by Amanda Davis
He did not fly.
He was broken, but lived.
He landed on a couple from the mall and they were a cushion. God wanted us right there, they say now: For Him.
16.
This is what I have been told: there was a white buffalo born some time ago…. The prophecies say that after this buffalo was born it would be followed by 5 bad years of natural disasters…. After this it will be followed by 5 good years. I feel if by that time balance is not restored we will then face world war 3.
Shamandove
I saw her up ahead and I knew suddenly, with unchangeable certainty, that the woman was coming with me, that I was catching up to her and we were leaving together, dashing into another reality, somehow making everything different. This knowledge was a bright and shiny thing; it pushed me to run faster. My lungs burned and my heart thundered and I could feel the heat in my cheeks, the steam rising off my skin, but I kept after her and didn’t slow down and neither did she.
We ran down Broadway for blocks and blocks, crossing Canal against the light and dodging angry honking cars. I just missed a Suburu, she almost got nailed by a green pickup, but we were undeterred, we ran on. We passed into the sprawl of Tribeca and the strange cleanliness of the financial district and then she veered. I followed, both of us slowing by now, still moving steadily but dragging slightly and before I knew it she was scattering pigeons in South Street Seaport and then we were on the docks and she stopped with the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ towers spread behind her, across the green river.
She faced me and bent double and, rather than grab her, I did the same: keel over with my hands on my legs and my head down, the blood pounding so loud I could barely hear, and we both stood like that sucking air for a long while, or what seemed like a long while before she spoke.
I don’t have it, she said.
I raised my head and watched small stars swimming around her face and mine and everything faded to pale and then crashed back to color for a moment.
What? I said.
Whatever it is you want, she said, panting. I don’t have it
17.
I know God spoke to my brother Jack. Whispered things he couldn’t always translate, things he didn’t want to know, things he already did. My brother, Jack, talked back, begged to be left alone. Assured God that he didn’t want to tell the world anything, and pleaded for Him to go away. But God stayed, and when Jack was well he would tell us things, scraps of information, shavings of insight that floated through the air.
And when Jack was not well he did what he could to keep himself from talking.
At twenty, he pulled out all his teeth, one by one with my father’s pliers. I found him then. Sobbing. Kneeling on the pavement in the empty garage with a mouth full of blood, head bowed, hands between his knees. His teeth spread in a ring around him.
He tried to cut out his own tongue. But that was later, in the hospital, and the staff intervened. By then he was difficult to understand.
Haldol, he whispered. Please.
It sounded like Goliath. People wrote these things down.
Goliath, they whispered. He said Goliath. He’s talking about David, he’s referring to a metaphorical slingshot.
But I understood my brother. I slipped him the pills. I stroked his damp brown hair and kissed his forehead.
18.
When they unplugged his machines, the room grew so quiet. Without the beep and pulse of electronics the only thing that told me he was alive were his eyes. He looked through me and he held my hand.
I hate him, he said. All of the voices, but especially him.
What other voices? I asked, but he slipped from me, leaving words in my head. I love you. I love you.
I looked out at the moon hovering low over the hills and something jerked in between my ribs but I ignored it. I adored my brother. Followed him around when I could and listened to what he told me to do. Always.
But then I was alone. And I was so angry.
19.
I have a recurring dream of being in a strange and alien place, where everybody seems so remote and soul-less. I am trying to speak to people in all the languages I know, but they don’t see or hear me. Their eyes seem empty and cold, and all the time there is a baby wailing somewhere…such a forlorn, hopeless cry of an abandoned child.
Peter Rubaya
There was no reason to push that woman. It was violent and unnecessary, but she had come to mean everything to me in that moment. I knew she had the book. She knew I wanted more than the book. It was too much, swirling up and around me—dreamless as I was, I wanted something magical to happen. I don’t know what. I didn’t think about it—I just pushed.
She went over the edge of the dock and gulls screeched. Her arms windmilled in the air while off in the distance a barge shoved slowly through the water like a large, stupid bird. Maybe I wanted her to take off, to wind her arms and lift into the air. I was so tired of running that I wanted her to vanish. Which she did with a large, protracted splash and millions of ripples.
20.
There are clichés: when prophets come they bring light and love and wisdom. No one ever talks about when they go. About the darkness they leave behind, about us blinking in their absence waiting for our vision to adjust.
21.
I didn’t mind asking Jack things. I was curious, after all, but the questions I asked were for me. I never accepted money to ask him anything. That’s a cruel rumor. I had my own curiosity. I had some questions for God.
Which is it? I asked: The truth will paralyze you or the truth will set you free? Which is it, Jack?
Erin, he whispered, you don’t want to know.
22.
I was in my living room…. I could hear this loud voice speaking in King James dialect…. The sound of people screaming begging me to let them in was terrifying. Suddenly everything was scorch[ed]…no trees to cover us no water it was like a desert…no animals clouds or sunshine. Needless to say we had no will to stop what was happening. We moved along like zombies.
jfine
They tell me it’s impossible to be dreamless, that the doctors couldn’t possibly have concluded that and I must not remember it correctly. My parents could not be contacted. My father died a year after Jack, my mother is now an Alzheimered resident of the Sunny Glen retirement community in Springfield, Arizona. I want her here, to clear this up. They say there’s no record of Jack’s birth or life or death but how can that be? What I want to know is whether I exist. Without him do I exist? If God won’t talk to me is he real? Am I?
23.
There will be a rally for peace and justice in the nation’s capital. At night, there will be a candlelight vigil and then gunshots ring out and everyone is running and screaming. The people shooting are wearing crosses.
star24
She went under like a bag of sand, and the water churned over her, erased her with froth and ripple as I stood there, still panting. The sweat on my body and face began to freeze. There was an awful, absent silence for just a moment: a pause as if the world noticed what I’d done, took one gigantic, outraged suck of breath, and then the city exploded with life. People surrounded me. Two large policemen pulled me away from the water and handcuffed me, cursing and mumbling my rights. I saw people peeking from windows and streaming from buildings. Men and women trickled by us on the docks. The river lapped and lapped; a tugboat sounded its horn as it glided past. And in my head, the song she’d been humming in the store:
Here,
All we have here is sky.
All the sky is, is blue…
24.
In the hospital the last time, Jack pulled me to him and whispered an endless stream of vital things. I wrote page after page of his words and added them to the books of Jack, his testimony. But I am twenty-nine. Alone. In this city where I believed life woul
d be easier. I underestimated my confusion. Memories crashed over my head here, collected in rivulets, trickled along my collarbone and down my back. Puddled. And I lost myself in them.
I burned many of Jack’s books, but I saved one: The Book of Fear.
25.
I dreamt that I was asleep with my charges. I would wake up and they had disappeared. The image kept on repeating itself never showing me how or where I found them. I would lock all the doors and windows put out the lights and wake up to find them gone again
enya
Even at his craziest I trusted Jack with my future. He was ahead of me by eight years, so I felt certain he would get there first, would tell me how it all turned out. And then he left. And maybe he will still tell me how it all turns out. Maybe he will still lead me through what I don’t know, through my ignorance to discovery and enlightenment. For now, I wait in the dismal evening and, with all the people in this city, I listen for one voice and hear nothing.
Do you know how it is to be truly alone? To look out into the night and realize that your voice echoes and calls back to you from a cavern? That you scale its walls alone? Some people do not ever feel this, I am certain. In sleep they are connected to other people. Others are not. I am not. There are no secret strings that bind, no lines I cannot see. No more bookstore, no more words. I am alone here with my voice. It is quiet. Night falls.
26.
I have good news for all of us, God’s children. The time of the Messiah IS AT HAND. He is here on Earth and soon His will shall be fulfilled. Prepare your hearts for the coming of the truth and do not let the truth pass you by. Your ears must be open and your eyes must be alert, for the Lord is at hand. God bless you all.
A Blessed Child (I’m sorry. For safety reasons I cannot reveal my true name.)
My psychologist says: You were looking for someone to tell you what to do, to replace your brother. But that’s not quite it. I am looking for the words that flew from God’s lips to his ears. Words he would not speak, couldn’t speak. Words which stammered and cursed and spat. Words more powerful than the language that made them. I am looking for that voice, as if those words were him and more than him. And the thing is, I feel it out there, trickling through someone more generous than Jack. Someone who can save us all.
CHASE
Lily was in love with a boy who chased freight trains. Rode his big blue horse like a big blue rocket shouting: Go Wonder, get ’em boy, and chased those trains and caught them.
The boy looped his mighty lasso above his head and tossed it over engines sputtering along, coughing black soot and faraway ideas all over the towns they roared past. When that lasso caught, he yelled: Here we go boy, and, holding on tight, got yanked on board to ride into the day ahead, with the whole open sky all around and the horizon unfolding like a clean new map. He rode until the land was chopped up by roads and he felt mankind spread in every direction like a crazy kind of kudzu. Then he whistled and Wonder, who’d been galloping faithfully along, was right there for him to leap back onto and off they went. He wiped his brow and said: That’s it boy, that’s the way to get ’em.
Wonder was faster than memory or scent, faster than hunger or illness or regret. But not as fast as love. No, Wonder was not a horse who could outrun love.
And Lily was in love with this boy who chased freight trains.
And the boy loved the horse. And the wind in his face. And the open earth.
Once she asked him: Why not passenger trains? Why not chase a train with people inside? and he said: Nothing doing, and his mouth became a jumpy line and furrows erupted across the field of his face and she saw how tired he was and how afraid and she loved him even more.
Though she didn’t know how to tell him so.
But then I could ride and you could leap aboard and carry me away on your big blue horse, she said. He sipped his beer and said: Nah, rope wouldn’t hold and my balance’d be off and besides if you want to ride Wonder, he’s out front so why go through all that?
And she saw he had no romantic imagination, but she just loved him more.
Ma, I’m in love with a boy who chases trains, she said, stirring potato soup and staring dreamily at the flat land spread from one end of her vision to the other like her feelings for him.
That’s nice dear, her mother said and pushed a tiny needle in a tiny stitch through a tiny hole in her tiny flowered design. She held the fabric close enough so the flowers were huge dots of color and she could see only them, flowers waiting to be threaded, waiting to be brought to life by her hand, while off in the distance her daughter’s heart was bruised and aching.
Ma, I’m in love with him and he rides a big blue horse and I don’t know what to do.
That’s nice, that’s nice.
He thundered across the flat desert and up the greenest of green hills. He flew in the dust and held his arms out and laughed wildly. Sky filled his belly and tickled him and tousled his hair and he couldn’t understand how there could be anything else. It seemed like all there was.
But he did like to drink beer in the bar with Lily.
They sat facing rows of colored bottles, butts on worn bar stools, in the one-room restaurant attached to the gas station and motel along the dusty highway. She wore her most shapely dress and sucked in her stomach and told jokes. They spent time making faces at each other in the mirror above the bar. Lily stared at his eyes, wanting to own them, wanting to rein them in somehow, so they just saw her. But at the end of the evening he’d ride off on Wonder’s back, leaving her alone with an empty beer and a starry view.
He ate at her house when she asked him. He even drank the very last drops of her potato soup, tossed twinkling glances her way, patted his stomach and stretched. And once, after a particularly fine bowl, he winked.
But he didn’t seem to know what was brewing inside her and didn’t seem to notice what more there was than trains and sky and food and Wonder. And as an afterthought: her. His pal Lily.
She couldn’t bear the rhythm of it. Lily couldn’t stand that he disappeared some days and she never knew when he’d be back with his windblown hair and his smile as big as the earth. So one day Lily concocted a plan to capture the boy.
At first she thought she should feed him her love, but that seemed wrong when she spun it around in her mind. She didn’t want the boy to just taste her desire, she wanted to wrap him up in it. So she boiled all of her love in a soup pot and in it she soaked a hundred yards of blue thread. Then she stitched him a blue-threaded, love-soaked shirt and packed it carefully in tissue paper and waited.
That night was clear and the air was sharp. When the boy thundered to her, tied up Wonder outside and sauntered in, sheepish and ragged, Lily gave it to him.
He unfolded the paper and an ocean crossed his face and he held up the shirt and was blinded by her love. He stood frozen long enough for Lily to breathe in and out and to worry about him. Long enough for her to say: Hey?
As he turned toward her, his face was the mountains, the plains and the sea and she smiled at him: I made it for you.
He put it on and was so beautiful that she gasped. He walked around in a proud circle basking in the soft fabric of her love and then he said: I’m gonna go show Wonder, Lily, thanks.
As he strolled outside, her heart began to leak. She saw them through the window, the boy who chased trains, with Wonder nibbling his ear, and suddenly she knew what she was up against: his heart belonged to his horse.
Whoa, thought Lily. What am I, nuts? I’m in love with a boy who chases freight trains and now I think I have to get rid of his horse to capture his heart? That’s crazy!
But love is a powerful thing when it’s under your skin and pricking your pores. As she watched them head to head, she was swept away by the sour taste of it, so Lily plotted to kill the horse.
One night, while Wonder was tied up and the boy was chasing whiskeys with sodas, Lily crept outside and looked the big blue hors
e in its big brown eyes and said: I’m sorry about this, Wonder, it’s nothing personal. And she placed a thick, poisonous soup made from simmered jealousy and swollen desire at Wonder’s hoofs and went back inside to chase the boy who chased trains.
She asked loose questions about the night and the sound of the trains while she sat on the bar stool and saw the blue threads, the same color as Wonder, the blue bottles catching starlight in the windows. She thought of talking a blue streak and feeling blue, of blueberries and blue cheese, of bluebells and bluebonnets and blue jays and blue jeans, and when she looked into the boy’s deep blue eyes she felt a sharp jab in her gut.
Wonder died quickly, not from Lilly’s stewed ill will but from the chemical reaction the ill will had with the aluminum pot. It doesn’t really matter, what matters is that he died.
And the boy found him.
And when he did, his grief was huge. It snapped him open. It scooped him out and the weight of it flattened him like a cracker, dry and crumbling.
Wonder was dead and part of the boy was gone. Wind blew through the huge gaping hole in him. The world echoed unevenly and became dark.
Lily tried to comfort the boy but it was as though he had deflated and she didn’t have air enough for both of them. She watched as he sat in the dirt of the plains, of the fields, by the road, motionless in the shirt she had made him, stitched so carefully with her love. The shirt grew tattered and its threads turned black.
Then it turned to rags. This was a quick process; soon the shirt was in rags and the boy was in rags and Lily watched him day and night and wondered at what she’d done, for she was invisible to him. Everything seemed invisible to him now. He even kept his back to the trains when they rolled through, held his hands over his ears and refused to hear their whistles.