and persuasive and demanding and bold. Got eyes like a time machine. They like to take me back to the party where we happened. The Tech party she didn't have no business being at. Guess I shouldn't have been there either. I wasn't a Tech student, but at least I was a student. I'd driven the road to Lubbock with a few guys from my own school in Kentucky. One of them had someone important at Texas Tech.
I wanted to impress the guys, so I had her. They all walked away from that weekend whole. Not me. I had to do the right thing.
I adjust the pack on my back and look at my watch again. I know she's watching me. I want her to know I'm watching my watch. I'm ready to hike—to climb. I was born for mountains. My father caught that early. That made him proud. We never missed a Tennessee deer season. That was before I could never go back home.
She finally stands up and drops the stick. She wipes something away from her legs and smacks her lips. "We ain't leaving him. You talking bout bears and shit. I'll be damned if I leave him down there. He ain't but thirteen, and he scary as shit," she says. She's gritting her teeth and spitting a little. I can tell she's trying hard not to be herself. She's so close to cursing me out I can hear the words in the back of her throat.
I want to sigh at the mention of her son Keylan, but I don't. She slapped me for calling her an enabler last month when I thought she was babying him. I didn't hit her back. I would never hit her back. My mother would rise from her grave if I ever considered it. My father would shake his head like I'm pitiful and hate me more than he already does. I remember he used to tell me before leaving for his own shift at the force, "Take care of your momma, or I'll take care of you."
Vashti slapped me hard enough to cause my face to turn red, and I'm blue-black. I try to understand that she comes from violence, but that gets hard. I feel bad for the man she's allowing—no making Keylan become. She's hindering his growth because she don't like where it's going. She's been doing that for a real long time. But it really got bad a few months ago when she caught him watching internet porn—gay porn. She didn't ask him how he found it. If it was by accident. She just blew up.
Now she swears up and down he's gay. Says she don't mind the boy watching porn, but Chicks with Dicks isn't the way she'll allow her boy to go.
The day she slapped me, she'd walked in the bathroom to put some towels from the laundry away, and Keylan was getting undressed to shower. Caught him off guard and he almost split his head wide open trying to hide behind the shower door. I guess she was pretty surprised by what she saw because she walked right out of the bathroom and slammed her hand over her mouth. Then she released the hand, smiling big and wide. "My baby got pubes and man-sized balls." Then her smile became a frown. She turned around and went right back into the bathroom.
Keylan started crying, begging her to leave, but she wanted to know what man he'd been showing his anatomy to. That's when I cut in and told her all her talking—her pushing the boy was inappropriate. She was being an enabler and she would stunt his growth to manhood. That's when she told me to mind my damn business. When she slapped me as hard as any man could.
Later that night, after we made what she likes to call love, after she told me she needed money for her hair and nails and a new outfit for job-hunting, she asked me what an enabler was. I just lay there for a while, trying to enjoy her head in the fold of my arm—in the fold of my arm where my woman should rest. I didn't want to ruin the moment—the peace. Her believing in me—that I had the key to open her up. Me believing in myself. So I lied.
"I don't know," I said. "I just made it up." And in that moment, I lit up her world. She rose from the fold, smiling and kissed me with as much passion as was ever between us.
My squad partner, Chavis, says I should leave her. Says to hell with her and her son, but I think Chavis is wrong. My father taught me that men don't leave. We sacrifice because we're supposed to see what's coming. "Men are prophets," he once told me. "Every single one of them got the power to see and cast out demons before they can touch us." I was supposed to see that Vashti was who she is. I failed.
My father. I'll respect him and his Kentucky Church of Christ spirit for as long as I live. Still, I know he'll never forgive me. All his preachy ways about men and what they're supposed to do and be. He thinks I'm a demon. A sodomite. He never tried to help me understand my manhood but penalized me when I tried to explore it. I asked him about sex when I was still in middle school, and his tongue sent me to hell. After his verbal rebuke, we kneeled in front of the white Jesus painting in our basement for days, praying that demon out of me. After that, we pretended to forget that I had ever said anything.
We both tried to make me right. Each in our own way. My father gave me God, and God gave me Alvin White. When my fathercaught us sleeping—cuddled up close and naked— in the same bed my senior year of high school, he stopped speaking to me altogether. It was the only time I'd ever been intimate with anyone, and my father gave up on me forever. Told me when I left for college he never wanted to see me again. But still, I try. I married Vashti for right. For my father and Jesus. Neither one of them speaks to me anymore.
I turn my head toward Vashti and can't help but smile. Her struggle for femininity is funny to me. She's so tall and filled out in those calf-length tights. Like a big man would be. Her belly button is smiling at me on purpose. Her tank-top is too short. It shouldn't be, but she likes it that way. Her stomach jiggles when she moves, but she does that. Wears clothes that no one can mistake are feminine and false nails so long they curve. Reminds me of mothers who glue bows on the heads of bald baby girls so strangers don't mistake them for boys. I wish she knew that her womanhood is unmistakable. That she's nothing like a man. And that I've really tried to love her.
We both hear limbs breaking this time and her eyes widen as she reaches her arms out to grab at me. The trail that winds up this mountain is narrow and two miles long. The trees are a canopy above us, creating a green darkness that I have missed over the years. Fear sparkles in Vasti's eyes at the cracking of every limb or the chirping of every bird. She's not used to this. She's from a flat land. Dust storms and tornados are common for her. She'll stand in the eye of one of those storms. She's not home in my mountains. We are only a quarter of the way up and I hope this hike lasts forever. I place my hand on her shoulder to steady her nervous movement.
"We need to go back," she says once she's safe in my arms. "Which way is it moving, Sonny?" she asks in a childish voice that I like. She's never really been submissive or nothing like that. Vashti always knows what she wants and when she wants it.
"Sounds like it’s moving down. We should go up. It'll have moved down, near the base, by the time we hike back down," I say.
"You out of your head. Keylan down there. Shit, I'm tired of you treating him like he ain't yours," she says. She's frowning and her eyes appear to have forgotten that she's helpless in my mountains. That this is where she needs me to guide her.
I want to tell her how unfair it is for her to say those things. That I love Keylan like he’s my own son. But most of all, I want to remind her that she is in my mountains. That she is woman and I am man. "It's not like that, Vashti. It's really not. And I'm talking about the base. Keylan's on the trail. The bear won't go down the trail. Keylan will b—"
"Why in the hell did he go back for anyway, Sonny? We climbing a fucking mountain. Me and my baby don't know shit about no woods. We from East Park," she says like I don't already know. Like I don't know where the night at the Tech party has led me. Like I didn't find out that, with her friends, she'd crashed the party from her raunchy neighborhood. Like I've forgotten that I quit school and moved to her town when she called and claimed pregnant. Like I can forget that there is no green there. That it's flat and mountains only live in my dreams there.
"Why would your dumb ass let him go back?" She twists her head out of my arms and looks around. "Shit, I don't even know what to do." Her eyes are blaming me for her confusion when the tree over our heads begins to wiggle.
"Move," I say, waving her back down the mountain. "He's coming down this way."
No sooner than I speak the words, a black bear pushes dirt and grass over the ridge above us. Vashti sees the same claws I see and I have to remind her with a finger against my lips to stay quiet. I mouth to her not to run. To walk back slowly, but I stand there and watch as the bear makes his way down to the hiker's trail and then to the small cave I'd warned Vashti about. I step back, keeping a safe distance between myself and the bear. He has deposited himself on the trail. He sits between me and the top of the mountain and moves with slowness and certainty, like he owns the trail and the mountain and the small cave. On all fours, he laps the falling water and I can see a bald patch on his back. He drinks and ignores me, but I know he knows I'm here. I look behind me to make sure Vashti is safe, but she's gone.
I want to worry about her, but I don't have time. I haven’t been this close to a bear in years, and I know he'll soon disappear into the mountain. He reminds me of my father. Large and comfortable and avoiding my eyes. My father loved the mountains. Said they were the original homes of men. He stopped taking me when I was sixteen. When I stopped being a man. I wonder if he still hikes them. If he's seen this bear.
I want to capture the bear. To have this memory of my father trapped in time. I remember that Vashti has the Nikon in her pack. I back away from the drinking bear to get it. When I meet her about sixty feet down the trail, she is standing with Keylan and another group of hikers. She's warning them about the bear—telling them it's not safe, but they ready their cameras and smile. They know this small mountain. Keylan smiles too.
"I want to see it, Sonny," he says, and his hopeful eyes remind me that I must be a better father than the one Vashti originally chose for him.
I smile at him and beckon him over with a wave. "Get the camera from your mom."
"I know you don't think I'm about to let him go back up there for no bear. You trying to kill this boy today, ain't you, Sonny?" she asks, grabbing Keylan's growing bicep to hold him near her.
Keylan rolls his eyes and lets out a loud huff. He shifts the weight of his slender, near six foot frame to one leg. He has grown so much since I met him eight years ago. He was a disturbed kindergartener then. Hiding under classroom desks, thinking that the same cops who arrested his father would get him. He was sensitive; Vashti called him a crybaby. He was just one of those kids who stayed to himself. The quiet kind of kid who didn't get into much trouble. Took him a while to warm up to me since I was a cop, but it didn't take me long to realize that Keylan was a good kid. Vashti is still hard on him. Says he's always been a little too soft. But Keylan really is a good kid.
When Keylan's father was released from prison three years ago, we had trouble. Vashti let the alleged father talk her into spending time with Keylan. I've run into trouble with him and Vashti since his release, but marriage is forever. That's what I keep telling myself. Didn't take long for his presence to start coming out in Keylan.
I was angry with Keylan at first. I had put a lot into that kid, and he was blowing it away to be like his alleged father. He was pulling stunts like experimenting with cigarettes, skipping school with his little friends, and even cursing when he thought we couldn't hear him. He even went to sagging his pants and trying to act tough. I took the belt to him when he called me a pig. He didn't tell his mother about the belt, but it hurt my relationship with him.
I began rallying for a kid of my own. Reminding my wife that I married her under false pretenses. She claimed to have lost the baby after we were married. I don't know if I believe she was ever pregnant—if I ever really cared. My father needed to see me be a man. He needed to see me with a woman. So I took Vashti as my wife. My father still won't see the man in me though.
Vashti ignored my requests for a kid. Said I better be happy with Keylan. And I am…until she reminds me that he's not my son. Those days—days like the day she slapped me—I want a son of my own. A little me to teach to be me one day. I'd teach my boy to be a man. I'd forget my father and teach him to be a man the best way I know how.
When I found out what Keylan's father did to him—what he thought he was doing for him, I felt bad—somehow responsible. I was sick for days and my wife didn't understand. It was no big deal to her. It was what he needed. It was the cure. I wanted to vomit and spit and laugh in her face. I wanted to tell her she was supposed to be my cure.
It was after I'd belted him—after I'd judged him—that I found out. It was a Saturday, so Vashti was on one of her all day trips to the beauty salon. I'd been working on the lawn all day. The lawn is the only place where I ever find peace in her town. I've taken on the characteristics of a mound builder and constructed a small mountain on our front lawn. With the grass starting to spring up all over the giant pile of red dirt, I feel that I am rebuilding. Like I have recreated the Appalachians or the Smokies. Reminds me of what I lost.
On that Saturday, when I came back into the house to wash my hands, I heard soft cries coming from the hall bathroom. When I tapped on the door, the cries quieted. I tapped again. This time Keylan answered with a shaky yes.
"Open the door," I said firmly. I was surprised when he actually did.
His eyes were red and tissue was stuck to his face from where he had tried to wipe. I asked him if I could come in, and after some hesitation, he opened the door. I walked over to the toilet and took a seat. He stood by the door with his eyes focused on his shoes.
"What's with the weepy eyes?" I asked, crossing one of my legs over the other.
He shrugged his shoulders. "I'm alright."
"Keylan," I called in a stern voice. "What is it?" I sat there and waited. When he realized I was staying put, he sighed.
"I won't never be no man," he said.
"Why would you say a thing like that, Keylan?" I asked.
"I didn't like it. Maybe I'm soft like Momma say," he said, pointing to his chest. His voice was shaky and it made me sad for him.
"What didn't you like?" I asked.
"He said something wrong cause I didn't want her. He said he gone break the faggot in me."
I felt my mouth open and fall into an "o". "Your dad?" I asked, but I already knew. He nodded.
"He bought me a woman—one of his customers. It made me sick. I didn't want her. I tried to and didn't," he said, before sliding down to the floor like a puddle of sadness and opening his cries to the world.
I stood up from the toilet and kneeled beside him. I offered him all the comfort I had in me. I rubbed his back and told him the story of how I lost home. Told him he'd be okay. And before leaving his defeated body on the bathroom floor, I told him, "Loving a woman has nothing to do with being man, son."
***
"Mom," Keylan says. "I can handle myself. Sonny bought me this." He holds up the wooden Swiss Army knife I found at the mountain general store last night. I couldn't find one with his name, so I had to settle for one engraved with a "K." That knife is why Keylan went back down the mountain. He'd dropped it and refused to go on without it once he realized it was gone. His mother had been examining the drop on the side of the mountain when he whispered to me that he needed to go back for it. I let him go. I was proud that he even wanted to.
"Where you get that from, boy?" Vashti asks. "You gave my baby a knife?" she asks, eyeing me.
I hadn't told Vashti about the knife. She had spent her time in the store asking the clerk about the Eastern Tennessee fascination with taffy and fudge. She hadn't paid me and the boy much attention. It was a private exchange. We understood that. Not in a hiding kind of way. But in way that meant we understood that this was an important moment, and it made us both something more to each other than we already were. We had these exchanges often, especially after that day on the bathroom floor. When I talked to him about what his father had done—what mine thought of me. When I told him that we would get through that. When I explained that his confusion had to do with his age. He'd been too young for what his father given him.
His eyes are begging me to climb—to see the bear, and as the strangers that had been huddled listening to Vashti's story begin to pass us, I want to share my climb with him.
"Vashti," I begin. "He'll be fine. You go on back down, and we'll meet you at the car. I just want him to see the waterfall at the top. Just this once. Trust me. Let me take him with me," I say. I'm begging her for this. To allow both of us to be men the best way we know how. To allow us this climb. To allow us this freedom to be one with this mountain. To see the beauty in what she fears.
"No," she says, placing her hands on her hips. "He can't go. Both of y'all need to get back to the car. I done let you play Jungle George long enough. Drop this mountain shit and let's go."
I sigh. "Is it the bear, Vashti? Is that it?" I ask. "The bear is like… He's like John the Baptist. He eats locusts and honey. Not people…," I say, letting my words trail off. I'm trying to be gentle and firm with her. But then, I'm tired of watching my tongue. "Not you. He doesn't want food… like you." I finish and feel a growl in my voice.
Her eyes widen and her black lips part to say something. She's rolling her neck and spitting curse words and fire and nails, but I don't hear her. My eyes are pinned on the dark beads that are her son's eyes. I want to save him from her. I want to protect him from becoming me, but defeat is all I've shown him. I cannot save him. Not like this. I'm lost. I've lost.
I nod in the boy's direction. I cut through his mother's words, "Take care of your mother." And then I adjust the pack on my back. A tear rolls down his face, but he nods back and tries to smile. Vashti's curses slice through the silence. She tells me that I can't leave her. I'm weak. I'm not a man. She's still cursing me when I turn my back and set my eyes on the winding trail that is the side of the mountain. Her screams grow louder as I hike away. After a while, those screams become cries, and then they cease altogether.
The sun beams down on the side of the mountain as it prepares to rest for the night. I trek sweaty with no sunglasses. I want to live the mountain. Although I want to see it, I do not pass the bear again. And I realize there is no rush. I'll wait for the bear. I'll wait for as long as it takes.
Originally published at Joyland Magazine.
Joanie had bad teeth; no one would fall in love with her. We sat at her kitchen table drinking gin and juice out of old jam jars while outside the window the world gathered itself into dusk. She said, “It seems so simple when you consider the odds. Seven billion people. Three-and-a-half billion men. That’s three-and-a-half billion chances. But then when it’s me, and every stranger is someone I’d have to smile at, a million to one I’ll die alone.”
She rose and stood in front of the fridge. “Listen to me, going on,” she said. “How are you and Robert doing? Do you want a cheese and pickle sandwich?”
There was a gentle knocking from upstairs, the ghost of her mother that haunted a bedroom closet. Joanie had left the closet closed for years. At night, she said, she could hear her mother crying, but was afraid to let her out.
Joanie used to be my babysitter. I hadn’t seen her in years, but when we moved into her neighborhood she dutifully appeared to shuffle boxes from truck to house in the flat summer light, arriving earlier and staying later than Robert’s and my friends. She looked how I remembered her: the unreachably aged way that 15-year-olds appear to five-year-olds. The front tooth that crossed over the other like a girl uncomfortably crossing and uncrossing her legs.
Our photographer friend Manny caught Joanie carrying a vase and lifted his camera; she shook her head, thrust the vase toward Robert and me, saying, “Flowers belong with flowers.”
“Joanie, come on,” we shouted, laughing. She returned to the door shyly, arms full of antimacassars, and peeked into the lens. As if the good work of helping a neighbor might, just this once, allow her to be lovely.
Outside the window the blue evening waned into black. Joanie said, “You’ve done so well for yourself, Lorraine. You were always so independent. You don’t even need a man.”
The sentence puddled on the table. I wanted to say, loving isn’t about need, but it felt like telling a starving friend that your turkey dinner isn’t very good as you sit and chew it in front of them.
I rose, and she told me I could leave before I said I had to. Upstairs, the ghost of her mother moaned. I rinsed my glass in the sink and went out into the night.
I was halfway home when flowers began to fall from the sky. The frogs hushed, and the whole night went ripe with gardenia. Then it was on me, a heavy rain, damp petals plastering to my face in the dark: dahlia and lily and rose. Stems and blossoms arcing from the clouds to tangle on trees and bounce wetly on lawns, a fragrant golden crush in the porch lights. Something wild opened in me, then. I twisted back to the yellow square of her kitchen window. I wanted to run back inside, to say, Joanie, come on. I wanted to run into every lonely house of every lonely woman on the street, to take them by the hands and fling their arms wide and lead them shy and tender and fearful into the rain with their arms outstretched, telling them: this is for you, this is all for you.
Originally published at People Holding.
There is a snake on your desk.
It is your first day of work. You are alone after a morning of team-building exercises, which you spent sweating into the armpits of a borrowed shirt. You had a tête-à-tête with your supervisor about time sheets and integrity that ran through your lunch hour, but you were afraid to chew in front of him, so now you are starving.
You do not know if the snake is poisonous. Snakes have never been your specialty. You examine it, try to be rational and adult, but all you can think is, it’s a snake! and it’s black! and it’s as big around as a penis! But you realize how subjective that is, and how revealing, and so you mentally amend this to it’s as big around as a pen! which isn’t true, but it’s hard to think of cylindrical things when the shirt you’re wearing smells like someone else’s detergent and there is a snake on your desk and you are going to get fired and have to work at Pizza Hut like everyone else in your graduating class.
You take a breath. You look around for your boss, or a binder of company policies on unexpected reptilian issues. In the neutral-toned distance, somebody switches on the copy machine. The snake flicks its small, black tongue. It tastes your nervous air.
In college, you believed you’d rather die than work in a cubicle. But then the economy fell out from under you and the rest of the nation, and your diploma failed to be the magic carpet that every adult in your life had always promised it would be. Your friends began to move back home one by one, shelving English and Peace Studies degrees to apply for management positions at Home Depot and Zaxby’s, and you thought: Okay. I can compromise for just a little bit. I can do something I love on the side. Until things even out, you thought. You checked your teeth in the mirror. Maybe they’ll give me dental coverage.
Your parents phoned every Sunday. “Have you found anything?” your father asked, weekly.
“I’m still looking,” you answered, weekly. It was getting harder and harder to say this. Applying for jobs was beginning to feel like stapling your resume to small boulders and pitching them out of airplanes. You just prayed they’d hit the right people.
“You know there’s always room for you at home,” your mother said, weekly.
“It’s not that we don’t think you can do it,” your father said, weekly. Which meant, of course, that they didn’t.
You fudged some numbers. You made follow-up calls. You were enthusiastic but not overeager. You smiled plastic smiles at plastic interviewers and described your qualifications and eagerness to work for a Company Just Like This One—only not Like This One, but actually This One, because This Company is appealing to you in some deeply personal way that is exactly the kind of bullshit that the interviewers are paid to believe about Their Companies. Your friends, in parents’ basements across the country, donned polyester uniforms, baseball hats with chickens on them. Their Facebook updates now are frequent, and bitter.
“I can fix up the basement for you,” your mother offered.
“What happened to my room?” you asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just moved in a few things. Sewing. Scrapbooking. The dog.”
“The basement is creepy,” you said.
“It’s amazing what a few throw pillows can do,” she said.
But somehow you got hired, and here you are: your first day in the real world, and there is a snake on your desk.
It stretches lazily across your keyboard, black in a way that drinks in the light and spits nothing back out—almost too black to be real. Perhaps it’s not. Perhaps this is a test. They knew they made a mistake hiring you, and now they’re just waiting for you to fail so they can outsource your job to India. “Couldn’t even handle a snake,” they’ll scoff. “Kids these days. Think life should be handed to them on a silver spoon.”
You tug at the cuffs of your shirt. The snake drapes itself across your QWERTY row.
You walk to your neighbor’s cubicle, trying to project an air of confidence. His nameplate says Bill. You are a little angry that somebody named Bill works in Billing. You think he could have made better life choices.
“Um,” you say, sticking your head in his doorway. “Hi.”
Bill is watching a YouTube video of fainting goats. He sees you and jumps.
“Oh, hey,” he says, whipping his headphones off and trying to look official. “You’re the new kid.”
Your hands are empty. You wish you’d brought something with you, something work-related, like a stapler or a three-hole punch, but there is nothing in your cubicle yet except your computer and a snake.
“How’s it going so far?” he asks.
You nod vigorously. “Oh, good, you know. Pretty good.”
“You have any questions or anything?” Bill from Billing asks.
You shake your head. Your voice is a squeak in your throat, a squeak of cheerful desperation. “Nope,” you squeak.
Bill nods. It is obvious he wants to get back to his goat video. “Well, let me know if you need help.” He tries for a joke. “You know where to find me!”
“Yep,” you say. You don’t want to leave because there’s nothing for you to do but go back to your cubicle and the maybe-poisonous snake, but Bill fiddles meaningfully with his headphones, and you are forced to take the hint. “All right,” you say. “Goodbye!” You punch the air a little. “Neighbor!”
The headphones are on. Bill offers a jaunty salute. He thinks you’re useless. You can tell already.
You hope that the snake will be gone by the time you get back, but it is still there. It has coiled itself around your computer. It makes sense, you guess. Snakes are cold-blooded, after all. They have to take their warmth where they can find it.
You approach your desk. The snake watches you, eyes glittering like grommets. Okay, snake, you think. I am just going to do some work now. You can stay there and sleep, and I am going to have a productive, adult day. And I am going to earn a paycheck like a productive adult person, and not move back in with my parents even though the economy is miserable, and I majored in comparative literature and there is a snake on my desk.
Heart pounding, you creep onto the edge of your chair. The snake doesn’t move.
Emboldened, you switch on the computer. You log in, open an empty spreadsheet.
The snake unwinds itself from the computer, undulates silently across your desk. Your throat goes dry. You wish you’d thought to get coffee. You never liked coffee, but you could use one now.
The snake spills itself across your mouse pad, dragging the smooth skin of its underbelly over your wrist. It is surprisingly soft. You didn’t realize it would be so soft. You swallow, affect an ergonomic posture as it spirals up your elbow, cool and dry. It settles itself in the hollow of your throat, and you hold your body very still. You type only with your pinkies, your left thumb. It is less difficult than you expected. You can easily copy and paste.
The back of your throat begins to ache. You think longingly of the water cooler, a coffee. You think: maybe something half-caf. With three Splendas, no cream. If a Starbucks order goes out later, maybe you can chip in. Maybe, once the snake has gone, you can be the one who takes the order.
Originally published by Monkeybicycle.
The trouble was that the shark had been born a human. Certain things were very difficult. The dryness of the air, for one. The stillness of food. As a baby, the shark-child cried constantly and without sound, a great white yawn of woe. It wanted to bite everything but had no teeth.
“She’s so sleepy,” her proud mother said.
“A born napper,” her father said.
The shark-child, of course, did not sleep. The shark-child lay awake in her crib in the silent house, moving her feet ceaselessly beneath the blankets.
The child grew up and forgot she was a shark. Her parents called her Anna. She did well in things like dodgeball and running away. She was running away constantly. Anna’s parents laughed. They bought a toddler leash. She outgrew the toddler leash. She disappeared for hours at a time in grocery stores, in parks. But she always circled back.
When Anna was six she got a younger brother named Lyle. Lyle was a normal child. Which is to say: he was not a shark. He was a human baby with Down’s Syndrome. The entire family loved him to pieces. At night, lying on the couch, their mother would find the two of them, Anna and Lyle, each holding the other’s arm gently in their mouths, and smiling.
After Lyle, Anna did not tire of running away. But she began to bring back things for him: buttons and sticks and the tail of a baby squirrel.
Their parents were very good at loving. They loved and loved and loved.
“We love you,” they told Anna when she didn’t make the volleyball team.
“We love you!” they told Lyle when he sang them songs at dinner.
“We love you,” they told Anna when she was 25 and had just come home again for the 4,815th time, “but maybe it’s time for you to strike out on your own.”
It was the first time Anna had heard love come with a but.
It was a difficult world for a young shark. Several career paths were obvious: cards, for one. Loans. Swim instructor. But Anna’s path had never been a straight one. She applied for everything she knew nothing about. She fell in love with all of the wrong men. She rubbed up against her lovers like she was sandpaper, and they came away from her bleeding and frightened and smooth.
Anna was working as a welder when she met Luis. Luis was a giant man who wore button-down shirts with the top buttons missing, a dark cloud of hair constantly threatening to spill free. He looked like someone who had been a refrigerator in a past life. Instead, he had been a bear.
From 1950 to 1961, Luis had lived in the remote Idahoan wilderness as an 800-pound grizzly. He had been female as a bear, which lead to many confusing encounters in his young human life. He had been shot once in a bar, when a drunk man took a swing at a shrimpy punk kid and a protective instinct that Luis could not understand had reared up in him, roaring. He walked now with a limp.
It was the limp that attracted Anna to Luis. Watching him walk, she felt a sweet ache in her molars.
He approached her after a few months. It had taken him a while to work up the nerve.
“Maurice says you’re pretty good at double-U butt welds,” he said.
It was not a good first line and, saying it, he knew it was a mistake. But the shark girl straightened and smiled.
“I do what I can,” she said. Which was modest. She was exceedingly great at double-U butt welds. But this generosity gave him courage.
“I feel like I know you from somewhere,” he said, tentatively.
She laughed. “We’ve been working together for the last three months,” she said.
He rubbed the back of his neck with a massive hand.
“But before that,” he said. “You seem really familiar somehow.”
Anna tilted her head to the side, scrutinizing him with a flat yellow gaze.
“Yes,” she said. “You too.”
Her torch was beginning to glow hot and bright.
“Do you—want to go out sometime?” Luis asked. “Grab a beer?”
Anna smiled up at him with all of her teeth. Every tooth was saying, yes, you, I choose you.
The bear was the first man Anna stayed with for more than a week. Nothing she did could make him go. When she bit, he bit back. The two of them had enormous, roaring, bloody tussles. Her friends said, you’re crazy. They said, this is a mistake. They said, how can you love a man who’s always at your throat. She’d corrected, we’re always at each other’s throats, and when they stared at her, she said, also the sex is really great. And they said, okay, we guess. Staring at the happiness glowing from her face. Wondering what it was they were missing.
They moved in together in autumn. Luis’ appetite was enormous—for Anna, for food, for life. He repainted her stoop, stacked firewood, talked about putting in a fence. He came home one day with a length of fabric he’d found by a Dumpster. He had plans: washing, ironing, cutting into curtains. “I can do the hemming,” he said, misreading the look on her face. “I taught myself to sew when I was a teenager.”
“Okay,” she said, flatly. That night, she lay apart from him in bed, feeling the tension that ran through her body every time she thought the word curtains. It was fierce and anxious and almost sexual. Curtains. Release. Curtains. Release. Curtains.
He woke to find her packing bags.
“Where are we going?” he asked. In a voice that knew the answer. There was a ring hidden in the underwear drawer. There were champagne flutes coming in from Amazon, with free shipping.
She crammed a sweater into the bag. She crammed an unmatched sock.
The man said from the dark, “But why?”
His voice was raw enough that something in her flitted back, circled with interest. But then he said, “Please stay,” and everything in her felt like drowning.
Anna lay in the bathtub at her parents’ house all that winter, biting everything in reach with her cute pebble teeth. The whole world seemed too dry and too bright.
“Keep your head up,” her friends said.
“Just keep swimming,” they said. “There are plenty more fish in the sea,” they said.
They did not know that Anna was a shark. Anna did not know, either. Sharks are not renowned for self-awareness.
Lyle came to visit her in the bathtub and she cried. Because she was crying, Lyle cried. She fell asleep and woke to find him poised delicately beside her with a toothpick, picking bits of things from between her teeth.
Luis found her again when she was working as a school counselor. He came to see her in the teachers’ lounge. He leaned on the vending machine. They were similar in shape.
She asked about his job. He asked about hers. That morning, a little girl had come in to talk about her parents’ divorce, and Anna had suggested they make voodoo dolls. The little girl had gone to the principal, crying.
She said, “It’s good.”
“I miss you,” he said.
The shark-girl said nothing, and then said, “I miss you too.”
Luis was thinner, bright-eyed. There was a new hardness to his edges. He said, “What’s keeping you?”
She had new friends now. She had taken up jogging. While they jogged around the park in their bright jog tops her new friends gave her advice about men. She let them think Luis had done the leaving. They ran in the same path every day and said men and said take his number out of your phone and said he never deserved you. She went to the dentist once a week and had them check for cavities. It wouldn’t be long now.
Anna said, “You know I’m not that kind of woman.”
He said, “What kind?”
She said, “The right kind.” And then, “The keeping kind.”
They looked at her hands, spread on the table. They seemed like hands that did not belong to a complete fuck-up. They did not seem relevant to the situation.
But the bear took them in his own and placed her knuckle in his living mouth: not to bite, but gently. She felt his tongue against her skin: a small, warm resting place.
The shark-woman gnashed her tiny teeth, thought no. Thought of the deathless march ahead of her: the endless succession of lovers, the jog tops, the bars. How sure a thing it seemed to run, smooth and uncomplicated. How cold.
The bear-man held her in his eyes and waited while Anna’s thoughts circled around and around the rest of her life. Waited until, terrified, she opened wide her human arms and sank.
Originally published by Smoking Glue Gun.
There is a monster living underneath your bed and the monster is lonely. His wife has left him and taken the dog, and his only son is a queer who went to UCLA and got liberated and runs around with a gaggle of men in v-neck shirts. The monster learned all this from his ex-wife's neighbor, the only person from his old life who still talks to him. She is kind of hot, the neighbor, in an older, spank-you-with-a-spatula way, but the monster knows that she pities him, and that's a huge turn-off for the monster. The monster has pride. Not the way his son has pride, mind you, but pride. Pride in his character, pride in his work. The monster has worked for the same company for the last thirty years, in a cubicle next to salesmen named Lenny and Bob. The monster always arrives at eight on the dot and has never taken lunch. Sometimes people try to talk with the monster about football or the weather, but since his wife has left him the monster exudes an air of horrible sadness that makes people feel tired, and so they talk about football without him. Somebody still has to do it.
The monster goes home on Friday nights and sits on the couch and stares into the quiet empty space of time ahead of him with no dog to walk no wife to argue with no son to speak of. The light is gray and aging in the window. The monster lies beneath your bed and stares at the springs. He wonders what it's like to carry all that weight, and thinks that if someone would give him some weight again, something to carry, maybe he could squeal for joy, too.
The monster frightened you when you were little and still believed you could grow up to become anything. You tucked away your fingers and toes, worried that his loneliness would touch you. But now you are old enough to know better. The monster deserved it, you think. Why else would he be a monster?
One night, drunk after your high school graduation party, your ears still ringing with congratulations, you let your hand trail down to the floor beside your bed. You wait for the monster to take it. The monster thinks about his son. He stares at your hand, and he stares at the phone. By the time he reaches out, if he reaches out, you have long since gone to sleep.
Originally published in Broad! magazine.
I went out to the mailbox in my bare feet. The mail just comes every other day. I was having some kind of fantasy about this being my last time out to the mailbox before Dad writes to say he's coming home from Texas, so my hair was loose and yellow and I'd put on a loose dress, also yellow, and my legs were bare too, except for the ankle bracelet Brenna made for me, which is a cord of tan embroidery thread couched in a narrow spiral like a backbone that never ends.
He sent me a pair of shed antlers when I turned twelve. I unwrapped them from the newspaper and for a few seconds I couldn't breathe. I hadn't told anyone what had started happening to me. At the bottom of the box was a letter. In it he wrote the highlights from the sex talk I'd already had from Grandma and from school. At the end of the letter, in handwriting scrunched at the bottom of the page like he was embarrassed, he wrote about what happened to him and to some other people in our family. He warned that it might happen to me. He must've forgotten when it happens for girls, or else it had started late for him. He said to not be afraid and to run as much as I wanted to and just keep my wits about me like I would anywhere else as a girl. If I see a gun, lie down or run away, depending on how close the hunter is. And keep away from bucks. That could get weird. Actually I hadn't thought about that part much.
I ran the crescent between the underside of my fingernail and my skin over an antler tip and felt a good pull. Then I nailed them above my bed. I noticed that Grandma never looked at the antlers.
He used to write me every week. He wrote that I should stick to our acreage as much as I could when I had to run but just be careful of the cars. A car ground past when I reached the mailbox. A few seconds later, it stopped. I couldn't really see the driver through the dust. Then it backed up. I took a step back. It wasn't time for it to happen, but I felt that way a little. Nervous. And like the boundaries of things – I mean the road and mailbox and even the blades of grass – aren't solid, but more like blur and flux.
The car stopped right in front of me. The driver rolled down the window. She was wearing purple sunglasses and her hair was black with grey in it. She'd braided it along the sides of her head kind of like the curls on a bighorn sheep, but the way pieces of hair sprang out of the braids made me think she'd driven all night. She looked at me for a long time. I couldn't see her eyes behind her glasses, but I could tell that she was looking. And I couldn't help it: I went back to the mailbox and opened the lid to check if he'd written me. But it was empty.
After a while, the driver smiled, but it was a sad waver and not a real smile. "You Colt?" she asked in a wavery voice.
"Ma'am," I answered into the black windows of her sunglasses.
She looked down into the empty seat next to her then looked at me again. "I'm looking for your grandma, Riley Crane. It's about her son. Your dad. Vance."
She smoothed back her hair with one hand. She kept her other hand on the wheel. I didn't know what to say. In 1971, Grandma got tired of being a famous artist and moved with my dad from New York to this house in Wyoming. She'd been very clear on what to tell the women who found out where we lived and drove up on pilgrimages hoping to meet her, that I'd call the police and so on. But none of them ever knew the name of my dad. None of them ever knew my name.
"Just a second," I finally said, and my voice came out like a squeak, and I turned and ran back to the house. Which reminded me of another thing he had written that I hadn't thought of on my own: If a hunter sees me and it's too late to lie down, do like I would with a mountain lion and move forward. Move right into them if I have to, because when I transform every part of me hardens into muscle and I'm stronger than any person. Charge, he wrote. But lying down – hiding – is always better, because someone might get scared if I was charging them and shoot anyway.
Dad had some women in Texas who knew all about the way he changed. They all lived together in the hills, grew their own food, and rehabilitated horses, which was what my mother had done before she died. Once a month, after dinner, they went together into the woods and the women watched him change. They'd invented a special chant that they did together just before it happened. One of the women had a baby and another was pregnant.
He'd written all this in a letter to Grandma in the same cramped handwriting he'd used in his letter to me about what to expect from my body. She threw our teapot through the window after she read it. Then she put on her shoes and picked up the window and teapot shards and we looked at the pile of them in her palm. She's an artist and her lessons are opaque. Her fingers were slowly becoming diagonal from arthritis. I kept thinking about the babies, wondering why he'd mention them if they didn't belong to him, and if they might have the deer gene too. I suggested that he didn't really care about those women and just wanted to make more of us. Grandma told me to go to my room. I lay on my bed and stared up at his antlers.
Grandma can't take care of the house as well anymore and I know she wants me to, but I tell her I have to do homework, and also when she was my age she was practicing for cotillion. I opened the door and went down the dark hallway. The leaves on her old ficus from New York and the bamboo were dusty. Books lined the hallway on both sides and all of them were dusty. I wondered what the woman would think if Grandma said she could come in.
Her studio door was closed, but I could see rectangular pieces of her through the clear parts of her long stained glass window, which is like a quilt made of glass. She was sitting in her chair and reading a book right up in front of her face. The window shuddered when I knocked our special knock. She lowered the book and smiled and I went in. I told her about the woman by the mailbox.
She laid her book in her lap and shut it around her finger. "We've had people before who said they knew about Dad, bunny. They say that to get us to let them in. Did you lock the door behind you when you came in just now?"
I nodded, though I couldn't actually remember. "But what if someone really does know about him?" I asked. "How would we know if we keep turning them away?"
There were some quilt blocks in front of her on the floor. The design was made from hundreds of scraps like brushstrokes: branches or antlers or coral. By now she mostly put her quilts together by touch. Even color she knew by touch, from the phantoms of dyes.
"Did she seem any different from the ones I told you about?" Grandma asked.
The woman's hair was silvery and her car was gold. "Her car has Texas plates," I remembered.
Grandma took off her reading glasses and folded them on top of the book. "I know you miss your dad. I miss him like crazy. But we have to start thinking what we'll do if he doesn't come back."
"I just really have a feeling about her," I tried. "She knows all of our names and came from Texas."
Grandma frowned. She moved her book and glasses onto the table beside her.
I was feeling more and more tense and was starting to think that when I feel like that it's because I wish I could stay a deer. The creek runs, freezes, floods. I can see every living thing and when something moves toward me I stop and watch it and it can't see me because my fur is the same color as the hill. My neck is lean and flexible. I'm energy. I run and jump. The ones of us who die give energy. Last year, I stopped eating all meat besides birds. I told Grandma it was because I was almost a teenager. She laughed and said fair enough.
She put on her other glasses, which were so thick they made her eyes look big and black. "You win. But the deal is you're coming with me this time." She'd never let me talk to a pilgrim before, or even see one, though I always ran to the window and tried. I smiled.
"Just do exactly as I say," she instructed. "When I go back into the house, you need to follow me right away."
I nodded and took her hand. We walked slowly down the hall and I wondered if the woman would even be there anymore. The sunbeam through the front window was in a different place than when I'd first come in. Grandma put on her coat and stepped into her shoes. Her thin socks were pulled halfway up her calves and her legs underneath them were skinny and dry. Her knees creaked when she bent them. She exaggerated her unease to deter the pilgrims, but I worried about those legs and how much longer they would hold her.
The car was still by the mailbox. The woman had gotten out and was leaning against the side, watching us. Even from far away I could tell she was very tall. Grandma walked straight toward her with her head up. Our shadows were long. The sun was moving behind the mountain and half the front yard was now shade. I wished I'd put on shoes and a jacket. She probably thought I was crazy all in yellow. She'd taken off her sunglasses and wasn't dressed warm enough either: she had on jeans and hippie sandals and an open blouse over a man's tank top.
She and Grandma stared at each other for a long time. Something was moving across her face like weather and it started to happen to Grandma's face too. Her blouse was printed all over with little falcons. Their wings were spread.
Her name is Eleanor Morris. We sat in the living room and watched it get dark. Grandma put on a record. I turned on the light and made us all some tea and flipped the record over. Grandma went to her room to lie down. I went up with her for a while and curled into the comma of her body and we talked about Dad in quiet voices. She said it hadn't hit me yet and that that was okay. She said I would have as long as I needed. She put her hand in my hair. Then she went to sleep. I stood on my bed and touched the tips of his antlers before I went back to the living room.
There wasn't enough in the refrigerator for dinner. I said I'd drive to the store. Eleanor said I was too young to drive and I reminded her that nobody here cares. Thirteen was almost sixteen, which was almost eighteen, and Grandma and I had agreed that it would be absurd for some woman from the government to come and tell us we couldn't live together anymore. Finally, Eleanor drove to the store and came back with enough food for the refrigerator, freezer, and cupboards. She set the grocery bags in a line on the counter and the paper crackled as we put everything away.
I said Grandma had plenty of money and to let us pay her, but she said don't worry about it, she was intruding and it was the least she could do. She asked if we'd thought about using Grandma's money to hire an aide to buy groceries, drive her to the doctor, clean the house. I said we hadn't thought of that and repeated what Grandma had told me about her identity being confidential. Eleanor looked at me with an expression I'd never seen. Her eyes were huge and her mouth crooked and she wrapped her hands around mine. I leaned into her shoulder. She smelled like sweat and horses. She smelled a little like what I remembered of my dad. I started to cry. She ran her hand down my hair over and over like she was petting a cat.
She would stay too long. She would help us hire an aide who didn't care at all about iconic feminist art. I would catch her late one night copying some of Grandma's papers by hand into a notebook and I wouldn't say anything about it. I would catch her taking pictures of the house and Grandma's quilts. A few days later, she would leave in a hurry. But at that moment all I thought about was winter and something Dad had written me. If you look at deer tracks in snow more than a few inches deep, they're stretched out from the way those pretty legs drag a little at the end of each step, and to the untrained eye they look nearly human. Eleanor Morris touched my hair like she knew I was an animal and loved me anyway.
This originally appeared in The Austin Chronicle as the third place winner of their short story contest.
The spring after we went to Mankato, I slept through auditions for the musical. I had Ds in geometry and English, and was failing history. As I filled out my Confirmation workbook, I became increasingly convinced that I’d experienced a miracle or some kind of holy mystery. Over and over I forgave Hollis and Emily for my suffering when they shut me out. It was so long ago it felt like a different life.
Uncle Frank woke late one morning and couldn’t lift his spoon to eat breakfast. While I was muttering through a presentation on Bless Me, Ultima, while Emily was in psychology, Mavie drove him to the emergency room. They put him on an IV to thin his blood and told Mavie he’d had a minor stroke.
The bell rang. Emily and I moved through our respective hallways. She had free period, which meant she drove to the park with Julie and peered into the cold stream and smoked cigarettes. I had modern dance, the only class I still enjoyed. I turned pirouettes and fell into a backbend. My name was called over the loudspeaker. I picked up the phone in the dance teacher’s office. It was my mother. She met me in front of the school and we waited for Emily to come back so we could go to the hospital together. Emily sat in the front seat with her hand over her mouth.
I hadn’t been inside the hospital since Emily’s frequent stays there as a child. The light was beige. Prints of tulips and France hung on the walls. Frank had been moved to the telemetry floor for monitoring, and he was asleep. He appeared deflated, his mustache and hair very dark against his waxy skin. Mavie was sitting on a chair beside his bed. Emily started to cry. She took his hand.
“He’s going to be okay,” Mavie told her, laying a hand on the small of her back. “His regular doctor’s already been here. It was a minor stroke, and they don’t think he’ll even need any physical therapy.” But Emily couldn’t stop shaking. Water collected at the ends of her hair and came through her pores. Water trickled down her arms and legs.
I had to look away, but my mother took a washcloth from her purse. She knelt next to Emily’s white boots and soaked up the water.
“Take it, pumpkin,” she said softly to my cousin, offering the cloth from her spot on the floor. Emily hesitated, but let go of Frank’s hand long enough to wring the water into her mouth and then press the damp washcloth over her face and neck.
We waited there for two hours until he woke. The monitors beeped. Water dripped onto the floor, my mother sopped it up, and Emily took it back.
…
When I heard that Frank had come home, I intercepted Emily in the hallway. Julie glared at me and kept walking. I told her I was glad her father was recovering, and she slumped against a locker and admitted she still thought all the time about seeing him in his hospital bed.
“Even now, I can’t really sleep. I just have nightmares,” she confided, as though she and Julie hadn’t spent the last four months avoiding me in the hallways. “I need a cigarette. You want to come outside with me?”
I was supposed to be on my way to modern dance, but I followed her out a side door. We rounded the corner and hurried down the hill into the woods behind the school. The trees had leaves on them now. Emily sat on a log and lit her cigarette.
“The weekend after it happened, I went to work. Hollis had the day off, so it was just me and the manager. It was super crowded, but I just felt removed, like there was a membrane between me and everyone there.” She blew out smoke. Her hair was damp.
“And I realized there’s like this other world,” she continued. “I’d gotten there without even noticing, and I couldn’t get out.” She glanced over her shoulder. “It’s like there’s the world with your friends and TV shows and tabloids and then there’s another, parallel world that only some people can see. The things we love are all distractions to keep us from seeing the parallel world, which is just loss and pain.”
“What does it look like?” I asked, picturing an endless plain of ice.
“It looks the same as this one. It’s more like a feeling.”
She dropped her cigarette and ground it out with a balletic jerk of her toe. I thought guiltily about modern dance.
“I know what you’re thinking. What happened in Mankato was a dream. You didn’t drop into a parallel universe.”
“I was just asking,” I murmured.
Emily pried a strip of bark from the log with her fingernail.
“Stop acting like what happened was my fault.” My voice came out clotted. “If you hadn’t been so fucked up, Marty probably wouldn’t have dosed me.”
She looked at me with wide eyes, her face guileless.
“I know you’re lying to me. I was even following footprints for a while on the ice. If they weren’t yours, whose were they?”
She stood up and crossed her arms. “What are you talking about?” she cried. “You had a vaguely scary dream. I came into it and rescued you, apparently. Ever since then, you’ve been insufferable.” Water had begun dripping from the ends of her hair. “My dad could’ve died. You’re so self-absorbed, you didn’t even cry at the hospital. You don’t know what it’s like to love him so much and know at any time he could just die.”
I stared at her. She started to walk, and I followed. Frank’s recovery meant her grief could be over, while mine was unexplainable and went on and on.
“But he’s getting better, it’s all over. What happened to me doesn’t even make sense. How am I supposed to recover from something like that if you won’t even tell me the truth?” My voice was rising. She had slowed, so I passed her. The woods dropped behind me and I focused on the bricks of the school wall.
“I should have fucking left you there,” she snapped. There was a hitch in her breath from walking up the hill.
I barely saw Emily again until the morning of my Confirmation a month later, when she stood beside Hollis in a church pew. Her dress was the same pearl gray as his suit, her hair in a sodden knot at her neck. She disappeared before I could say anything to her. Hollis looked uncomfortable all through lunch. Emily didn’t want me at her graduation party, so I stayed home. Neither she nor I explained what had happened between us to the rest of the family. Mavie thought she could reunite us by getting us to talk on the phone: Emily, get your dupa down here, she would scream, her hand branched over the receiver.
Emily started to melt that summer. She melted from my height to around five feet by the time we took the Christmas picture that year. My mother said it was just the way she carried herself, her back rounded and head jutted forward; it never occurred to her that Emily might have stopped drinking herself back.
…
The shadows were lengthening. The wind blew harder. We still hadn’t seen the mountains. “It’s going to get dark in a few hours. Can we stop to put snow in our water bottles? Mine’s almost empty,” I said to Hollis. He didn’t answer.
“I know you don’t have a TV, but every night after rehearsal, I watch a nature show on PBS. I’ve seen a bunch of ice ones.” My brother was silent.
“Goddammit, Hollis—”
“Remember the rules,” he said flatly.
“I’m doing the rules.” I tugged on the back of his jacket until he stopped walking. His face was raw and red. Hours ago, he'd clamped his water bottle onto a carabineer and hung it off the side of his backpack, and I hadn't seen him drink from it since. “Are you dehydrated? Is your water bottle empty?” I asked.
He just stood there. I lunged forward and shook the bottle. It was empty. I gave him what was left in mine and he drank, expressionless. I unclipped his bottle and scooped it through the snow to fill it. Folding it into my hat, I slid it underneath my coat and folded my arms across it. I did the same with mine when he passed it back. He found the pair of expensive, bruised apples he’d been carrying in his backpack and we ate them.
I hoped for another bird.
Though it was barely cold enough to snow, I knew it was dangerous to drink freshly thawed water. I couldn’t risk my voice. I thought of the bags of melted Emily ice in our pockets. They'd be warmer by now. The Emily ice was weighing us down. We’d need more food to replace the energy we burned by carrying that weight, but all we had left after the apples was half a sandwich.
"This Emily ice thing is absurd," I attempted once we started walking. He pretended not to hear me. "We're dehydrated. Even if she literally became part of this glacier, she'd want us to drink it. Wren said the ice just needs to melt for her soul to dissolve.” I felt embarrassed even repeating it.
“If we’re going to follow someone else’s ritual, we should do it right," he said.
…
For Easter, Grandma drove up from Des Moines, and I overheard her and my mother plotting the number of sides they'd need to offset Mavie's cheap ham. Frank had lost some weight over his year of recovery and now ate mostly vegetables and brown rice, and he drank red wine instead of beer.
Easter fell early that year and it was still cold outside—tiny domes of snow lidded the plastic eggs Mavie had hung from the branches of the dormant bush in front of the duplex—yet Emily’s skin held no more of winter’s luster. Her hair was limp and dry.
But at dinner, she and Hollis chattered happily, and she told us how she and Frank had taken up walking. For their hearts, Frank added. Our town was walkable. Neighborhoods had sidewalks and houses with front porches; even the shut-down glass factory’s lot, even the blocks of mostly empty storefronts were edged with traversable pavement. Two hours on foot and you were mostly through it. Mavie rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.
I pictured Frank and Emily, side by side, the wind picking at the backs of their coats. My own father was a cop, increasingly stressed and absent from working overtime, and not someone I could walk with like that. Sometimes Frank walked to the grocery store and ate a salad while Emily finished her work, and then they walked home together.
My mother beamed. “Frank, I’m so happy for you. For both of you.”
“This year’s a blessing. Easter, new life,” said Mavie.
After dinner, Emily asked me if I’d come upstairs with her, and I followed her to her bedroom.
“I wanted to know how you’re doing,” she said as she opened her bedroom door. “We haven’t talked in a while.”
“I’m good.” We hadn’t spoken in almost a year. “I started looking at colleges.”
Her room was dim and smelled dense, organic. A large, lemon-colored glass bowl sat in the middle of the floor. Four pairs of tights had been draped over the back of her desk chair like shed skins. Sketchbooks lay open on her floor and bed.
“It’s hard,” she said, answering the question I had not reciprocated. She sat on the bed. I sat on the floor with my back against the door and eyed one of the sketchbooks. She’d drawn a picture of her tights slung over the chair, each with a different reptilian face. Her lines were heavy and confident. The paper was creased, and I could see that on the next page, she’d drawn a geometric landscape, the surface a wash of jagged crystals and the sky empty. “I work full-time and I want to be there for my dad, so I took the night shift so I can work while he’s sleeping.”
She collapsed onto her back. “But I’m so tired. Like right now I don’t even remember what we were fighting about. I just want to sleep for days.”
I leaned forward and flipped the sketchbook page. She rose halfway and looked at me. “Don’t look at that,” she said levelly. “That’s my private shit.”
“What is it?”
“None of your business.”
I stood and, hugging the sketchbook against my chest, blocked the door with my body. “You said it was a dream. You told me I made it up.”
She bounced fast on the bed. She was smaller than I’d ever seen her. Her eyes had the same creepy look they’d had in Mankato, intense but unfocused. Her body had the same electricity.
“Give it back,” she demanded. She stumbled onto her feet and pitched toward me, but I was taller and heavier. Her hands were slippery when she grabbed my arm. Her body left a dark mark against mine where she soaked my clothes. “Why can’t you just leave me alone? You follow me everywhere, you always have.”
I just stood there and let her slide all over me. “I want to know what you did to me,” I said softly.
She sat back down on the bed and met my eyes. “I saved you, you idiot.”
Across the room, her face was sallow. Her cheekbones were dark blots. My mother had told me that when Emily was born, she wasn’t predicted to live more than a few months. Then she wasn’t supposed to live past two, then five, then puberty.
She started to cry. “It’s my place. I made it when I was little. When kids teased me, I imagined a perfect ice place so they’d freeze if they tried to chase me there.”
“How did I get there?”
“I don’t know. Forget about it.” She exhaled sharply and shook her head. “My father almost died. Every day of school my whole life, somebody made me feel bad about what I am. So one fucked up thing happened to you. Let it go.”
Carefully, I turned the sketchbook back to the reptilian tights page. I placed it on the rug. The yellow bowl was filled about a third of the way with water.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and closed the door behind me.
…
“We weren’t good to them," my brother said the next time I proposed we drink the Emily ice.
"Who?"
"Frank and Mavie, Emily. We never were. It was like everyone decided their family was lower than ours.”
“That was our parents,” I said.
“It was all of us. Can you imagine the kind of debt they were in?”
“Not really.” I paused. “You were good to them, though. To Emily. You never found anyone better. You never moved on.”
“This has to stop,” he murmured. My brother was good. He'd been sober eight years. He still worked at the grocery store, and he taught guitar to kids at an afterschool program. After Easter, that yellow bowl in Emily’s room had stuck with me. Part of me knew what she was doing.
The sky was growing dark. People on PBS dug snow caves to sleep in. We could do that, too. There had been no more birds. My stomach was tight with hunger.
“Look, Tracie. I guess I haven’t been totally honest. Emily and I were really good friends, and she told me things she didn’t tell anyone else.”
I slowed my pace and he matched it. “This thing about Mankato and what you dreamed. It was a real place to her. She told me how much it messed you up to see it, but it was a sort of meditation for her.”
“She told me she went there in her mind when kids teased her,” I said.
“There’s more, though. At first, she’d just end up there without trying sometimes. When she woke up back in her room, there’d be snow in the treads of her shoes. Then she figured out she could get there deliberately if she melted down far enough.” He was looking at me. His eyes were red.
“I told her not to try it. I told her what’s good in this world, like her family and her friendships with me Julie. I talked about moving to Alaska together. Then the thing with Frank happened, and she seemed happy with him at home. We didn’t see each other as much. I was so fucked up all the time, I didn’t notice how far she was melting.”
“You were a good friend to her,” I said, because he looked as stricken as I’d seen him at her funeral. “You were the best friend to her anyone could be.”
He sighed, and I could see that he’d carry that guilt about Emily for the rest of his life, and still I didn’t say anything about what I’d seen.
We hadn’t brought any kind of flashlight. I wondered when my brother would let himself read the coming of night that was written all over the sky.
…
At the beginning of the summer after my junior year, Emily locked herself in her room. Mavie was woken repeatedly by the sound of their daughter pacing. Occasionally, Emily’s window creaked open and the smell of cigarette smoke drifted through the house. Then Hollis called because she’d missed a shift at work. Frank broke down her door. A lemon-colored bowl that had gone missing three years before stood in the middle of the wet rug. It was filled with water.
Frank retrieved a nice blue glass from the kitchen. He and Mavie wrung the rug water that had been my cousin into it, and then Frank called us and Mavie called Grandma and we called other people so Frank and Mavie could go to bed.
Two days later, we drove in a procession to the park. Hollis wore his hair down so that it hid his face. In the car ahead of us, I could see Frank in his hat with the little clutch of feathers, and that Mavie was tilted forward, probably gripping the glass of their daughter between her knees, the bowl on her lap. Marty's van was behind us, followed by cars full of people from school, the grocery store, and town. We filled the parking lot, then walked in a line up the hill, past the play equipment. The tall grass rasped against my bare calves and left long red marks. Hollis walked up with Frank and Mavie; since they were old and unsteady, they let my father carry the bowl and my mother, the glass. I walked between my parents. No matter how slowly we moved, there was no way to keep water from splashing onto me. Birds looped overhead, screaming.
We descended the hill to the stream that connected to a river that fed the Mississippi. We stood in a thick circle around it. Across the stream, Julie and Marty looked rough and old. Each of us said something kind about Emily. Frank talked the longest. They poured her into the water.
…
I made sure Hollis drank his water slowly, then I showed him how to dig a snow cave. When Emily and I had molded the landscape of my front yard into tunnels and hollows, her hands had been almost as white as the snow they pawed into. Her veins were visible underneath her skin and I thought she had rivers inside her. Hollis and I used our hammers and chisels. We worked fast— it was almost dark.
I drank half the water in my bottle and offered the rest to him. As I dug, I put snow in my mouth.
Hollis finished the water and handed back my bottle. “Thanks for watching out for me," he said. "Thanks for listening. Tomorrow morning, we’ll find our way back. I’ll buy you a hot chocolate.”
I indicated a spot ten yards away. “I want to fill the bottles up with clean snow.”
A blurry yellow orb of rising moon glowed behind the stranded clouds. I scooped snow into his bottle, tamped it down, and filled it the rest of the way. The temperature had dropped with the sun, but I took off my gloves before putting my hand in my pocket. I wanted to make certain I didn’t spill anything when I undid the seals on the bags and poured each one into my water bottle.
I drank the Emily ice in one slow sip.
Originally published by Eleven Eleven. To order a copy of this journal, go to SPD. Part 1 posted on Thursday, 9/24/15. Part 2 posted on Monday 9/28/15,.
By Melanie Westerberg
First I told my mother about Mankato, casually, as we were making Christmas candy. She brought it up with Hollis the next time he came for dinner, which happened to be the night after Cats. Outside, the snow had collapsed into dirty slush, but bouquets of flowers brightened the dining room and my bedroom. Hollis deferred to Emily. Unbeknownst to any of them, I’d also mentioned it to my grandmother. She must have still held sway over Mavie, because by the end of that week my mother told me I’d be accompanying my cousin and brother to Mankato.
Julie’s boyfriend Marty was twenty-two; his hair was already silver and it sprang in a wooly nimbus around his head. Hollis and Emily were sitting on a big pillow in the back of his van when I pulled open its door. Marty had duct taped an Iowa flag over the back window, and beneath the russet eagle he’d inked I Only Want Anhydrous. Since nobody talked to me, I spent much of the drive to Minnesota looking out the window. Stands of bare trees separated the white fields from the white sky.
We didn’t ski at all. They spent the whole time in the cottage, smoking meth, drinking beer, watching TV, and talking all day and night. Occasionally, they ran outside and rolled around in the snow. Trying at first to shield me from this, Hollis led me through sparse woods until we found a big frozen pond. He trod on its periphery to test its strength, then shuffled onto the ice. Arms out, he spun at its center, his long hair and open leather jacket fanning around him. I realized he was imitating one of the dances from Cats and slid out to join him, singing under my breath. Crows murmured in the trees, and the branches scraped together when the wind blew. He leapt, landed hard. The pond shuddered in response. Without saying anything, we ran back toward the trees as fast as we could, and when we reached the bank we fell to our knees, gasping and laughing.
But when I looked at him, it wasn’t Hollis. My brother was a serious person. He was in a metal band and the municipal orchestra. Just a year out of high school, he was assistant manager at the grocery store where he and Emily worked. When we got back to the cottage, Emily offered him a pipe and he took it and I watched him turn over.
Nobody wanted to eat, and the only food I had was a small bag of sandwiches my mother had made and a container of Christmas candy. I rationed it. The bathroom and unused kitchen opened off the living room, and in back was a single large bedroom with two sets of bunks and a queen bed. None of them slept. I closed myself into the bedroom for hours at a time. I moved all the blankets onto the queen bed—they were running the heater low—and lay underneath their broad pressure, trying to sleep.
I kept the lights off to discourage them from coming in, but I woke up sweaty the second night and noticed that a lamp by the bunk beds had been switched on. Water dripped rhythmically. The room was much warmer. I folded down four blankets and angled up on my elbows.
Emily stood across the room, in underwear and a tank top, her back to me. I hadn’t seen so much of her body since we were kids. Her skin was pellucid and laced with veins. Tension coiled and released in her hamstrings as she rocked. I sat up; she didn’t notice. The beads of her rounded spine protruded against her shirt. Her arms and head dangled, and water coursed past her fingers and the ends of her hair. She collected it in a bowl she’d positioned beneath her on the floor. She was shorter, thinner.
“Emily,” I said quietly.
Her hair flicked water as she whirled to face me. “Go back to sleep.”
“What are you doing? You have to drink the water back.”
She raised a finger to her lips and pantomimed quiet, darting her eyes at the closed door. “I don’t have to do anything,” she whispered. “Go to sleep. You can’t just have this room to yourself, we didn’t even ask you to come.”
“Do they know what you’re doing?” I asked, raising my voice.
Emily turned off the lamp. The frame creaked as she sat on the bunk. The bowl scraped the floor, and I heard her throat work as she gulped the water back, then the rustle of her putting on her clothes. She returned to the living room without a word.
My heart beat so hard I didn’t sleep again for hours.
I woke at dawn. In the living room, Emily was lying on the couch with her forearm angled over her eyes. A few candy wrappers were crumpled inside the dry bowl near her on the floor. Hollis was curled up on the rug with a mammal identification book tented over his face and, at the table, Julie and Marty played a static game of dominoes, their heads sagging. Neither of them looked at me when I walked out the front door.
I waited until a car with women in it paused beside me on the highway, then I asked them for a ride to the ski area. I had money. I had a marigold-colored ski jacket my grandmother had bought for me. By watching other people, I figured out how to put on my skis and found the rental place’s ski instructor.
He said to bend your knees; my bones felt insubstantial inside the heavy boots. Skis crossed and my compact shadow far beneath me, I took the lift to the top of an easy slope. I looked out over the hills. The snow was a combination of what had fallen and ice crystals spat from machines. I launched myself down. A sheet of wind flapped around my face. I torqued in my legs, bringing my skis to a point. Then I returned to the top.
As I descended my fourth hill, I noticed a pale blue patch near a tree ahead of me. I swerved to avoid it, but I couldn’t control my trajectory. The blue expanded. I dropped my weight back and let my knees buckle, but I’d already fallen.
Though I was sprawled on the snow in an unfamiliar place, there had been no jolt of impact. The ground rippled in confectionary peaks of white and blue. Except for the shadows of scudding clouds, everything was motionless. My skis had come off in the fall and I was wearing my regular boots again. I walked hesitantly forward, sidestepping up an incline the way the ski instructor had demonstrated.
From the ridge, I could see that the landscape extended infinitely in every direction. My stomach constricted and my vision blurred. My jacket was all wrong, I thought. Long after I died here it would stay crumpled on the ice, a scrap the color of flowers my mother liked to grow.
“Hello?” I called out. “Help me. Please.”
The wind skittered a layer of ice over the surface. I noticed a trail of footprints nearby and followed them for a few yards before they disappeared. A shudder coursed through me. My tears froze over my cheeks and the cold was sharp each time I breathed it in. I cried for help again, and the wind howled back. I started to walk.
“Tracie,” a girl’s voice answered moments later.
I turned and saw Emily coming toward me. She walked easily over the rises. She had no coat, just her white boots and a cable-knit sweater and black jeans, and her momentum spread her hair around her like a wing.
I watched her approach until she was right in front of me. “What is this?”
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said gently, and put an arm around me. We started to walk. With her beside me, my feet no longer slipped.
Once I could walk on my own, she moved ahead of me. I reached for her, terrified she’d disappear as quickly as she had materialized, but my hand just pawed the air between us. “Follow close,” she ordered. “Put your feet exactly where I do. Otherwise, you could step into a crevasse, and I can’t get you from there.” I kept my eyes on her back and the lilt of her hair. I couldn’t reconcile this Emily with the version of my cousin I’d seen the night before. Periodically, she turned to check that I was still following.
“What did you give her?” Hollis asked.
I looked around, but the landscape hadn’t changed. I hoped I might see a polar bear or some penguins, and the thought made me laugh.
“Come on, man. She was bumming you out, right?” said Marty.
“You motherfucker,” Emily growled, and the cables on her sweater twined and sighed; my feet were breaking new snow and I leaned toward her to look closer at the cables, which were like open, leering faces.
Emily lay beside me on top of the blankets. I could feel little twitches in her body. The room smelled like vomit. My brother was sitting on the edge of the bed.
“We’re leaving,” she said sternly, and smoothed back my hair with cold fingers.
…
I raised my left foot, tilted forward, and stamped my crampon spikes into the ice. Then I did the same with my right. My ankles purred, hesitating on the edge of pain. I searched the glacier’s surface for cracks that could indicate crevasses.
“You remember Mankato?” I asked. Hollis winced, and I felt an unexpected twinge of pleasure.
He brushed my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know we never talked about it. I can’t believe how we were then.”
“It was almost twenty years ago. That’s not why I’m bringing it up.” I paused. “But yes, now that you mention it, you could’ve stood up for me.”
“I never talked to Marty again.”
“You barely spoke to me until Emily died, either,” I snapped.
“Tracie, I’m so—”
“You know I forgave you. All of you.” I took a slow breath. “When I was out, I came somewhere that looks like this. I mean, I had this long dream where I hitched out to the slopes and took skiing lessons and went down a few hills. Then I skied into this patch of blue and I was here. I was alone. Then Emily came and she helped me get back.”
Hollis waited a long time before answering. We passed a patch of dirty ice shaped like a fox. It looked just like one I’d noticed two hours ago, right after we saw the bird.
“You’re doing it again,” I said finally, my mouth dry.
“Doing what?”
“Disengaging when I need you here.”
“I’m not. I’m thinking. I remember Emily mentioning that, what you said about the ice world.”
Secretly I’d hoped Emily had never told anyone about how obsessively I’d pursued her about it. “I was convinced it all happened literally,” I admitted. “I thought she was lying about it being a dream, that she was hiding this secret place from me.”
“I should’ve been there. Mom told me you were having trouble in school. I thought it was because of what Marty did and how we all avoided you after. I didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry, Tracie.”
“It’s all right. I mean, Marty dosed me and I had a dream. It just took me a long time to get that.”
We came to the edge of a small hill, so I dropped my right foot at a diagonal down the side and kept my left foot level. A curl of blue was frozen at the bottom of the incline. Deep beneath the ice, there must be fish. Flat, silvery fish, and a sort of vermillion corkscrew animal. A pale pink creature resembling a fan rotted through with holes. I must have seen them on television.
“Emily and I talked about you all the time, you know,” my brother said. “She loved you. She wanted to protect you.”
“I really think we’re walking in circles.”
“We’re heading back, I know it,” he assured me.
I never told anyone about seeing Emily try to melt herself. I knew that part of the night hadn’t been a dream: she was high and had probably been experimenting with how far she could go before drinking her water back. Seeing her that way was so grave and intimate I felt like I couldn’t talk about it. And not telling had been a type of subtle revenge, I thought, for the way she ignored me, for the way she began to turn her anger and hurt on me. I cupped my palm over the lump of Emily ice in my pocket.
Originally published by Eleven Eleven. To order a copy of this journal, go to SPD. Part 1 posted on Thursday, 9/24/15. Part 3 will be posted on Thursday, 10/1/15.
The letters my mother found when her aunt Mavie died exposed her and Uncle Frank as the kind of Catholics who believed in things like exorcisms and bleeding statues. Maybe they were just more open to mystery because their daughter Emily was made of ice. When they lost her, Frank and Mavie wrote to a Mr. Wren, who advertised himself as adept in communicating with the dead.
Emily’s soul still languished in the physical world, Wren responded. The water she became had evaporated, then reconstituted as snow that fell onto a glacier in Patagonia, where her soul remained. He advised that she could be chipped out of there and carried home by someone who loved her, and then she would melt again and her soul could dissolve into heaven.
Mr. Wren suggested he might be of service in obtaining plane tickets to Argentina. He claimed to speak excellent Spanish and said he could arrange a rental car or schedule a flight to El Calafate on the state airline. He could even go with them.
Poor Wren, who in his letters capitalized words like soul and heaven, had not suspected my great-aunt and -uncle’s poverty. We assumed his final letters had gone unanswered; they grew more and more desperate, as though he were himself convinced of Emily’s presence in the glacier and not just a con man preying on the bereaved. My brother Hollis and I had a good laugh reading them, but they were sad, too.
I had to fly back to Seattle right after Mavie’s funeral because I was the principal in Norma. It was the highpoint of my career. After the final performance, I stood in a corridor in my gown and stage makeup and held the hands of everyone who passed me. All I could think about was those long months after Emily melted fifteen years ago, when I was convinced I’d practically killed my cousin myself.
The next morning, I called my brother and suggested that we try finding the Emily ice in Patagonia like Wren had proposed. For a while he thought I was joking. Then he said he couldn’t afford it. I told him I could get us there.
…
Wren’s letters had invoked the glacier so casually I hadn’t thought much about how patches would be dirty, or how the plain that looked so flat on TV was terraced with exhausting little hills. Hollis and I had lost our trekking group behind one of those hills, when we hung back filling Ziploc bags with ice that matched the blue of Emily’s eyes.
We called for our guides until our throats were tender. When my legs started shaking so hard I was afraid he’d notice, I said I needed to sit down and rest. He crouched beside me, and we were about to eat lunch when I remembered that we had only an afternoon’s worth of food with us. So instead of eating, we made up rules. No blame or guilt around the idea to take this trip. No more looking at the bags of melting ice in our pockets. We were not to discuss what we thought had happened to the rest of our group. We still listened for them, though. I could see it when he’d pause, head cocked, one crampon tilted at a toothsome diagonal.
“We just need to walk in the opposite direction of the sun,” Hollis said.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” he demanded. “The sun moves east to west and we started out coming from the east.”
“Don’t yell at me.”
“That’s not what I meant.” The hardness dropped out of his voice. “We have a long time before dark. Don’t worry.”
I sighed. The glacier was tongued between mountains, but we hadn’t seen their dark peaks in hours. I watched his ponytail sway against his back.
“You all right?” he asked, swiveling his head around. I nodded. “Stay with me,” Hollis said.
Sheaves of clouds skated on the wind and the ice glittered each time they broke.
“I think we’ve been walking longer than you realize,” I said after a few minutes of listening to our crampon spikes puncture the ice. “I think the sun’s in a different place.”
“I’ll take care of you. We can do this,” he said like he hadn’t heard me. I was pretending, too, smoothing over my panic with each step, but I continued to follow him.
A bird passed overhead and I lurched forward and grabbed his arm. The bird just had to be a sign that we were nearing land. Even after it disappeared over the horizon, we stood with our heads tilted up and remembered the arc it had sketched across the sky.
…
My sophomore year of high school, I’d see Emily in the hallway after fifth-period choir, often with a rangy girl called Julie. Both of them were seniors. My cousin was thin, her hair long and pale. She was into science. She wore black to disguise the way heat undid her, or else wore layers of outmoded, light-colored clothing in diaphanous fabrics: tunics and long skirts embellished with sequins or wan fur. Her parents thought secondhand clothing made them look poor, so she left and returned home in the cheap clothes they bought her and changed in a bathroom or her car.
She called one Friday evening and invited me to an all-night diner. I went through three different outfits before she picked me up. We sat in the smoking section and she laid a pack of cigarettes on the table. We’d brought our homework. She worked on a chemistry assignment in a notebook. I read Ernest Hemingway. Furtively I scanned the room for people I recognized from school. They moved from table to table, laughing and smoking. At the time, I imagined everyone cool to be of a kind—a tight, clever network of those who were stylish and had one thing they were extraordinarily good at—and so I was confused about why no one came over to talk to my cousin. Elderly women occupied the booths along the far wall. Middle-aged people filled out the room, probably workers the glass factory had laid off when it shut down a few months before.
The room was so hot that sweat dripped from Emily’s face onto her paper. She held her water glass over the notebook to catch the drips. She melted in the heat and also when she was agitated or upset; her doctors had taught her to collect this meltwater and drink it back into herself. Every time the bell above the door jangled, she raised her head and looked over my shoulder.
“These old ladies must make them crank the heat or something,” she muttered. I snorted. She’d pushed her wet hair back off her face, and her cheekbones gleamed. I shut my book around my finger and asked what she wanted to do after graduation.
“Keep working, I guess,” she said. A peal of laughter came from a nearby table, and Emily ducked her head slightly. She wrapped one hand around the water glass but didn’t drink from it. “Hollis said he’d go to Alaska with me.”
“Can I visit?”
She lowered her eyes and tapped her fingers against the side of her glass. “It gets really cold.”
“But you said Hollis was coming,” I insisted.
“Maybe you can get your parents to fly you up for a week.”
My heart started to pound. Frank and Mavie chronically struggled to pay their bills, which they tried to conceal from Emily. Her family seemed strange and comical to us, old fashioned. The inside of their rented duplex smelled like freezer-burned ice cream. Mavie was my grandmother’s younger sister, and she insisted that she was three years her husband’s junior, though she was actually eight years older, Surely Frank handled their finances and paperwork, yet he never seemed to find out. It was like the world before empirical science, when one might look at stars or the horizon’s curve and see only the dark and the flat.
“I can save up,” I murmured.
“Do you even have a job?”
“I’m fifteen.”
“Right.” She lit another cigarette. “I check out when someone mentions graduation. I can't wait to get out of here.” She laughed, and my heart slowed down.
In her terrible handwriting, she scratched a broad column down the center of her notebook page. I opened my book and closed it. “I think I can get a music scholarship if I keep my grades up.”
“You can. You’re really smart.” Then she slid her glass off the page and clapped her notebook shut. “Hey, I have to meet someone, you want to come?”
“What for?”
“It’s just this guy from work. My parents think he’s sketchy, so we have to meet in the park.” She rolled her eyes and smirked. “It won’t take long.”
She waited as I put on my coat and hat and wound my scarf around my neck. “Don’t you have to drink your water?” I whispered, motioning at the glass. She smirked again and drank half.
We drove to a park with a couple miles of wooded walking trails and a stream, and play equipment on a hill. The parking area was flanked by drifts of plowed snow. Emily’s was the only car in the lot. She did not bother to run the heater. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and kept her eyes locked on the rearview mirror.
“Did Hollis tell you we’re going skiing in Mankato with Julie over Christmas? Her boyfriend’s family’s got a place up there they never use.”
I felt a quick lift in my chest. “I’m usually in rehearsal when he comes for dinner. We’re doing Cats.”
“What’s Cats?”
“For the musical. I play Grizabella. We’re all these cats, and we move just like cats, and all the lines are poetry.”
She compressed her lips into a thin line and exhaled. A car turned onto the long gravel driveway toward us, then backed up and returned to the street.
“Do you think I could come with you guys?” I asked. I unbuckled my seatbelt, drew up my legs until I could rest my chin on my bent knees, and wrapped my arms around my shins for warmth.
“I’d have to ask Julie. We’re just taking one car.”
She turned on the radio, scanned through the stations, turned it off. “I miss hanging out with you,” I ventured. “I miss Hollis since he’s graduated.”
“You wouldn’t want to hang out with us,” she said, not unkindly.
“Could we turn on the heater for a minute?”
“He’ll be here soon. You could go for a walk or something.”
I flushed. “Okay. I’m kind of cold just sitting here.”
“Sure. Hey, I’ll take you out for real before I leave over break, all right?”
I mumbled something affirmative as I fumbled up the lock through two pairs of gloves. I walked to the edge of the parking lot and looked at the icy trees. Another car turned in from the road and drove toward us. Snow crunched under my feet as I went up the hill to the swings. The air burned my cheeks, but I pumped my legs to propel myself as high as I could. At my topmost arc, I could see the adjacent golf course behind the shag of frozen branches. All the diner coffee I’d drank roiled in my stomach.
I gave Emily twenty minutes, but when I returned, the windows were iced over thick, parking lot lights speared gold across the windshield. Smoke seeped around the window edges. I knocked on the door, but she knocked back instead of opening it and her friend started to laugh, so I went to the golf course alone. New snow fluted across the hard-packed swells. I looked up at the moon and stars and thought I would get so far away from this town and this family that the constellations themselves would be unrecognizable. Like the Incas we talked about in school, I would know the stars only by the darkness between them.
Originally published by Eleven Eleven. To order a copy of this journal, go to SPD. Part 2 will be posted on Monday, 9/28/15.
Pigs can’t skin themselves. My husband says this to my son every morning over cereal. He says it to me also, but when he says it to me it’s because he’s being a jackass. This is an English word I learned recently from the pigs.
The pigs agree with my jackass husband. “You can’t hold a knife without opposable thumbs.” They grumble at each other, “And anyway, it would be a violation to do our own skinning. You wouldn’t embalm yourself, would you, New Wife?”
“I might,” I tell them.
- -
When my husband first drove my son and me in his pickup truck from the airport to his confinement, I knew there must be pigs somewhere, but I couldn’t see them. Low metal buildings nested in rows a dozen deep. My husband pointed at a lake a few miles away.
“Lagoon,” he said. “No. Not ever.”
My husband’s favorite thing about me is that I am not good with English.
He took us through all the buildings, his chest puffed out, his face scruff barely concealing his grin. I couldn’t see what he was so proud of. There were hundreds of pink pigs in each of the metal buildings, crammed into pens so tightly they couldn’t move. Two males in what I now know to be the fattening pen screamed and ripped savagely at each other’s hides. In one building, there were crates of pregnant mothers too round to stand. In another, blind, staggering piglets bleated weakly as men in rubber suits clipped their ears and tails.
My son, a lover of pigs, giggled.
“Their faces bleed,” he laughed in Hungarian, his eyes full of their bared teeth.
“Enough,” I would have said, had I known the English word.
- -
My father was a pig farmer all his life. Before him, his father was a pig farmer. Before him, his father was a pig farmer. Before him, his father was briefly a jeweler for Austro-Hungarian aristocrats, and then he became a pig farmer. My husband is a pig farmer. One day, my son will become a pig farmer.
My father’s pig farm was a wooden hut and a beech forest where furry pigs ran free over the roots of white trees. Hungarian pigs are not the bristly, immobile masses my husband raises. Mangalitsa is their real name, though my son called them “woolies.” They could be mistaken for sheep, they have such thick, curly hair. The sound they make when they snuffle in the snow is like the kindest sort of laughter. I loved to run my hand through their black and creamy curls and then smell their musky oil in my skin. They are good, wild pigs, and my son rode them like horses and slept with them in the forest until the first snows of the season, when I made him come to the hearth. On winter mornings, my father shoveled a path through the snow to the house of the pigs so I could bring them warmed water and our steaming dinner slop. Their grunts echoed against the vast, crispy ice. “Thank you, Moon Face”, they called to me. The white walls rose beside me, the stars glittered down, the mountains crumpled like old leather faces.
My husband’s pig farm isn’t even called a farm. Nevertheless, he works with pigs, however bristly and immobile, and this is why I married him. Love has nothing to do with it; he simply put his hands to my nose so I could smell the pig on his skin, and then he offered me two visas. My son, my new husband and I were on a plane within hours.
- -
“Make for me a grand soap bowl tonight,” my husband said to me on my first night. “Make what?” I asked. My son blinked up, uncomprehending. My son had no understanding of English beyond the words “pig” and “leaving.”
“A grand soap bowl,” my husband repeated, angry. My husband is American and not fond of repeating himself. “I will be cold from the [word I didn’t know], and I will like some soap.”
“Yes, all right,” I answered.
While my husband toiled in the cold of the word I didn’t know, my son and I made a grand soap bowl. All afternoon it took us. I had smuggled with me a small box of salo, made from my father’s pigs, and I carved the oxidized fat from the upper paprika-orange layers, which my son scooped into a large pot. I boiled and rendered and strained, then emptied the white puffy stinking fat into a large silver bowl. When the soap was hard, I gave my son and myself each two metal spoons and we set to carving out the bowl.
When we neared completion, my husband arrived home at dusk. He stared down at us where we sat at his kitchen table. My sleeves were rolled past my elbows, my son’s hair curled with sweat, and the kitchen was coated in the thick smell of pig soap.
“Where is my soap?” he demanded.
I held up the silver bowl. “Right here, husband.”
My husband tightened his fist. My son stared.
“Where is my soap?” he said again, slowly.
“Soap?” I asked, hesitant.
“S-o-u-p,” spelled my husband. “Soup.”
“My English,” I pleaded.
My husband erupted in laughter. It hurtled out of his muddy, smeared body. He clutched the edge of the table to keep himself upright. My son flinched and held his spoon out in front of him, as if warding away evil.
“Oh, poor wife,” my husband laughed. “You are too stupid for your own good.”
“I…sorry?” I tried, unsure now if even that was the appropriate phrase at this time.
“Yes,” he agreed, patting my head like a child, “I know you are.” He looked at my son. “Isn’t dumb mommy very, very sorry?”
“Soup,” my son said quietly in English.
“Look!” cried my jackass husband. “Even your five-year old son can say the right word!”
- -
“You’re just here to slum it with us,” the pigs in the third fattening pen say. They’re wrong. I like the way they sound. The words they use. The pigs in the fattening pen are crude, and I like way they curse each other with names like “crackle” and “chop,” “hock” and “rind,” as though they’re preparing their minds for the divisions of their bodies after they go to slaughter. I like that they can understand me. Pigs always do.
“You can’t just come into our pen and act like you belong here,” the pigs say.
“Let me stay,” I beg.
“There isn’t room,” says a pig whose ear has been bitten off. He has long scars running all across his body. The other pigs like to pick on him. Now he picks on me. There is a clump of fecal matter smeared on his nose.
“Go bother the mothers,” says the pig who clicks his teeth. “They’re always talking.”
The pigs snort together in agreement. Then the pig with one ear knocks into the pig who does all the biting, and they snarl at each other. Just in time, I step lightly past the flushed bodies and out through the cage door. The fight is so loud I can hear it rattle the tin siding.
- -
My husband does not abide by my son’s “peasant upbringing.” He clips my son’s hair and keeps him in clean shirts with small, embroidered men riding horses on the lapel. When my son is allowed to see the pigs, it is on an arranged occasion, and my husband is the one to take him. He leads my wild boy through the aisles of contained animals. He doesn’t like me being in the confinement, but he can’t legally stop me, and I refuse to stay in the house on the hill.
When I am inside the confinement, the workers don’t talk to me, or even look at me. They stomp past in their rubber suits without even a head nod. They have eyes only for the pigs, and I’m sure they don’t trust the boss’s wife. They leave me to it.
“New Wife, will you scratch behind my ear?” whines the mother pig with the high voice, but I can’t reach it. There’s no room. The mothers lie in tight crates. Without space to move, they must let their urine and feces squirt from their bodies through the grated floor to the concrete below, smearing trails down their skin that irritate and sting. They can’t raise their legs to scratch. I imagine the hooves jabbing their uterine walls. I remember pregnancy. I hated every minute.
“New Wife,” say the mothers, “where are you from?”
“I am from Hungary,” I tell them, extending my hands to stroke the spaces between their eyes. A worker pushes past me, looking down.
“What is Hungary?” they ask.
I speak of my father’s map of Magyar Királyság, the Kingdom of Hungary – the “real” Hungary, he used to grumble, “To its full extent, before the Treaty carved it up into the little plot of land it is today.” That was what he said, right up until he died. My father was not so different from many Hungarians. Even now, if you go into Budapest and you sit down in a dark bar, and you say to the bartender, “Bartender, tell me what Hungary used to be,” this bartender will glare at you and bring out his own map of Magyar Királyság, and he will say to you, “One day, when we finally rid ourselves of our government, we will be whole again.”
The pigs nod, their cheeks brushing the grated floor, though I realize they don’t know what a bartender is, or a map, or land.
“We had pigs in Hungary,” I say. “They ran the length of forests and found meals in the snow.”
“They ran,” says the mother who is quiet. “How lovely.”
- -
My husband likes to observe rituals when he comes home at the end of the day. He kicks off his muddy boots at the back door, in the “storm room,” where one goes to disrobe when they are dirty. (The front door is only for clean entrances.) While I sweep up the crusts of earth, he takes out his small knife and cuts off a piece of the grand soap bowl I made. He scrubs up and down his forearms and soaks them in the sink under hot water for ten minutes. Then, he likes to sit down at the dinner table and eat, in a circle around his plate, the things I’ve cooked for him: first the meat, then the potatoes, then the vegetables cooked in pig fat. These three actions in this order, every time.
A month into our marriage, I was eager to practice my English. We’d held real conversations only twice, and I wanted to know him. I cooked for my husband one night a lovely mound of pork belly. My father used to call it Abált szalonna, boiled bacon anointed with good Hungarian paprika and garlic. Though in Hungary, we ate it cold, I knew my husband hated cold meat, so I served it to him hot with raw slices of onion.
We began our meal in silence. My son loves Abált szalonna, and he noisily chewed the tender fat. My husband poked at the rosy lines suspiciously for several minutes. Then he shifted the plate and started with the onions. I ignored his change in routine and kept my hands folded in my lap, where they sweated. I reviewed all my verb tenses.
“Husband,” I said slowly. “How was your day?”
My husband snorted and slurped an onion slice. “It was fine. Damn pigs are eating too much, I’ll have to cut back on the corn feed I’m getting from Purina Mills.”
I understood all the words in his sentence. Pride colored my cheeks.
“Did your father keep pigs also?” I asked. I yearned to know how my husband learned to farm pigs.
“Yeah,” said my husband. “Taught me everything I know.”
“My father also,” I said, pleased.
“Huh,” said my husband. “Didn’t know that.” He looked down at his plate. He turned it again and speared a piece of pork belly with his fork. He bit off an end. “This is good,” said my husband.
“My father’s recipe,” I beamed. I motioned at my son. “We ate it at his birth.”
My husband stopped chewing. He stared at me. I frowned. Had I used the wrong tense? Perhaps “birth” was not right, and I should’ve used “day of birth” instead?
“His birth,” mocked my husband. “Was your [word I couldn’t remember] there too?”
“My what?” I asked.
My husband was beginning to get impatient. “Your [word I still couldn’t remember].”
I sped through all the English words I’d memorized before this conversation, desperate for a familiar definition. The way he’d said it made me think it was a slang term. My husband lost patience. He slammed down his hand.
“His father,” he snarled, pointing at my son. I felt the blood flee from my face. A brief image of my son’s father – the dark eyes that crinkled joyfully, the one night I saw his naked flesh – flew in and out of my memory. My husband must have seen the image, too. He picked up his plate and threw it at my head. Had I not ducked, it would have shattered my face the way it shattered against the white, tiled wall. My son looked between us, chewing.
“You’re with me,” said my husband slowly, the way he does when he wants me to know that I am the most stupid of all wives. “Forget him.”
So I did.
- -
The mothers are bored today. They get to gossiping quickly.
“I want to bite that worker who cleaned my rump this morning,” grumbles the mother with the birthmark. “Who uses that much water pressure? I’m still leaking from my asshole.”
“Remember when Slackteat licked the blonde one?” says the mother with the tooth-shaped scar on her shoulder.
“How he blushed,” says the mother who laughs at everything.
“You would have liked Slackteat, New Wife,” says the mother with the scar.
“Slackteat?” I frown.
“One of the ex-wives,” says the mother who is sad.
“What happened to her?” I ask.
The mothers shift and twitch their hooves. “Bad blood,” they murmur.
“I liked Snowhair,” says the mother with the high voice. “Even if she was only around for a month. She was so beautiful.”
“Beauty – fuck! We lasted longer than she did!” barks the mother who laughs at everything. The other mothers catch it like children. Their laughter becomes a dull roar.
“Why was Snowhair here a month only?”
“All of us wives get bad blood,” says the Quiet Mother. “On every farm in every state.” I lean over her crate, but the mothers hear the white food canisters being filled. They swing their necks wildly until their cheeks can touch the tapering mouths of the feeding canisters.
“My hocks are killing me,” says the mother who is sad. She sighs.
“Shut it, Slagskin, and eat,” snaps the mother with the birthmark. She parts her lips to reveal her white teeth and slavering tongue. She suckles from the great white teat. Gray slop runs down her rosy chin.
- -
Rain will come soon. I walk the path that trails up the hill, and when I am halfway up I stop to look at the house in front of me. The windows, large and clear, give me a yellow glare that cuts the gray evening into pieces. Past the porch, I can see my husband sitting on his leather couch, his face cast blue by the screen in front of him. My son pads over and climbs beside him. He drinks a box of juice. His face begins to blue. I turn away.
The wheat fields bristle up and out like worn, brown fabric. My feet lead me over loose stone and hard earth, away from the confinement. Five feet from the lagoon, the air is suddenly hard with stink. I pull out a rag from the pocket of my jeans and hold it to my nose. I trip and crumple and cough.
At the lip of the water, the trees curl. Grass rots where it touches the still surface. Long, white tubes protrude on stilts, lines of sludge trickling from their lips. I stare at the water. It is the wrong color. It is not dark, not any kind of blue. It is pink. Resting in the purple muck along the shore is a small, pale crescent. I lean down to examine it properly. It is a tiny piglet, a fetus, no larger than my hand, veined, blue-stomached, its legs not quite formed beyond nibs, its eyes squeezed and its mouth stained red with bad, bad blood.
- -
“Mother Pig,” I whisper. The mothers are sleeping the fitful sleep of the imprisoned. I want the mother who is quiet, but I cannot find her face in the dark.
“Mother Pig,” I whisper.
“New Wife?” someone squeaks. I tiptoe to the left. There: her distinguished cheek, her wide, sad eye roving. I put my mouth close to her ear.
“I saw the lagoon,” I murmur. “There was a dead pig.”
The Quiet Mother shivers.
“What is the lagoon?” I ask.
“Our waste and our dead and our afterbirths,” she says. “The ex-wives. All of us. Every farm has one.”
“Every farm?” I whisper. I cannot make sense of the pink poison. Surely I am misunderstanding her English.
The Quiet Mother moans. “Yes, New Wife. Every farm. If you fall in, they won’t find your body.”
“Slackteat and Snowhair,” I say.
“And you,” says the mother. “And me.”
A light at the end of the confinement clicks on.
“Run,” hisses the mother, and so I do.
- -
Our silence could be navigated by ship, it is so wide. I stand beside the bed, naked and ready to fulfill my nightly requirement. My husband stands opposite me in his white boxer shorts, his penis protruding between the short’s slit. He rubs his face, the sound of bristles loud in the room.
“Come to bed,” he says finally, hauling his body onto the mattress. He kneels in the center, pats the space in front of him. Come here, his hand is saying. But this night is not a night when I can hold my tongue and close my eyes and wait for it all to be over.
“What is the lagoon?” I ask my husband.
“What is the lagoon,” my husband repeats.
“Yes,” I reply.
“No,” he says. “This is like the soap-soup thing. You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Yes, I do. What is the lagoon?”
“Disrespectful cunt,” he says. He raises his hand and brings it down on my face. I laugh.
“I am Hungarian,” I remind him. “It will take more than a slap to break me.”
“Let’s test that theory,” he says. His eyes glint.
- -
There are two types of violence to use against a wife.
The first is the smart of the dominating gesture and with it the clarifying pain of understanding one’s place, and if it is not beloved, it is at least a learned action.
The second is the pig kind. The flaying of the body. The butchery. The consumption. The fury.
My husband uses my pig body and leaves me, my mouth stained red, curled on our bloody bed. He locks the door on the way out.
- -
My son scratches at the door.
“Mama,” he says quietly.
When I do not answer he tries the handle. It will not open. I lick a corner of the bed sheet and rub at the dried, crusted blood on my inner thighs.
“Mama please, when will he let you out?”
As long as my son still speaks Hungarian, I can continue to lie here silently.
“Hey,” booms my jackass husband’s voice. “Want to see the pigs?”
My son is led away.
- -
After three days, the door unlocks. My husband stands in the doorway. He hasn’t shaved. His beard makes small curls across his ruddy face. He sneers at the sight of me and stomps to our closet. He throws me a white summer dress. It is raining and cold outside.
“Get dressed,” says my husband. “We’re going to the lagoon.”
- -
My husband wears a white mask, but I am forced to hide my nose in my elbow as we approach the lagoon. It is even pinker than I remembered. The white pipes slip their goop into the sludge. The sun sits high. The flat sky presses down. Standing in rubber suits with masks on their faces are three workers, one much shorter than the other two.
“Mama,” shouts the small one, “look at me!”
In his hand is a leash. My eyes follow it to the pig it is attached to.
“New Wife,” says the Quiet Mother. Her belly touches the ground, swollen with unborn pigs. My feet sink into the purple muck.
My husband calls to the two workers, “This is the one?” The two workers nod. I have never heard them speak, and even now they stay silent.
“Do it,” my husband says.
My son tugs on the leash. The Quiet Mother begins to scream and cry, digging in her heels.
“Please,” I say to my husband. I tug on his arm but he wrenches it away. “Son,” I yell in Hungarian, “you must stop!”
My son tugs harder. “This is my job, Mama,” he pants. “I am learning to be a pig farmer.”
I try to move, but my feet are trapped. I am shin deep in the muck of the dead. I watch the workers and my son push and shove the Quiet Mother until only her head can be seen above the pink. She gives me a wild look, and she disappears.
The trees shudder. My son stands. My husband takes my chin in his hand and yanks.
“Disrespect me again, and you go, too,” says my husband. His spittle lands on my cheek.
My son looks at me, uncertain, and waves.
- -
I prop open the pen doors. I guide the mothers to standing. I lead the multitude out into the moonlight. I teach them to walk again and then to run. When they run, they carry me on their backs. It’s like flying. It’s like coming home. I ride the pigs, wild once more, into the brown fabric of this country. The land is ours. The wind is ours. The babies bounce in my arms. The mountains rise from the flat expanse to take us back into their folds. We sleep in a pile of pink, measured breaths. We raise our young to be strong and wild, clever and true. Berries and sweet swamp onions become our meals, and we sing the song of being whole again. My hands teem once more with the smell of slop.
Here is another ending: I prop open my legs. I guide my husband to where he desires. I lead him to the moment when he is grunting and his eyes are closed. I teach my arm to hack the kitchen knife through his thick skin. When he dies, he bleeds all over me. Relief keeps me breathing hard. I drag his body away, wild again, into the pink lagoon. The farm is mine. The pigs are mine. My son rests tight in my arms. The silent workers fade away like shadows at dusk. We work together, my son and I, in the pens of pink, measured breaths, killing each mother, when her time comes, quietly and eye-to-eye. The meat we now eat comes from peaceful pigs, and there is no fear on my pig farm. My hands teem once more with the smell of slop.
Here is a third: I prop open the oven. I guide my head inside. I lead my hand to the knob. I teach my lungs to stay flat. When I die, I leave no blood. My husband buries my body, wild again, in the black earth. The farm is my son’s. The language is his to choose, the television his to watch, the money his to inherit. My husband stands beside him. In the pens of pink, measured breaths, the pigs are silent to my son. There is no shared language there. He spends his life in a country where no one makes their own soap. His hands are clean of everything.
I, New Wife, stand in silence in the cold and the muck. There are three endings for a story like this. I make my choice.
Originally published in Caketrain.
