by Kelly Link
& work the letters by hand, & refrain, & writhe an I until the graphite bonds, & write in the dark to let the lack pencil itself in, & let things be only because they are, & flesh them out.
& put to an end. & move out of the glassy roll, & break from an absence of noise. And not care for a bland thing, and be short of a version I no longer want, and be one kidney away from never leaving, and be a river, a god, and be almost forgotten. & imagine where nothingness comes, & imagine, & learn Chinese or any lucky number, & know the way a flat cut severs, & feel the metal wheels strain against rails, & hear an epiphany of trumpets out of tune, & bend a paperclip into a perfect line, & take the perfection and guide it into electricity.
could have been a blur of knuckles filtered by a desire to multiply zero. I felt like an in-between. & is I, a twenty-seventh letter, some corrupted symbol of a boy’s finger hovering over a map, measuring omission from one vaporous morning to the next, everything handed down, Bill and Judy piecing it all together somehow. I could have been a reflection if I stayed: mirroring
______________
Samuel Clare Knights was born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan. He holds a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Denver and an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He lives in Colorado and listens to the Grateful Dead every day.
Editor’s Note
Amy Sauber’s “State Facts for the New Age” is a glimpse at a thirtysomething schoolteacher’s life unraveling after a breakup. For Bekah, newly single with only two cats and an amethyst-encrusted mat to keep her company, the middle school where she teaches is the stage on which, every day, the show must go on. Behind the scenes of Bekah half-assing geography lessons for eighth graders, we watch as the octopus arms of her contempt stretch toward her kooky therapist, closed-off ex, headmaster friend-but-boss, her students, and mostly herself. Sauber expertly captures the ambivalence of this contempt both with Bekah’s deadpan observations (“A pigeon pancakes into the window and probably dies”) and her increasing inability to hold the pieces of her life together in front of an audience of thirteen-year-olds.
As fiction editor for The Rumpus, I love finding and sharing stories that crack open ideas about the many identities that women can possess. What I love about Bekah is that she is not simply sad about being dumped; she’s furious, and has no idea what to do with that fury. She is also negotiating shame, something Sauber captures in remarkable images: Bekah taking a knife to her expensive therapy mat; Bekah sitting on the floor of her classroom, sewing together the map she accidentally tore down the middle. This story is smart, painful, and funny—a moving debut.
Sarah Lyn Rogers, fiction editor
The Rumpus
State Facts
for the New Age
Amy Sauber
Dr. Hura is a therapist I will never see again. I know this, sitting cross-legged on her couch, as she recommends a BioMat, a long electronic mat about half the length of a twin bed with crushed-up amethyst crystals inside a series of horizontal ridges.
“I’m not sure that’s right,” I say.
I’ve been talking at length about Micah, how our relationship is finished after six years. It seems like a stupid thing to see a therapist about. I try to compensate with research, symptom listing—a more concrete reason. I had confirmed on the internet that I might be depressed, have fibromyalgia or cancer, a brain metastasis. Web-diagnosis led me to Dr. Hura, but I don’t tell her this part.
She flips over my forms and gently closes my file. Dr. Hura’s hair is dark, with the exception of a skunk stripe sweeping through it. Her skin is icy, translucent, almost blue. She interlaces her skeletal hands, long and knobby, and rests them awkwardly high on her chest.
“You, Bekah, are here because you hurt,” she says, and coughs, but weakly, almost like a giggle.
“I’m a shock absorber for tragedy,” I say, not really knowing what I mean. “Maybe I should just move to Hawaii. I hear that’s a happy place to live.”
Dr. Hura listens, coughs or giggles, and says, “All right.”
A Zen garden rests on a glass table. I use the miniature rake to draw seismographic patterns in the sand. There are stones with words on them. Love. Hope. Peace. I turn them all over.
“So what do you do with it? This BioMat,” I say.
Dr. Hura rises and tiptoes to a massage table topped with a few pillows, presumably with the BioMat underneath. She reaches over and hands me a small throw pillow with beige and cream tassels. It is surprisingly hot. I join her at the mat.
“You lie on it, for about twenty to thirty minutes each day, absorbing the infrared heat,” she says. “Turn the volume up if you are sick.”
“The volume?”
“The dial. You turn it up when you are sick. More heat will kill the viruses.”
I’m not sure I know what we are talking about anymore. She motions with a dial, left and right. There are tiny notches and temperature markings that range from 50 to 155 degrees. I look around her office, holding the pillow to my chest. Mason jars full of puzzle pieces line the bookshelf, neighbored by a few coffee table books about astrology, swimming pools, and blue-green algae.
“And this is going to help me?”
She furrows her bleached eyebrows and pulls her lips inward. For a moment I think she might cry.
“This will help you.”
I think about the last thing Micah said to me: You are a dark woman.
I put the BioMat on my credit card and Dr. Hura namastes goodbye. There is a strong probability that paying it off will take some time. I’m not even sure if the BioMat is legal. The thing comes packaged in a black suitcase that I wheel out to my clunker junker of a Honda. The sky is ominous with thunderstorm. I wonder if it will actually break. I slide the BioMat sideways into the backseat. I realize I’ve forgotten to give Dr. Hura back her throw pillow, which is now neither hot nor cold.
I teach geography to eighth graders at Bridge Academy, which isn’t the best school but not the worst. It’s a small school, a brick building with blue castle-like towers, next to the crosstown. Dull light comes in from the back of my classroom on this grayish February day. Outside we hear honking and a fender bender. It smells like erasers and stale cotton candy.
We’re doing a one-week unit on the U.S. and state facts. I point to South Dakota on the large vinyl map and drag my finger down, resting on a pastel yellow Texas.
“These are the tricky ones,” I tell them.
It’s a Tuesday and that means we have geography last period. Right now we’re spending time memorizing what color is what state. I know if South Dakota isn’t blue on the test, they’ll be screwed.
“Think South Dakota: big and blue.” I know this is not teaching.
They give me their zombie faces. A flock of white ibises flies by my window. Kristi splits her split ends with her teeth. South Dakota will be blue indefinitely and no amount of enthusiasm or adrenaline injections in the world can spring these last thirty minutes to life.
I tell them spelling, memorization tricks for each state. The chalk breaks as I write on the board, Connect-i-cut. I stand back, looking at my prison handwriting. I decide to switch gears and quiz them.
Jeff says, “Pier-ee.”
Kristi says, “The capital of Washington is Olympics.”
I pass out their notecards with their assigned states. Assignment: They each have two states—I’ve claimed home, the Carolinas—and they have to identify state flowers, birds, mottoes, and interesting facts. They give a notecard presentation, write a two-page paper. They complain—moaning, echoing their favorite word, lame, dropping their heads to their desks—because they all want California. I’m pretty sure all my students have never left South Carolina, so I don’t know what they think they know about California. And then there’s Jazzerie, who loves school more than anything in life. I don’t h
ave to worry about her. She is my best and most annoying student—annoying as of late, because I cannot tolerate her enthusiasm. I can hear her squealing over Rhode Island and Alaska as if she now owns them, the ones she’s always wanted.
Durrell frowns at his notecard. He flips it over as if there has been some mistake.
“How do I do a report on Nebraska if nobody lives there?” he says, flapping the notecard against his desk.
“Oh, people live there,” I say.
“How? They don’t even have a football team.”
“What’s really wrong with Nebraska?” This comes out too aggressively. I know better than to ask these kinds of questions.
“Everything,” Durrell says, carefully enunciating extra syllables.
Actually, it was Micah’s idea to have them work on state facts. Two weeks ago, we’d sat on stools on the back porch, passing a hand-rolled cigarette back and forth. Micah had agreed with irrational tranquillity that he would be moving out with all his paintings and that I would keep the cats. This was decided, and it seemed like enough for one night, that we would talk more later. We never did. It was late, the porch light dimmed. The way the shadows fell, I could see only his hand in the dark, sort of floating, as it reached toward me for the cigarette.
“Didn’t you ever have to learn the state song?” he said. His voice seemed to come from nowhere. “Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas,” he sang to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw.”
“Never heard that song.”
“You should try it.”
“I’m not going to sing,” I said. I thought, How can you sing at a time like this?
“Well, state facts could be good. Did you know that J. C. Penney was founded in Wyoming?”
“This is too hard.”
But he just said, “Well, you are a dark woman.”
I let my kids out early. I’m not allowed to do this, but it’s only ten minutes. I tell them to be quiet, like bunnies, or moths or something.
Jazzerie whispers to me on the way out, “I have the largest and smallest states.” She smiles. She has those clear braces but with blue rubber bands on the brackets. She’s pretty popular despite these braces, one of the richest girls at school. The zippers of my students’ backpacks tinkle down the hall.
At home, I lie on the BioMat and stare up at the wood grain on my ceiling. I try to see patterns or faces or shapes, something Micah would do. I slide my hand under my underwear, then give up.
“In the future,” I tell myself, but I don’t finish my sentence. My clothes are smushed to one side of the closet. On the walls, a few nails stick out like warts.
Martha, the dumb cat, hops up on the bed. She tumbles onto her back, legs flopping awkwardly in the air. Dr. Sarah DeMint, the middle school headmaster, calls to see how I’m doing, talking quickly and nasally. Our weekly friends-but-she’s-my-boss chat.
“How was that therapist? How are your students?”
I tell her about the BioMat. “It’s like radiation rock therapy,”
I say.
“Is that safe? Are you sure you went to a therapist?”
I explain how it works and rifle through the bedside drawer next to me. It’s jammed full of randomness. One of Durrell’s old homework assignments, a stuffed monkey Micah bought me one birthday, a lone earring, a rusted screwdriver, a Byrds CD.
Sarah stalls for moment, making a weird clicking sound with her tongue. “Huh,” she says. “Different.” She changes the subject to how it’s going without Micah, which I find annoying.
“Fine. It’s not much different,” I say. This is not a complete lie. Basically, I’ve been going without Micah for a while. It’s just that now he has all his stuff.
I shove the monkey farther back in the drawer, as if it will dry up and die back there. I snap the Byrds CD in half. We hang up, and I look up facts about North and South Carolina on my phone, recording them on the back of Durrell’s old homework that I’ve ripped up into notecards. I discover that the state mineral for South Carolina is the amethyst and take this as a sign. I tell myself that maybe the BioMat is like one of those pills that has to build up in your system.
I roll over onto my stomach. My back feels roasted. The mat gives off deep heat, like body heat. I sort of hug it. I fall asleep and have terrible dreams with terrible repetitive music, a mixture between a hymn and a circus jingle. Here we have Idaho. Here we have Idaho. When I wake up, the lights are still on. It is too early in the morning, and the BioMat has shut itself off.
It’s one of those freak days where the temperature is up near eighty, and I’m wearing the wrong clothes.
Bridge Academy is decorated with red, pink, and white heart garlands, and everyone is high on chocolate. Since Tuesday, Durrell has made six tiny crane birds from aluminum candy wrappers. I find them carefully balanced on all the chalk. The art teacher hangs sixth grader Twizzler portraits near my classroom. Lots of people with Twizzler hair that won’t stay glued down and sprout off the white cardboard. Very Raggedy Ann. I nearly overdose on conversation hearts.
Students and teachers send carnations to each other, an annual event this time of year. The flowers are delivered to kids’ lockers and to classrooms. I receive two. One from Dr. Sarah DeMint, and one from Anonymous with a note in Durrell’s noodley cursive. “Roses are red, South Dakota is blue, here is a NY State fact for you: New York invented the toilet in 1857.”
Before lunch, Dr. Sarah DeMint and I meet about how my quarter is going, and I slip up, forgetting she’s my boss, and tell her that Jazzerie is a princess bitch and Kristi Collins might be the dumbest student I’ve ever had. I go on when I know I shouldn’t about how Durrell is assaulting me with Valentines.
“It’s sexual harassment,” I say.
“Durrell is twelve,” she says. “I’m going to pretend that you didn’t just say that.” She scribbles something in my file.
In geography, a pigeon pancakes into the window and probably dies. Also, I accidentally rip the map.
“Kansas isn’t just Wizard of Oz stuff,” I say.
I look down and see the piece of chalk that made me lose my footing and subsequently stab the country with my meter stick, right across Kansas and into Colorado, Utah. Durrell and his buddies laugh.
Jazzerie gasps. “Oh, the heartland!”
I mat back some sweaty hair behind my ear. “How about the state song?”
The bell rings, I grade, school ends. After the last bell, I resolve to stitch up the gash and search through my drawer for adhesives. I find rubber cement and a small thread mending kit from a Folly Beach Marriott, located twenty minutes away, a vacation Micah and I once took after he sold one of his large paintings. This mending involves unhinging the map from the pulley and pushing back all the front-row desks so I can lay the map flat on the floor. The vinyl gash has already begun to fray. The school is quiet and I spend a long time tracing rivers until they evaporate into other states.
Dr. Sarah DeMint pokes her head through the door. “Damnit, we just bought those,” she says, arms crossed, head shaking. “Let me guess, Durrell Walkins.” But this is an act. I can tell by the way she inhales that there is more she wants to say, but she doesn’t.
I go home and I lie on the BioMat for hours, much longer than recommended. My amethyst radiation. I try to burrito my head inside it, pretending that I am a superhero being recharged even though this is bullshit. Peeling back the quilted covering, I watch the rocks at work. For some reason, I expect them to glow, but they just look like purple rocks. The mat is making me so dehydrated I’m peeing ochre.
Julia, the bitchy cat, scratches at a bolster pillow, shaving velour fuzz everywhere.
“Stop it. Just stop it,” I say, and Julia hisses. “You could’ve gone with him, for christsake.”
When I think about Micah, I think about things I wish I could forget. We’re on the beach, my head in M
icah’s lap. My sundress pulled up over my face, Micah pulls away from me to sketch. It is stupid.
I think back to something Dr. Hura said in our only meeting. She stood up, took her X-rayish hands, palms up, and opened her arms wide as if she were moving into a yogic pose.
“Attachment only leads to suffering,” she warned.
I get off the mat and unplug it from the wall. In the kitchen, I rummage in the drawer for the dull steak knife. Row by row, I split open the BioMat, collecting the amethysts in the skirt of my dress. They are still warm. I dump the rocks into a pile in the empty side of the closet.
Dr. Hura got it wrong. Maybe I just need something cold, like Fla-Vor-Ice or sorbet.
I drive out to the Harris Teeter around the corner. I smile at a young couple pushing a stroller. I let an older woman take the last basket and enjoy a free sample of grapes and cheddar. In the frozen foods, Micah holds hands with young woman. Blond, alabaster skin. I try not to look at her face. Or his face, anyone’s face. There is a loud screeching in my mind. I turn and run, knocking over a large bread display and slipping on plastic. I get up and abandon a carton of raspberry sorbet with the bananas. I’m not sure if I am breathing. I speed through two stop signs and when I get home, I swing open the door and lock it behind me. I kick over the cats’ food dishes. I strip off my leggings and kick them off and peel off my dress and hang it sloppily on the doorknob and click on the BioMat. Except I forgot that I just ripped it apart. I stare at the rock spectrum in my closet and kick that, too.
When I reach my hand into my underwear, this time I cry.
I’m seven minutes late for geography. They are supposed to start their presentations today. I run in sweating and panting and slam the door behind me. My button-up shirt is inside out. Durrell is standing up to leave, swinging his backpack around his shoulder. When he sees me, he sits back down in his seat, slowly, with his backpack on. He looks at me strangely, as if I’m not his geography teacher or anyone he knows at all. I pull down the U.S. map, making that unzipping sound. There’s that wonky blister over Kansas, Colorado, Utah.