Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes

by Natural Causes- The Nature Issue (retail) (epub)

  Sylvia nods, cups the phone, blows on it a moment. Then she orders Seth to at least get on the hallway phone. Hurry: She can’t face this news without him. Seth does pick up, but with his back to Sylvia, so she won’t see that he’s holding a hand over the receiver. He doesn’t want to hear the ruling. He’ll be able to see Sylvia’s face from the hallway mirror. See it widen with relief or constrict in pain, and that is all he can handle.

  The defendant’s reaction, after the jump:

  Supposedly dispassionate, pH neutral, a ruling is always a blessing to one party and punishment to the other. But it doesn’t always fall along the lines and loyalties a witness would expect. Seth Snow has sketched faces he guessed would register horror but instead were colored by relief; pardoned faces continuing to defend themselves. Even those sitting on the same side of a courtroom respond differently. Best friends, family members, failing to reflect one another’s reactions to rulings.

  So it is with Sylvia’s face, when she learns she cannot keep her kids; that she will, come Monday, lose custodial rights to the court, and they will be officially entrusted to a man living eight earth circumferences away. Her look is an imitation of composure: the moment where self-possession grinds to powder. Tranquillity’s last stab.

  That tranquillity will disappear for stretches in the days to come, then show again when she visits whatever facility the court exiles June and Joyner to, or when loose acquaintances approach, asking how are those kids, does she have pictures on her? Oh yes, pictures are all she’ll have on her. In days to come, Seth will sketch Sylvia’s aped composure over and over, until wrist nerves deaden and his hand feels free of weight. He’ll draw so hard, fine powder will spill over a towel lying in his lap, permeating his apartment carpet, pigments no solvent could remove. He’ll lose his deposit. Dust from each sketch fluttering off his fingers, onto prior drawings he has put aside.

  There was tension in Seth’s face when the call came, near his brows and the edges of his lips. It may have looked similar to hers, but was not a mirror. His spiked the moment hers vanished from her face. His has been in constant orbit since she hung up the phone. Orbiting questions he’s fated to ask in a vacuum. Will he take steps toward Sylvia now, to help her pick up the pieces of what she helped shatter? Or leave her completely? Because, when he looks at that last lake drawing June drafted, one he scooped up just before the state scooped up the kids, he realized June was right. All that effort he’s made these last months hasn’t been for Sylvia. The affair only amounted to putting one foot in front of the other, a quick tumble into bed, a predictable and small step.

  The giant leap, the fall into love? That happened with Sylvia’s kids.

  In a minute I’ll turn in this tale, then prepare for 12:01 Monday. One small bite from a needle in my veins, and I’ll attain escape velocity. Before that, I’ll request lobster Newburg and peach and raisin-bread pudding for my last meal; you’ll send in its stead imitation crab and apple compote. I’ll ask for bottled water too. Why not? Did I hoard what was precious? Yes. Will I pay for the crime? I will. Would not taking have been a larger crime? My answer to that is the reason I’m here, and won’t be this time tomorrow. So forget tomorrow. The moon, at this moment, slants through my window; its glow floating past the bars, spreading an elongated rectangle of itself onto the concrete, the shadow of a shallow, glowing bed. Do you remember when moonlight was romantic? I’ll lie atop my cell’s smooth, cold floor gazing at that glow all night, until it becomes romantic again.

  Fire Feather Mendicant Broom

  Noy Holland

  There was a stonemason who went by the name of Hawk, who, until his mother died and left him her home, had scarcely owned a thing. His mother’s home was not a house but a trailer on the outskirts of a big eastern city Hawk detested and he lived there with her dresses and jars of cream, with her radio tuned to the station she liked and her book still opened on her chest of drawers to the last of the pages she had read.

  Hawk would rather have slept and passed his days in a hippie van or a pickup truck but he owned neither and never had. He arrived to work holding his broken-down gloves and soon these sprawled among the stones at his feet—a nuisance, he thought, and frivolous, though every finger of each glove was eaten through and the thumbs were mostly gone. He liked the feel of the rock in his hands.

  Hawk’s work was slow and meticulous. From the rough gray schist of the region, he built a stone egg that stood on end amid milkweed and goldenrod and the glassy, bent grasses of a meadow. The egg was his most beautiful and difficult work and he carried a picture of it in his money clip, the way people carry pictures of people—daughters, sweethearts, sons.

  Hawk had no children, no wife, no mother now, though the idea of his mother was everywhere in the trailer where she had lived.

  He brought his hand to his mouth to feel his breath come and go in the room where she had passed her last days. He was Hawk for the shape of his nose like his mother’s and the unnerving flicker of his eyes.

  Hawk. A name like a revelation.

  So he wandered, but a boy—setting out by morning, by nightfall looping home. Home a house on a rubble footing then. Hawk a boy in his feral glory, a truant who had buried his shoes. He learned the trees of that place and birdsong and ashen tatters of skin; tooth mark, claw, the habits of bees, the smell of a thing afraid. Here a doe slept, here a fawn. Here the ledge tilted skyward, glittering schist, and beneath it a fieldstone wall ran slumping through meadows to keep cattle and sheep in an era when the woods were cleared. Here morels grew, here were berries. Ginseng; psilocybin. Sap pulsing in the trees.

  The place was enough for him and then it wasn’t and soon he was said to be elsewhere building a house of mud. He baked bricks on their sides in the reliable sun, brought the walls to his knees, and walked away. He walked from Tucumcari to Reno, across the great divide. He walked from Reno to Winnemucca and there found a cobbler in a dusty shop who taught Hawk to cobble his ruined boots and sew his own clothes and carve wood. He made a pouch from the tissue of a buck he had killed and from the bone of an elk he made buttons. Stew of raccoon, of squirrel. Roadkill, should he come upon it.

  When his boots went to shreds he left them standing in the road facing where he had been. And walked on. His feet grew flat from walking, and calloused and gray and wide. He walked from the Black Rock to San Francisco and from San Francisco to Truckee and on to the Hood, the Missouri, the Milk, great northern windblown plains. Crow country, Mandan Sioux. For years little was known or left of him but the cairns of what rock he came upon as though he meant to be found.

  Hawk sent word from time to time to his mother to relate some next fascination—a beetle walking out of its luminous shell, out of the barbs of its legs. The orderly ways of elk herding up; moonset while the sun lifts too.

  Once a picture arrived of a cave of ice Hawk had chinked some indecipherable thing into—how, she could not say. By wing, by rope and harness. No word, ever, of a woman. Her son said nothing of where he had been nor where he was going now. A rumor reached her of Patagonia, great palisades of muttering ice, Hawk traveling with only a rucksack in whatever way he could. Tierra del Fuego, land of fire, people of fire in scant guanaco hides they moved to shelter their sex from the wind. The wind incessant. The calamitous past recorded and calving into the sea.

  Here rabbits clipped the grasses and trees grew hunched and low, turned from the wind and twisted. Gray seas battered the shore-bound rock and green in the face of the lifting wave, the ice swam, brief and lethal. Heavy, hissing, frothing tide—it spit out the ice and moved on. Green of his mother’s dishes; shattered glass of the gods. A place that was like a painting of a place. A gray mist, and Hawk’s hair turned, and when his skin appeared gray he walked north again, blasted, brilliant, vacant days, pampas and tidy vineyards and flamingos in shimmering pools, uncountable iridescent flocks like something from a dream he dreams still.

 
By his hands he is known and recognized and by a picture of the egg he still carries. By his flickering eye. Hawk. But something leaves him now. He is like something dying in a cage. Traffic moves without pause beyond the window; headlights approach and swing away.

  If he had a place for her things—but he has nothing. He sits among them. A neighbor boy comes to hear tales of Hawk’s travels but soon the boy’s mother forbids him to so much as walk down the block. The days are lengthening. The tin of his mother’s trailer ticks like a clock in the sun.

  He saw a condor dead, a few alive, rising, the sky immaculate. He saw gauchos in flimsy slippers standing on their horses in the blue. A lamb in a box. A spoonbill.

  A mobile home, Hawk thinks. Ridiculous.

  One night he sets fire to the withering grass, standing in the dark with a garden hose poked through the chain-link fence.

  She lived for years like this, sequestered, he cannot begin to grasp why. His mother was waiting; she ironed bedsheets; she was polishing the stove. She raked the grass each day as if it mattered—ugly little patch the dog pissed in—until the morning she tripped and fell in her kitchen and called out and no one came. A stain spread where she lay on her buckled floor with her small dog chewing her hand. The radio played, the singing, the talk, and in pencil in meticulous letters she composed a list for herself: New broom. Ammonia. Bicarbonate. Bobby pins. Chicken.

  Hawk sets to work trying to lift the stain from the place his mother fell. Ammonia—his eyes are streaming, and his hands, his hands are from another animal, huge, like paws, like slabs, torn from the rock he built with. He has worn his fingerprints off and his thumbnails are gone and the skin is thready and raw.

  The stain comes back by morning. Always as something new. It comes back in the shape of a toaster. A pony. The shape of a sleeping dog. Hawk crouches above it, scouring, gloomy and consumed. At last, he thinks. Still it comes back. Now as a dress she favored. Now as fire. Feather. Mendicant. Broom.

  From Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners

  Sarah Mangold

  It may be true that landscape painting tends

  to naturalize ideology Taking my eye off

  the water cask and fixing it on the scenery

  where I meant it to be Saying firmly in pencil

  in margins “Help I am drowning”

  *

  However the heroine upheld her respectability being

  located indoors She sees nature working by herself she

  sees a shiver in July Skylarking our good ship makes

  but slow progress I once placed in a sealed jar I kept

  skins lampblack rock-work Duly crumpling setting

  artificial eyes gluing hair flesh fawn pine

  *

  When I botanize

  I am thinking

  When word and object coincide

  Words are the shadow

  *

  No one could be sure which observation would prove

  useful celestial winds

  rainbows

  kidneys gesture

  of remembrance perishing the keeper

  footless birds

  of paradise

  *

  This sounds discouraging to a person whose

  occupation necessitates going about

  considerably in boats My continual

  desire for hairpins and other pins My

  intolerable habit of getting into water

  Abominations full of ants

  *

  Hither come and hence departed many a man

  to represent birds in situations somewhat

  similar Both a frame and what a frame

  contains Who is this we Our difference

  from trees grasses clouds Whose nature

  is marked Wilderness Farm City

  *

  diagram for violet

  diagram for buttercup

  diagram for dandelion

  diagram for daisy

  diagram for pond lily

  twine heavy and light

  an evenly notched leaf

  grooving the blade of grass

  driving a pin down through

  each foot into the soft pine bottom

  Proof of the Monsters

  Matthew Baker

  May 9th

  I found a novel, at the library, after work today. Basically, that was all that happened. Monster season should begin in about a week.

  May 10th

  Well, this year the bodies came early!

  I didn’t have to work today. Living in the attic, above the trees, from the (somewhat grimy, yes) lattice attic window I can see the beach. A point of land. A narrow strip of black sand. There weren’t any bodies yet. The beach was deserted. While I’d slept, a bit of yarn had gotten tangled in my beard.

  I ate a few apples. Red skin with gold flecks, very good, tasty. I read some of the novel. I ate a grapefruit. I composted the seeds, the stems, the peel. The novel has gotten strange. Although it began in a seventeenth-century city—ballrooms, carriages, a neurotic soldier with debtor troubles—it has since relocated to a mythical city beneath the Arctic Ocean, constructed over the course of several centuries by omnipotent czars with impotent kholops. The debtor soldier is seated at a feast. For one hundred pages the narrator has been describing a certain woman’s hat. I understand now why obscure seventeenth-century writers remain obscure.

  Afterward, I was lonely, I felt like being around people, so I considered walking to the café in town. Straightaway, however, a new problem occurred to me. To sit in the café, you must buy a coffee. To socialize, you must consume. Now: The café stocks paper cups and plastic cups. I could ask for a paper cup for my coffee, but that would hurt the planet, ∵ paper is made from trees. I could ask for a plastic cup for my coffee, but that would hurt the planet, ∵ plastic takes approximately three hundred years to decompose. ∴ I should use neither a paper cup nor a plastic cup. However. The paper cups and the plastic cups have already been manufactured. Whether I drink from them or don’t drink from them, the tree has already fallen, the plastic already been made. ∴ I could use a paper cup or a plastic cup. However. If I use a cup, the café will have to buy more cups from the manufacturer, which means the manufacturer will manufacture even more cups, felling more trees and making more plastic. ∴ I should use neither a paper cup nor a plastic cup.

  I could ask for a mug, but afterward the baristas would have to wash the mug, which would consume water, soap, electricity.

  I never bought a coffee.

  I never went to the café.

  Instead, I rambled down through town, to the beach, wearing the same boots, the same jeans, the same baggy forest-green woolen sweater as always. I had the novel, a tattered paperback, bent in half and stuffed into the seat of my jeans (the pocket is worn with the faded outline of a vanished wallet, the wallet of whoever wore these jeans before me). The ocean lunged foaming onto the sand, crept away again. I stepped across rocks, still arguing with myself (silently) about coffee.

  That’s when the seals began washing ashore. A body—another body—a few bodies bobbing on the same wave. Disfigured, skinless, bloody. Misshapen carcasses. Only the whiskery snouts, the bulging eyes, untouched. The crumpled flippers. The surface of the ocean was littered with dead seals, from the sand to the horizon. I stopped, watching the bodies float to shore, like indecipherable messages from a faraway land.

  It always begins with the seals. But never this soon, before, and never this many. Most people consider the beach unlucky, jinxed, during monster season. I sat on a boulder and read the novel a few minutes, then got spooked and trudged home.

  May 11th

  When Grandpa Uyaquq could still speak, he often spoke of his childhood, and how the monsters were back then. In those years, according to my grandfather, the mon
sters never killed other creatures. The monsters were peaceful. The monsters lived in the depths of the ocean, drifting through kelp forests, enjoying their monstrous lives. Then—here my grandfather would frown, puff at his cigar, glance beyond the porch railing—something, nobody knows what, happened. One summer, bodies began washing ashore. Seals. Then worse. This was in the seventies. Only Alaska, only our town, only this stretch of beach. Nowhere except here. The monsters must have been reacting to something. Something we had done. Even monsters have motives. And how else could ocean dwellers communicate with us on land? Would we have listened to anything except for bodies? Even then, with all of the bodies, had anybody listened? Here Grandpa Uyaquq would laugh, and cough, and stub out his cigar on the porch railing.

  I have never heard the monsters referred to with a name. Simply, “the monsters.” Or, occasionally, “the bloodsuckers” (an illogical moniker, considering the monsters leave the blood, yet take the skin!). Whether the monsters are nonextinct megafauna, evolutionary aberrations, maybe products of abyssal gigantism, is unclear. There has never been a reported sighting.

  At daybreak my stepbrother came by the house. I was sitting on the table in the attic—reading through yesterday’s entry, chewing an apple, still blinking awake—and saw him arrive through the lattice window. He parked his truck, crossed the driveway toward the backyard. He was dressed for work: dark-blue suit, light-blue tie, leather brogues, an unbuttoned trench coat, a bright-red woolen hat. The attic has a separate entrance—I heard the rusted attic staircase groaning on its bolts, the ramshackle attic balcony shuddering—my stepbrother ducked into the attic through the doorway, pulled the chair out from the table, sat there chatting with me.

  “There must have been sightings,” Peter said.