by Kelly Link
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
July 2015 · Issue 33
Made by: Michael J. DeLuca
Countenanced by : Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 33, July 2015. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731173. Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Caslon.
LCRW is usually published in June and November by:
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Guest Editor’s Note
Michael J. DeLuca
The Humanity Versus the Earth Issue
The Earth Saves Itself from Humanity Issue
The 30% Non-Dead-Tree Issue
The Crying Indian Is Actually Italian Issue
The Women Turning Into Trees Issue
The What the Mushrooms Told Me Issue
The Jellyfish Inherit the Earth Issue
The Critical Mass Issue
The There Is No Such Thing as Critical Mass Issue
The Change Is Inevitable Issue
The Inevitability Is Change Issue
When Gavin and Kelly let me hold the reins (I hope they don’t live to regret it), an issue themed something along the lines of the above was the first thing that came to my head. It’s no watershed moment, much as I’d love it to be; Conjunctions just did one they were even-keeled enough to call The Nature Issue. And there have been anthologies, and even the occasional novel-length text, every few years since the anthropocene started: ideas in narrative form I’d probably never have thought to lump together into anything until I spent a month reading submissions for an LCRW issue I claimed would be themed on “humanity’s relationship with the earth”.
It was gratifying and calming to learn that people other than me and not just the talking heads do think about these things. In fact, the experience bordered on the sublime; it restored (some of) my faith in humanity. This is what art, speculative literature in particular, is for: unrestrained thought in a form that if we let it will touch every part of what makes us human and thereby foment more of the same.
I asked for optimism, I expected cynicism, I got both. We’re not going to make it through this thing without a sense of humor. I tried to find complexity and overlook the easy answers.
Read. Look. Think. Be changed. I hope it makes you feel what it made me feel.
The Sanctity of Nature
Leslie Wightman
behold the trees
trunks twisted and resilient
home to birds
and frogs
and insects
and part of the mighty forest
Now turn,
Say: “Fuck it,”
And go get a coffee.
(Make it an espresso.)
I Bury Myself
Carmen Maria Machado
Here is what you do when you need to choose the end.
First, find a person who knows your body, and fuck them for three days.
Then, drive to a meadow, where there is so much life.
There, dig a hole long enough and wide enough for your body to fit.
Next, climb in.
Then, wait.
fresh
I die, and die, and die.
The first thing I stop feeling is my fake tooth, the one mounted on a screw that is threaded deep into my jaw. I have been aware of it, day and night, ever since the novocaine wore off during a summer afternoon when I was seventeen. The day was hot and bright and long and then it was hot and bright and long and there was something else inside of my body. I could feel it, an alien presence; something hunkered down in my mouth. Now, it blinks out, as if it never was.
The sun leaves the patch of sky visible to me, and when the shadows above lengthen they dip down into my grave, distorted on the walls of clay.
My heart has stilled, a new kind of quiet.
My body is no river, but as it if were a river, my fluids sink like silt. Gravity crawls on top of me, into me, and weighs them down.
My limbs are stiff, like on the days after an unexpected sprint.
There are five stages of decay and five stages of grief, but this is a coincidence.
As for the creatures, the beasts, the living things? I hear them coming.
bloat
Now, inside of me, life again; though smaller than what was there before, legion: blowflies and maggots the size of pencil erasers, all of them working, working. They push up and out and I swell like I am full of want or food or both, and I wonder if afterwards things will grow out of me and my soil, saplings perhaps, who with age will become trees with fruit-bearing branches, the kind of red, red fruit children eat when they’ve gone exploring, and from that slip of life more life will come, more trees and things that can grow beneath the shade of their canopies, and rain will fall, new rivers will cut through the earth because there is nothing more powerful than water and time, and the river will rise and fall and rise and fall with every storm and every summer drought, and from me will come a whole, new forest, and the center of it will be my body long dead, but because I have fed that tree, I have fed everything, and I am the forest’s mother, I am her father, I am her god and goddess, her primordial soup, her progenitor, her big bang, the forehead from which she has sprung, and if a brave young woman were to cut through the forest to its deepest and most tangled interior, on a mission to find a mythical flower that will cure her lover of a mysterious illness, a witch would certainly tell her about me, and send her the center of the growth to find the origin, the source, the holy seed, the bloody uterus of the known world, which is to say, the forest, which is to say, this forest, and she would find the tree above my bones and nap there and dream and know that before her lover grew ill, and before they had touched even once, and before she was born and before the forest spread and before this tree grew and weighed down its branches with red, red fruit, my body was in this grave in the earth, still slick with spent desire, dead, and pregnant with the gases of a thousand nursing organisms, and that I heard the rustle of birds and little creatures tunneling through sandy soil, and once a deer looked down into the grave, right at me, its sharp shovel skull tilted sideways, my face reflected in its inky pupils.
I am deep in the woods and there is no returning home.
active
Here is what falls away:
A history: When I was seven, I couldn’t stop swallowing dirt. And grass, soil, stones, fallen leaves, leaves plucked from branches, branches broken into bites, bark, snails. It gave me powers. It made me immune to the invisible monsters of the world, the kind that traveled to you by innocuous methods: on the fingers of friends, a shared cup, an oyster of saliva dropped into your mouth by a neighborhood bully. Better the germ you know than the germ you don’t.
Fears, all of them: Brain tumors, blood clots, choking while alone, slipping and impaling myself on some otherwise ordinary
object, tripping and breaking my neck, that amoeba that eats your brain, auto-immune disorders, being struck by a stray bullet, the exponentially growing catalogue of cancers, blood poisoning, rabies, mad cow disease, quicksand, ticks and their many diseases, allergic reactions, being cut so deep you can see the color of your insides, flesh-eating bacteria, bird flu. That one day you will be taken by one of these things, and you will be buried—all of this in the passive voice.
An image: A salmon slit at her gut, pink eggs pouring out of her like beads.
A sensation: My mouth filled with tapioca balls, teeth mired in the sleek stick of them.
A sound: My father kept my milk teeth in a box that he’d rattle when I was sad. It made me smile, a gum-gapped smile, that clatter of wood and bone.
A memory: I was a girl once, and my father and I hiked to a summit. He wanted show me nature, tell me stories, pass on some campfire songs, but I couldn’t help but stare at the sheer drops to the valley below and worry about my body pinballing down the mountainside until it was broken, dragged away by wild things. In my mind, I walked off the ledge of stone and pedaled in the air for minutes, like a cartoon character, until I thought to look down into a yawning abyss below me.
A confession: I am afraid of what lies at the bottom of the valley.
A confession: I cannot remember not being afraid.
A story: There is a story of a boy who wished to die, and so he sought out poison to drink. But what he imbibed were sweet things, unfamiliar to him in his sorrow: honey and wine. He staggered to a freshly-dug grave and laid himself inside, waiting for the end. He mistook the heady slur of alcohol for oncoming death. He misheard a local wedding’s church bells for the sounds of paradise. And he died there, of exposure. He did not follow my advice to the letter, and died afraid.
A realization: The worst part about being alive is worrying when you are going to die. When you decide to die, you take death’s power away. This is not the same as suicide. This is not the same as dying by your own hand.
A hand: A bird descends, then lifts with her prize.
The rest: All the things that do not serve me.
They fall away and become part of the earth. They’re her troubles, now.
I am roiling, frenzied, lightened. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so my fear is replaced by nothingness is replaced by life, life, life. My body gives birth to a million others, more useful than ever. It churns like rapids. It swallows and belches and muscles like a living throat. It evaporates. It is rinsed away by itself. It is a sink filled with coffee grounds; a hand circling water around steel until it’s all washed down. My skin slips from its perch like a silk blouse.
Startling, starting, staring, string, sting, sing, sin, in, I—
I tumble off into oblivion, the rapture of the deep.
advanced
The exhaustion of an all-night dance marathon. The body is heavy, but exhilarated. It is rocking, bouncing, fighting sleep. It moves just enough to avoid disqualification. The judges are watching. They’re tapping their pencils on the table and looking at their watches. A glance passes between them.
The body walks home. The pre-dawn sky is marbled, the moon a slit of stone. The air is supple, new, just warm enough. Promise pollinates everything, and smells like wet grass.
The body will age. The body will swap the faint elation of possibility for the white-hot scorch of terror. It will not mean to, but it will: deep, physical fear, muscle-locking anxiety that obliterates all happiness. Don’t you understand that the line between being alive and being literally nothing is so fine you could cross it with a half-step in front of a subway train?, the body tells anyone who will listen. The body will occupy ERs, doctors’ offices, therapists’ armchairs, friend’s couches, all because the body is sure death is close. The body explains that none of this—the body sweeps its arm to demonstrate friends, family, lovers, Klimt paintings, hot bowls of pork broth ramen, stark winter landscapes, the sucking vacuum of grief, karaoke, navigating the New York subway, watching a coyote stalk a rabbit, ghost stories told by strangers, holding someone’s sister’s baby and cooing at it until it pukes down its onesie, dirty martinis, the slip-and-tumble of the first fuck with a new person, being so cold the face hurts, a novel that breaks open the mind, driving fast with the top down, a summer thunderstorm advancing across the sky, the warm bath of the Florida ocean, feeling beautiful, stubbing a toe on a table leg, all of the things that are the cumulative experience of its existence—none of this will matter when the body is in the ground. The more it lives, the more is lost when death finally comes.
The body is not very old when it decides to become more than a body—to become a dense, collapsing mass, to become soil, a sapling, a forest, to give something back—but it feels like it has lived a thousand years. The body learns that it is the inheritor of any number of broken genes and shattered DNA and that the body is even weaker than the body had previously anticipated. This is it, the body decides. Time to get off.
Even maggots leave bodies, in the end. They have better places to be.
dry
It waits. It does not—
Thoughts are not its strong suit.
A clock ticks. Not a clock. But a clock.
Bones bleach the earth, and ferns lace the bones.
Soil might quake. A tree
might come. It trusts
it hopes
a tree
will come.
Winter in the Feral City
Christopher Brown
1.
In the winter I learned that I am better at smelling death than my dogs.
Dogs have a nose for life and a gift for extinguishing it. You can see it when you watch them police the perimeter of the human habitat, doing the core task we have bred into them over the millennia—eliminating our competition from other species. You can watch the way they read the secret olfactory language of the forest, tracking their way to all the burrows in the ground you would never notice. If you let them, they will kill whatever they find and leave it for you to decide what to eat. They are our truest familiars—mediators who articulate the blood-soaked truth about our relationship with wild animals.
It is naive to think you can hack this programming, but I try anyway. I don’t want to kill anything. I just want to explore. So every morning I take the dogs out into the woods where we live, a pocket of interstitial urban wilderness preserved through an accident of industrial downzoning. There are about sixty acres of thirsty cottonwoods and hackberrys along the river below the dam, ten minutes from downtown, hidden behind a door factory and a dairy plant, growing up out of the outlaw landfill of twentieth century concrete debris and abandoned backyard flotsam. There are places like this all over every city, if you look. I spent a decade exploring this one before I found a spot nearby where I could build a house, which ended up being more like a nature bunker, buried in the trench that was left after we persuaded Chevron to extract the abandoned petroleum pipeline that bisected the lot.
Woods like these never run out of wonder, even when you walk them every day. In part because of the river, a powerful agent of geologic change that makes daily deliveries of decontextualized objects from upstream and every year or so decides to reshape the landscape. Layered over this is the liminal mystery of the edgeland—the zone where city coexists with wilderness and uncanny things result.
I can’t follow a scent as well as my dogs. Especially not the smell of rotting mammal I picked up the first morning of December, which was more like a cloud. A warning. I wonder if it was against nature the way I instinctively wanted to check it out. It came from a place that didn’t want me to enter—a patch of dense, weedy woods between the river and the big wetland where the herons like to hang out and watch the planes come in. But I found a way to crawl through the lattice of ragweed, vine and scrub, dragging my reluctant dogs with improvised simian yoga, following my own loco nose to a scene I was not meant to see.
When I saw it an actual frisson of real, deep fea
r ran through me, almost before I made sense of the distorted shapes. Which part was branch, which part bone, which part body?
The clear plastic coated the tangle of wire that gigged the deer. It was a horror show torture scene, the way its big long neck was stretched out in the V of the trees, pulled taut by the cable that tied its rack to the branches. The front legs hung, barely touching the ground, while the hindquarters were starting to dissolve into the shadowed ground. I thought a human must have done this—strung the animal up for cleaning. Then I came around the other side and figured the deer must have gotten itself caught in a tangle of human trash, something the floodplain is full of. No signs of wounds other than those left by the animal scavengers. A plausible path for a fast-moving deer. A pose that could reflect intense struggle, then exhausted resignation.
The dogs were largely uninterested, perhaps wisely. So I took them home. And then decided to return, with a better camera and an undistracted eye. To document the scene, which so captured the dark aspects of this place where human and animal realms collide.
I began to think I wouldn’t find it again. It’s like that back in there, even when you traverse it every day. Tarkovsky Park hahaha. The scent didn’t seem near. Then it scared the shit out of me again. Maybe, I realized, because the pose was so human. So crucified.
I got my shots. I felt on edge, like a foolish journalistic interloper into some infernal reality vent. I settled more comfortably into my amateur accident investigation assessment. Until I noticed the way one of the branches was a big stick, with another smaller stick tied to it, the shape of a cross, or a medieval weapon.
Huh.
I wondered about the immigrant hunters you see around here on the weekends, the net fishermen and turtle foragers who have not yet been taught not to treat the urban forest as a source of food. But this didn’t seem like a place where they would set a trap.