by Jac Jemc
“Her body was heavy then and as she sang she grew more and more relaxed. Her legs splayed around Lou, still inside of her and ’bout ready to come out. Her shoulders dropped. Only her head shook ever so slowly as those notes came out.
“And I remember, all of a sudden, I just couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take how she could make me change just like that. Right away, I just got so sad and I told her to stop. Her eyes opened after her voice quit. She didn’t ask any questions. We just sat and listened to what was left.”
They were all quiet for a long time again. Everyone sipped their coffee.
“I think I need to leave Lou here with you for a while.”
Louie looked up at her father. She’d known as soon as he started talking about her mama, it wouldn’t be long. He could never stick around after he started thinking about her. Even if he stayed in the same place, he checked out until he knew her memory had cleared. Her grandparents nodded. Louie could tell they were torn. They were happy to have the last little bit of their daughter, but they were also thinking, “We were right; we knew he couldn’t handle her.” Everyone gathered their belongings and headed to the street. Louie and her grandmother walked slowly, peeking into shop windows. Her father and grandfather walked ahead a ways, talking quietly. While she looked at a dollhouse, full of its tiny perfections, she heard an engine start and looked back to see her father pull away. Neither waved. Louie certainly didn’t cry.
Her grandmother took her hand. “What do you say we walk on home?”
Louie nodded.
On that last day, on the long walk back to the farmhouse, she wondered if it wasn’t just the fact that she was made out of a lot of mind and he was a lot of world. She hummed a little as she scuffed her shoes, kicking rocks. She thought about how much more quickly she could move with a horse beneath her; she wondered when she would get to learn.
The Chamber of the Enigma
“You tell me,” Buzzard whispers in my ear. Buzzard and I made a baby, but that baby ain’t anything like we’d ever expected. Think of a doll the size of a boy. Think of a mannequin plucked from the children’s section: vague and featureless. Buzzard and I are small and soft, malleable and hand-powered. Where had this blank and stiff being come from?
“Buzzard,” I say, “you better pony up the cash to get this boy to the doctor. I don’t know how to care for a thing like this.”
Buzzard’s eyes sweat rhinestones as he stares at me. “We’ll love him,” Buzzard says, raising his hand and gesturing to the boy, making a toast to the con man of his sadness.
“Snap out of it, Buzzard!” I say. “I’m gonna need your help here. You can’t be glazed and spilling for all eternity. You can’t let your head circle round and round. You gotta land.” I slap him hard and he finally focuses.
The doll-child is hard to read—he makes no sound and moves not a muscle. It is hard to know if the doll-child is even alive. If he is living, he is an invalid, and he must be lonely inside himself.
Buzzard stutters around the room, watching the doll-child. I sneer and chase my own tail, trying to think what to do. I swaddle the doll-child in several of my tulle dresses. The child is already at least three times my size. I’m starving, but my needs aren’t the thing to think of anymore.
I look at Buzzard, but he’s not looking at anything. Then I look at the doll-child and think, “The first thing we’ll need is something to call him by.” He has a head of fine black hair all curling around itself. I look deep into the child’s eyes and wonder if there’s anything in them. I wonder where the key is to this iron box. I wonder when everything that he’s made of will well up and surprise us all. Finally, I say his name like I’m saying “thank you.”
Things don’t get easier. We call the doll-child Bluebird. When I try to talk to him, my mouth tangles like rosebushes. The thickness of my tongue dances slow, like pushing stones. I feel deaf and late. Bluebird lies listless. I never hear him laugh; his focus, control, stillness are constant. Even his breathing is just a measured ripple. I enter his room, burnt and swinging. I trumpet and crumple, trying to get a rise from him. I am collapsing-tired on the sidelines of him. He is daytime television. He is silly profanity. He is a white gardenia that blooms too long, brown on the edges and sweet in an uninvited way.
I ask my mother what I need to do, and she says his needs should attack me like a bear. When I smell him, I change him. I flush with the effort of rolling water and soap down his body. I grow used to the sound of the old sand through the hourglass and his silent refusal to sleep. I read him stories of countesses and counts dressed in rich, blue velvet. My mother visits and stares as she watches me care for him, declining her turn to speak. Buzzard does just what he said he’d do: loves him. And that’s about it.
I tell myself over and over that I don’t mind all that I give up for Bluebird and wonder, with my weak brain, if the Lord is sarcastic. Bluebird grows bigger, his skin stretches over new bones, the growing pains pulling him beautiful and awkward.
He smiles like an anchorman for a while, and I wonder what’s better: his blank slate or this horror.
I try to rouse him, but his fatigue is spotless. I try to drag him through the small knot of the doorway, out into the world. I gasp nervously when people ask about him. I seek advice in private, and everyone has a different thing to say. To let him ghost if that’s the stage he’s in. To try and light him like a cigarette. To pop my own laughter outside his door to lure him out.
People ask what worries me most, and I say the fear isn’t really sorted out that way. I wake and retrieve the pressure I shed in my sleep. I keep checking on him and expecting things of him. My Bluebird, a grumbling stump, his hands hid, his mouth shut, convinced all of this something is a nothing. My eyes jangle, my cheeks dry and show lavish tilts of salt. Every day more and more crashes into the walls. I want to go too far, I want a neon sign to let me know this is worth waiting for.
The Colleens
The Colleens cruise their shadows again along the window-sills, discriminately in the nightshade alone. They peek in. The Colleens, though? You won’t see them back. They deviate from any usable light. Their straight golden hair stretches artfully over one eye like an invisibility cloak. A band of pretty girls, unnaturally menacing, becomes unnoticeable. Their fingers spin at their waists like Turing machines. The equation is never solved; the digital dervishes gain speed.
Piloting these Colleens is a gentle North Light, dispatching them like the couriers of some repeatable secret message. Again and again they meet the approach of the night but never recognize the falling of the watery darkness as a stop sign. The calm and legible way the Colleens ride their feet through the evening presents them with the immense time hidden in sleep. Good hour after hour takes them on mental journeys. Every bit of their interiors has been raided, and so they wander like the Burghers of Calais, willing yet not wanting to give themselves for the good of the people. The Colleens want, without pursuing their desire, to wear the hats of others but proceed not able to recognize anything beyond the pattern of steps they take.
The Colleens shepherd the night into each small town, and when it is safe, when a sufficient amount of time has passed, the light will brutalize familiar streets again.
Engrossed
We is preoccupied and headless. We takes the open invitation of mirrors and stares without eyes and the pressure thins to a prop. We wheels the piano into sun showers and watches the warp and hustle. We pains and flashes with strange gestures. We cannot be love that works. That suicide be stopping in a residual and curtsying way: it are cute like thumbs and nipples and unexpected swelling. We bites your will like a ball of wool. Your body flood us and we rocks and fogs, delivering. The climate outside our body are a busy woman. We takes a nap every hundred feet. The silence realizes again and we is water-hungry. We drinks our brothers and the frame are everything we can’t forgive, driving and tricky. We likes your language with exceptions. We clicks and zippers through this light rain. You can memorize our mind in on
e go. We kittens down empty roads like old winter. There is floods and glass eyes and nothing that resembles what you knows to look for in the middle of the day. We cushions your head, delicate and crested. Desire wills itself through muscle and moist dreams dusts our arteries. We started out less human than this. Our lips was pink and amphibian. No bruise is as real as the one wrought by the engine in our chest. Ruthless green interruptions truth my starving blood. Instead of “we am,” say “we will.”
The Direction of Forgetting
To travel the incense road requires a man to lay down his longing in favor of the will for adventure and wealth. He must put aside the scents of his lover and let the turmeric grow comfortable deep in his lungs, easy as breath. One must prepare to find threads of saffron clinging to his cloak and pluck them thoughtfully away, as if they were strands of his wife’s golden hair.
In Java I lose the details of my wife’s skin when I plunge my hands deep into a sack of weaver bird feathers. I trade, with a plastered urgency, a surplus of cinnamon we’d been carting since Aden for the sack of plumage.
That night, in my inner cabin room, I examine one of the bright quills carefully, stroking it against the grain, and wedge it into the band of my hat. A shipmate summons me with a bald knocking—the rats have cracked a barrel of wormwood and are stumbling about the hold. They’ve become emboldened, are approaching deck hands with curious noses and mouths. I go to examine the ravaged barrel, slats splayed out like so many petals of some stiff flower, and find a quiet cricket whose heart has seized from just a lick of the stuff. In time the rats will drown themselves with their confusion, but in the meantime I watch to make sure they don’t ravage more of our store.
In Al Bayda we pick up an extra cask of gentian so that we might make bitters on the ship: to aid in digestion, to pour down the throats of the seasick, to doctor our drinks.
In a Somalian market I pick up a banana with my left hand. In India, I say the word “no.” In Yemen, I grasp the sleeve-covered wrist that a woman offers to me in greeting. Once word has spread of our presence, every passable window’s shade is drawn, every child is yanked inside. There is no telling what will be traded next. It seems impossible to behave ourselves. It is certain we’ll offend some subtle complexity of etiquette.
In Piraeus we ask for fennel by its Greek name. “Marathon? Marathon?” We say the word to each market vendor until someone nods. It was a stalk of fennel that Prometheus used to steal fire from the gods, and when the vendor botches the exchange rate, giving us ten dozen potted fennel plants for the price of five, we feel as triumphant. Sailing out of port that night we are glad not to be chained to a rock, having our liver devoured day after day. We do not, however, escape unpunished. Within a fortnight a flutter of mouse moth larvae have hatched from the soil of the plants, and tug bites out of our woolens. They hover densely around our candles, casting the ship into unsolvable darkness.
The barrels and sacks of seed and silk, the burlap wrapping the roots of the seedlings form a pulpy poetry all their own, and on days at sea, the light shining into the hold from punched-out knots in the wood allows me to read the names stenciled on each vessel. My wife’s voice rings through my head, sounding the fractured lineage of our cargo: frankincense from the land of Punt, Pippali from Kerala, sweet wood from Indonesia, amomum from Bengal. My eyes land on a bale of myrrh and I think of Berbera, where we were shown the purposeful wounds inflicted on commiphora trees to draw out the resin. All so that once we returned home our worship would have a scent all its own. In time, my wife’s voice becomes dead and still in my memory. I can hear only the sounds of foreign birds made familiar over time and the many names of one spice in the disjointed language of the markets. Cinnamon, cassia, róu gúi, cannella: they all mean the same.
When the ship’s stays start to creek with the weight of our supply, we turn around. I pace the decks trying to remember my wife’s name, and thinking of how to ask for forgiveness if it won’t come to me. When I attempt to look back on the life that waits for me at home, the mirror reflects only on the smell of the lurching sea and the crisp-sounding snap of an aloe leaf, split and oozing focus onto my relief. I’d grown sunburned and bristled in a way that would not be familiar to her on my return. But even with as much as I’d changed, and even having lost the details of her entirely, I assumed that nothing about my wife would be different. I was sure that when I walked through that same old door, the recognition would crescendo between us and the scent of her skin would break through the curry powder and thyme and ginger, and her gentle smile would cause me to begin forgetting in the opposite direction.
Roundabout the Bottom
Until now I have been desperate and young all my life. A whirlpool’s spider webbing a ship, and I am on duty, receiving the distress signals. They light up my brain with their ciphered knocking. I can only guess at what they’re saying. I cheated on my Morse code tests. The water hikes itself up around them. Their noses goggle, filling with sea. They crumple deeper. The sunken six hundred struggle inside the ocean. I stay up all night thinking of ways to retrieve a ship from roundabout the bottom of the sea. I drag out maps and periscopes. I find a compass and a barometer. I can’t swim, but I change into my bathing suit. I consider hurling myself off the dock and dragging each sailor up one by one. The water beetles grow fat with salt. I know it is too late, but still it’s my duty to dredge them up without letting anyone know my mistake. Bells ring inside of me, telling me to do something else and then something other than that. Alarms sound. I don’t know where to go. The possibilities keep splintering. My mind turns over and over like a weak ankle. The waves violin above them; a telescope can give me that sight. My marrow curdles with ignorance. I recognize my lack of reason, and I purge my apologies into the night air. I offer only my grief as recompense.
Tangle
My sister is curled around the tower like a ribbon. Venus gladdens in the sky as I try to talk her down, but seven intact sunrises later, she’s still there, the solitude snarled in her hair like wind. I try to run my fingers through her disastrous ringlets but probable accidents begin to rustle between us and I give up. Dark parlors are vacant beneath her eyes and even I am praying for an aperture to open already, for some light to reach in and unknot her. A lyrical and nagging lack in me prevents me from understanding what makes her do this: like a pane of glass sanctioning off a part of my mind.
Someone deceived her; an owl perhaps.
There are pleats hidden in our heritage hiding gaps it will take much time to unfold.
There is magic all around her that does not tell the truth.
My sense of direction trembles when I get near her, like a compass near a magnet. When I try to reason with her, she yields only the half-syllables of infancy or full-martyred stories of the women who have gone before her.
I have lost my gramarye; it wriggles now somewhere in the wrong person’s hands. Without it, I haven’t the slightest idea how this situation will be remedied. The illogic of the good has been flossed away; malignant nonsense remains, unclaimed. I am using “nonsense” here to mean “recognition.” I have seen this happen before and prayed the nomenclature would not come back into use, that the eternal would reverse and never ask another question.
I hire a gentleman to help, to chip her fingers from the brick while I tenderly pry the ivy strands of her hair from the mortar. Her connection to this castle, chaotic and forbidden, buzzes through us like gripping a miniscule current with spit-veiled palms. We work gently and carefully, fearful of the disease patterning out to us. These gradual and tiny distances separate her from her dependence. Pulling her from this foundation is much like dislodging young poems from the beaks of hummingbirds. The power and delicacy at once astound us.
Each point connects with a rigid and forceful pulse, but as we lever her away from this landmark, she loosens, her edges going almost liquid. This work wracks our nerves, never knowing if the girl we crow from this architecture will be able to recover, will survive the
withdrawal from this behemoth to which she’s been clinging.
When the surrendered self of my sister lands in my arms, the true work begins. I can tell you: a fine talc settles between us and within us, evenly filling us to the brim. Our perspectives pare again and again as we fight to understand the other. We tug at the skin of each other’s sentences. I find she has the looping reason of the psalmist and I know if the way I think is a library, then it is full of larks. To calm her, I weave lavender into her hair, blazed into a shock of gray at her release. When we are at a loss, we teach our mentalities ventriloquism, and find comfort in the sympathy and compassion we’re able to rumble out at a moment’s notice. Each day threatens whims until the petals of the town bells sound and we allow ourselves to sleep and forget.
Points on Staying Alive During That Old War
1.In the window teddy bears & alarm clocks sold themselves.
2.The gridlock stars of the night went invisible with uncertainty.
3.He asked me, Where are you going, kid, so slowly?
4.I had a way of looking back at him that made everything else clear & empty.
5.I grew tired of tongue-kissing disintegrating soldiers.
6.Like a ship’s captain he wore so many buttons & so much beard.
7.His expressions showed up in the lenses of his glasses.
8.With me on the handlebars, he bandied the bicycle about dangerously.
9.Cars wrestled us on the pavers.
10.A lion and a lamb ogled our course from the lintel of the church entry.
11.Gargoyles read the palindromes of streetlights.
12.A plane raped through the low clouds of the sunset.
13.At the bar a gun stretched the distance between us.