by Unknown
I watch Lucinda claw at the television as it reveals photos of charred debris, whispering quietly now, “My baby, my baby, that’s my baby.”
It is possible, I think to myself and realize the words are coming out my mouth in the form of cold air. To the room of ghosts and wailing women, I say aloud, “Where are you, Mal?”
No answer except the air that blisters. Ma is slumped over Lucinda who is slumped over the television, the images awash in her tears. Grandpa Why, Ike, and Shin press themselves against a wall, so far removed from immediate grief that the scene suddenly reminds them of their ghostliness, and they howl, too. Throwing a sweater over my nightgown, I let this phantom feeling take over. I leave the apartment.
“Where you goin’, Lone Ranger?” Grandpa Why calls after me.
I ignore him as I bolt down the stairs, knowing that eventually my feet will stop when they reach where they need to go. When I hit the door, I pelt through the lobby and through the long corridor stretch until I reach the red door marked 1A. Knocking with such urgency burning through me, I am surprised when I hear several locks click from the other side.
The door opens slightly and I see the clean nails of a man’s hand gripping the edges of the door. Then the door opens fully and I stare into a square chest. When I look up, I realize the man has no head.
Mal used to say I had no conception of danger. One night I took the train home alone from Canarsie, thinking it’d be fine to put money on my Metrocard in an empty subway station. She said she was not surprised that someone clubbed me from behind, took my purse, and my Metrocard with inexact fare. In this moment, I imagine she would say, Now you’re just doing it on purpose.
I open my mouth to speak after a long silence. “Are you Sad?” I ask. “This is Mira from the radio show. Is this a bad time?”
When he doesn’t speak for a long time, I think perhaps my instincts are right—that a headless person will not be able to hear me. As I try to apologize, he moves aside to invite me in. I stare for a half second before walking into his apartment.
There is no side table or mirror where a side table or mirror should be, but instead, a generator with a line of tubes taped against the wall leading to the living room. There, a large aquarium tank stretches from floor to just slightly below the ceiling. When I reach the living room, my hands instinctively run along the side of the tank to feel the weight of its glass, strangely reassured by its thickness. In the tank are looming pieces of pink coral, spiny growths, and leafy plants with glossy petals that start out wide at the bottom and taper as they reach towards the top of the water. There are fish too—bright purple ones with transparent skin, suckerfish with spotted brown and yellow flesh drifting along the gravel, and peacock eels that ripple through the water quickly when finger taps against glass.
I stare so hard and long at the tanks that I do not realize Sad is standing right behind me. He points his finger to one of the peacock eels and then points at my chest.
“You’re saying that’s me?” I say, perplexed.
He wags his finger and points again, this time to the left of my chest, to the space over my heart. He touches his finger to my skin.
“Oh.”
He points to my shoes, which in my haste, were thrown on without socks and neglectfully unlaced. I take them off. He gestures with his arms upwards from his torso and when I do not understand, he takes hold of my nightgown’s hem and lifts the garment up and over my head, my sweater falling down to the floor along with it. He pauses but then goes ahead and pulls my underwear down too, after feeling that I would let him.
“How are you going to kiss me?” I ask candidly. I am too ashamed to tell him about all those times I dreamed of him and his mouth pressed against my body.
He places his hand flat on my chest and moves it slowly along the span of my body as if he is mapping a waltz and I think how his hands can be his eyes, seeing everything. When he reaches where I need him to reach me, I feel him trace a somber wetness that rings like a siren upwards and through me.
In the corner of the room, I see Grandpa Why camouflaged against the ceiling cracks shaking his head disapprovingly, then covering his eyes. I see Ike crying into his hairy knuckles while Shin consoles him and when no one is looking, winks at me.
Sad hoists me up, at first level with his hip, and then over his head until I am standing on his shoulders, holding onto the top of the tank for balance. He points emphatically to the top of the tank and then gestures his finger downwards. At his direction, I throw my body over the edge of the tank, diving headfirst into the cold water, salty and sour with aquatic life. I see the many fish disperse when I splash into them and then quietly and surely return back to center, gently nudging against my flesh. It is as if they know how my body has become a box over the years—that I would do anything to be smashed open. This bone is real. As is this heart and everything wrong.
Later on, when Sad joins me in the tank, I tell him about Mal and how the first time we slept together, I fell in love with her strangeness. Plagued by night terrors, the only thing that could calm her at night was to fashion a bed in the bathtub. She would sleep there and then, in the morning, drink water straight from the metal spout. She said it reminded her of being in the womb, which she knew was ridiculous, because nobody ever remembers being in a womb. And yet, she said, the body knew things that memory had no footholds to, and that in such a way, we were always building surrogate wombs while living—to sleep and to dream in, to pour into the quiet, which we knew to be increasingly rare, but we could build and protect it if we would only try.
LINDSAY LUSBY
Forestry (Parts 1–3)
The Ochre Issue Poetry Contest Winner as judged by Joyelle McSweeney
Forestry (part one)
The girl with no hands
prefers to imagine herself
a bird:
pink pigeon feet
and tiny holey bones—
the heart-in-throat murmurs.
An unhanded bird
is still a bird
is still worth its weight in breadcrumbs.
Forestry (part two)
The girl with no hands
carries her heart in her teeth,
a muffled two-step
that becomes her name:
twig-snap and recoil,
soil-deep in bear trap.
It all hinges on bone
and ligament—
this lockjaw-love,
its metallic aftertaste.
Forestry (part three)
The girl with no hands
listens behind her
for the tramping
of lumberjacks,
the temper of boots against bark.
If a felled girl falls in a forest,
does it sound
inevitable? A flogged
girl dragged back
to the sawmill. She hears
the swarming rattle
of locusts.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
The Old Women Who Were Skinned
There once were two sisters, close in age, who had been birthed and loved and became stooped and wise and were now old women together. They lived in a house in a courtyard surrounded by a tall stone wall, meant to keep out most children and all men, though starlings made their nests in the boughs of the elms.
One day, the king—an old man himself—was walking by the wall when he heard the lilting voices of the sisters, who had become accomplished singers over their long years. He listened for a while, his eyes narrowed with contentment, and then ambled his way to a small gap in the mortar.
“What sweet creatures sing behind these walls?” he asked. Both sisters scrambled for the gap, but the first sister—a little taller, with slightly longer legs—got there first.
“We have always been here, your highness,” she said, her voice gravelly at its edge.
“Show me,” the king said.
So the first sister slipped her finger into the gap. She felt the k
ing’s breath puff on her skin, and then his lips enveloped it.
The thrill she felt! Out of sight, the king’s mouth was wet and tight—like probing her own sex—and she felt a kick of desire as he suckled her fingertip as if it were a nipple. At the edge of the pull and draw was a nip of teeth, and she moaned. Excited by this, the king bit down and drew blood, which excited him further. It was all he could do to not loose himself from his clothes.
“My young maiden,” he said. “My blushing, tender girl. Come to my bedchamber tonight. I wish to be your first, to barricade past your maidenhead.”
The sisters laughed silently behind their hands, for they had rid themselves of their maidenheads long ago. But then the first sister said, sweetly, “My king, you may have any part of me you wish. I will be there tonight.”
And then the king was gone. The first sister withdrew her finger and examined the bite marks at their tip. Before she departed, she had the second sister gather up her extra skin and pin it tightly behind her back, so that she might appear young as the king believed her to be.
That night, the first sister arrived at the castle beneath a cloak, and was whisked upstairs by staff as silent as dolls. From outside his bedchamber door, she said, “My love, I am afraid of fire. Please put out your candles before I enter.”
From within, she heard the hiss of a snuffed flame. The door opened.
In the silt of the shadows they made love. Afterwards, as she glowed with sensation, the first sister wished him to see her as she really was. She wanted his pleasure to come from her stomach and thighs and breasts, not those of some imaginary creature. And so in the darkness, she stood, and unpinned her skin. She struck a match and laid it to the candle’s wick.
The king, horrified by her shape, leapt from the bed. He shoved her toward the window, and then out of it. “Please, please,” she begged as he pried her fingertips from the ledge. He did not even stay to watch her fall.
The first sister plummeted down, and down, but just before she struck the ground, she became tangled in the branches of a tree. Its thorns hooked into the soft folds of her body. She screamed and cried and hung there like a tanning hide.
It was then that a group of fairies passed by. They laughed at the old woman in the tree, bare and slick and weeping. Her humiliation was intoxicating to them as wine.
Fairies are very indulgent, self-satisfied creatures, and their meddling knows no ends. And so one of them waved his finger and the first sister dropped to the earth. She lay on the cool soil, afraid to move. The fairies walked off, and she heard their voices long after they’d disappeared into the night. Her tears dried and left streaks of salt behind.
When the first sister finally stood up, she felt strange—no longer sore, and supple as a reed. She ran her hands over her body, apple-firm and smooth. Her flesh was young again.
The second sister waited for the first sister to return. They had shared lovers throughout their long lives, and as soon as they were together again, the second sister knew that she would learn the secrets of the king’s pleasure, and take her own in turn.
But when the night thinned into dawn, and then day, and the first sister did not return, the second sister left their home to find her. She walked along the wall and through the door and out into the bright world. All she found near the castle was a beautiful young maiden, sitting naked beneath a tree.
“Excuse me,” said the second sister, “I don’t mean to trouble you, but have you seen—” It was then that she recognized her sister’s eyes, hazel as her own.
The first sister looked at the second sister with horror. Had her own skin hung in such a way? Had she been so shriveled, so loose, so ancient? She could barely remember.
“What’s happened to you?” the second sister asked.
“This is the skin that was beneath,” the first sister said. She closed her eyes and shook her head, as if disagreeing with herself. She tried to explain again. “This is my true skin.”
The second sister reached out and touched the first sister’s jaw. It was downy and soft as a newborn fawn. They had not had skin like that since they were young women together. “You’re gone,” she said. “Sister, you’ve left me behind.”
The first sister pulled her face away. “I’m sorry,” she said. She stood and walked back toward the castle, to find the king.
The second sister walked to town and located a barber. “Take my skin,” she said. She handed him a coin.
“Take it off?” he said.
She handed him a second coin.
He shrugged. He dragged his razor up and down a leather strap, and then held it up for inspection. The blade-edge caught the morning light.
It was like the sweet, briny bite of sugar against an open nerve; then, like being dropped into the sun.
The second sister continued to live even after the barber hung her skin from his window, and then sold it to a bookbinder. But with no flesh to contain her body, the wet meat of her muscle and the roping of her tendons were on full display. Bits of dust and soil clung to her damp organs.
She often woke to the sensation of mice scrabbling beneath her breastbone, of skittering cockroaches rounding her eye. On the rare occasion when she ventured beyond the wall, mothers would bend down to their children and point at her. “See?” they would say. “This is what happens when you worry about your looks. Such is the price of vanity.” She spent the remainder of her life wiping crumbs from her joints and crevices, tears draining through her body like raindrops sliding down a windowpane.
As for the first sister, there are many stories about how she ended up trawling the earth for her old skin. In the first, the king died, and when she went to find her sister, she discovered a dead, shucked corpse in a chair by their old fireplace, and she clutched the body and wept and wept. In another, the king tired of her, and their old home was vacant and lined with dust, and soon she found herself wandering the land alone.
No matter the story, one thing is the same: she missed her old skin. She felt vulnerable without its age and warmth, like a fox pelt silver with time, and its power of concealment. This taut, ageless woman, her skin gleaming like dew clinging to stem and petal, with a mouth like a pitted cherry, was never left alone. Wherever she went, men followed with their hands and cocks and voices, their hungers and wants and desires. They trampled and pursued.
She hunted down the fairies. She demanded they return her skin to her, and when they laughed and refused, she pulled their heads from their bodies like dandelions. In this way, she walked and searched until the end of her days. Her grief never abated, and when she died and should have become part of the soil, she remained unchanged and immutable as wax.
She is there still, if you know where to look.
REBECCA MACIJESKI
Death’s Pocket Inventory
Roofing nails. Half-empty prescription bottles.
A lucky rabbit’s foot, gnarled and orange.
Books of matches. A used tea bag.
Thumb tacks. Bobby pins. Mustard packets.
Bookmarks. Scone recipes. A pocket Shakespeare.
Sewing needles. Loose handfuls of seeds.
Directions to Grandma’s house.
Directions to the airport. Restaurant napkins.
A crystal cigarette case. Ball point pens.
Fountain pens. Felt tip pens.
Blotting cloth. Musket balls,
and bullets: .45 caliber. 9mm.
Reading glasses. Quarters. Twelve watch fobs.
Miscellaneous teeth—human and animal.
Car keys. Pocket knives. Switch blades.
Nail clippers. Forty-eight pairs of nail clippers.
A grenade pin. Dental floss. Brass buttons.
Handkerchiefs, monogrammed. AM. RS.
TR. LR. Stones. All colors and sizes of stones.
Some deep gray. Some almost green.
One weighing eleven pounds.
Scissors. A colt revolver. Infantry medals
from Normandy, An
tietam, Hanoi,
Gettysburg, and Saigon. Ribbons.
Letters to and from the front—
some worn to tissue, others never opened.
Wax seals. Signet rings. Jacks. Bookmarks.
The countless tiny galaxies inside marbles.
Golf pencils. A compass. Lockets. Passports.
The Lord’s Prayer written in Latin, Greek,
Russian, Spanish, English, Italian, Swedish,
Japanese, Korean. German. French. Portuguese.
Orange peels—some still fragrant.
Dried flowers. A lachrymal.
A music box dancer.
Note to Reader: The physical integrity of this work may not register on any e-reader. For the most accurate depiction, please see the print edition.
CHRISTOPHER NELSON
Fairy Tale
Father: a branding iron, an ocean—
that’s the end of the poem.
I’m a child againamong the birds, six warblers frustrating
the hedgerow
(There are few things one can trade for a pair of wings)
See the blond grass, its empire of nothing
See the blue treesinto which you walk, the path that stops
being a path
(Though a path continues till the end of identity)