A Different Bed Every Time

by Jac Jemc

  14.We drank martinis, watched the clouds deform, and swallowed swords.

  15.In general, his mouth spoke my vision & his eyeglasses circled one specific area of my brain.

  16.What he ended up looking at were the places where the lace peeked through to my skin.

  17.Beyond that, in a parlor, ladies wove through the crowds of wealthy men like roots looking for water.

  18.Women with jazzed-out tits handed us drinks.

  19.The patchwork burlap shadows listened to everything we said.

  20.We walked out the door, wobbly with drink & his whistle splattered out.

  21.Everything spiraled & curved like an arpeggio on the staff.

  22.We played anarchist hopscotch, in the night, removing cobblestones from the sidewalks.

  23.With the structure beside it felled, I could see the concrete description of the inner stairway of his apartment building perfectly.

  24.I was so lost that when he put a wineglass in my hand, I held it like a map.

  25.Later, drunk in his bedroom, it was as if we had hooks for hands.

  26.We languished in his garret under the precarious moon.

  27.We snuck down to the dark kitchen, skinned tangerines & shocked each other.

  28.We were shoved full, slopped over.

  29.Sweat spots metastasized on my blouse.

  30.Our hands overlapped, while above us careful ghosts measured the value of appearing.

  31.My bare ass on a heavily patterned carpet, designed to hide stains, and then his hand nearby.

  32.We had been warned not to move from this quadrant if we knew what was good for us.

  33.I was one of many who had laid herself out beside him.

  34.The nights were jagged & multiple, like falling down a distracted rabbit hole.

  35.My eyes exploded like stars, my lips blew wild screams his way.

  36.The last of the fireworks faded. When closed, our lids replayed the whole night in negative.

  37.Then nothing.

  38.In the morning, with flashlights, megaphones & broad daylight we began our search again.

  39.Mothers sat at home, knitting it together, the radio blaring.

  40.A crowd of men judged what to do, one after the other.

  41.Soldiers inflected their gunshots with meaning.

  42.Two trails of smoke snuck from the same mouth.

  43.A chinstrap, a seat belt, a stray hair.

  44.Murky fingertips like elephant cysts.

  45.Tally sheets.

  46.A skull kissing a stone lion.

  47.The spider web of numbers breaking down.

  48.He was told to bury them where he could.

  49.So many jaws pulled open by hook & key punch.

  50.The general dozed while his buttons stayed alert.

  51.The tentacles of his power strained wily & long.

  52.Surely the planets that orbited his brain would align soon with an answer.

  53.The tyranny peered over the frames of his low-slung spectacles.

  54.At the dump, the pure volume of discarded motors, mechanics, coils, made my mind twist like a paper bag.

  55.It never took long for the trash to gray, for the fluorescence to grow liquid brown.

  56.I recorded bits of the long drawn speeches to spout back to him later.

  57.He had the job of telling mothers to sit down, please turn off the radio.

  58.The arthritis curled their fingers like fans of scorpion tails.

  59.Each television broadcast colorful disasters.

  60.Then even a kaleidoscope was too logical for what I saw & I could think of only the words “scattershot.”

  61.The stories he had to tell each evening to purge himself in that scrum of an attic apartment.

  62.The difference between inside & out had always been tenuous for me.

  63.The glare off his glasses had been mirror-slapping me for months.

  64.And then that nothing.

  65.His dark shadow against the window at night when I thought he was beside me.

  66.A couple hours later, the bars on the windows striped his face against the pillow & I wondered how I was back here again.

  67.Lately I’d been seeing even the narrowest things in panorama.

  68.That was what it was like to stay alive then.

  69.Those were the things I saw.

  70.That was the way I moved.

  Felted

  The story begins realistically, with bread and wood and yarns spun.

  Though hungry, the elders feed the children one fig, one filbert apiece.

  After the children are reined in and sleeping under wool, the parents speak of what to do once hunger has bruised even their care for each other.

  They’d been frugal, Mother argued with Father. They pulled spider webs down and packed them along the cracks in the wall for insulation. What more of a gesture could be made?

  And despite all, end still stretched for end.

  The children woke in the night and heard their parents come to a decision.

  They knew fear when they met each other’s glares; but home was not yet a place that could be left.

  They knew they only needed to sleep through the night to wake up again.

  So into an unlulled sleep they went, willfully hopeful.

  They woke to their parents’ lifting arms. Their expressions appeared stern, but behind their mother’s eyes they saw that gossamer love they wanted so badly to prevail. In their father’s brow they saw the prayer that this was the right decision.

  And into the forest the children were driven by their parents’ resignation, by the wet spring wind, by the snagging branches of the black hickory and alpine ash.

  Their wool trousers blistered and their skin grew loose. The loaves of bread they carried against their hips left a trail of crumbs behind them, though they knew they would never return.

  The steeples and spires and minarets of their fantasies fell through to the gutters and sewers of marshlands, the trenches of nature.

  And wading through all of this circumstance, the children made this rhyme about the past:

  Roll it over gently.

  Twist it on the spot.

  Pull it out and pull it through.

  Tie it in a knot.

  Entered

  We is stiff and rare with the making of sense. Impressions debate the monotony. We doesn’t know a needle from a conjunction. We helps the bulbs of language sprout. We learns the length of a month and the next month, it already feel short. We has sexy eyes that dawn open and the lessons murmur in keys and closets, and we reads your pale vocabulary like a limit. We eat tiny planes with our ears and telephone the world with our loud voices to notify nature of our safety. We leaves and returns, having purchased some terrible mistakes from our intricately creased elders. We lurks slightly ominous in our white van with our oatmeal and greetings and cooperation. We opens ourselves back up to the littler lives possible. The dark is waiting, relaxing, leaning into us, arriving.

  We is speaking and instancing. We opens the windows and lets the cold dedicate itself to us. The helium delays and we find a god with two bodies that swims and fishes itself through us. Geniuses is waving at us and we presses and kicks and burns and deadpans back at them. We soaks in our shame, even alone in the woodland at night. We culls our fears in promises. We leaves the evening undealt with when we can. Every day we rushes home to see what is causing the sunlight to smoke and jimmy. We is distracted by attractions.

  We rests and thins ourselves out. Can we asks you something? Your thin bodies pathing circles inside us, does they ever feels like practical jokes? Can you feels the bright muscles concentrate and scatter? Can you hears the crows caw the morning open? We writes poetry the way pleasure tells lies.

  A Willingness & Warning

  Millie is happy here in the forest, saying “Beware,” again and again. She has wept smoothly down long trails and squeezed herself into skirts of certainty and now I wouldn’t be surprised if she never wan
ts to leave. She comes up behind hikers and campers and the wayward youth whispering: “The ground shall tell all,” and “The eternal lies beside you and me.”

  Millie grew up happy, but a switch was flipped somewhere once and then flipped back again later. What I’m trying to say is that she has known the reverse—bare and farther away from the present, still. She learned, “Murder finds time in a minute one doesn’t even know is there,” and also, “A minute is not long enough to ask all the questions the yellow rooms later will.”

  Young opinions and decisions happened everywhere and the peaceful spinning wheel of memory was catching it all. Millie would note that the man disappeared and then the next minute he would still be gone. Poems and apartments were left behind. The subway platform filled with sparrows. Everywhere. Millie thought, “I was almost a fool,” and “I am swollen with caution now.”

  That night, Millie only got as far as the buried trains would carry her. She had heard of a land where trees grew tallest on the skyline, where the twisting days sounded only slightly, like bird calls and rustling leaves. She would find that place soon, but for now she had another strangled night to lay down with the city. The hot concrete beneath her fought the voices that passed unawares. She dreamed of nature beyond the eye of the city and of the dead plants from the hallway of her grandmother’s house.

  When the dew woke her, heavy on her skin, Millie found her way to her feet and her feet found her walking the questionable distance between city and country. This area looked something like a road with a small gravel shoulder. Millie was unable to see much more because she was remembering from where she’d come and imagining what was ahead. Before she knew it, a truck carrying a man traveling the world around with a load at his back had pulled up and opened his passenger door. “You’re not a foolish missionary are you?” and “Don’t you know there’s a certain finger that works better than that one for hitchhiking?”

  When they had traveled only a very short distance, Millie asked to be let out. The driver refrained from asking questions. Millie climbed out of the cab and down into the field beside them. The driver didn’t wait to see if she got where she was going; he had work to do, including steering himself away from this point. Millie aimed herself at the woods beyond the field and her focus made the distance seem short. She hummed and whistled while she made her way to the trees.

  Millie made herself a life of clean work and reality in the forest. She had made her mistake and now she was committed to surviving it. I have seen her. The “Beware” from her lips has landed beside me by the campfire. I can see the clean nests in the branches above me and it’s easy to tell that she sleeps in a different one each night so they won’t find her. When I feel her near, I say, “They’ve stopped looking,” and “Come out now; it’s safe.”

  More Mysteries

  I let it get to the point where only shallow water filled our bellies. By that time, there was only one person to ask: my brother had just been released from rehab. I was watching to see if he’d still go awry. The throaty noise he made while we drove him home didn’t bode well. He asked if he could stay with us for a day or two before going back to his own apartment. He wasn’t ready to be alone.

  He watched cartoons slowly, laughing a little late at the gags. I had a son, four years old, and if I didn’t have the money to pay the water bill, well, daycare seemed like a joke with another adult who could spend the days with him. Jimmy had slowed since getting clean, but my desperation allowed me to believe he could manage keeping an eye on Sammy.

  I worked as a custodian at the hospital. I’d scavenge the left behind, finding stuffed animals abandoned in quick transitions to the ICU, flowers to place on my table to convince myself I lived a different life, half-empty boxes of candies in rooms occupied by non-contagious patients placed on feeding tubes.

  The substance of our home shook looser every day. Each morning showed a shelf sagging, its contents sliding to the ground before I noticed. I felt denied of choices, but when more than one option showed up, I broke down, so unaccustomed to being able to make the right decision.

  I’d parade through the hospital like I knew the answers. I forgot whatever I could in the daytimes. I played sick pranks on myself. I attracted men with issues and put effort into keeping them around. Someone else’s scars are always more mysterious. I’d invite men to sleep in my bed while my brother slept on the couch. When I went to work, everyone would still be sleeping, and according to Jimmy, my men would sleep all day. Jimmy watched cartoons with Sammy, microwaved cheese sandwiches, pretended to forget they hadn’t brushed their teeth. It was a workable arrangement in the worst way.

  Most of my day, I did a good job of being courteous, falling easily into the patterns of politeness. If truth had been an element, though, you’d have noticed the holes. At work, I had to write everything down: if I checked a bathroom, if I failed to mop a floor. Always a record. My supervisors would glance at it, but no one would tell me to do anything different. My thumbs peeled from the strong chemicals and I waited for someone to tell me I didn’t have to come back. I’d become ambidextrous in my scrubbing. My arms were the same size. At the end of the day, I’d look hard at the ceiling while I lifted my uniform off in the locker room. I’d take a deep breath and hold it while I tied my shoes back on. I’d hold my hands under the hot water until I couldn’t stand it. I’d make malfunctions I could fix.

  When I got home, I’d go through the trash, looking for evidence. I wanted to know how smart Jimmy was: smart enough to stay sober or smart enough to put his empties in the neighbor’s trash? I opened the bureau drawer in the kitchen, and asked him where the extra set of keys had gone. He pretended he didn’t know or he really didn’t. One time I came home to find him sprawled out in my nightgown—the long flowy one with the careful embroidery. He didn’t fluster when I walked in the door. I widened my eyes, running them up and down his body. “This?” he said. “I wanted to get all my laundry into one load.” If I hadn’t just worked a twelve-hour shift, I’d have argued that I had sweatpants he could have worn just as easy. Jimmy said, “Sammy, tell your mother our new nickname for me.” Sammy looked away from the cartoon cats and mice, and smiled huge. “Uncle Jimmy is Second Mommy!” I shook my head and turned back to the recliner. “That’s healthy, Jim. The boy doesn’t need an uncle. He needs a second mommy?’” Jimmy cracked up and leaned over to high-five Sammy.

  A few days later I found a baggie in the trash, a different size than what we bought. “What was in this?” I asked my brother. “Jeez, Kim, Sammy had a snack,” he said, turning to the sink. “Where did such a snack come from, Jimmy? Not this house.” “Bake sale at the park. Am I gonna get in trouble for sharing a brownie with the kid?”

  If I took Sammy somewhere, Jimmy wanted to come with. I shared with Jimmy every bit of my relationship with my child now. Every opportunity I saw to nourish some small internal light I saw in Sammy was undercut by Jimmy’s nudges and jokes. I wanted to pose impossible questions to Sammy to see how his youth would reason. I wanted to present him with antinomies, to see whether he would gravitate toward this thesis or that antithesis. I knew Sammy had some answers in him. Jimmy’d roll his eyes at me and tickle Sammy and tell me to lighten up—he was just a kid. At that point, I expected Jimmy to be with us a long time. Sammy was starting school at the end of summer, but I imagined the three of us carrying on. I couldn’t tell if I hated it or if I was just looking for something to end, like I’d gotten used to the finite and had trouble believing in anything more.

  I brought men home. I’d tell you about a single one of them if I could remember. Every night shaped itself into a fanatical bustle. Looks in the grocery store, a kind word in the hospital parking lot. I didn’t spend minutes in a bar or dollars on drinks. The men always turned up over shoulders, in the bellies of shadows, at PTA meetings. Clint told me to call him. Randy told me I knew his number. Darren told me about problems he thought trumped mine, and I let them. Every time it happened I thought I was get
ting closer to a target and then it’d turn out I was throwing my dart in the wrong direction.

  Jimmy didn’t mouth off about it. He knew better. His own past sounded constant, gnarly jingles and we’d try to keep the peace as best we could. Sometimes when they were giving me a bad vibe, I told them to leave before the morning. Sometimes when their phones buzzed, I told them to go find their wives. They’d scowl at me and think better of it while I held their fate in my hands. Jimmy’d say, “No breakfast buddy today?” I’d shoot him my most dastardly glare and say, “We’re allowed to do things we think better of after the fact. Am I right, brother?”

  Some nights Jimmy would pace in a flurry of spells and fits—then set himself down and bite his lips, jitter his feet. Jimmy’s face furrowed and dug deep at the slightest emotion. My knees sagged, soft and liquid, just like the old ladies at the public pool. Our hard lives showed up all over our bodies, but when I said something to that effect, Jimmy’d say, “Who are we comparing to?” I’d find him some aspirin, give myself a few too. We’d sip warm soda out of thin straws I stole from the coffee station at work. We’d handle each other softly for a little while. After I’d put myself to bed, I’d wake late in the night to Jim’s dark whistling over the muted TV hum. The light comforted him even when the voices did not.

  Twilight hung behind the curtained windows. I carried a sack of groceries that would sit on the coffee table long enough for the ice cream to melt. “Where’s your uncle?” I asked him. “Jimmy?” I called into every corner of that tiny house. “He can’t have gone,” Sammy said. “He was just here.” My stomach turned with disgust and frustration and relief. “What do you mean just here?” I asked my son. “Minutes or hours?” Sammy shrugged and turned back to the TV. The laundry basket with the broken handle where he sniffed out the clean from the dirty each morning lay abandoned beside the couch. He didn’t have anything else. The bread bag sat open on the kitchen counter, half as empty as when I’d used it to make myself toast that morning. A dirty knife lay next to it, looking like it meant to make it to the sink. I’d expected worse of this moment. I looked in the trash can. “You didn’t see him leave, huh?” I sat next to Sammy and stroked his baby bird hair, waiting for him to answer. At the commercial, Sammy turned to me. “How could I have seen him if he didn’t go?”