And I Do Not Forgive You

by Amber Sparks

  That’s fucking it, you say. I’m going upstairs. It’s obviously some kind of fucking joke, or a loud movie, or something. It has to stop.

  No! I sit up, clutch your arm. You can’t! What if there really is some kind of animal up there?

  I’m just going to knock on the door, you say. Animals can’t open doors.

  Werewolves can, I say. I don’t know if this is strictly true, and wouldn’t claws get in the way, probably, and obviously it depends on whether it’s a more or less anthropomorphic werewolf, but there’s no doubt I suddenly believe in werewolves.

  And ghosts. And poltergeists. And vampires. And haunted houses. And murderous neighbors running illicit animal meat farms. Don’t go, I say.

  But you are pulling on your jeans, you are tying your shoes, you are grabbing your keys, you are opening the door. Take your phone! I shout. You are rolling your eyes, you are gone.

  I listen to your footsteps fading down the hall. I listen to them coming back, one floor up. I listen to the knocking, loud, persistent, then stopping. I wait for a scream. I wait for a shout. I wait for the muted tone of polite conversation. I wait for anything other than this silence, dark and thick as smoke. I hold my breath against it and I wait, and I wait, and I wait.

  Our Geographic History

  DEARBORN, MICHIGAN: HERE IS WHERE I TOLD YOU NOT TO buy that fucking 7-Eleven franchise. You couldn’t even remember to pick up the kid from the sitter, so how were you going to keep track of how many Hot Pockets to buy and whether or not the hot dogs had been cooking for days or weeks? How much green shit to put in the Slurpee machine?

  Existential Suffering, USA: Here is where I understand our complaints have been vague. I understand it is off-putting to you, to your obsession with a certain certainty.

  Fort Wayne, Indiana: Here is where I used to think you had given your whole body to Jesus Christ, all those delicious lusts and longings. I used to admire your purity, so unsullied that you could not even touch a breast or kiss a mouth.

  Columbia City, Indiana: Here is where I read them all, book after book in the Columbia City Central Library. Here is where I learned about myths and maps. Here is where I traced my pink-sparkled fingernail over the lines that my parents traveled, over the landscape of the past. Here is where I learned what vagrants we are, we whose people were farmers once. Tied to the land for years, we were pushed out, exiled as Ahasuerus.

  Here, too, is where I dreamed of futures: all those unspoiled dots, waiting to expand into towns, into cities, into grand tall buildings and crowds of people all waiting for something to happen. Here, too, is where I dreamed of the moon: round and open and waiting to give us everything we needed.

  Dead center of my heart: Here is where you lived for a long time, before the kid was born, before you started drinking all day. Here is where you lived while I think we loved each other. At least, I loved you enough to feed us both for a while, enough to paper over the spreading damage. Here is where you kissed me and gave me a ring, and I believed in that diamond like I believed in fairy tales. Even though I was old enough to know neither was real.

  Dearborn, Michigan: Here is where the milk went sour. And here is where the kids stole cigarettes when you were pumping gas. And here is where Ahmed got shot on the overnight shift, survived thank god or whoever. I got the call when you were dead drunk. I dropped the kid off at Mrs. Tiffany’s, called in sick to the pharmacy, and then I drove to St. Joe’s. They had Ahmed in a room, IV and all, but he said he was okay. I told him not to go back and he said he wouldn’t, said his brother owns a place, they do coffee and donuts, said he’d go work for him. Ahmed was so happy, more happy than I’d ever see him—usually he’s just like, Here’s your change and That’ll be sixteen twenty-five. The nurse came in and said visiting time was up now, and Ahmed reached out for my hand and patted it, like he was comforting me. It’s a new start, he said.

  The muffled quiet of the womb: Here is where we got our new starts, our very first starts.

  Huntersville, Indiana: Here is where I met you after my family moved, where I went to your youth group because I thought you looked like what Kurt Cobain might look like if he was a born-again. I sat on the carpet while everybody prayed, holding one hand up like they needed to ask god a question. Then everyone looked at me, and I didn’t say anything but inside I was like, Oh, fuck, no. But then you smiled at me, and I felt it then, that good feeling, and you nodded, like, Go on, and so I said Okay, Jesus can come into my life I guess. It made all those people so happy, and it made you happier, so I suppose it was a small thing. And you felt okay about loving me then.

  Lansing, Michigan: Here is where we ended up, after the franchise went bust. You came home last Christmas, drank a case of Coors, and passed out in front of the tree. I had to haul your ass to the bedroom by myself because the kid was only three, and what was that going to do, her seeing you unconscious, all those crushed cans and tinsel and you under the soft red and white lights. You slept it off the next morning while the kid and I opened our gifts and then we left for good.

  Underneath the sky somewhere between Michigan and Indiana and you: Here is the moon, that same shape I’ve been looking at since I was small and thought I might do bigger things. Now I’m the deserted bride howling up against it. It’s bigger and emptier than me. It’s something to hold my sorrows, I suppose. It’s something for you to remember me by.

  DEATH DESERVES ALL CAPS:

  On Planning for My (Very Far-Off) Funeral

  1.Get it right, or I will haunt you all.

  2.I write “far-off” so my parents, who find me morbid, will think of wills and distant relations instead of smashed china and the unreliability of actuarial science. “Very” was added to preserve the rhythmic integrity of the line. The parenthesis was included to please my fiancé—Hello, A.—who is an annoying stickler for punctuation. He is also an annoying stickler for Not Eating in Bed, and for Telling Others When They Are Wrong on a Small Point. He may or may not be invited to the final celebration.

  3.Seriously, you have a lot of time to plan this thing. I don’t intend on heading into the metaphysical sunset for quite some time.

  4.But still, who doesn’t think about death, every moment of every day? I simply don’t see how one could exist otherwise, in such earthly limbo, excuse the intentional misuse of the word. Mrs. Peters in the seventh grade accused me of being a goth and my dear parents (Dear Mother and Dearest Stepfather, I’ll probably have forgiven you by the time I’m dead, perhaps) sent me to the Catholic girls’ school in Kent to retrain me, and really, is there anything more inclined to train someone to think exclusively of death—manner and method of, and What Lies Beyond—than a Catholic school education?

  5.I’m excited to be a ghost and that’s the truth. I don’t fear the banality of endless earthly hauntings, stalking you all through the emotional landscapes of Whole Foods and holidays. No, no, it’s the celestial idea of the afterlife I fear, living in the stars or clouds or rain or something—like being on a never-ending plane ride where there isn’t any Xanax and everyone keeps talking about the most obscure Greek gods and you feel so left out and so untethered.

  6.To be clear, I don’t want a funeral. I want a memorial service, a sort of celebration or party. The term “funeral” is only used as a generic marker, a shared cultural symbol to let others know that: (1) I am dead and (2) hope is the thing with feathers, and I have always been allergic to down.

  7.Seriously, no funeral. No bodies, no Bibles, no biographies. No sermon or studied sad faces. Just my life strung out in beautiful films projected on the sides of buildings and the understanding that you are all the poorer for the passing of it.

  8.Rending of garments is acceptable, though unlikely to succeed, modern fabrics being what they are.

  9.Dreams are boring: please don’t share yours.

  10.No pictures age 9–16. See item 1. No Instagramming or live tweeting my death. See item 1.

  11.I would be pleased with a brief, bright ceremon
y held in front of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, but I know we are all supposed to disapprove of Damien Hirst now. So I suppose I should settle for the sea, which is really the same thing.

  12.Stop talking about death, people always say. As if it were taboo. As if it weren’t the Great Leveler. I was trained up to a life of accountancy and account-settling, so how can I not include it in my calculations? WHO DOESN’T LIE AWAKE AT NIGHT AND THINK ABOUT DEATH? I don’t believe it. Death deserves all caps. To deny it is like denying that you eat sandwiches. Everyone eats death. My last girlfriend broke up with me because she had a death allergy. So she said. She also wore a Hello Kitty anklet everywhere, even in the shower, because it was supposedly lucky, and how magical thinking isn’t about death I’m not quite sure but Hello, E., I certainly hope no one invites you to this death celebration. We met as accountants who hated our jobs but I suspect now that you were just pretending and I’ve always hated pretenders even more. Anyhow at my celebration you’d probably stand there with your banker wife (and her inappropriate Crocs like that bitch couldn’t afford some decent shoes) and try to read Ayn Rand to the assembly.

  13.Related: anyone who reads Ayn Rand, or attempts to read Ayn Rand, will be forcibly ejected from the proceedings.

  14.If anyone plays or sings “Candle in the Wind,” I will extra haunt them.

  15.Is it possible to make of me into a kind of champagne? Or better yet, whiskey—bury me in a peaty bog and get everybody good and drunk on me? I always wanted to be a bartender, but the parents warned me about my Uncle Ed too often. I was trained up to make money, not to drink it. Before my favorite brother, D., died, before in fact he graduated to fentanyl and vodka cocktails, he used to love scotch so much it was a family joke. Because we’re Irish! Haha, ha, haha. Addiction, it runs in our family and this funeral—I mean celebration—will certainly be no place to deny that. Hard truth will be spoken, indulgences indulged. I can’t wait to see D. in the afterlife, so there had better be an afterlife. And he better be clean in it. I really miss him.

  16.I’m paying, so everyone crowd in! The neighbors, my stylist, my therapist, the panhandlers. All the animals from the zoo. The more the merrier. The more the more memorial. The immemorial, scattered through skies of memory in a thousand probably off-base but well-meant memories of me.

  17.Yes, there will be proceedings. Possibly elephants. Certainly tigers. Probably not bears, as they are unpredictable and entirely too Russian for what will on the whole be a pretty Midwestern affair.

  18.Probably someone should read Sir Thomas Browne. I wish that the entire body of Shakespeare’s work wasn’t so done. I mean, someone could read something from Coriolanus, but that seems to defeat the purpose of demanding superlatives. Do I need my funeral to be different, to be unique? Are we worried about this sort of thing past the point where the heart collapses and the lungs fill with larvae? I wish that Kissinger hadn’t wasted “I shall not look upon his like again” on Nixon. Though I suppose if it was read at my funeral it would confuse literal-minded attendees. They might suspect they had come to the wrong service. My easily shocked conservative family has always been concerned about my fidelity to gender. After a succession of girlfriends, the family was audibly relieved when I found a man. I could have married an escaped convict and still they’d have celebrated my return to the fold. As a ghost perhaps I’ll come back as a man, especially to haunt them. Or perhaps ghosts have no gender. A comforting thought. In the meantime, A. and I will surely share a succession of mistresses, younger and plumper as the years go by.

  19.Every funeral must be cliché. In the end there are so many deaths, and only a handful of geniuses to hold the glass up to them. This is not a funeral, no. But it will still be a cliché. A.’s and my children will weep, and someone will clutch at a handkerchief, and someone else will wear entirely too much black to be sincere. My two sisters or my other brother might attend, if their grandchildren don’t have any soccer tournaments that day and they don’t mind the traffic on the drive into the city. If I’ve accomplished anything in my life by then, big if, then someone important may speak about it. Now husband A. will look distinguished and sad, if he’s still around, and I’m sure that bastard (Hi darling) will be such an annoyingly handsome old man that someone younger will fall in love with him then and there and he’ll mourn me all of five minutes. I hope our children stop speaking to him after that.

  20.I’m not sure how much dancing I want. Definitely no DJ. A nice jazz quartet might be tasteful, I suppose. Classical music would be too on the nose. On the other hand, perhaps we’ll need a good band. I have some sexy exes I would dearly love to dance with again, even and especially as a ghost.

  21.Would it be a disaster if the memorial wasn’t tasteful? Shouldn’t death, the great renewal, be a sort of breathless bacchanalia, anyhow? Shouldn’t I choose the whirling of dervishes over the starched collars and dusty mourning of the barely bored and the mentally absent? Perhaps my family would learn to love one another at my celebration. Perhaps they’d drop repression for a moment, just one, and stop slicing into one another for the sake of respectability. Perhaps pigs will grow wings, as they say, and the halls of hell will empty and grow cold.

  22.Could we pretend death is really a sort of starting over? Or is that just too much to ask? Could we refrain from imagining one another in our underclothes, in our skin, in our bones, in our foaming muscle and softening fat to feed and fortify the loamy soil we float in? Could we refrain from the cranking of hymns, from the showing of slideshows, from the off-center programs made in Microsoft Word over our lunch breaks, littered with lachrymose sentiment and wrong-aspect-ratio pictures where we look, ashamed, at the camera—suddenly so embarrassed to be alive? Standing in front of the Taj Mahal, or in Times Square, in places teeming with life while we stop what isn’t ours to stop and claim it like a big-game hunter in the Nairobi, while we nail down our trophies of space and seize this pretense, this rarified air that we pretend is ours alone? While we understand that we are all just falling through, like Alice down the rabbit hole, and taking snapshots on the way of all the wrong-sized things and places we may find ourselves, oh funny man-shaped spaces, because what else, really, can we be expected to do with this tiny vial of time on earth?

  23.No shorts, or cold-shoulder dresses. And for god’s sake, no poetry.

  A Wholly New and Novel Act, with Monsters

  IN LATE 1956, THE CLASSIC CIRCUS DIED AND SO DID SUSAN Malone, the world’s youngest lion tamer. At six she had been known as the Laughing Maid, for taunting the lions, leaping lightly out of the way of their subsequent rage. At ten, she’d retired to Pensacola and taken possession of the defunct King Circus’s auctioned-off lions. She was bitten in the thigh and arm before being dragged off into the bushes and eaten for breakfast.

  In early days, “circus” described a wide variety of attractions, from a simple caged animal to a tent with featured aquatic acts, aerialists, equestrians, clowns, and bicycle races. There were bands and ballets and even sea battles fought in wide, water-filled arenas. The beasts languished in cages, more portable zoos than animal acts. Joseph Handler’s eighteenth-century show, “A Wholly New and Novel Act, with Monsters as Seen in their Natural Environs, TERRIFYING AND SHOCKING,” was in fact just a small, barred wagon crowded with malnourished leopards illegally smuggled in from Madagascar.

  Then Isaac A. Van Amburgh stuck his arm and head into a cage of lions in 1862. And the crowd, as they say, went wild.

  Famous Ringling Bros. lion tamer Daniel Descartes died in 1892 after his arm was torn off, exactly ten years to the day after his brother was killed. Both were mauled by the lions they worked with, in what observers said were unprovoked attacks. Three other family members were hurt or killed by the family business in the intervening years. One cousin told his local paper it was the price one paid to make bargains with the wild. Animals rarely honor such bargains, and humans even less often. He had chosen to open a butcher shop instead.<
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  Elephants and bears were introduced to circuses well after the big cats, to significantly more fanfare. They were also more dangerous, their attacks more sensational. Some claimed, of course, that this was the whole point. Revenge as a story, attack as an art form. A wholly new and novel act.

  In all instances, the animals’ revenge was short-lived. Topsy was, of course, electrocuted, and Mary hung from a crane. Dino and Barry were shot, Marvin poisoned, the King Circus lions all quietly sold for their meat and bones. In some cases the executions were public and publicized; in some cases the deaths were kept quiet. In a few cases the animals were allowed to live—not because trainers were softhearted, but owners were thrifty and refused to buy new animals. In all cases the animals were eventually pronounced “destroyed,” and in all cases they probably were.

  Thomas Macarte, known as Massarti, was scalped and torn apart by four lions in front of a full house. Children suffered nightmares so severe they said they carried them in the blood, like a disease. Their descendants claim they still dream of dreadful sounds and empty rings, blood spattered over the sawdust-covered floors.

  When the Husband Grew Wings

  THE WIFE THOUGHT THE HUSBAND LACKED SPIRIT. HE WOULD hunch silent over his breakfast in the mornings, hands pale and cold as his cereal, his hair the color of cubicles. They married because the wife thought she could open him up, pull out wild Irish weather. But when she tried she found a map of Cleveland instead. Her days grew long and endless as parades.