Erica’s personal dam has been breaking down recently.
Erica imagines scrolling through unread emails and endless feeds in the car.
Erica reminds herself that she is here to take in the scenery, to observe things rustling. Wood, vapor, where the light falls, or doesn’t. She is not here to frantically anticipate, or remember her failures and behaviors.
She walks down a tree-lined path that opens up into a small meadow. Three squirrels watch her from nearby trees.
This meadow is dedicated to the local schoolmaster who would start fall semesters only when the goldenrods bloomed. Here the goldenrods are bent with heavy yellow pollen. Goldenrod leaves can be made into rubber. Young leaves are edible.
Erica’s mother has goldenrod salve above the sink, next to a vial of perfume called Dark that smells like leather suitcases and olives. Erica used to put it on every day.
The trail feels deserted and Erica imagines encountering possible forgotten things on the path:
1. a half-finished picnic,
2. a pair of hiking shoes, midstep,
3. a cell phone still on the line. When she picks it up and says hello, the voice knows exactly who she is.
In an article that Erica recently read online, a group of archaeologists from the Great Basin National Park found a forgotten rifle that had been leaning against a juniper tree since 1887. Perfectly intact. A Winchester—“The Gun That Won the West.” This particular rifle had been shot only once, perhaps as an attempt to communicate something to someone far away, before it was left behind.
Erica currently has seven open tabs on her browser:
1. A Google Flights price graph for a trip she’ll probably never take.
2. A YouTube playlist of “stimulating classical music.”
3. A spreadsheet of due dates for jobs located in places she’s never been to, like Connecticut and the Netherlands.
4. A Google search of “How many wonders are in the modern world now?”
5. A Google search of her name.
6. A Google search of her nemesis’s name.
7. A Google search of the local librarian’s name, who has a level of serenity that she wishes she could have.
Please do not stray from the marked path.
Perhaps if she could obtain a large powerful mallet and pound each individual tree neatly into the ground, then she could be happier.
Once, Erica bought a gray skirt from a secondhand store. It was the perfect length and made her feel like the schoolgirl with levity she’d once been. Before she put it in the wash, she noticed some markings—the times table, the Fibonacci sequence, a Civil War time line, and two phone numbers, labeled Kevin and Hookup, in permanent marker under the front flap. Erica tried wearing the skirt three separate times after washing, but felt weighed down by the leftover noise it carried.
Climbing over rocks of various sizes, Erica follows the path uphill.
Some study Erica’s colleague shared online explained that people who experienced hardship were much calmer and confident when they spent time in rooms that were decorated with indoor plants. But after a frantic azalea purchase, Erica was still so overcome by the demands of herself that she forgot to water it, which only depressed her further.
Erica reaches a bluff, reminiscent of the rocks that lure people to die in Picnic at Hanging Rock. Erica remembers the part where Miranda, in her white dress, takes off her stockings and starts to climb, defying the grasps of the teachers and girls who call her to come back to the world. But Miranda wants timelessness, because that means to want shapelessness, so she disappears into the rocks to get rid of the body and its restrictions on knowledge.
The internet makes it easy to be seen and vanish completely at the same time. “An ethereal corset that traps everyone in the same unnatural shape.”
There are forty-five species of butterflies here. How many did you see, Erica?
Erica wishes she could be the scientist who discovered that butterflies drink the tears of turtles. How he must have felt when he saw one rest over the turtle’s crying eyes for the first time. Maybe it brought tears to his own. How different it would feel to see it rather than to read about it on her phone during morning traffic.
By the end of the walk, a bluebird has seen Erica thirty times, but Erica never saw it.
Rest in Pieces
I am calmly organizing the things on the desk, grouping them with things of similar weights and sizes. Among them are three objects identical in shape:
an orange punctured with cloves,
a paperweight,
and a pink tennis ball,
which I switch around in front of me on days when I feel anxious. My massage therapist, Effie, told me that there’s something about the power of threes that makes the tactile exercise emotionally satisfying. Effie wears the same white calculator watch on both wrists. Whenever she feels the knots in my shoulders, she lets out a low whistle.
This morning at the Water and Power Supply Company, I am early for work. Morning light makes the tenth floor look dusty and discarded. The copy machine is white and muscular like a cargo horse.
A man in a waxed raincoat appears from the corner office, makes a cheers gesture at me with his coffee mug. His eyes are puffed from a yawn, and he walks the length of the office in a slow two-step. I goose-neck for a moment, holding my pink tennis ball, until he disappears behind the EXIT door.
Just me again, alone with time.
I think of everything I need to do, and the thinking feels like hard work. I write down a list of tasks on a sticky note to appear intentional to myself. Around me are lists of phone numbers and calendars, reminders and follow-up appointment cards.
I make a concrete stride into the morning by taking my coffee into the stairwell, and looking out the large window. I stretch my wrists and clear my throat. I imagine the TENTH-FLOOR EXIT sign read in the voice of someone I love. I don’t have time to be down. I only have time to be productive.
The Water and Power Supply is divided between two warehouse buildings on the Shoreway.
There’s the Power building, where the Power people work, and the Water building, where I work with the Water people. Through the window is the brick face of the Power building, where everyone types quickly, and ties large helium balloons to the clamps of their clipboards while they soundlessly install on/off switches throughout the city. The Water people, by comparison, are washed out and ugly like eggs.
One wall of the stairwell is all windows. My colleague in the waxed raincoat is farther down the descending clip of steps, footsteps in rhythm to the tennis ball I’m bouncing.
Suddenly the thwum-thwum of the ball pauses, as it bounces slightly too far from my hand. The ball now dwomps down the staircase, blinking around corners and gaining on my colleague. I peer over the railing vacantly, before deciding to trudge downward to retrieve what I have lost.
The layers of the rainforest are:
emergent,
canopy,
understory,
and the forest floor.
This city has its layers too, horizontal strata stacked one upon the other. From the tenth-floor window I can see the city’s emergent layer of smokestack tips, antennae and roof accessories, the plump and greasy seagulls that bob in the early air and squawk hee-hee over empty parking lots.
From my view high up in the building, I can see the flat palm of the lake and its forty-five miles of water to Canada. In 1969 the Cuyahoga River caught fire by itself—it was a black hole of trash—and slowly emptied into the lake. I envision a horizon of fire, while the tennis ball continues to strum down the steps.
I see a kite propelled by a boat. Both glide along surfaces, impossibly weightless. Somewhere else, I imagine a tanker squeezing through a stream, carrying a monolith.
Following the ball, I now enter the canopy of the city. Around the sixth floor of the Water Supply, I start to see the neighboring buildings, the old chipping signs on the empty warehouses and distant steelyards. A Sp
irit aircraft flies overhead from the airport. My aunt and uncle used to fly separately when their daughter was young, in case one of them crashed.
Now it’s the part of the morning when the middle cut arrive to work, as indicated by the sudden influx of pale and garbled men and women who pull up the stairs, stepping around the tennis ball as it bounds down.
At the third floor now, the understory. The windows look out to bridges, train tracks, and a methadone-clinic billboard. Apartments above an adult video store. Bloom and rust. Groups of attractive people laughing heartily and groups of less attractive people laughing nervously.
The man in the waxed raincoat disappears out the front door while I’m still a floor above him. A bicyclist circles around the block with a bag of Plain Dealers. I watch as the ball rolls through the open door and trips the bicycle, causing the man-and-bike and my colleague to collide.
A pink tennis ball,
a bicycle bell,
and an apple from the pocket of the man’s raincoat
roll into the street. When I get outside I pick them up and swap them back into their proper places, killing time before the next thing comes undone.
Pets I No Longer Have
A duckling that was straggling behind her skein; I pocketed her into my small rain jacket. A rabbit from Petco; I pretended to find him shivering in the garage. My secret kitten who slept in the attic. Seven parakeets, let go, over time, when my father opened windows. A turtle from Florida, forgotten on the rooftop of my parents’ car. Some people dedicate their lives to reptile shows. Some people say “both me and my cat liked it” in reference to movies they have seen. Frogs can recognize their owners; none recognize me. There are albino peacocks kept in the garden at church. They hide their babies on the roof. When the mother bird escapes onto the street she is occasionally lured back with dog biscuits. One day she didn’t return. In a dream, I stuff her in my backpack. The peacock’s periscope neck peeks out.
The Squinter’s Watch
I walk past the park holding some groceries when I see some junk kids gathering around the trunk of a juniper tree. There’s a girl in a hot-pink skirt looking up with her mouth open at a dragon tangled in the branches. It’s struggling to breathe through the leaves. Its silver scales are dented from the grasp of a branch. The boys throw cans at it and the girl says “damn we should probably do something about this,” and takes out a forty-volt lithium-ion chain saw and starts cutting. The dragon regards her with intense feelings of loneliness, and the girl feels powerful to be conquering this armored beast surrounded by juniper berries the color of vodka and sea salt. The wood splinters and the dragon heaves majestically, parting the branches like a curtain and spreading its wings as dragons are depicted to do in folklore, and blows out a curl of fire that engulfs the girl and her hot-pink skirt, while I stand there thinking about how someone probably loved that juniper tree.
Love Language
Biba scoots around in the airplane seat, feeling for her headphones. The upholstery itches and the cool air nozzle is unavoidable. She feels a melancholy for everywhere she is leaving, as though she will be leaving forever.
The passenger next to Biba wears big yellow beads and prays. She prays for a safe landing, but also for death to her husband, and the whorish violinist who took him. During a quieter part of the flight, she turns to her little airplane window and whispers down to everyone below that soon their sweet soul pain will come.
The flight attendant is plump and comfortable like a babysitter, or a sausage, and she tottles down the aisle to make an announcement. The turbulence on the small aircraft gives Biba a bellyache. She wants an Ambien and a kiss.
Over the speakers, the flight attendant whispers, “We are lost.” Various facial expressions pass through the plane. The flight attendant goes on to say that the pilot has “never seen this place before,” how, according to the navigation system, we are passing over “somewhere that should no longer be there.”
Biba stretches to take a look. Outside are bursts of clouds and brown patches. Biba shrugs at the woman with the big yellow beads.
“Looks the same,” she says.
Other, less comforting flight attendants in starched uniforms file through the plane, reminding everyone how to deploy their air masks, urging everyone not to look out their windows.
The clouds and hills are simple and familiar.
The pilot starts to speak over the intercom. He tries telling jokes, and proposes questions for the passengers to discuss, like “what is your favorite dinner dish?” and “where was your favorite vacation destination?” Biba answers all his questions in her head. They calm her down. She feels like she could die peacefully to this. The woman with the yellow beads hisses at a family in the row in front of them, then starts to hyperventilate.
Outside, the sky gradually shifts to a vibrant magenta. Outside, the clouds become spherical and silver. The plane appears to be going slowly, as though moving through something thick. A strange feeling spreads through the cabin, like a body ache.
After an hour, the flight attendants’ voices become shrill, and their brows furrow fearfully as they assemble at the back of the plane, where they take bottles of slivovitz from behind a black curtain. A man in tears joins them. The woman with the yellow beads joins them. They take swigs while looking out, pointing at the abstract and hellish landscape, inciting panic in one another, their mouths gumming down. They drink so suddenly that they drop empty bottles, which cover the floor in shattered glass. Outside, the sky is black, and flames engulf the clouds. There is an evil sound that brushes up against the side of the plane.
Eventually one passenger opens the small exit hatch, as a joke, but then climbs through it anyway, and the other passengers follow, one by one.
After some time the plane is empty, except for the pilot, Biba, and a long hurry of wind.
“What kind of music do you enjoy?” the pilot asks. Biba’s body feels hot. The pilot plays a Strauss piece over the speakers.
“Where do you wish you were sitting right now?” he asks.
“If you could run into anyone at the library, who would it be?” he asks.
Biba hums. Biba wants to ask the pilot questions too.
“Can you hear me?” the pilot asks.
Biba wishes she could walk up and sit beside the pilot. She cannot bring herself to move. He feels like something that appears to be walking closer, but is permanently standing still.
Can he sense that she is somewhere in the plane with him? That she stuck around? She wonders if he thinks about family, God, or someone he loves when he flies. She wonders if he owns pets who greet him with uncontainable joy, and if he holds the door open for people who are far away.
“What will it look like when we land?” he asks.
I’ll hold your hand as we exit the plane, Biba thinks. The terminal is an empty room; it smells like a rubber glove. A baggage boy sleeps in a red chair. We get into your car and drive in the rain. We sit side by side. We don’t say a word. We don’t look at each other. You park alongside the shore. It’s the most comforting thing in the world.
She leans deeply into her seat.
After a long time, she hears his voice again. It is quiet, and she listens for footsteps.
Outside, a grove of lemon trees.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Yuka Igarashi and everyone at Soft Skull Press.
To Jordan Castro for your love and guidance.
To Maud Casey, Howard Norman, Michael Dumanis, and my teachers and peers at Bennington College and the MFA program at the University of Maryland.
To Beata Polek, Kira Scerbin, Matthew Childers, Milo Conroy, Megan Boyle, and Chelsea Hodson.
To the libraries and quiet corners that allowed for me to work.
And, completely, to God.
Publication Acknowledgments
The following stories have been published previously, sometimes with a different title or slightly different form: “Girls I No Longer Know” and �
��Pets I No Longer Have” (Codette); “Doorstop” and “Nearby Places” (Egress); “How to Eat Well” (Fanzine); “Coed Picnic” (Hobart); “The Rope Barrier” (Hotel); “Your Shining Trapdoor” (Monster House Press Pamphlet Series); “Grocery Story” and “Invitation” (Muumuu House); “Winners” and “Flowers for Angelika” (New York Tyrant Magazine); “Sabbatical” (Pacifica Literary Review); and “The Seamstress” (Shabby Doll House).
“How to Eat Well” was also displayed on a marquee board for S1, an art gallery in Portland, Oregon.
“The Squinter’s Watch” was written as a press release for Colin Foster’s solo show at Springsteen, an art gallery in Baltimore.
“The Nearby Place” was included in a group exhibition at Kai Matsumiya, an art gallery in New York City.
© Jordan Castro
NICOLETTE POLEK is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is a recipient of the 2019 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.
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