Lucy Corin
STORY
1. FIRST I responded in the way I thought he wanted me to respond and then I heard what it was he said, which I was not sure how I felt about after all, and have now forgotten. 2. Then she notices that if she agrees with the woman, the woman will assume they have both read the article, and she can watch the esteem growing in the woman's eyes the more silent she becomes. 3. When he was a boy in The Pied Piper, cast as a witch who had one early scene and one late scene, in the first scene the Pied Piper said a line from the late scene, so he pictured the line in the script, white next to his in yellow highlight, and as he pronounced the line that followed it-his line, as he saw it-all the rats' eyes went shifty but everyone proceeded directly to the end of the play from there, and even the kids who never made it to the stage took their curtain call responsibly. 4. Later, she was thinking how weird it would be to be a horse and to have a crop hit you behind the saddle out of nowhere.
BOATS
WHEN ANNIE WAS a child, her mother explained her gift and burden: that what she saw was not what others saw. "You know better than that," she told her daughter. "You know better than them," she said. Growing up, Annie felt isolated and misunderstood.
Walking by the water a man said to her: "Look at that boat." There was no boat in the ocean that she could see, but he sounded sincere.
Later, another man, this one with a hat, said, "Look at that boat," and this time she did see a boat; it was exactly as he said. But as soon as he said it the boat seemed truer than any boat she'd seen before with her own eyes only.
"Watch it," said her mother, on the phone. Annie stared at her kitchen cabinetry, and saw her mother deep in the glossy paint.
Later, she was eating an enormous salad at an outdoor cafe by the harbor. Every few bites she bent under the table to rearrange a folded napkin under one of its three feet. Soon, she added a bottle cap under a second foot. The third foot hovered. Then, she scooched the table around on the cement. She took another few bites of the salad and it loomed like a mountain in front of her. She could see her knees through the mottled glass tabletop. The top wobbled in its white metal frame. She looked around, feeling the edges of panic. Everyone seemed happy as bunnies. Bunches ate, clinking glasses. Annie turned sharply in her chair, this way, and then the other way. A few people looked up. Her breath felt like a train. More people looked up. A boat went by. It was a harbor and still she could only see one boat. It went by, sails gushing, and by the time she couldn't see it anymore everyone in the cafe had turned to watch her as item by item, signposts, trashcans, pedestrians, and then plank by plank the pier, disappeared, until she was sitting with her salad in a desert at the ocean surrounded by nothing but suspended eyes.
NIGHT AND DAY
I DRIVE BY a motel when I need anything from the other side of town. Town's built like an hourglass, and there's a big lit sun shining from the motel sign. They put all the houses down here and all the stuff up there, so if I'm going to get anything I have to go by it. That's a pun.
In this motel, pets are okay. There's a parking lot around it, and a rising hill of grass around that, like the bank of a moat. Wait until it really starts raining!
An hourglass. Figures. Because of time.
So I drive by, and this time it's day, with the sun over the sun. I see a woman's head doing a swivel, like behind the bank she's riding in a bumper car in a parking space. There's a dog on a leash: I can't see the dog, but I know it's there behind the land. This is suspicious, or prophetic, seeing someone's head but not whatever makes it do the things it does.
Then at night ... I tell you ... the sun at night. It's not right. It's a symptom. It cancels everything out. But if I want anything, it's down that road.
Night, day. I think about getting by. I don't know what to do. It's hard to tell if I get any sleep. I feel pressure to do one thing or another. Sometimes I look up and say "Give me a sign!" but of course I'm kidding. It's only a matter of time before something blows.
PHONE
ALL THE Boys across the courtyard have girlfriends. This boy on the phone on the porch in springtime is letting his voice move, light as a leaf in a river. He's saying, "It's like I'm only me when I'm around you." He's twirling a piece of grass between his thumb and forefinger, watching its head spin. "You're the only one who knows," he's saying. "I know you won't tell anyone."
Dim through the walls behind him his friends are playing their guitars without the amplifiers and laughing with daiquiris. He is secret from everyone, especially the girl on the phone. It's obvious to anyone paying attention. When the earth shakes and the dust of the rest of the world rises from the lawn, when the posts that hold the roof above him snap, he feels no more misty and no less certain than he had the moment before. He still says, "I love you" into the phone, and believes it the same. The girl on the phone, who always felt afraid he might not love her, feels the earth turning to powder as he says the words, and thinks, "This must mean he really loves me," and in the next instant thinks, "It doesn't count!" and by the next moment the end of the world has already happened. The telephone and the amplifier dot hillsides on opposite ends of the universe. The boy's eyelashes flutter and spin like a blown dandelion. The girl's fingernails sparkle in shards.
STAR CHART
WE TOOK A day trip to San Francisco and I wanted dim sum, which I've never gotten to eat, but my uncle basically ordered only shrimp and one pork thing and the pork thing was so divine I just haven't had anything like it-it was so cinnamon-y and had puffy white bun stuff around it. Like a cake you might make. But all the rest was one delicious yet almost identical shrimp thing after another. My uncle sensed a bit of boredom with the shrimp from us girls. He said, "I just wanted to show you what I like."
He's a glassblower and he makes a lot of fish to sell. He also scuba dives and goes on fly-fishing trips and deep-sea fishing trips. He also collects fish figures, mostly realistic ones. One time when I was visiting he was swimming and got stung by a whole mass of jellyfish and came back to the house covered in whip marks, but he was so quiet, and just sat there while my aunt put meat tenderizer on him that I didn't really see that he was in any pain. In Chinatown I liked the tea shops and candy shops, not to eat (my uncle enjoys the dried octopus snacks) so much as to wonder at. All those categories of things and I can't remember any of the names just that there was a lot. My cousin bought a silk haltertop, "for clubbing if he'll let me out of the house" and I bought a cotton robe. She's the blonde and I'm the brunette. Then we went to the aquarium.
"Sturgeon! Yum!" I have never been to an aquarium with someone who wanted to eat everything. Then on the way back to the cabin we picked up Dungeness crabs and clams and mussels and my uncle made that San Francisco-style stew with sourdough for dinner. We ate outside. I hardly ever look at the sky, but my uncle looked up, crossing his legs and sipping his wine. My uncle was getting pretty drunk, which at first comes off like he's a little pleased with himself, lightening up (he's a big guy) but pretty soon his psychology starts rumbling. He went into his bags and got out a star chart. I don't know anything about stars. He came back out and said, "Speaking of child abuse ..." and my cousin got up from the table and went inside and came back with an extra shirt to put on. He said, "Remember how we used to look at the stars?" and my cousin said, "Dad, put the chart away," and put the shirt on. He kept not letting up on the subject. I couldn't tell what he wanted me to do, if it was a test involving whether or not I'd think the star chart was cool. I cleared some dishes and he followed me into the kitchen with the star chart. It was yellow, with two parts that revolved in relation to each other.
I could just see it, though, because he's a lot like my own father, tottering after me, shaking me by the shoulders, saying, "Goddamn you, girl, why aren't you following in my footsteps?" My cousin and I have talked about how I'm not going to have any kids for my reasons and she's not going to have kids for her reasons. We look at each other and know we're the end of the line.
&n
bsp; APOCALYPSE
THEY COULD STAY afloat for only so long before the deranged creatures picked them off. They were so thirsty or so hungry. They swirled in the raging wind, fire, and water. Their skin shriveled. Time had ended and yet passed. Parched, they watched the last particles of moisture rise and fade in the golden air above the orange earth. There have never been colors like this. They trudged on and on but the land was barren. Fungus rotted their limbs and bacteria new to the dying world cruised their organs. Germs, maggots, and death from virile viral microscopic life loomed in the near future. Buildings tumbled upon them. Flying debris severed them. Chasms opened wide and swallowed. They were crushed and strewn, and they exploded. Their brains burst from the noise. A spinning cow or lamp broke them. Their insides fell out. Their fingers crumbled. They were all half-dead anyway, until they died.
DINOSAUR
A DINOSAUR LAY under a rainbow in a white sunset on shining hills. The girl reached for the imaginary hand of the ghost. The ghost had been trailing her for states, holding his basket, ever since the apocalypse. In the basket, tiny ghosts of prairie dogs and butterflies, mongeese and baby foxes wobbled, nested, nuzzling in their contained afterlife. The vast exposed land, its lid lifted, its whole history layered under the grass, now history: girl, dinosaur, ghost, basket, teetering on the deserted road in the light air. The dinosaur's anchor-shaped nose brushed the grass tips at its knees. Plateaus of clouds seemed still. The hand of the ghost was not a hand, it was the memory of hands, or now, since the apocalypse, the idea that a hand could come. She missed her dog. Purple flowers massed and then spread thinly over the field. Yellow flowers made a wave near the road. She remembered how many people must have used to have been awakening each moment. With so little left after the silent blast that razed so much and left so much as well-too much to take in, to count, witness, know, hunt, cover, recall-she didn't know what to do with her still empty hand full as it was to be, if she could reach it, with that much ghost. The dinosaur looked heavy, the rainbow looked light, and the hills could have been covered in snow, or nothing, or something that had never existed before.
CAKE
SHE BAKED AN angel food cake for the dinner party, which means it's as white as possible in cake except golden on the outside and you have to cut it with a serrated knife. It's funny to eat because you can kind of tear it, unlike most cakes. It stretches a little. It's a little supernatural, like an angel.
I was watching her with her boyfriend because I admire them and am trying to make them an example in my life of good love being possible. Toward the end of the cake everyone was talking and a couple of people were seeing if they could eat the live edible flowers that she'd put on the cake for decoration. A fairy cake. She told a story about making the cake. There wasn't a lot left. Everyone was eating the ends of their pieces in different ways, and because of the stretchy texture there were more methods than usual, and no crumbs at all.
Really funny cake.
I tried to imagine making the cake, same as I often tried to imagine love. I would never make a cake. So it's down to say less than a quarter of the cake and the boyfriend reaches across the table-it's a big table that no one else would be able to reach across, he just has really long arms, and he takes the serrated knife but when he cuts at the cake he doesn't do the sawing action, he just presses down which defeats the point(s!) of the serrated knife. The cake squishes as he cuts it in half; it was only a piece of itself already, clinging to its imaginary axis, and now it's not even a wedge-it's pushed down like you can push down the nose on your face-and then he takes his piece with his hands and I watch the last piece of cake to see if it'll spring back up but it doesn't, its just squished on one side like someone stepped on it.
But here's what I don't understand, is how all through it she's just chatting with the dinner guests and it's like he's done nothing at all. She's not looking at him like, "You squished the cake!" and she's not looking at him like, "He loves the cake so much he couldn't help himself," and he doesn't seem to be thinking, "Only I can squish the cake!" Or is he?
I never know how to read people.
But here's what else: watching the round cake disappear, watching the people trying to make the most of their pieces, people coveting the cake on one hand and reminding themselves on the other that this will not be the last cake. But will it be the last? I look at their love and I feel like this could be the very last piece of it on earth, and just look at it.
FEELINGS
I SMOOTHED THE described sheet over the described person I'd loved before the apocalypse. The rich feelings welled from the page emotionally. Under the blanket, the person I loved remained. We used to mean so much.
THREAT
FOR YEARS, A telephone pole leaned, a low fear at the back of the neighborhood. That evening he went home and poured several very even trays of ice cubes. I was dressed for the apocalypse. I was depressed for the apocalypse. I carried a bundle of dust like a nest. My heart beat in its fleshy pocket. Worms had tried to make it across our porch over night and now they lay like something shredded, like shredded bark, but deader. My brother, looking ashen, kept waiting for the telephone. I missed out on all the gossip. An iris wilted into a claw. A rowboat rocked in our vast yard. New birds gathered like, I don't know, a lack of entropy?
DOLL
Now SHE STEPS into the street of her town that has been cleaned by a supernatural oven. The chemical stench is left. The sky is a soft green. Behind the haze the sun hums, fuzzed like a moldy fruit. She is not quite sure where her limbs are in relation to her body. Something has happened to the air and given it a texture of fog. It is either hard to see through or her eyes are changed or there is a funny color or blur to everything and she has objects mixed up with the air. Across the street is the bank, with its mirrored exterior, and there's something on the sidewalk in front of it. What is the logic of this apocalypse? What is eradicated and what is left or half-left, zombie-like, behind? Is what's left behind a code?
Zombies are codes. They are codes of warning. They are the form of our preapocalyptic foolishness; our sort-of-dumb-sort-of-evil existence that led to this, which is our fault even if it turns out the final threat was the one from outer space.
What she finds on the sidewalk will help us know. As she approaches the object she discovers that it could be one of two things: it could be a doll, or it could be a baby. If this is a doll, she thinks, then this is a sentimental apocalypse.
She can see herself kneeling at the doll, touching its cold fingers, raising her eyes as if she is being witnessed, meeting her own eyes in the mirrored bank wall. This could make the television right after all.
Luckily, when she arrives, it's not, and when she touches its fingers the fingers are like rubber. Then when she raises her eyes she is startled to find she sees eyes that are not her own; they are the eyes of a ghost who is standing in the street behind her. When she turns she cannot see the ghost, but back in the mirror, there the ghost is. The ghost doesn't really look at her. The ghost only sort of has eyes. The ghost is a little bit clothed, a little cloaked. The ghost is hard to see. It's heavier than vapor; more held together than dust, more specifically formed than constellation, and it seems, she decides, to be a male ghost. She gazes across the baby at the ghost. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, she thinks. It's the three of us left to redeem civilization.
JULY FOURTH
GOT THERE AND the ground was covered in bodies. Lay down with everybody and looked at the sky, grinning and bracing for the explosions.
THE OTHER WAY AROUND
WE CAME AT last to the wackily fantastic land of opposites. We'd read this one in childhood. Candy tasted terrible and we all wanted liver with onions. Water got us drunk and we could only breathe when we were under it. Right was wrong and so we were very popular. Our mouths swapped spots with our assholes. Our belly buttons turned outward, (except for George's) and our vaginas, well, you had to be there. The birds under our feet annoyed us with their philosophies. It was the en
d of all we'd known, and our hopes sank.
MINIONS
THE MINIONS LINED their sneakers along the wall and then made two lines, like teams at the end of a game, and each by each held hands and touched foreheads. They were past words. They'd been hollering and leafleting for months. They'd been psyching themselves up and out for years. They lay in their cots like orphans. Hands to hearts, eyes to the black air, the rafters of the bunker invisible in the dark, a sky without stars, everything celestial sprinkling the insides of their domed minds. They waited for the world to disintegrate. It would disintegrate before next light and they waited for a red and gold explosion to light the universe in one final burst. They listened to night tick through the wooden walls. It could be now, or now, or now. Someone held back a sneeze and then sneezed. They'd abandoned their timepieces in the river that evening at dusk, but at two A.M. a boy named Jonathan got up from his cot, cracked open the door, put his penis out and peed. Then he went back to his cot. One woman, a secret doubter, had taken a bottle of pills before she lay down to wait and died with the click the boy made closing the door.
By morning, there have been three more suicides and two of the leaders have disappeared into the woods. One leader is weeping under a tree, fallen leaves in his fists. One leader is running, running, running, hoping he will die midstep, trying to feel the moment within each step when he is sure both feet are off the ground because he feels that if he can prolong that beat he will be flying, he will be without his body finally, he will be light, light air, light light. In the hut one minion has punched another in the chest. One is cross-legged on her cot, watching. She's vacant or else she's fuming. Three have closed themselves in the kitchen and begun to screw. Two are quietly packing their knapsacks, stuffing them as full as they can with any useful items the group had forgotten or not bothered to purge: a woolen lap blanket, a can-opener, a tin of olives, a box of matches, a comb, a tube of lip balm. By two o'clock in the afternoon the bunker is empty except for a few dead bodies and one man, badly beaten, who is clinging to his cot like it's a raft, who is gasping for breath and calling "Help! Help!"
The Apocalypse Reader Page 8