Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  The baby learns to sit up and cloud gaze. She wobbles and squishes her nose flat against the glass for hours. Then she learns to crawl, and day by day her laps around the periphery of the observatory increase in speed until she is crawling the length of the four glass windows as fast as she can, crawling as if she is looking for some means of escape from all the blue.

  Every week, one of the scientists’ assistants climbs the staircase that winds its way to the observatory. Bearing a sack of groceries and the local newspaper, he pauses to huff and make breathless small talk, then trudges back down the steps, hauling away garbage and recyclables. At first the lookout can rely on two or three hothouse apples in the sack, but eventually, the produce stops coming, and there are only powder mixes for Wacky cake and bread and corn muffins, and the eggs and oil with which to make them. The newspaper carries profiles of terminated and obsolescent weathermen, and an article about how the old weather station has become a factory that produces waterless bath powder. Eventually the newspaper stops reporting the drought.

  A year passes with no clouds.

  The baby learns to toddle. She learns to sing lullabies, eliding the l’s and w’s. Every night, she counts stars, and although the lookout doesn’t know the names of any of them, she starts to point out the same ones, noticing their different arrangements against the sky. The baby stops nursing, and the assistant brings glass jugs of milk. The milk is bluish—it doesn’t taste the way the lookout remembers.

  Sometimes she unlocks the door and stands at the top of the staircase with the baby, looking down from a vertiginous knotted pine step. The air is still, smelling of dust and dirt. She imagines what it would be like to walk all the way down these steps to the yellow weeds and brown earth below.

  Baby claps her cheeks with tiny palms and says imperiously, Inside, Mommy!

  ***

  While the lookout is making Baby a sandwich one afternoon, she sees something white whirling by the glass.

  Later, after she has called the head scientist with the coordinates, they hear the rocket rumbling below. This is it, Baby! she says.

  This is it, Baby says. This is it Baby!

  Baby takes her peanut butter and jelly sandwich apart with the absorbed curiosity of a mechanic. She pulls the edges of the white bread this way and then that on her plate. A cloud.

  Around twilight, something smacks the glass. A drop of rain and then many and fast. They crawl into the puffy sleeping bag on the futon, but the warmth and the synthetic scrunch of the fabric is not comforting. Lightning strikes a nearby skeletal tree and a bare branch flies off and thwacks the rain-coated window. Water swirls on the glass and oozes away. Through the water, blue moonlight. A crash—the world cracked open.

  Late that night, masses of people congregate in the violet darkness of the fields below. Baby listens carefully to the horns and noisemakers. Cheering and dancing as thunder roars. The glass drizzles away, leaving only the pine platform in the wind. The lookout wraps her arms around Baby like a mantle, and all through the night she sings songs of dust and dirt. Remember?

  “Deception” appeared in Juked under a different title; “Elephants in the Pink City” appeared in Joyland; “Hema and Kathy” appeared in The Normal School; “The Logic of Someday” appeared in the Stockholm Review of Literature; “Everywhere, Signs” appeared in Kweli Journal; “Wild Things” appeared in The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review; “Rampion” appeared in Strangelet Journal; “Swans and Other Lies” appeared in The Rumpus; “The Lookout” appeared in Necessary Fiction.

  I wrote the first story of this book, “Wild Things,” in a workshop with the late Beat poet and novelist Ron Loewinsohn at UC Berkeley in 1998. During the two decades since then, scores of readers have offered comment on earlier incarnations of these stories, and some are bound to be lost in the slippage of my memory. For forgetting or not acknowledging someone formally, I apologize in advance.

  Thank you to Porochista Khakpour for selecting this collection and opening a door.

  Immense gratitude to editor Blake Calamas of Stillhouse Press for completely and wholeheartedly engaging with another writer’s stories, asking such smart questions, and trying to help make these stories the best versions of themselves, draft after draft after draft—and also, for the gift of a sequence that felt right. Many thanks to all the good people of Stillhouse Press who believed in this collection, and put their valuable time, energy, and resources behind it, including Meghan McNamara, Michelle Webber, Marcos Martinez, Douglas Luman, and Scott W. Berg.

  Thank you to Beth Parker for PR help and kindness to a lit-world outsider.

  Thank you to the journals where these stories first found homes, and the readers and editors who selected them: Ashley Farmer at Juked, Helen McClory at Necessary Fiction, Casey Brown at Strangelet Journal, Sofia Capel and Ted Greijer at The Stockholm Review of Literature, Randa Jarrar at The Normal School, Sarah Lyn Rogers at The Rumpus, and Lisa Locascio at Joyland.

  Thanks especially to these incredible teachers: to sharp and insightful Rae Bryant of Eckleburg Workshops, without whose phenomenal editorial feedback and strong sense of aesthetics I might not have understood in what direction to take this collection. To generous and wholehearted Laura Pegram of Kweli Journal whose emotional tuning fork and dedication toward writers of color is everything. To Chris Abani of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA), for lasting wisdom, vision, and survival skills.

  Thanks also to workshops taught by Lan Samantha Chang, Gary Soto, Eric Puchner, Katherine Noel, Tom Jenks, and Lynn Stegner.

  Over twenty years, many lectures and books have infiltrated my subconscious, but I’d like to cite, as factual research indispensable to writing this collection, Sumathi Ramaswamy’s The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories and Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India 1891-1970, as well as Jennifer Cole’s Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar. Any interpretive errors or alterations to their research and ideas in the service of fiction are mine alone.

  Thank you to Ina Roy-Faderman, a sister from another mother, for understanding these stories right away, and championing an earlier draft of this collection. Thank you to the astute readers of one or more drafts of these stories (or either of the novels that were abandoned and transmogrified into these stories): Karin Spirn, Phoebe Kitanidis, Sarita Sarvate, Vidya Pradhan, and Jo Greiner. Thank you to literary agents Victoria Sanders and Deborah Jayne for reading this collection, and taking me on as a client.

  Thank you to Elisa Cheng, Kerry Guinn, Nalini Rao, and Athena Wong for listening to my stories for decades and for such staunch friendships.

  Thanks to my parents for spending time with my small children while I worked and for handling with equanimity and grace my lifelong compulsion to write all the things that good girls don’t. Also in particular, thank you to my father for patiently teaching me to read when I was four—this remains the most important thing I’ve learned how to do.

  Eternal love to my trio—Illyria, Kavi, and Beckett—you will always be my North Star. Love and gratitude to Steven, a true believer, for recommending all the best existentialist and magical realism books for the last seventeen years and for being my first reader. I couldn’t have written this collection without you.

  ANITA FELICELLI’S short stories have appeared in The Normal School, Joyland, Kweli Journal, and Eckleburg, and have been finalists for Glimmer Train awards. She’s contributed essays and reviews to the New York Times (Modern Love), Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Puffin Foundation grant for poetry and two Greater Bay Area Journalism awards. Her work appears in several anthologies and has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She holds a B.A. with honors in Rhetoric, English and Interdisciplinary Studies (visual art) from UC Berkeley and a J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law. She was bitten by the travel bug, and has never recovered—she’s visited all the continents except two. Born in South
India, she lives in the Bay Area with her family.

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