Beginnings of years, each random thing is an augur. I sleep unwell, is that life now? Make tiny adjustments to furniture. Poem is a four-room house.
We walk several miles, see many animals at the zoo. “What the living do”: they pace aroun d, eat, content enough to be bored. A moon bear. A Bactrian camel.
This elephant stands there so casually, one back leg crossed. She’s 39. She’s younger than me—she so enchanted/entrenched with time.
I want time that deep. A trench, an intractable arrow. I want not to know what I want, I want to want nothing past tomorrow.
Caravaggesque
There’s a scene in The Hustler you once heard described in another movie. There’s a hole in the future, hope rises up, hope you don’t want.
Years pass. You see The Hustler. The scene floats out from the screen like a soul leaves a body, a memory of someone else’s dream.
Sunday now, train in the mist, you look at the cars on the other bridge. Is life always like this—doubled, removed, and thus understood?
As in a famous painting of the Magdalen, her candle positioned to watch itself flame in a mirror, which also is framed, it also is paint.
Once, while traveling alone to see family, I saw Tom Hanks at the airport. He was also alone, just walking with a coffee, and it was definitely him.
I love movies, and I even love most of Tom Hanks’s, so I was flooded with an urge to run up to him and ask what he was doing, where he was headed, and maybe what movie he was working on.
But the moment passed. I was too shy, and he kept walking, and I looked down. By the time I looked back up, I’d lost him to the terminal.
After boarding and finding my seat on the plane, I began beating myself up for my cowardice. I should’ve been brave and struck up a conversation with him or something. After all, Tom Hanks isn’t an alien or a god; he’s just a human being, and I’m a nice guy, and there’s no reason we couldn’t have had a perfectly normal conversation. Hell, maybe he’s lonely.
Maybe it’s like when there’s a car crash on the highway and everyone assumes someone else has already called 911, so no one does, resulting in no one coming to help the people who need it. Maybe Tom Hanks is so famous that most people are afraid to speak to him because they assume everyone else is always approaching him, resulting in him never having anyone to talk to.
Maybe what Tom Hanks longs for more than anything is a simple, friendly conversation with a fellow human being, assuming the person didn’t overstay their welcome, and since it was me, I knew I wouldn’t have. I would have bailed at even the slightest hint of his discomfort or annoyance. I should have risked it, but I didn’t, and now he’s gone, and when I tell people about seeing him, they’ll only ask if I went up and asked him for his autograph or something, and I’ll have to say no. I’ll have to look them in the eye and say nothing remotely interesting happened.
My thoughts circled thusly as the plane filled with passengers. To try and take my mind off my missed opportunity, I searched the in-flight movie selections for a Tom Hanks movie, but none were available.
That’s when I saw him again—Tom Hanks, the real Tom Hanks—walking down the aisle of my own plane, coming right toward me.
I had a second chance. Sure, it would be awkward. There were people behind him who wouldn’t have wanted to be delayed by our conversation, and I’m sure Hanks himself would’ve hated to be the one whose detainment increased the annoyance of those behind him. But maybe it was worth it. I’d just convinced myself I’d missed a big opportunity for me and for Tom Hanks by not engaging him earlier. What if the concerns about holding up the line of boarding passengers was just another excuse to chicken out?
I quickly tried to think of something better to say than simply asking him what movie he was making next, hoping I could come up with something that would seem like a valid item of conversation between any two passengers—maybe something practical and related to flying, like a question about frequent-flier miles or seating assignments, so the people behind wouldn’t feel like I was just fawning over a celebrity—but I couldn’t think of anything, and once again, and as soon as I’d seen him, he was gone, having walked past my row, into the depths of the plane.
You can imagine how my self-flagellation escalated in the next few moments, realizing I’d missed the same opportunity twice in a row. I wondered how I’d ever gotten anything done in my life at all, given my obvious predilection toward paralysis at the moment when the hand of fortune presented me with an opportunity to do something actually memorable and interesting. Had I lived my life in such a way as to specifically avoid having to do anything memorable? Was there anything memorable about me at all? It was going to be a long flight . . .
Or so I thought . . . until Tom Hanks sat down beside me, having returned from placing a bag of his in the overhead compartment two rows behind.
He didn’t even ask me if he had the right seat. He just sat down, and a moment after I thought my chance to prove something vaguely significant about my life by interacting with him proactively had flown me by, here he was a third time. Inches from me. I could smell his musk. I had the measure of the man in ways few do. Now there would be no excuse for me not to act.
The flight was three-and-a-half hours long. I had that long to come up with something to say to him, and I already suspected that a simple “Hello” and “I’m a big fan of your movies” would be sufficient. For me, there was no better feeling than to already have a good plan and then, on top of it, to have tons of time to come up with a better one.
Ironically, due to Tom Hanks’s own proactivity, I never even got the chance.
As soon as he saw me looking at him in a way that told him I recognized him, he smiled warmly and asked me if I’d seen his latest movie. I gave my honest answer—I hadn’t—though I did assure him that I’d seen most, if not all, of his other movies, and in the theater, too.
“It’s just that I haven’t been to the theater in a while,” I explained. “Just busy, I guess.”
He absolved me with a wave and told me not to worry about it whatsoever. Then he asked me if I wanted to see it.
“Your movie? Sure. I’ll see it as soon as I get a chance.”
“No,” he said. “Do you want to see it right now?”
I must have looked stunned.
“I’ve got the final cut saved right here on my phone.” He lifted it. “Want to watch it with me?”
“You . . . want me . . . to watch . . . your movie . . . with you . . . right now . . . on this flight?”
“Only if you want to.”
“Oh my God. I would love to.”
We watched the whole thing.
I’m not a movie critic. I neither loved nor hated it. It passed the time, and it made me think, if only a little. Maybe it made me feel a little more than it made me think. But it was unquestionably thrilling to watch it on the phone of its star, with that star right beside me watching it with me. They say movies are best experienced in the theater, and until today I would have agreed. You’ve never really watched a movie until you’ve watched it with the star, almost touching, as they hold up the screen, tilting it toward you slightly so that you get the best angle, as if their whole performance is personal and meant for you.
After the movie ended, I still hadn’t gotten over the coincidence of Tom Hanks himself taking the seat next to mine on a flight and showing me his latest project.
Is this the greatest day of my life, I wondered, or just the oddest? Or is something exactly this odd simply something everyone experiences eventually? Lots of people have strange celebrity encounter stories. Maybe they’re just statistically destined to happen every now and again, even to people like me?
Just as I wondered this, I awoke—alone—in a comfortable bed in an extravagantly appointed apartment.
The transition was so jarring, it made the comfort of the bed almost feel like a trap. Where was I?
I went instinctively to the bathroom, and looking in the mirror, I saw that I wasn’t me at all, I was Tom Hanks—the real Tom Hanks himself.
Of course the apartment was mine. This was where I lived when I was on the East Coast.
I took a piss and brushed my teeth and thought about my dream and what it was about—me fantasizing about being someone who was afraid to meet me, and then thrilled to meet me, and even more thrilled to watch me act in a movie with me beside them, holding up the little screen. Whatever it had meant, it wasn’t flattering. Was I too obsessed with my own career? My own self-image? Did I not have friends? Real friends that weren’t business partners or filmmaking collaborators? Did I secretly pine for random people to approach me and tell me they love my movies? After a career of playing different characters—from the comedic to the absurd, from the ordinary to the neurotic, from the stoic and heroic to the doddering and sad—was I anyone at all?
And after waking, had the fact that I hadn’t even remembered who I was until I saw my reflection in the bathroom mirror meant that I was no one at all until I was being looked at?
And were the only eyes I trusted enough to tell me who I was my own?
Or was my slippery self simply proof of my talent as an actor?
With no one around, with no prestige attached, with no consistent sense of self to accept it, was this moment of liminal amnesia the only awards ceremony that mattered?
As I finished brushing my teeth, I shook all these thoughts from my head and left them swirling away down the drain with the suds of toothpaste. I went to the kitchen and brewed some coffee. I sliced open a grapefruit, poured vanilla granola into a bowl of plain yogurt, and opened my laptop. I had several emails to review from various producers and agents regarding the project that lay before me.
By the time the coffee finished brewing, the dream was more or less forgotten. First, you become someone else; then you become yourself again, only to find you’ve forgotten who you are; then you finally forget that you forgot, and you’re yourself—I can think of no better distillation than this of the actor’s miraculous burden.
The upcoming movie was particularly exciting to me. Even though production was months out, the bulk of financing had already fallen in place, per the first email I read.
The script, too, which was already tight, was getting tighter, and the theme it explored was something I had no small amount of personal experience with. Best of all, the character I was to play was unlike anyone I’d ever played before.
“You’re going to school?” he scoffed, overhearing the word high school.
He clenched the steering wheel as we sat in the 1990 Chevy Lumina van, back windows forced open with PVC, the exhaust from all the other cars hoping to cross back into El Paso from Juarez sinking in around us. Abe, his wife Mary, and their daughter Leah, my best friend, travelled the four and a half hours to Juarez for doctor visits and cheap medications once a month. Over the years I went with them more times than I can remember.
“Well, I went to school too—the school of hard knocks,” he grumbled into the rearview mirror. When I said nothing, he turned his attention to the young man scrubbing the windshield with a dirty rag and promptly turned on the windshield wipers.
In his mind, at fourteen I was best suited for hard work and, in a couple of years, a husband. That evening when we were alone, Leah—who had left school the year before, after finishing the eighth grade, to work as a secretary in her father’s well-drilling business— approached me, eyes low, and said, “Don’t listen to him. He’s just a grumpy old man.”
His moods, mere shadows of what they were twenty-one years before, when he was an alcoholic (“I was a drunk. I am an alcoholic. That’s why they call it alcoholism, not alcoholwasm,” he would always say, correcting us), were still unpredictable, and I knew that. And I knew that in a few hours he would slap us on the back, laughing at some ridiculous joke. An old man joke, the kind that was only funny because he wheezed and snorted when he laughed. Because we laughed at him, not with him. Sometimes I still feel guilty.
I did not question him—his fourth-grade education in a Mennonite colonia in Mexico, his conversion to Pentecostalism that left him strict but sober. His unrelenting willfulness and stubbornness that allowed him to survive as the youngest of nine children in an abusive family. He made sense. What didn’t make sense was my own education. “Yeah,” I thought, “high school is important, but what about the school of hard knocks?”
As far back as I can remember I had been told by my parents—high school teachers and Bootstrap University graduates themselves—that I was going to college. Though I grew up in a county where the sale of alcohol was prohibited and church was the primary social activity (besides getting completely wasted in a caliche pit), my parents were not religious people. The Baptists and Church of Christ preached fervently against dancing, the Methodists said everything in moderation, the Mennonites fought with each other about what was considered worldly, and the Catholics and Holy Rollers danced, one in the flesh, the other in Spirit, but as for our house, we worshipped education.
My parents grew up in the Midwest during the steel strikes and riots of the 1970s and fled the Rust Belt for the Sun Belt in the early 1980s. My dad’s father was a “mill rat” while his mother raised five children in a fog that we now know as postpartum depression. My mother, on the other hand, didn’t meet her father until she was in her twenties after having been raised by a single mother with schizophrenia. My family legacy, together with the fact that I was the daughter of government employees in a blue-collar community where illiteracy was not uncommon, reinforced my understanding from an early age that I was in a position of privilege. Education, my parents maintained, made all the difference.
My friends’ fathers were truck drivers, oil-field hands, farm laborers, and carpenters, and their mothers were homemakers or worked long hours as home health aides, LVNs, gas-station attendants, Walmart associates, and as maids and school janitors. Their kitchens became like holy places to me, places not only of love but also of education.
Around their tables is where I learned the words “WIC,” “CHIP,” “free and reduced lunch,” and “Indigent Adult Medical Coverage Program.” We ate red and green birthday cake in July made from expired mix with Christmas trees on the box donated by the grocery store to the local food bank. While we ate, drank, and laughed, one of the favorite topics of conversation was rich people who didn’t know how to do shit. Lawyers who left their dirty underwear in their dry cleaning. Foremen who didn’t know how to hook up jumper cables. Doctors who didn’t know how to put on a sling. Bankers who insisted that their maids roll up the Persian rugs before dinner parties so they wouldn’t be stolen. Teachers who—well, they never said anything, at least in front of me, about teachers.
In the summers when I was a teenager many of my friends worked hoeing cotton with their families, and later, after they turned sixteen, they got jobs on spraying crews. They said they probably could hook me up if I wanted to come with them. They knew somebody who could talk to someone else who could talk to the boss. I asked my parents, but they said I couldn’t because the work was dangerous. I think they were ashamed that I wanted to work in the fields after all their hard work and education.
Sometimes at night I lay awake, afraid that I would grow up and not be able to do shit.
But before my insomnia and the incident on the border, I sat in an assembly at Seminole Junior High, in my hometown, Seminole, Texas, population 6,000. We squirmed in the oversized auditorium seats because we were about to register for our middle school electives, which meant that after the summer was over we would practically be adults. But before we could mark an X on choir, band, or art, we had to listen to a bald, thick, administrative type talk to us about success and education. He launched into some platitudes about us becoming “young men and young women” and “thinking about the future.” I don’t remember much else because after his introduction he made a comment that still ranks high on my list of most ignorant statements I have ever heard, even after all these years.
“Success,” he bellowed, before pausing for dramatic effect, “isn’t just something that you fall into. You have to work for it. As a matter of fact, you can tell who has been successful just by driving around town and looking at people’s houses.”
I was ten years old and I already knew it was bullshit.
I slunk down in my retractable chair, narrowed my eyes, and crossed my arms across my chest. Who was this over-educated asshole, who probably didn’t know how to turn off the water when his toilet was overflowing, telling my friends that their parents were unsuccessful? Thus began my contentious lifelong relationship with authority and institutions—my activist education.
Now, a substitute teacher in El Paso, I sometimes walk into a classroom only to be greeted by a poster that showcases several luxury cars parked in front of a mansion with the caption “Justification for Higher Education” plastered across the top. The same poster that hung in my classrooms growing up. Each time I see it I want to rip it up ceremoniously and give students, teachers, and anyone else in the immediate vicinity an education that they didn’t ask for. But, the bell rings, I look into the spectacled eyes of an owl perched beside the chalkboard over a placard that reads “There’s no substitute for a great teacher,” and I know my place.
Some days when I sub, students stab each other in the face with needles, throw rocks at windows, and get up in my face and ask, “What are you going to do about it, bitch?”, giving me an education that isn’t pleasant but that I still want…most days. Growing up middle-class makes me shrink back sometimes, but dammit, I press on. I know my blood is lined with white trash women who can survive! I find the ability to go back to the classroom again and again when I am able to make a connection, an enemy, a friend, and sit down together to talk, to laugh, and to listen.
Last week I subbed at a GED center for students on probation. When I asked the room monitor if the teacher had left anything for the students, he pointed to a table of sixteen-year-olds with buzzed heads and white T-shirts and said, “These gentlemen have been socializing instead of doing anything productive. You can sit down if you want to hear about the gang life—who jumped who, who got busted by the police, and what party was the best. But, you know,” he sighed into his newspaper, “it’s whatever you want.”
I looked back at him and laughed, “Maybe I can get educated, right?”
He smiled, shook his head, and returned to the morning’s headline: “Nine More Dead in Juarez.” I grabbed a social studies binder and pulled up a chair next to the boys.
I’ve come to understand that the most important moments in my life, the ones that shaped my values, my goals, and my day-to-day decisions, seemed to be about getting the education that I missed. The education that my parents tried to shelter me from but inadvertently propelled me toward. I can’t stop knocking on the door of the school of hard knocks. To see if I can make sense of what I see around me and to ask if I’m seeing the right things. To see if I can find my mom and dad, grandma and grandpa, aunts and uncles. To see if I can find my friends who stayed behind when I went to college. To see if I can find my friends (Leah among them) who said, “Fuck this shit, I’m going to college.” To see if I can find everybody who never came back and everybody who never left somewhere inside.
Three Poems
by Kevin Bertolero
Interiors
Outdoors in Eastwood & there’s all this
shady breeze on the lawn by Blessed Sacrament.
Everything now feels like clarity to you
/ remember smoking a bit from the back porch
watching Planet Earth then crying
to several hundred walruses leaping from
that cliff in the sub-Arctic all that
land haulout & melted sea ice they had
nowhere left to go.
From the moment you arrived the air
was changed / handsome organism
who needs a bucket to scrub
all the Massachusetts from himself,
/ that queer accent
—how driving sometimes, you see the sun
come up over tips of pines & it feels
surreal, reminds you of that November you
found yourself waking up
in someone else’s bed, standing
to look over the land / admiring
that new foreign kind of snow.
Ogunquit Painting Poem
So many changes upon this fresh arrival
—check out all those artists painting summer
on the outcropping or that bluff
which sees the offing—as if a new school
had formed in some general fashion & what is
this if not just another early-in-the-day poem
which I’ll try not to treat like some autobiography
/ a document or some flecks of dry skin.
On the gay beach there are men
who look like they want to be called daddy
& there are those who do the calling / now
back to Dover in the evening where the sun
sets kind of funny in a way that
just tells you what it is not what it’s like.
Riverside In West Forks
Two feet in the Kennebec
& slipping on little granite stones
for hours [smooth geology]
strawberry moon keeps
running water light enough
to see those skipped flatheads
against some shadowed
white mountain ridge
& more friends stumble down
the steep path to join us
[now twelve feet in the water]
& when the wind picks up
we huddle
closer modulated breathing.
If someone were to find us now
there’d be no sound.
Kevin Bertolero is the founding editor of Ghost City Press and is the associate director of the Kettle Pond Writers’ Conference. He holds degrees in literature from Potsdam College and the University of New Hampshire, as well as an MFA from New England College. Kevin is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Love Poems (Bottlecap Press, 2020), and a nonfiction book on gay cinema, Forever in Transition (Another New Calligraphy, 2021). Follow him on Twitter @KevinBertolero.
“up and down the ladder” by Robert Couse-Baker is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Sky, Ladder, Cow, Lantern, Lake, Flowers, Heaven
Shane Jones
From the novel Young Forest
The hotel PDC was found online for two hundred dollars off the original price. Melanie had celebrated with half a beer and then immediately felt guilty because she imagined the alcohol infusing with her breast milk and brain damaging Julian. In the room I stood looking at the massive sand colored tub before deciding to lay down in it to see how large it was compared to my body. I could easily fit seven of me inside it and I wondered at what size a bathtub becomes a hot tub, and laughed to myself, alone in the hotel room. It had no jets and finely detailed clawed feet, so technically it was a tub. The rest of the room was dark, eggshell white walls and maroon carpet with black diamond shapes along the edges. I couldn’t stop laughing at the size of the tub. Even when I checked in the hotel manager commented on the tubs, arrogantly stating they had the largest of any hotel on the East coast. But what about the West coast? I had asked. I stood with my bag in one hand and holding the card for Athena in the other. What about it? You said this hotel had the largest tubs on the East coast, which is an interesting thing to mention, you didn’t say it had the biggest tubs in the country, which I probably would have accepted, you said the East coast. I surprised myself by the way I was talking. Maybe Athena’s work was influencing me. Portland, Oregon, said the hotel manager. It’s called The Foxtrot, owned by my brother. He heard about the tubs here so he installed even bigger ones there. That’s crazy, I said. No it’s not. Brothers do that sort of thing. Any time we stayed in a hotel Melanie made sure the room had a tub. She would pay extra for one. I never used them until the hotel PDC, where I had to take a bath in the largest tub on the East coast, and besides, my legs hurt from walking all day; the stress of finding my brother and not hearing from Melanie was exhausting. The warmth of Athena’s sun was still in my stomach. After the tub was filled I climbed in and closed my eyes. Because of the size I kept sliding into the water. Even when I did go under my feet never touched the opposite side. Next to me were folded washcloths neatly stacked in a thick triangle labeled heaven cloths, and soaps labeled soothing stones, and a Velcro headrest labeled sky cloud that I attached behind me on the tub wall. I checked my phone and made sure the volume was on. Still nothing, and the worry I had earlier was surprisingly gone in the comfort of the tub. Since Julian’s birth I couldn’t remember the last time I slept more than an hour stretch—now my fatigue had maxed out. I thought I was going to fall asleep during the meditation, or maybe I had, I couldn’t remember. I had slept maybe twenty minutes on the train and had momentarily fallen asleep across the backseat of the cab. When I closed my eyes I immediately fell asleep and saw four treehouses in four trees, waking once because I thought I heard my phone vibrate. I reminded myself to call Melanie again when I woke up to tell her about my trip, how much stranger everything had become, but still no idea where Nick was. I would also call my father and let him talk about Horse, hoping he would talk about my brother or my mother and what she had done that day, but I knew he wouldn’t. He would discuss Horse and what he was fixing around the house. Finally, I let myself relax. I envisioned the field. I dreamt about the hotel I was currently inside of. Nothing was different in the dream, and I found myself inside the dream telling myself how boring the dream was with just me walking into the hotel, nodding to the manager in a BIG TUBS t-shirt, riding the elevator to the fourteenth floor, and walking into the room where I laughed uncontrollably at the tub. The dream didn’t feel like a dream because I could move around inside it, I knew it was a dream, I could experience it and I could make fun of it. I checked my phone again but still didn’t have any messages. An intense hunger—my stomach held an empty heat. In the hallway the lights were bright pink, the carpet sun yellow with skinny black stains, and every door to every room was open. Cats were passing between the rooms, and at the end of the hallway stood a horse, inferno red. As I walked, I looked into each room and found a new environment, a new setting. The cats similar to Horse moved around my legs and I sat down to pet them, letting their bodies slink under my hand before continuing on. In one room I stood at the doorway, the hallway light behind me bright pink, and viewed a wide field and a lake on the hotel window. In the lake was a floating cow and two people swimming with ropes, attempting to rescue it. They brought the cow to the shore under a sun seemingly made from construction paper, and the longer I watched, other details I realized were drawn, colored with crayon, cut from paper and childishly taped down at the corners. Someone had hole-punched the sky, making ovals of white light—it was more beautiful than real life. At the shore, a family of four walked into a dark transparent gas rising from the dead cow’s mouth. It formed a bag around them. Then the lake began to smear like brushed paint to the far right side over the trees outside the hotel window. The next room was much darker, but still held the appearance of something created from paper, pen, tape, crayon, and scissors—in the middle tree branches were mended in a triangular structure. The light in this room came from a pile of burning flowers at the top of the structure, and I was in there, climbing one side like a ladder. I stayed in this room until I reached the top where I began speaking at the fire. A man standing at the bottom of the structure, who had previously been motionless, turned and was sucked into the wall. The last room I had to get on my knees to be able to see what I was looking inside of it was so short, which was connected cabinets with children stuffed inside. I stuck my head in. I heard my mother and father in muted voices from above. Hunched over, my brother was in there, surrounded with papers he was furiously writing on, single words on pages reading: SKY, LADDER, COW, LANTERN, LAKE, FLOWERS, HEAVEN. When I crawled a little closer, I noticed the hiding cabinets were made of cardboard. How long I stayed in this room I’m not sure, easily much longer than the others, and as I stuck my head as far inside as possible, reading my brother’s papers, I tried to speak but what came out was an amphibian groan of hot air, and one of the cats, scared from the noise I had made, slipped past and over my brother’s lap who just kept writing the single words on entire pages, furiously flipping the pages. I continued down the hall with the cats following me, trying to see if one of them was Horse, they resembled her, but each time I looked closer a white spotted foot, clipped tail, one eye green the other blue would tell me it wasn’t her. I kept walking but it didn’t feel like I was walking, more like I was telling myself to walk, seeing myself walk, but not feeling it. At the end of the hallway the horse had been replaced by a man in hunting gear who wore a red hat low over his brow, a black flannel jacket thick with muscle, and from where his eyes sat in shadow two blue lines moved vertically off his jaw. A rifle was strapped to his back, but he wasn’t menacing, rather, I felt comfortable standing in front of him, so I asked if I could leave the dream and he said why, this is what you’ve always wanted, and I said what I wanted was to see Julian, I couldn’t remember his face, and the hunter raised his arms—I braced for him to hit me—and his fists came thrusting downward through a pool of water.
Shane Jonesis the author of six books, including Light Boxes (Penguin 2010), Daniel Fights a Hurricane (Penguin 2012), Crystal Eaters (Two Dollar Radio 2014) and Vincent and Alice and Alice (Tyrant 2019). He lives in upstate New York.
Three Stories
by Ashley Mayne
Scarsdale
Every time she rode the train from the city that winter, she saw the house in Scarsdale. Colonial white, a peaked roof. A backyard choked with trees. One in a row of similar houses, though less immaculate.
A black cellophane bag twisted on a branch. On windy days she’d see it inflate like a torn black lung, sunlight punching through it.
They were together in the house once. His paintings everywhere. Displayed and stored, leaned against walls. There was a portrait of his wife standing in front of a garden shed in calico. A face of sharpened innocence.
Another woman’s icebox. Another woman’s couch. An eiderdown like a cold snowdrift. A cat purring on the sill. The lace band of her underwear scratched her thigh.
It rained that time. Rain fell in the orange rinds in the ashtray, and in the champagne flutes they’d left on the porch, one half-full and the other empty, each with its own hollow chime.
That airless gasp. The pained sheen of his eye. A shudder in her brain, a hard, dark star.
He told her she’d made him feral. A crow out of a cage. Dear God.
When a stranger on the train spilled into a diabetic swoon, everyone tried to give him candy. He’d slumped in his seat across the aisle from her. She moved next to him and grabbed for his hand.
Pray, someone said.
The look the man gave her as he came out of it: something she’d never seen. Not even in her lover’s eyes, in the house. He would carry the sun in his mouth for her if she asked him. If she stayed by him through this.
Her roommate over drinks: How well do you know him really? The artist?
She said: Where do you think he was when I was a child?
A painting of the Williamsburg Bridge, not the girders but the spaces between, embryonic shapes of light. The sugary orange from his fingertips burns her mouth. In the skeleton trees behind the house, she sees him tall as her father.
One of her earrings went missing that time. She worried about it later, riding back on the train. Thought of his teeth against her ear, the click of gold on bone. Had it fallen in the eiderdown? She knows he’s capable of having stolen it.
Or maybe it dropped in the backyard. In the deepest leaves, in the black earth no one sees. Gold glistening like the seed of next year’s sun.
They’d put out the cat in the rain that day so it wouldn’t stare at them, laughing at themselves. The cat stalked off across the backyard to shelter in the garden shed. She saw it for a moment from the window, over the arm of the couch, before he pulled down the neck of her blouse.
It turned back once, betrayed, mewed from the far side of the yard. It had a child’s voice.
The Deep
Your mother calls you from Astoria and says: I was like this when I was waiting to have you. She says a lot of things. Nettles for iron. Blue for luck. Breathing exercises.
You look up nettles in a field manual. You tell her you’ll go cut some by the well in the woods behind your house. But really you want a cigarette.
You bought the house at auction for a prayer. Another woman, a girl, lived in the house before you did. You worked for a non-profit in the city, fighting the good fight. But now you need someplace no one can find you.
The postmistress in town likes to tell you about this girl. Long hair, sang like an angel in choir. The usual. Until she thinks she knows you, and it gets weird. A sad, lost girl with secrets. In trouble is what she says. Not crazy or knocked up.
She looks at you and waits to see what you’ll do. You stand there without speaking, holding your junk mail, grocery store coupons, keys, and thinking: It’s the country, maybe you really should have a gun.
Then the postmistress tells you the girl was alone for a long time, in the house that’s now yours. Where was her mother, anyway? Where were her kinfolk? For months, this woman tells you: She didn’t attend church, didn’t post any letters. No one suspected anything. It would have been rude to try the lock.
You think of the pale spot left by a rug at the foot of your bed, the place where the girl once said her prayers. Of the tap that leaks and probably always has. Of the dust on the baseboards, the cigarettes in your desk, the water stains making wolf tracks on the ceiling around that one light fixture. You wonder if the girl ever felt safe here.
The postmistress wants you to say something. So you say, When did you know she’d vanished?
She tells you a bird flew against one of the windows. Broke a pane. Ladies from church finally came by with lamb casserole and noticed how the air exhaling from the house was cold.
The house went up for auction. She had no family, bless her heart. Oh, honey. Would you like to sit down and rest your legs?
It’s a sad story. What did you expect? You imagine it: The house, the well, the dripping faucet. Darkness moving on the face of things.
The postmistress rings you up for stamps and packing tape.
Somewhere you heard Charles Darwin saw the word mother on a Scrabble board and said: There’s no such word. And you like sad stories, or at least you did. Before you left the city, a man went off the Brooklyn Bridge. He removed his shoes like he was getting into bed and left the sky and the air, escaped into the water. Disappeared the way men do. Left his shoes waiting like hopeful little dogs for him to come back up.
You really should call your mother.
You can see the well in the woods from the window of the old house, breathing damp air. The cell signal is always bad. Afternoon. You stand in the middle of your bed and stretch to hold the phone toward the ceiling. Her voice, so far, so small, sounds like the wind around your ears when you were a kid floating in her sight on Lake Winnipesaukee. Those floats they used to have when you were young, lungs on children’s arms, what were they called? Water wings? Something made for flight, for jumping the blue. Something an angel would have.
You pace in the house tonight and the baby kicks you. A foot against your hand under the skin. This presence, you and not you.
It’s only now you wonder what disappearing will be like. The way a girl can vanish. The way an animal’s breath fades slowly from a window. The way God doesn’t exist, all over everything.
When you were small you cried in your mother’s arms and she was the invisible world. Summer in the eighties. A Volvo 240 wagon, packed to the tops of its windows: fishing poles, sunscreen, jigsaw puzzles, Call Of The Wild. Ribs of the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson. Your family’s annual summer flight from the city. That cabin on the lake.
A meteor, a mockingbird. A yarn god’s eye hanging in a tree. She was God with a birthmark on her breast, and you cried in her arms, sunlight. The dust of your lashes left a mark on God’s blue dress. The white, ghost strike of a bird’s wings on glass.
Lake Winnipesaukee. Your mother held your head above the water. When you swam in her, she breathed for you.
The damn bathtub. Still that wire of rust locked in the porcelain. Baking soda isn’t going to cut it. In the leaves by the well there’s a lost shoe.
You’ll have to throw out the cigarettes in the morning. In the woods, where no one will find them. Not even you.
Song
You hear that car accident song in June, before you know. The refrain: Take me. You think it’s a love song. He thinks it’s about death.
White Wolf Tequila and an old Nikon. His head flung back against the night sky. Take me.
All summer a forest unspools in film ribbons from his eyes and mouth. You touch him, and his body shakes. You hold onto him ‘till you can see his dreams upside down on the dark grass, and you take in these images, all of them. Too many frames. Too fast to see.
Your body fills with old light and you hold him. You never imagined you could hold so much.
Wait, you say. Take me, too.
You know what your arms have been for all your life.
#
He leans down in September, jaw scraping the corner of your forehead. His body now a delicate, hard machine taking him somewhere else.
So you spool the ribbon back, play it again. Backward, forward, half speed, fast. You live in black and white now, the way an animal does. But there’s nothing in these frames you haven’t seen. Maybe that flicker right there. A ghost on the lens. His gorgeous eyes. The shadows of cars sliding upside down across the ceiling of a room where a man smokes in bed. Now a collared dog, tied up. Now a hypodermic needle. Now the rafters of a crawlspace. Now a child’s birthday party. A boy running his hand down the neck of a grey guitar.
Did he see time when his eye was on you?
Or have you been an old fear all summer, something wild in the house? What was he saying yes to, the times he told you yes? When he shook against your body and the two of you lived in colors, wanting the speed no one survives. When you became another kind of dying.
#
The summer’s over. October comes. You hear that song in your head on the back of a motorcycle, take me, and your arms around somebody’s waist say yes to death. Death doesn’t love you back now, though it will someday.
Grace presses in. You’ve never fallen faster. The engine is a wolf shaking. The trees on this country road flicker until they blur together, form a white tunnel of light, and you hold on, all your life. Hair slices behind, wind cuts across your throat between the helmet’s chinstrap and the broken leather collar of your jacket.
Just your arms holding time.
Ashley Mayne’s work has appeared in Fence, Post Road, Juked, Peripheries, Blight Podcast, Metambesen, and elsewhere. She is one of the founders of Crystal Radio and edits fiction at Fence.
