by Amber Sparks
Eventually, he decides it will be easier to erase her, to undo her. He gives away her things and he tells their friends she was having affairs. He throws away their photo albums. He sells her piano but the movers can’t get it out of the window; they shake their heads and depart, sweaty and disappointed. He becomes fixated on the notion of getting the piano gone, any way that he can. He measures it obsessively, plans to chisel wider doorways, break windowpanes. He sketches plans that rival Wile E. Coyote’s, all when he’s supposed to be working.
Finally, he buys a small ax from the neighborhood hardware store. The young woman working there makes a joke about the frozen sea within us, and he smiles wanly because his wife once bought a throw pillow embroidered with that quote and it had given him some small pleasure then to prove she didn’t know where it came from, and that it was a stupid thing to sew onto a pillow. He marches home with purpose, ax very much in hand, and of course no one stops him because he is white and middle-aged and wearing an expensive parka. He proceeds to chop the piano up, no method, just one thunderous chord at a time.
When the police finally force the door, he’s sitting in a pile of broken keys and lacquered wood. Someone called about a domestic disturbance, they say, and he shrugs and says, Yes. His wife’s ghost hovers just overhead, and she smiles as if in apology, as if to say, This is all my fault, I deserved it, I asked for it. But no one is fooled. The room vibrates with something much the opposite of kindness.
The officers flee as the piano keys start to fly, broken bars whirling across the living room. From outside, they see the window darken; the man and his things are obscured by the blizzard of silent notes.
Tour of the Cities We Have Lost
OUR HISTORY IS A HALLWAY. IN THIS VAST SUBTERRANEAN corridor, we keep all the secret places of the world.
This wing, for example, houses our lost cities. The lost city is a thing of power, grown to enormous size through its dislocation from time and people. All the cities we have lost can be found here, all the props and scenery, the backdrops still hiding the concrete walls. The people, though, are long gone. The people’s absence is what causes our voices to echo so strangely here. Debussy knew when he wrote La cathédrale engloutie how small and dreadful sounds can be, drowned in an empty city without bodies to absorb them.
Here you may visit any city you’ve ever loved and left. Childhood playthings, cities you built with blocks or bricks or mud or logs, the tiny cities that sprang up around your toy railroad station and its whistling, smoking trains. Cities of discovery, where you first knew love, or suffered loss, or encountered meaning; these are all awaiting you in exactly the condition you found them. Now, of course, if you return to the original and excavate the source, you will find gray skies, pointless architecture, primitive inhabitants, and cumbersome grid structures. But here you will find the sky as blue as it appeared to you the day you met your husband, or your wife, or your lover.
Remembered cities are easy to rebuild. Our true specialty is the difficult cities: cities lost for centuries, cities that existed only in the collective fancies and myths of men. Here we have cities as they were. Here we have cities as we have always imagined them to be. Here, for example, is Camelot: the old, deepening light illuminating silent castle walls, the great table within, where all valor once lived and died. This is a sad place, like any lost city. Here greatness can still be felt seeping out of the soil; here only the trees remember the important things, secrets whispered in the shadow of dawn and shouted through the din of battle. All is still green in Camelot. But only the kind of green that grows over graves, that thrives in the stillness of a finished story.
This way now, a few doors and to your left: this is where we keep Ys. Wicked city once swallowed by the sea; the smell of rot and brine is strong here. The king’s daughter, Dahut, once held court in this chamber. The chamber was kept full of bodies writhing in passion and later in pain, but all this flesh has dissolved and only the violent stains spattered across cut marble speak now of Ys’s tragedy. The bronze walls are still whole and polished, the wide gates still flung open, still inviting the floods that swept the city’s innards into the ocean. You can feel it. The disease that eats the soul of a city long after the living have vanished.
Come away from there, and follow us to a city that never was. Five doors down and turn the key where it fits inside the doorplate, beneath in the golden knob. Now quickly, look away! At first glance this city will blind you. This is El Dorado, rich in cinnamon and other spices but most of all in gold. The streets, it’s true, are paved with it. The luster of this city is both vision and portent. It is the dream of wealth and death that all men dream. It is beautiful, yes, but a bloodless beauty; it has no heart, no heat, no life. A city, yet not a city; it is a prison, a mirage. We keep this one under lock and key, as you can see. A dangerous place, El Dorado. Strong poison in a golden cup.
There are so many secret cities here, once or forever lost. We can take you to Babylon, to Quivira and Cibola, to Shambhala, Thierna Na Oge, and even to Troy as it was. We can show you Xuan Pu, Basilia, Agartha, Shangri-La, Pompeii, and Caritambo, too. Cities consumed by fire and war and water. By avarice and greed and pride. All wiped out, razed, ruined, smashed, shuttered, annihilated and crushed. Gone.
We must carry torches down here, for strong light is a bath these cities can no longer stand. They would crumble to dust in daylight, like old manuscripts and maps. We must wear special gloves to handle the structures of these places, to examine the cafés and sidewalks, the cinema and stadium without risk to their form and integrity. And we must always visit in groups, for these cities can never be seen by one alone. Only for its former crowds will the city slowly stir and come to life, street by street, building by building, like an enormous diorama giving back to us the things we thought we’d lost forever.
Acknowledgments
EVERY BOOK IS AN EXERCISE IN ACCRUING DEBTS YOU CAN’T possibly pay back; instead you write a list of thank-yous and hope in some small way it suffices. Bearing that in mind, thank you to the many editors who worked on, polished, shaped, loved, and published some of these stories: Brian Mihok, Gabriel Blackwell, Roxane Gay, M. Bartley Siegel, Kate Bernheimer, Benjamin Schaefer, Scott Garson, Jeremy John Parker, Tara Laskowski, Lauren Becker, Amanda Miska, Katie Flynn, Morgan Beatty, Aubrey Hirsch, Adam Prince, Richard Thomas, and Josh Pachter. Thank you to my marvelous first readers and longtime trusted friends: Robert Kloss, Erin Fitzgerald, and Steve Himmer. Thank you to Gregory Howard, Lincoln Michel, Joseph Scapelato, Jeff Jackson, Rion Amilcar Scott, Tara Campbell, Sarah Rose Etter, Matt Bell, Kate Zambreno, Penina Roth, Marie-Helene Bertino, and Laura Bogart for reasons varied and numerous.
Thank you to all of the women I know, writers and otherwise; you keep singing in dark times and you keep me sane by doing so. Thank you to the men I know who are fierce allies and feminists: you guys get it. Thank you to all the genderqueer folks I know: this book is very much for you and for everyone tearing down gender norms and barriers.
Thank you to my blurbers, who gave of their time and so generously read this book, no matter how busy they were. Thank you to my fabulous editor, Gina Iaquinta, who worked so hard to make this book a thousand times better. Thank you to the whole team at Liveright; I’m so happy to be working with you all again. Thank you to my agent, Kent Wolf, who will always have the best hair along with the eternal gratitude of all of his writers.
Thank you to my family, especially my mom and dad, who probably still think I’m a morbid weirdo but who have been nothing but supportive of my morbid weirdo pursuits. Thank you to my husband, Christopher, who is the very best human in the world and without whose support and time and love I would never, ever have been able to write this book.
And finally, thank you to my daughter, Isadora. This book would not exist without you. I wrote it for you, and for all the daughters, and for all the mothers of daughters, and for all the mothers of mothers of daughters; thank you for carrying the world.
&nbs
p; ALSO BY AMBER SPARKS
The Unfinished World and Other Stories
May We Shed These Human Bodies
The Desert Places
(with Robert Kloss and Matt Kish)
And I Do Not Forgive You is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Amber Sparks
All rights reserved
First Edition
Some of the stories in this book originally appeared in matchbook, Gamut, Outlook Springs, Wigleaf, The Collagist, Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Corium, Thumbnail Magazine, People Holding, Grist: A Journal for Writers, and PANK. “A Place for Hiding Precious Things” first appeared in Fairy Tale Review, The Pink Issue, edited by Kate Bernheimer (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2019).
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN 978-1-63149-620-2
ISBN 978-1-63149-621-9 (eBook)
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