Tiny Silk Strings

All my teeth are being pulled out by tiny silk strings. The pain is perfect. Like an orchestra of only violins in complete and beautiful discord. Or the desperate gasps of life being choked out of a thousand cats. The strings are whiter than my teeth but they are black. Like the eye of a blind panther, raw and rich and endless in the white hot sun. There is no blood. I want there to be. It would be more alive. I want to scream in agony but my voice is far away. I follow the line of the strings to see they are held miles away in the most delicate pink hands. Hands so soft and innocent, they look like they lack bones entirely. Just perfect and soft and innocent. I know these hands. I made these hands. Yet I cannot place them. I look up to identify them and the sun obscures my vision. An eclipse, total and complete. There is a jolt. I ride the pain back to myself. A familiar thought strikes me in the gut. I know something I already knew but I cannot place it. Something that is mine is slow and distant and foreign. Lightning strikes the strings but there is no storm. It’s quiet. Obscured images of the foreign familiar thing race past me and I cannot catch them. With a deep breath, I try again to scream and the lightning finally reaches my incisors. And there I am. Hot and awake. In my bed or the chair in the sun room or the chair in his room where I once rocked him back to sleep, to soothe him, to assure him the world is good and that I would always keep him safe, the shape of my trembling left behind. My constant craving for sleep is cruel. Because it happens every time. I go there to find him and I fail.

Georgetown, South Carolina

It happened again this morning, as it does. It wasn’t still dark but the sun hadn’t come up yet. I know how to ride it out now. I need it. I took off my socks to feel the cold and the grain of the wood. As I walked through the house, the air and the quiet felt hard and full. I ran the sink water, the hottest it gets. The steam rose in from of the window, the sink filling with the filth of the dishes. I stared through the steam and plunged my hands into the heat. The assault was validating. This was reality. I watched out the window and a ribbon caught on a bare tree branch. It wasn’t perfect. It fought the wind. It fought the tree. I felt the wrinkles in my fingers from the dirty dishwater. I felt the grain of the cold wood with my toes.

The sun bounced off the window and I closed my eyes in it. The phone rang and shattered the light, the silence, the full cold.

“Hello, Mrs. Young.”

“Yes.”

“Good morning. How are you?"
I had nothing to say.

“I’m calling from Dr. Ross’ office.”

“Yes.”

I listened.

And then I knew I had to be new again for you.

I have to find him so I can let him go and be better for you.

Where are my blueberries?

Where are my blueberries?

A hot breeze lollygags down Canal. Its arms and legs are cigarette smoke. Its mostly unbuttoned, lightly wrinkled shirt is water and bourbon. Its face is the unfortunate mug of the mouth of the Mississippi. Its hair though. Its hair is gardenia and sweat and allure, disarming, hurtful, and turned the corner before you looked up.

Good question, son.

His laugh is so secure. I want to trust him. I want to take him to my kitchen. To feed him and watch him make faces at the newspaper.

He’s never coming home.

A door of red-painted wood and cloudy glass flashes open. The brass handle smacks against the brick. The ghost of a mean old lady floods the space in front of you. You walk into her. She runs her long, bony fingers down your arm. She smells like nothing. You know she wore yellow often but was never happy. She drank.

Canal Street — New Orleans

No one knows. No one knows. No one knows it was me.

Every few steps, Canal Street assails you. It’s clamoring for more of you, for less. The discord is unbearable. But it is yours. And theirs. Can you even stand it? Can you share it? Can you ever have it? Its smoke arms grab at you. Its jazz lips call out your name. Are you more? You doubt it. So far, you know you don’t know.

I forgot to lock the door.

Everything will be fine because what else would it be? Your guts are ravaged, you think. Your spleen is in the gutter. Your esophagus is everyone’s now. It’s no secret. You love it. You couldn’t be anyone else, any other way. You can taste the salt of your exertion, the same as your surrender. The morning is over.

The balances are off. I left the lights on and that will only make it worse.

The din cannot be differentiated. It has all melted together. It is a dirge and a Doo Wop and a sneeze. It is yours. You belong to the clash and the romance and the forgottens you just stepped in. Your shoes are not your shoes. Are they hers? The heat rises off the brick.

I’ll never go back. Every day I’ll never go back and now I’m just late.

It is also tomorrow. The bells are farther away now and you are fatter. Her earring throws the light through a window. You watch it shatter. The light. You want to laugh. But that didn’t happen.

It’s ok, sugar.

You want to say thank you but you just keep moving. You’re late but it’s already done.

Jane

“When do I get to be the queen?”

“When you’re ready. And when I’m done.”

“Ok.”

Then we held hands and bopped through our kingdom.

Fourth of July — Jay, New York

“Jimmy! Put that frog – where did you get that firecracker? John, why aren’t you watching your son?”

I wanted a sweater but I couldn’t wear one because Jane said these were dresses for summertime.

“Jane, Janie, Jane, Jane,” I whispered. She didn’t look down but she held my hand and led me to a table full of cookies and cakes and pies and popcorn and everything bigger than my eyes. I stared.

Jane piled a paper plate up until it caved from the weight of all the things I was not supposed to have. Clouds and clouds and clouds of frosting stared back at me. Sprinkles fell from the clouds onto my fingers. I looked around. And licked the evidence off my left hand.

“Jane, Janie, Jane, Jane.” She took the plate from me and one star-shaped striped cookie was lost in the lawn. It was ok because there were so. Many. More. Janie took my hand and led me to a stump, over behind the tent a little.

In my excitement to regain the plate, I forgot about my balloon. Sitting on the log like she told me to, I couldn’t reach the plate anyways. So I stared up at the darkening sky, watching the red balloon turn blue as it left my world.

Just before the my balloon went all the way to heaven, while the flicker of red still twirled in the blue, the first white blast of the night popped off.

I fell backwards off the log. I gasped. I coughed.

Before the tears could form in my eyes, Jane’s laugh caught me. And then she laid down on the grass beside me. With our feet up on the log, we watched my balloon vanish into the spidering smoke the blast had left behind. Everything was fine and I was happy there with Jane.

Houndstooth

"Mom, why are their heads so shiny and their backs so scratchy?" Angela whispered to me as she giggled with the straw of her apple juice box lodged in the space between her two new front teeth.

En route New York to Washington Club Car. Robert Frank. 1955-56.

"Not nice, honey," I said, kissing her head. What do you say? I wanted to tell her mostly that I'm just in awe at her curiosity. Has a child ever wondered so much? That fascination comes - without any curiosity on my part - from her father. Alexander was in love with the world. And so, not me. But if it took that disaster to give the world Angela, then thank God for Alexander. 

I have to say that sometimes, for a rare fleeting moment, I miss him. Those are always the longest moments. And so big. When snowflakes get caught in the corner of Angela's lashes. Alexander. When I smell lemons and feel the feel of acrylic paint. Alexander. When it's totally, eerily quiet in Brooklyn. Alexander. 

Those moments are always longer than these trips back and forth from New York so Angela can see him. I don't want our inadequacies to deprive her of a father, or even of Alexander's good traits - however entirely absent they may be from our relationship now. I can't even look him in the eye. I think the him I miss isn't even him any more. His increasingly gorgeous body just vessel for a stranger. The only parts of him I still know are probably different now too; I'm just not invited to find out. The smell between his neck and his clavicle. The double-blink when he's trying to decide if his cooking or painting or rearranging of furniture is complete.

This guy's jacket is like the great-grandchild of the chair Alexander had in his apartment when we met. That was it. Just the chair, a lamp, one pot and all his many nations of painting tools. I hate that jacket.

My arm is falling asleep because Angela's asleep on it now. I hope the look of a houndstooth jacket will one day mean so much to her. I hope he would have thought me if he saw this jacket. I hope he doesn't know I wanted him to ask us to stay.

Plume

Marna Czerkowski gently shut the green, hollow door with her right hand. The brass of her worn wedding ring clicked against the brass of the door knob. The ring, now almost fused to her bony finger, had been getting loose lately. Her left hand met her left brown with relief. It didn't help the ache behind her eyes any more though.

She paused, facing the door. As Marna exhaled, she blew a green paint chip onto the bare, blond floor. She flipped off the light switch; up for off, down for on, an oddity George had always found endearing and American about their home. With the gray December afternoon light flooding the kitchen and keeping her company, Marna picked - one by one - the pound cake crumbs off her formica table, the color of salted pistachios. She brushed them from her hands into Norma's tea cup. A few crumbs stuck to her hands. She wiped them carefully on her clean, white-with-red-stitch apron. Those crumbs mostly fell into the apron's pocket that Marna had sewn onto it before the Christmas dinner she and George had hosted in 1953. 

The clanking of the pink plates and the tea cups and the polite tea spoons all made Marna cringe; so she quickly placed them in the sink with minimal splash and went into her and George's bedroom. She put on her mother's tan tweed jacket, relishing the touch of the rich navy silk lining on her dry, December skin. The smell of George's cigars puffed off the coat as she settled it on her broad shoulders. Marna buttoned the coat up and noticed her hands. She quickly fled the thought and scurried around their neatly-kept bed to the window. 

Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey. Robert Frank. 1958.

She threw it open.

The air assaulted her.

She was grateful. Marna stood at the window with her eyes closed, smelling tweed and cigars and the bite of the air. The wind silently commanded Norma's flag against Marna's window. Norma had always been a fine neighbor. Marna qualified her bossiness as concern, but not without reserve. Marna took in the cold until she could feel it in her teeth and her toenails. Then, she returned to the kitchen to finish tidying. The cold followed.

As Marna finished the dishes - the three plates, the two tea cups, - she noticed the steam where the cold air met the hot, hot sink. As the dish water drained, she was sad to see it go, leaving only suds. Marna wiped her hands clean on the red (now practically pink) dish towel she always kept hanging on the oven door. With a few drops of dish water lingering on her hands, Marna undid the tie to her apron and let it hang from her long neck. Minding her carefully-pinned "blonde" hair, Marna slipped the apron over her head and placed it on the table to rest. 

She looks up. 

The flag flaps against the window in the bedroom behind her. She turns to return to her and George's room, instead finding her hand on the only other door knob in the apartment. Marna tiptoes into the third room, carpeted for quiet, and finds herself perched on the other well-kept bed in the apartment. Not a wrinkle in it, in 20 years. She stares across the room out the closed window, listening to the flag flapping in the other room. Marna closes her eyes again, as her left hand returns to her left brow.