The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far

by Quintan Ana Wikswo

  When I gathered my napkin to leave, she rose and pulled back my chair. Perhaps a walk? she said, and we went out down the staircase, across the ballroom, through the foyer, and into the woods beyond.

  It was nearly a week later that she blushed. And as the blood rushed her pale skin and ruddied it, I felt a kiss form within my mouth and travel down through my throat and viscera and down further, to where leg meets leg in my most tight and demanding place.

  This is the shape of love: a V of care that widens from a finite point, or narrows from a gulf into a well. It is the bottom of a funnel, a cone, a wedge, a fang.

  I became alternately wild and bashful. I avoided all contact, then sought it mercilessly. I began to smoke cigarettes. I stopped drinking wine.

  I sat in my room of red velvet chaise and wood desk and white sheets and watched the insects gather on the lampshade.

  I walked the woods for hours in tight shoes.

  I turned my memory of her face into a puzzle, rearranging it until I could forget the angles of her eyebrows, which at dinner would arrange themselves anew. She would pull back my chair, and again we would follow our past footsteps into the future.

  We would talk toward dawn, a corpuscle flush in the horizon that brought chills and wind and wanting, and we would come in from our woodland walks, and all would begin again.

  It was at the height of our happiness that the old hotel announced a change in weather. A storm approached.

  The geese flew overhead.

  Mice crawled into the walls to die.

  Bats infested the vaulted ceilings in the breakfast rooms.

  It seemed severe, the approach of winter, or was it hurricane, or something worse?

  Those of us intent on survival quickly took to the highest floors.

  She and I found rooms that had known no occupant since the last century.

  We gripped the wooden balustrade, whose ancient beeswax gripped us back, layered and layered, attracting touch.

  Oil lamps lay shattered on the carpet, drowning the startled mites barely extant from another era.

  She was beside me at times, or I thought I could see the nimbus of her head in the rain, but I would squint toward nothing solid.

  The water came first, then the wind, and then peculiar colors lit the sky: magenta, chartreuse, crimson, tangerine.

  All the colors war casts upon horizon, but this in the night, through no human hand.

  I stood on the balcony.

  I wanted to be taken, but tied myself to the post in hopes she would find me there.

  Or did the lightning arrive first, its skeletal electric fingers cracking all along our bones, spying out our soft places?

  And next the rain?

  It battered us in unlikely geometries—wet lines of angular momentum that unlatched windows and doors and smashed them. It took our curtains and clothes and sliced all raw. Exposed, we crouched there, swollen and pliant in the water, our spines and ribs left alone with the work of shelter.

  Then came the wind, wise from the lightning’s reconnaissance: it found our seams and split them.

  We toppled and gave way.

  What folly, architecture.

  What futility is a wall.

  Hallelujah.

  The others died like cattle: crushed, drowned, half-knowing.

  Hers was not among the bodies.

  I buried the rest.

  I knew.

  My red room mildewed to a pink in the beginning, then bruised black and green with mold.

  Next my bed, infested with spiders, celestial navigators come to harbor from out of the floodwaters.

  They charted star maps, constellations of red bites along my flesh.

  As the waters rose, I climbed higher.

  In the attic, my next bed was soon overtaken by mice.

  The damp mattress half barrow, half burrow, writhing in a dank mass of furred bodies. On Sunday mornings, teeth nibbled my toes. At hours that once marked sacred time, my flesh became a new communion.

  Rats left their droppings along my dresser top.

  I first mistook the delicate black fecal whorls for tea leaves; I soaked them in standing water and found them bitter.

  And the waters rose and took that room too.

  Centuries hence, and two girls could come through my ruins and bow their heads into the gloom of a reflecting pool.

  They would know of the hotel, the storm, the broken heart, the world’s near end.

  That future pool is blackened, shadowed; they do not find me there. Their faces glow, distorted through the surface.

  The typhoon rose toward me in a spiral, offering ascension.

  Yet I stayed below.

  When I arrived at the hotel, my hair was black, my skin was smooth, and my toes were crimson manicured. When these future girls come to visit this place, green ferns will have unfurled along my fontanel.

  What fertile skull have I, that allows such snails safe mooring?

  These toes, webbed, gelatinous, fused with scale and fin. We first were gangrenous, then all went liquid: a relief, at last, to abandon castle and become moat.

  It’s impossible to talk of sadness here. Any remaining sense of self must survive unarticulated, decomposed, in shapes and lines that once formed words, but since the storm have unfurled into threads that stitch my layers together, connecting inside to outside and back in again.

  I withdraw and emerge in unbounded states, with edges that cannot be marked and meanings that cannot be defined.

  A barred owl passes by the rooftop at dusk and flies away with one of my mice. It comes back again and takes another.

  Regardless, there will be more tea in the morning.

  I have wondered in what nest this evening hunter rests: there are but few trees, half-burned, and this eviscerated hotel. All else is mud and sea and roughage. The raptor carries bits of meat that had been claws, brain, thigh.

  I braid my hair in a circle on the top of my head and fix it there with sticks. I am ready for a crown of claws, of horns—to take lessons from a predator.

  I want the owl to mistake it for a nest and land there.

  When the waters took the highest bedroom, I broke through to the roof, with no time for provisions or supplies. Now my pillow is wherever I gather my hair into a bundle and sleep.

  Orion takes aim at my closed eyes. I open them for the hunter, and she comes riding in.

  I beg the imagined rescuers: Don’t come for me here. Don’t look for me with your bright spots of dry light.

  I don’t want rowboats, flares, blankets.

  I want earth, pebbles, broken branches.

  Stonecrop. Roseroot.

  Porcupines.

  My love.

  Years have passed since I walked with her through her book of questions in the wood. No, it is not years, but moments, days. I can sense she is here, inside the walls themselves, inside my walls, that there are other lips on the side of this delicious cup of tea.

  Where is the one who knows the questions? At night, I dream in answers, often in sunshine—the sun an orb driving pins of light into my hands, and I wake in pain. I have not seen that yellow planet since the rains.

  My flesh nocturnal, my pigment secret, my sight wary of illumination, and I have the soul of a newt.

  The nose of a mole. A starburst of pink in the middle of what was once my face.

  The shell of a snapping turtle shipwrecked on my roof, picked clean of meat by seabirds, by the single kingfisher that takes all the fish we reach for.

  I peel the black resin off the turtle’s bony shell, and it becomes a helmet, a bowl, a drum.

  I should fill it with blood sacrifice.

  Below the third floor, the eels have arrived. They are languid. This their sanatorium. They have left the confines of the formal garden, their prison of cistern, and swim through what was once their sky.

  Now it is they who reside in the best rooms of this hotel, and I who crouch in my bounded space, captive, dependent, ill at ease.
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  Should I fashion some harpoon? There is no meaning here to anything but hunger. I am eclipsed by need, and grow thinner by the hour.

  I have become a hibernaculum: the eels have found me. Their scarlet tongues taste my breath as they rest in limpid coils of black and yellow, long lines of sex and ease that defy my human loneliness and anxiety.

  They are cool to the touch, and hard as an erection.

  If they slipped through the waters and found but me, am I the only shore?

  Every living thing has a water tale.

  What mythos of creation leaves out aquatic devastation? A lesson meant to teach a humble stance before the cosmos’s mirror.

  Even a birth begins with water, breaking.

  Even the daffodils speak, hushed, of the spring when the creek splits its seams.

  And yet this event unseats me from these stories—I am thrown down, gasping, knowing I have no value to whatever delivered me here, unwanted.

  When I lie on my side to imagine sleeping, I watch the stone roof swell, the pale slate tiles bulge outward in thick pops.

  This roof, my room, turns from a place of hardened angles to a kind of angel, a fleshy place of pale white with freckles of brown.

  But it is not her.

  The rains come down lightly this time, as though offering armistice, or apology.

  When I lie on my back to imagine sleeping, I feel the tiles rise up beneath me as the waters below ebb and flow.

  I rest on a great rib cage. A racket of bone and flesh with heart and lung expanding and contracting. It seems I can smell another’s breath. That the wind, once cold, is warmer.

  Only the moon has not been torn from the sky, and it illuminates the pearl of this place: a roof goosefleshed, prickled, and suddenly sprouting frond and root and stamen.

  So now this, a lugubrious green; my arms are the leaves of lilies stretched across a scum of floor.

  There are mosses sprouting from the hollows of my kneecaps.

  They rest and gaze and pollinate.

  Now the night has come again, the next in an empty sky of new moon.

  I cannot face the chasm, and I lie on my chest to imagine sleeping.

  This floor of my roof, my room, my universe, has grown soft and warm, and I curl into it, gripping its short green hairs in my fists.

  Tonight, a new, soft plant rising up from a crack that grows wider in the slate.

  The moon is new, and I am hungry. From the slate bulges up some kind of fungus, some sort of bud, as though the storm drove a wild spore across a thousand miles to reinter it in the flesh of this hotel.

  In the endless dark and damp, we are growing.

  Have I lost the will to live, or have I lost the will to live as human?

  See how thin I have become?

  My wrists a gathering of sticks, my lips are lichen on a lake of stone.

  Is she this mossy plant, nourishing—could I eat her raw?

  No matter how I pull, it will not release from the wall. Despite my hunger and my strength. The walls themselves groan. The force of my will shall pull this place apart.

  I take this flower in my mouth and swallow all her stars, and she takes my face and covers me with leaves.

  There is a deep sadness that can sometimes be redeemed. When the sense that all is lost becomes unneeded.

  When the lake is sky and stars offer themselves for fishing.

  When inside mirrors outside.

  When all is wet and wanting.

  See here, I say to the emptied, merciful sky, now you are the same as I.

  THE ANGUILLIDAE EATER

  He sucks at my breasts and tugs my nipples, and—with one finger—presses down on the median of me until a single egg emerges from between my legs.

  He smoothes the peak of my hairline and the sweaty locks around my forehead, leaving a residue of my oil on his thumb that will stay for days.

  I am exhausted but will return to the ridge to watch the ships.

  A tall, narrow spritsail, mainmast sprit-rigged.

  Reef point at upper edge.

  Dawn.

  He carries my egg in a waxed leather sack. It rests within a nest of dried seaweed, warm and chalky as phosphate.

  Rain today, as always.

  And later I will return, cold, from the ridge at sundown and build a fire in my hearth.

  As always, it will produce a black haze so thick my flesh itself turns gray.

  But in its dark, gentle heat, I will let down my hair and pick it out quietly with a comb, the small bodies of my lice igniting with a hollow pop in the coals near my feet.

  The men load caskets of eggs into the small boats and take them out toward the holds of the deepwater ships.

  In the men’s deep-floating, double-hulled ships are barrels of eggs packed in dried straw and brown algae.

  Each egg the size of a fist.

  Some with shells fierce as oyster shucks.

  Some eggs, more fragile, have already broken open and begun to cloud, staining the crated hay a viscous black.

  I scrub at my teeth with a handful of sand, and pick out the grains that lodge beneath my fingernails.

  I sit, knees crossed, on the low ridge above the shore, watching the men standing tall in their sterns.

  Jib tacked to stemhead.

  In the mornings, the flat boats leave the shore low to the water and tie up a while at the ships’ sides at high tide, then return, lightened, to be tied up again at shore through the night.

  Night will fall, and at shore the empty boats will float high at low tide.

  Their heavy daytime waterline of stained oak and barnacle raised in the moonlight.

  Dark falls charcoal on the sea.

  The ships anchored far out of reach.

  Orion.

  Cormorants.

  The sailing men are on land with the women.

  The ships are anchored far out to sea.

  The small boats are empty at the shore.

  At dawn they will again be filled with eggs.

  He returns.

  My skin is smooth and pale as duck fat.

  He returns—

  I am more fierce than wolves.

  I have clawed open seashells with my fingers, then crushed and eaten them.

  I have honed my teeth to points with handfuls of sand.

  He harvests the egg with his tongue.

  He leaves with my egg in his bag.

  When he stands shoulder to shoulder with the other men and packs my egg into the morning barrels, mine is the pale lichen white of young fangs: slightly luminous and unbreakable.

  He looks down at a sea pinked with blood.

  My bed is filled with crow feathers.

  He returns.

  We leave my bed together at dawn, and I leave the door open for new air.

  I walk apart from him toward the morning shore.

  When we reach the water, we move in opposite directions.

  The man, with his purse of egg heavy at his thigh, is expected at the ship.

  He retraces his footprints backwards from the night before.

  I walk apart from him toward the south, holding my iron eel rake.

  At times I stop to loosen tiny pebbles with my toes and examine them for size and smoothness. I warm them in my palm, then knot them into the hem of my blue dress.

  The man’s odor still carries to me from the north.

  It echoes the scent of his thumbs on my forehead, and along my spine and thighs.

  I find my usual inlet for eel—a calm place where the sea snakes linger in the silt below seaweed. It has taken them thirteen years to travel from the Sargasso to nest in these cold northern waters of the Baltic.

  Untying my rocks, I swallow them.

  I will wade in—then dive—and sink heavy in the shallows before scything out an eel with my rake and pinning it to a tine with my hands.

  Small. Rough.

  It arches up and twists, tough, but I wring it, and its spine stills after the crack.


  I will walk back alone with my catch.

  A thin fall of blood streams from the eel, its skin cut from my rake.

  I will lay a bed of seaweed over the gray ash and pinecones of last evening’s fire, and later add shavings of rue, birch, linden. My eel steams and smokes as the sun rises slight above the dunes.

  The men stand high in the stern with their barrels of eggs. I can pick out mine by his silhouette. It’s a private matching of night man to day man, and it happens in the ducts between my eyes and the insides of my skull and chest and hips.

  The smoked eel is not yet stiff in my fingers.