Eyes are such lovely treats. Let them age in my head. Pupils like fingerprint whorls count years like rings inside creaking trees. She assumes a languid posture for unfocusing. The slow stun strobes and the soporific burbling stimulate an ache to scratch the itch deep within the spine. Minute fibers braided and frayed encased in bone separated by flexing cartilage wave like purple sea anemone. Succulent rib bone cage bent up and out like great condor wings, a scavenger body in awkward contrapposto. Thin fingers claw tipped and taut for belly depredation. Spindly clacking knee bone rhythm walk on wind shifted dune face. Click-cluck dry tongue behind elegant teeth in wretched gums.
Bloated electronic liver filters television toxins. Distilled for brain pickle.
There must be something wrong with my optic nerve, and surely I have damaged my cerebrum. I cannot remember, I cannot remember, but when I see you there, there floating, fading, it is my brain that is looking at you, no matter how inferior. Yes
there is gray everywhere and it extends out of my body as an urban marrow, radiating from solar farms, thermal fields and synthetic trees.
This is no longer my city, or my body in it. Such realizations always strike me hard like hammer blows the kneecaps.
The last thing I remember was the blood. The blood came onto my thighs as I walked and I pretended it wasn’t happening, not as it collected in the hollows of my knees, or as the wind iced over what was left of my face. I pretended like none of it was happening. I’m down again. That’s for certain. It’s so very hard to get back up, but I do. I rise. I’ve risen like this before. Exactly like this before. Coming up from the surface. Palms on the sidewalk. Palms on my knees. Slowly. I’m up and my hands crawl around my torso and cover my face. A rhythmic humming is coming from all around. The light is strange. Cold season is here. Flat line horizon stirs with a mass like black waves. Flashes of white light strike out like needles through skin. My fingers played across my face, touched bone and came away wet. A shadow moves in front of me.
"What do you think you're trying to do?"
With my right hand I continued to explore the exposed bone structures, the rifts in soft tissue. I tried to see the shadow but it stayed on the edge of my faltering vision like a speck of dust on my eye. When I attempted to focus it slid away.
"What are you doing? What’s happened to your face?”
"Come closer," I said, "I can only see out of one eye. And not very well.” I brushed my fingers across the remnants of my lips. Touched broken teeth that felt like crude knives, arrowheads maybe.
The shadow shifted, seemed to come at me from behind boulders. I could smell something now, a mixture of ash and cologne.
“What happened to your face?”
“I still can’t see you. I can smell you, but I can’t see you.” There was a rush of air, I heard tigers screaming. I was a fountain. Sounds of bodies falling, engines roaring. Still, that hum was there, rhythmic, like a chant. The shadow shifted once more. I saw that it was made up of rags. Filthy rags whipping in the wind like shrapnel torn flags. What was inside the rags? What sort of flagpole would support this inundation?
Colors were coming back to me, still though, only in one eye. I could see beneath me, where my left hand was propping up my body, a line of green grass peeking through the dark gray and white concrete. There was red too, of course. There was red everywhere, but I chose instead to see the green grass. When would it ever be likely for me to see such a thing again?
“I think he’s had it.”
My right hand was fluttering uncontrollably over what I thought was more than likely exposed skull. Why was there no pain? The bones felt like flowers, the skin like leaves.
“I ain’t had it.”
The shadow came closer. “You look like you had it.”
Something was coming out me. A movement at my belly. Long trains, caterpillars, and metal.
“You’re bleeding again.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever stopped.” I gasped, still no pain, though it was getting hard to breathe. “I was born bleeding.”
“You’ve gotta great sense of humor about the whole thing,” the shadow laughed. I think I saw teeth. The flagpole had teeth.
“What happened?”
The shadow receded. I was left there for a while. I saw a circle in the sky or maybe it was the ground. Everything seemed reflective and it was equally possible in my mind to fly on both the ground and the sky. You simply needed the right apparatus. They apparently had it.
“Who are they?” The shadow was back, rags whirling about it.
There must be wind. Was I talking out loud? “Who are they?” I repeated. I didn’t know.
“Who is she?”
Colors were crossed. The green grass was red. I was lying in a puddle of green. It stuck to me. I couldn’t get it off. She?
“You sure that’s a she?”
“Gotta be.”
“How you figure.”
“That’s a tit.”
“That? That don’t look like no tit.”
“That’s a tit.”
“Looks like a, ah, I don’t even wanna say it.”
“Yeah.”
The blood came onto my thighs. What happened before the blood? I was walking. Surely I was walking. There were birds, but then again there are always birds. But they were acting strange, not assuming their normal patterns. Creating quite a ruckus. Wind. There was paper in the sky. White squares, we pointed… we…
“No point in leavin’ it there like that.”
“Right, right.”
“What’s he doin’ now?”
I thought my arm was a column and I was tree growing around it. Sky was my destination, starlight, sunlight, that’s what I was hungry for.
I put both my palms down in the green lake. I pushed up. The columns were structurally unsound. They buckled, but my knees came up. Volcanoes, waterfalls, geysers, I was a steam engine, cracks unsealed, roaring, spilling, gushing. I pushed.
“What does he think he’s doing?”
Light whirled. I saw buildings cracked and burned. White light meant the sun. I would go to it. Ragged shadows surrounded me. A red light turned green. There were screams. At least, I think there were screams. The whirling was distracting. I looked down. So tall. I was so tall, standing in a green lake. Where are these hands coming from?
“I will disintegrate, you will disintegrate, I will disintegrate, you will disintegrate…” The waves were closing in again. I saw the rags spin toward them. They were too late. The horizon was nothing but a hole to let the light in.
“Yeah, I was thinking that might be a good decision.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to go with the cherry one?”
“Huh-uh, it would clash with the curtains.”
“Really?”
“Honestly darling, I’ve always been better with color.”
“Well, yeah, I guess. Hey, finish up that latte and we’ll go get it today.”
“Today? You mean it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re the best!”
“Anything for you.”
“To hell with the rest of this latte, let’s go get it now.”
“Whatever you say darling.”
“What’s that light?”
Monday, September 7, 2009
Twenty-eight Sentences
1. I will never have to bother mother for another Kit-Kat.
2. This bicycle is inexplicably rickety.
3. I will disarm the megalomaniacs with my tiny arm.
4. It's partly because he smartly disguised the object as detritus and found his way secretly through alleys packed with field operatives that he lives to sing about it to his family clan.
5 .The deadly man with the two-ton hand is slowly eating up the land and leaving piles of dying flowers behind him
6. As an ancient predator, I predate, or come before, the carnivorous green dinosaur.
7. She propels herself through fields of poppies with the tiny golden motors implanted in her spine.
8. Robert can't fit into his old pants because he ate the sun.
9. The copperhead mirage exists to ensure your personal charm
10. Her tender paws were bruised and bloodied after surgically replacing the calloused pads with shining caps of titanium
11. The most intense moment of beauty I have stored in my feeble memory is when your belly was splayed open like an orchid and the baby you had hiding within you tumbled out bloodied and tender like a suffocating eel twitching and convulsing until the hook rips out of its fat purple lip
12. After I drastically reduce your food supply, I will introduce a food packet that is many times more flavorful and shiny.
13. We were not sure about allowing you to be a part of our gang until you proved yourself by selling fake drugs to elderly people, you jerk
14. Dear Marine Life Geniuses, I am a very capable manager of submarine creatures and as such a person, I humbly request you expedite your review process of the Manatee Managerial application form as quickly as possible so that I may know how best to deal with the next few days as I may have other jobs lined up in my specific field
15. One time, in Istanbul, I had a cup of coffee that sort of approached the greatness of the coffee I now hold in my hand but I wasn't quite as pleased with the consistency as I am with this very pleasurable coffee now sitting before me which I consider to be the best damn coffee I’ve ever tasted in the entire fucking world
16. I thought it was really cool that you didn't get a fake hand cause I think that people who get artificial limbs are the same as people who go bald but comb their hair over the tops of their head in some insane attempt to convince others that they are not losing their hair
17. My easily policed avocado somehow outwitted your biogenetically engineered eggplant
18. I thought maybe you could tell me how intelligent viruses bent on destroying the boy who deployed special forces commandos on his video game last week infected the gelled meat.
19. I can't seem to identify myself within this vague program full of blips and places to hide
20. My dimple carver ain't so simple farmer john
21. Hey you crystal gazers in your stardust chambers, how come all your animals are in the polls in last place?
22. My intermittent insect drone emitter is hidden well in a certain anarchic African country
23. I hid the sheep cannon beneath a stack of fresh hay where it will not be sniffed out because their noses will never be able to penetrate the green stack.
24. The neophyte prostitute sanctimoniously dumped her progeny into a canal filled with flesh eating bacteria and cheeseburger wrappers from McDonald’s
25. On the ladder leading to the sliding board I thought I heard a high-pitched word being sucked into my ear and into my other ear
26. Every car I see shaped like a Bentley makes me want to see a Bentley shaped like me.
27. Mister Vietcong did you think you were wrong when you bought that Coca-Cola for fifty-nine cents?
28. Don’t worry; I won't give you the cold shoulder like sweet Al Capone did, honey
2. This bicycle is inexplicably rickety.
3. I will disarm the megalomaniacs with my tiny arm.
4. It's partly because he smartly disguised the object as detritus and found his way secretly through alleys packed with field operatives that he lives to sing about it to his family clan.
5 .The deadly man with the two-ton hand is slowly eating up the land and leaving piles of dying flowers behind him
6. As an ancient predator, I predate, or come before, the carnivorous green dinosaur.
7. She propels herself through fields of poppies with the tiny golden motors implanted in her spine.
8. Robert can't fit into his old pants because he ate the sun.
9. The copperhead mirage exists to ensure your personal charm
10. Her tender paws were bruised and bloodied after surgically replacing the calloused pads with shining caps of titanium
11. The most intense moment of beauty I have stored in my feeble memory is when your belly was splayed open like an orchid and the baby you had hiding within you tumbled out bloodied and tender like a suffocating eel twitching and convulsing until the hook rips out of its fat purple lip
12. After I drastically reduce your food supply, I will introduce a food packet that is many times more flavorful and shiny.
13. We were not sure about allowing you to be a part of our gang until you proved yourself by selling fake drugs to elderly people, you jerk
14. Dear Marine Life Geniuses, I am a very capable manager of submarine creatures and as such a person, I humbly request you expedite your review process of the Manatee Managerial application form as quickly as possible so that I may know how best to deal with the next few days as I may have other jobs lined up in my specific field
15. One time, in Istanbul, I had a cup of coffee that sort of approached the greatness of the coffee I now hold in my hand but I wasn't quite as pleased with the consistency as I am with this very pleasurable coffee now sitting before me which I consider to be the best damn coffee I’ve ever tasted in the entire fucking world
16. I thought it was really cool that you didn't get a fake hand cause I think that people who get artificial limbs are the same as people who go bald but comb their hair over the tops of their head in some insane attempt to convince others that they are not losing their hair
17. My easily policed avocado somehow outwitted your biogenetically engineered eggplant
18. I thought maybe you could tell me how intelligent viruses bent on destroying the boy who deployed special forces commandos on his video game last week infected the gelled meat.
19. I can't seem to identify myself within this vague program full of blips and places to hide
20. My dimple carver ain't so simple farmer john
21. Hey you crystal gazers in your stardust chambers, how come all your animals are in the polls in last place?
22. My intermittent insect drone emitter is hidden well in a certain anarchic African country
23. I hid the sheep cannon beneath a stack of fresh hay where it will not be sniffed out because their noses will never be able to penetrate the green stack.
24. The neophyte prostitute sanctimoniously dumped her progeny into a canal filled with flesh eating bacteria and cheeseburger wrappers from McDonald’s
25. On the ladder leading to the sliding board I thought I heard a high-pitched word being sucked into my ear and into my other ear
26. Every car I see shaped like a Bentley makes me want to see a Bentley shaped like me.
27. Mister Vietcong did you think you were wrong when you bought that Coca-Cola for fifty-nine cents?
28. Don’t worry; I won't give you the cold shoulder like sweet Al Capone did, honey
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Sometimes
Jelly squinched up her face in an effort to plug her nose without having to remove her hands from her jeans pockets. She hated summer. The sun beat down on the rusted dumpsters and made the streets smell like rotten fruit, sickeningly sweet and black. She was hot. She always wore long sleeves and pants in order to cover up her scars. The scars didn’t bother her so much; she thought they made her look a little dangerous, sexy even. It was the freshly scabbed wounds that made her feel self-conscious. People always stared at her arms, usually with shock, sometimes with pity. Jelly hated pity. She ran her fore and middle finger over her left arm and pressed a little where it was the most tender.
She frowned and looked to her left. Andy was late. She glanced at her watch for the tenth time and shook her small fist at a fly she was too slow to kill. Andy appeared around the corner and walked toward Jelly. He moved slowly, long legs stretched out and seemed to grab the ground and pull his upper body grudgingly forward.
Jelly crossed her arms. “‘Bout time.”
Andy lit a cigarette, inhaled. “Am I late?” Smoke curled out his nostrils and around the corners of his mouth. His eyes were slits. Pupils dilated. He looked straight through her.
Jelly stared.
“You’ll have to forgive me.” Andy’s cigarette hung off his lower lip.
“Why?”
Andy swung at a fly and caught it. “Flies.” He shook it in his hand and let it go. The fly buzzed off in a slow awkwardly oscillating circle. “Let’s walk.”
“Too hot.”
“I wanna show you something.”
“Do we have to walk?”
Andy flicked his ash at Jelly. It landed on her black shirt. She didn’t look at it. She knew it was there, had felt it land through the material. He turned and slouched down the street. She glared after him, cursing underneath her breath, then caught up and walked not quite beside him, but not behind him. She tried to remember how she’d met Andy but couldn’t quite get it clear in her head. She thought maybe it was in a bar, but couldn’t remember which one. Then again, maybe it was a bookshop. Jelly couldn’t think straight. It was like this every time they got together. It wasn’t like she was in love with him; she didn’t think herself capable. She’d never been an emotional person as far back as she could remember. Everything was filtered. Though, sometimes memories did surface.
They would appear in her dreams, garbled yet intense. Day to day sensations would stir up faint recollections of her past, of yesterday. There was a wall. Jelly was aware of this wall because she created it. Sometimes she dreamed about it. It was gray. Sometimes, she dreamed that there were cracks in it. She didn’t enjoy thinking about it. Andy made her feel strange. Maybe he simply amused her; kept her from getting too bored. Jelly stared at his arm. It was like a noodle. There was no muscular definition and he let it swing back and forth limply. The skin was shiny. There was no hair. It reminded her of plastic. She crossed her arms and ran both hands over her elbows, down her forearms, over her wrists, into her palms and snapped her fingertips together. She let her arms fall to her sides.
“Where we going?”
“You’ll see.” He tossed his cigarette into the road and lit another. Jelly hated how much he smoked. It was always one cigarette after another. It made her think of her father. She remembered him sitting at his HAM radio, smoking, speaking to tinny voices with funny accents. She would try to get his attention by shoving her toys in his face, with a “look dad, looky!” He would push the toy down, “That’s nice, dear,” and continue talking to the disembodied voice. She remembered his face when he died. Aneurysm. She was five. He had looked like he always did. Expressionless. Sitting in his chair. His cigarette burned down to his blue tinged flesh.
Andy stopped. She almost ran into him. They were at the big black wrought iron gates of Center Park. She’d never been inside. The city ran out of funds to maintain it, so it had gone wild. The art deco designs were nearly covered by the dead vines that were so dense they seemed to have strangled themselves to death. Suicide.
“How narcissistic of you,” she whispered as she ran her fingers over the dry brown stems. She cracked a small piece off and held it between her fingers, like a cigarette, mimicking Andy. Every time he inhaled, she inhaled. Andy pretended not to notice, or didn’t care.
“Yesterday,” he said slowly through the thick cloud of smoke in his mouth, “I woke up and my mouth was bleeding. I got up and went into the bathroom to rinse my mouth. It was completely dark and I couldn’t see anything at all. I turned on the water and let it run over my fingers until it was cool.” He rubbed his hands together. “When I put my hands to my face I felt something. Then I felt how tight the skin was on my face. When I turned on the light there was blood all over my face. I opened my mouth. There was a wound.” He bent close to Jelly and opened his mouth. She looked into his mouth and saw it, long and jagged, near the back of his mouth on the right side.
“Did it hurt?” Strange things always happened to Andy. Inexplicable bruises. He woke up with a broken finger once and had no idea how it had happened. Jelly found it interesting that he always discovered these things in the morning after sleeping. She wondered if he slept violently.
“I reached my fingers in and touched it, but I couldn’t feel anything. I thought maybe I’d bitten myself while asleep so I tried to remember my dreams. I couldn’t fully recall anything- just lights, colors, movements. That upset me so I decided to take a walk. I found myself at these gates.” He gestured up toward the top of the gate then let his arm fall slowly back to his side. “We’re going inside.”
She watched him climbed over the gates, arms white and flashing in the heat and then followed him over. Jelly felt a chill pass through her. It was distinctly cooler inside in the park. Willow trees cast purple shadows. The park was overgrown with long grasses, briars and wild flowers. Black-eyed susan, violets and dandelions fought thistle, wild rose and onion. Each scent dominated for an instant in the soft breeze then merged together. Jelly closed her eyes and inhaled, savored the scents like a connoisseur of fine wine, sorted them out individually, then let them all crash together and become one.
“It reminds me of you.” Andy pursed his lips and stared at the ground awhile.
“Everything is tangled. Moves slowly.”
“This should be my place.”
“C’mon, I want to show you something else.” They walked down a trail that had, in its heyday, been a series of interconnected blocks of polished marble, but the weeds had crept in over time, grown through the cracks, died, decayed, and created a new layer of moist soil over the old path. Here and there the marble peeked out where small animals had scratched at the surface in a futile attempt to burrow or bury their treasure. The path reminded Jelly of her childhood. There had been woods behind her childhood home. She used to play there. She would climb the trees and pretend to control the wind. She would close her eyes and imagine faces in the atmosphere around her. She commanded them to blow the leaves. Sometimes they would blow her to the tops of the trees and hold her, safely, where she was too afraid to climb and she would look at the other side of the world with her hands positioned in the ‘okay’ sign, connected at the thumbs, pressed against her cheekbones and brow. She called her make-believe binoculars her ‘far-eyes.’
One day she was walking home from playing in the woods and she found her mother on the side of the path just at the edge of the woods. She was crouched by the walnut tree that marked the edge of their property softly swaying back and forth, uttering a plaintive moan. The hem of her plaid dress made the dead leaves rustle on the ground. She crept up to her mother, being careful not to step on any twigs and looked over her shoulder. Her mother pawed at the ground like an animal, fingers stabbed through the crisp leaves and anchored her to the ground saying, “Oh, oh, oh.”
Jelly put her hand on her mom’s shoulder. “Momma?” Her mother moaned louder, raspier. “Momma, stop!” Jelly pushed her mother with all her might. Her mother rolled over easily and Jelly fell on top of her, felt her vibrating, convulsing. Jelly yelled at her, tried to get her attention, grabbed her face and turned it toward her own; tried to look into her mother’s eyes, but they were clenched tight. She put her thumbs on her eyelids and forced them open. Her mother’s eyes were red and swollen from crying. The eyelids were too slippery for her to keep them open. She stood up and just stared at her mother on the ground. She looked like she was sleeping. Jelly turned and ran to the house where she found her father. Sitting. She watched his cigarette extinguish on his flesh.
“It’s just up ahead.” Andy glanced over his shoulder, pushed a thin, purple thorn branch back and held it between his fingertips ‘til Jelly took it by the tip and arched it up. She ducked under it and they continued plodding through the undergrowth that became more and more dense the deeper they plunged into the unkempt parkland. Soon they came to a clearing of sorts. The willow trees and thorns they had been methodically plucking their way through abruptly ceased. They were in a semicircular enclosure. Opposite of where they stood was a twenty-foot sandstone wall that disappeared to the left and right into the vegetation. Jelly wondered if there was graffiti on the other side. To their left was a fountain. There was no water in it. The sculpture in the middle looked like it was once a male figure, but was now only a set of well defined muscular legs with a metal tube sticking out of the middle, bent and rusted at its broken tip. The rest of the sculpture now existed as a collection of debris scattered about the base. Some of the chunks hinted at human form; the curve of some muscle, a shoulder maybe, or perhaps an ear.
Andy looked at Jelly for a while, like he was expecting her to say something.
“Did I ever tell you about my mom?” she asked.
“She’s in a mental hospital, right?”
Jelly nodded. “I just got a letter saying they’ve moved her to another hospital upstate, one where they can watch her more closely. She’s been in eight altogether now. I keep all the letters the doctors send me. I don’t know why they send me letters, I’ve never visited her.”
“Why?”
Jelly shook her head. “I’ve been remembering a bunch of things today. Things.” Jelly crouched down and dug her finger into the dirt. “Things I either decided not to think about, or,” she frowned, pulled a small blue pebble out of the earth, rolled it between her thumb and forefinger then let it rest in her palm. “Or, maybe, I just wanted to forget.” She dropped the pebble. “Do you know how many foster homes I’ve been in?”
Andy shook his head.
“Me neither.”
“So, does this place remind you of you too?”
Jelly looked around, arms crossed. “I dunno. Everything reminds me of me. That’s the problem. I’m inundated by myself at every turn.”
Andy shrugged.
Jelly cocked her head to the side. “Is this it?”
“What?”
“This. Is this what you wanted to show me?” She opened her arms and gestured. “This stupid wall? Those trees? I ripped my shirt back there you know.” She pulled her shirt out and showed him the small jagged hole.
Andy turned around, faced the wall and pulled a cigarette from his pack. He didn’t light it, just tapped the filter end on the back of his palm and stared at the wall. “There’s one more thing,” he walked toward the wall, reached out, touched it with his left hand and turned right. He walked thirty paces, his hand dragging along the coarse sandstone till he came to small fissure in the wall that ran top to bottom. He kneeled in the grass there. “Come here.” He motioned without looking up.
Jelly followed Andy’s path of flattened grass along the wall and looked over his shoulder.
“It’s a mannequin.”
“It’s you.”
“No, it’s a mannequin.”
“Yes, it is a mannequin, but its also you, don’t you see?”
Jelly looked closer at the form. It was lying on its stomach. It had no legs. The left arm was missing. The right arm was stretched out above the head; forefinger extended, pointing, no, its finger was inside the crack in the wall. “No. I don’t”
“Remember the dream you told me about?”
“What dream?”
“The one where you find yourself at a wall? Where you think there is some part of you on the other side?”
“That wall is gray. This one is brown.”
“But it’s a wall.”
“A gray wall.”
“The color doesn’t matter. It’s a symbol.”
“What are you saying?”
“This is a key.” Andy put his hand on the mannequin’s back. “There’s something here for you.” He ran his hand up and down the mannequin’s spine. “I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
Andy flipped the mannequin onto its back. “Give me your knife.” He held out his hand.
“Why?” She fingered the contour of her knife through her jeans.
“Please.”
“It’s mine.”
“I know, trust me.” He stared intensely. His pupils were pinpricks.
Jelly scratched her neck then pulled the knife out of her pocket and put it in his palm.
“Kneel beside me,” he said. “Look at this arm.”
She did. It was mostly smooth with small dirt encrusted abrasions.
“Does it remind you of your arm?”
“No.” Jelly started to stand but he grabbed her by the arm and made her stay.
“Make it look like your arm then.” He held her knife out. “Do it. Cut it like you cut yourself.”
“No.”
He squeezed her arm. “Cut it like you cut yourself,” he said again. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the mannequin, still holding her knife out by the blade. “Do it,” he whispered.
Jelly reached for the knife. Her hand was shaking. She didn’t know exactly why she was doing what he wanted. She felt disembodied. She heard her voice in her head as if it were coming out of a tiny speaker in a cavernous ballroom,
“Fine,” she said.
She took the knife in her right hand and grasped the mannequin’s arm at the elbow with her left. She placed the point of the knife right below her own hand and pushed the tip in. Jelly glanced up at the mannequin’s face. Its pale blue eyes stared vapidly underneath faded brown eyebrows. The lips were the same bland cream color as the rest of the body. Jelly pulled the knife slowly toward her own body, down the mannequin’s forearm and stopped just before the wrist began.
“Again.”
“No.” Jelly felt hungry.
“Again.” Andy squeezed her arm, tighter this time. “This time deeper.”
She did. She kept going this time, carving gashes that flowed into the palm of the hand, tiny little scratches with curlicues on the tip of the pinky. She kept going, created grids, maps, drew the entire world on the mannequin’s arm.
“Are those tears?”
“It’s sweat.”
“And there you are.” He ran his hand up and down her spine while she wiped away her tears. “I want you to do one more thing for me.” He smiled.
“I don’t want to do anything else for you.” Jelly’s head was throbbing. She felt an immense pressure somewhere inside. Her body was trying to remember something. Her brain fought against it.
“Then do it for yourself.”
“I don’t want to do anything.” She held her head between her hands.
“This will help. I know it will.”
“No.”
He squeezed her arm again and leaned close to her ear. He whispered, “You have to.”
Jelly tried to squirm away but could not. “What do you want?”
“Cut off her arm.”
“I don’t-”
“Cut her fucking arm off!”
It took Jelly a while to cut off the mannequin’s arm. When she was done, Andy stood over her.
“Wasn’t that cathartic?”
Jelly pressed the blister that had grown on her palm. She scratched at it until the tender flesh was exposed underneath and pressed that. The little stabs of pain helped her head. The enemy was no longer at the gates. She was exhausted.
“Pick it up and c’mon. Leave the knife.”
She picked up the mutilated arm by the finger and dragged it as she followed Andy back to the entrance of the park. This time she didn’t care about the thorns ripping at her clothing and scratching her flesh, but she still savored the complex smells.
She tossed the arm over the gate and climbed out after Andy. As soon as her shoes hit the broken sidewalk she immediately began to sweat. She wished she could stop breathing. The black air filled her lungs again- sickeningly sweet, made her ribs ache like they were teeth riddled with cavities.
Andy turned to her, smiling a little, put his arm on her shoulder and asked, “Do you remember when we first met?”
Jelly counted how many times the crack in the sidewalk splintered off into smaller cracks. She thought of the smaller cracks as tributaries.
“You were reading on your steps. I walked up and said ‘Do you like dancing?’ And you said-”
“No. I like sitting.” If the tiny cracks are tributaries, and the big crack is a river, the road must be an ocean.
“Yeah, that’s it. And I said ‘me too’”
“Uh-huh.” An ocean. That doesn’t make any sense at all. The grass must be the ocean.
“Well. I was thinking. Maybe we should go dancing.”
“Sure.” The grass moves like an ocean. Roads don’t move.
“Okay. We’ll make plans later.” Andy lit a cigarette turned and walked down the street. Jelly watched him slouch away down the street past the rusted dumpsters filled with black and white and green bags split open like bellies baking in the sun. She watched him stride over rivers and tributaries- flick ashes into the ocean- exhale smoke like a giant machine. She watched his back as he got smaller and smaller then held up her hand, squinted, got him in between her thumb and forefinger and squashed him. Jelly turned the opposite direction and towed her arm behind her a few blocks ‘til she came to a small corner store. She tossed the arm into a dumpster, went inside and bought a pocketknife and a soda.
She frowned and looked to her left. Andy was late. She glanced at her watch for the tenth time and shook her small fist at a fly she was too slow to kill. Andy appeared around the corner and walked toward Jelly. He moved slowly, long legs stretched out and seemed to grab the ground and pull his upper body grudgingly forward.
Jelly crossed her arms. “‘Bout time.”
Andy lit a cigarette, inhaled. “Am I late?” Smoke curled out his nostrils and around the corners of his mouth. His eyes were slits. Pupils dilated. He looked straight through her.
Jelly stared.
“You’ll have to forgive me.” Andy’s cigarette hung off his lower lip.
“Why?”
Andy swung at a fly and caught it. “Flies.” He shook it in his hand and let it go. The fly buzzed off in a slow awkwardly oscillating circle. “Let’s walk.”
“Too hot.”
“I wanna show you something.”
“Do we have to walk?”
Andy flicked his ash at Jelly. It landed on her black shirt. She didn’t look at it. She knew it was there, had felt it land through the material. He turned and slouched down the street. She glared after him, cursing underneath her breath, then caught up and walked not quite beside him, but not behind him. She tried to remember how she’d met Andy but couldn’t quite get it clear in her head. She thought maybe it was in a bar, but couldn’t remember which one. Then again, maybe it was a bookshop. Jelly couldn’t think straight. It was like this every time they got together. It wasn’t like she was in love with him; she didn’t think herself capable. She’d never been an emotional person as far back as she could remember. Everything was filtered. Though, sometimes memories did surface.
They would appear in her dreams, garbled yet intense. Day to day sensations would stir up faint recollections of her past, of yesterday. There was a wall. Jelly was aware of this wall because she created it. Sometimes she dreamed about it. It was gray. Sometimes, she dreamed that there were cracks in it. She didn’t enjoy thinking about it. Andy made her feel strange. Maybe he simply amused her; kept her from getting too bored. Jelly stared at his arm. It was like a noodle. There was no muscular definition and he let it swing back and forth limply. The skin was shiny. There was no hair. It reminded her of plastic. She crossed her arms and ran both hands over her elbows, down her forearms, over her wrists, into her palms and snapped her fingertips together. She let her arms fall to her sides.
“Where we going?”
“You’ll see.” He tossed his cigarette into the road and lit another. Jelly hated how much he smoked. It was always one cigarette after another. It made her think of her father. She remembered him sitting at his HAM radio, smoking, speaking to tinny voices with funny accents. She would try to get his attention by shoving her toys in his face, with a “look dad, looky!” He would push the toy down, “That’s nice, dear,” and continue talking to the disembodied voice. She remembered his face when he died. Aneurysm. She was five. He had looked like he always did. Expressionless. Sitting in his chair. His cigarette burned down to his blue tinged flesh.
Andy stopped. She almost ran into him. They were at the big black wrought iron gates of Center Park. She’d never been inside. The city ran out of funds to maintain it, so it had gone wild. The art deco designs were nearly covered by the dead vines that were so dense they seemed to have strangled themselves to death. Suicide.
“How narcissistic of you,” she whispered as she ran her fingers over the dry brown stems. She cracked a small piece off and held it between her fingers, like a cigarette, mimicking Andy. Every time he inhaled, she inhaled. Andy pretended not to notice, or didn’t care.
“Yesterday,” he said slowly through the thick cloud of smoke in his mouth, “I woke up and my mouth was bleeding. I got up and went into the bathroom to rinse my mouth. It was completely dark and I couldn’t see anything at all. I turned on the water and let it run over my fingers until it was cool.” He rubbed his hands together. “When I put my hands to my face I felt something. Then I felt how tight the skin was on my face. When I turned on the light there was blood all over my face. I opened my mouth. There was a wound.” He bent close to Jelly and opened his mouth. She looked into his mouth and saw it, long and jagged, near the back of his mouth on the right side.
“Did it hurt?” Strange things always happened to Andy. Inexplicable bruises. He woke up with a broken finger once and had no idea how it had happened. Jelly found it interesting that he always discovered these things in the morning after sleeping. She wondered if he slept violently.
“I reached my fingers in and touched it, but I couldn’t feel anything. I thought maybe I’d bitten myself while asleep so I tried to remember my dreams. I couldn’t fully recall anything- just lights, colors, movements. That upset me so I decided to take a walk. I found myself at these gates.” He gestured up toward the top of the gate then let his arm fall slowly back to his side. “We’re going inside.”
She watched him climbed over the gates, arms white and flashing in the heat and then followed him over. Jelly felt a chill pass through her. It was distinctly cooler inside in the park. Willow trees cast purple shadows. The park was overgrown with long grasses, briars and wild flowers. Black-eyed susan, violets and dandelions fought thistle, wild rose and onion. Each scent dominated for an instant in the soft breeze then merged together. Jelly closed her eyes and inhaled, savored the scents like a connoisseur of fine wine, sorted them out individually, then let them all crash together and become one.
“It reminds me of you.” Andy pursed his lips and stared at the ground awhile.
“Everything is tangled. Moves slowly.”
“This should be my place.”
“C’mon, I want to show you something else.” They walked down a trail that had, in its heyday, been a series of interconnected blocks of polished marble, but the weeds had crept in over time, grown through the cracks, died, decayed, and created a new layer of moist soil over the old path. Here and there the marble peeked out where small animals had scratched at the surface in a futile attempt to burrow or bury their treasure. The path reminded Jelly of her childhood. There had been woods behind her childhood home. She used to play there. She would climb the trees and pretend to control the wind. She would close her eyes and imagine faces in the atmosphere around her. She commanded them to blow the leaves. Sometimes they would blow her to the tops of the trees and hold her, safely, where she was too afraid to climb and she would look at the other side of the world with her hands positioned in the ‘okay’ sign, connected at the thumbs, pressed against her cheekbones and brow. She called her make-believe binoculars her ‘far-eyes.’
One day she was walking home from playing in the woods and she found her mother on the side of the path just at the edge of the woods. She was crouched by the walnut tree that marked the edge of their property softly swaying back and forth, uttering a plaintive moan. The hem of her plaid dress made the dead leaves rustle on the ground. She crept up to her mother, being careful not to step on any twigs and looked over her shoulder. Her mother pawed at the ground like an animal, fingers stabbed through the crisp leaves and anchored her to the ground saying, “Oh, oh, oh.”
Jelly put her hand on her mom’s shoulder. “Momma?” Her mother moaned louder, raspier. “Momma, stop!” Jelly pushed her mother with all her might. Her mother rolled over easily and Jelly fell on top of her, felt her vibrating, convulsing. Jelly yelled at her, tried to get her attention, grabbed her face and turned it toward her own; tried to look into her mother’s eyes, but they were clenched tight. She put her thumbs on her eyelids and forced them open. Her mother’s eyes were red and swollen from crying. The eyelids were too slippery for her to keep them open. She stood up and just stared at her mother on the ground. She looked like she was sleeping. Jelly turned and ran to the house where she found her father. Sitting. She watched his cigarette extinguish on his flesh.
“It’s just up ahead.” Andy glanced over his shoulder, pushed a thin, purple thorn branch back and held it between his fingertips ‘til Jelly took it by the tip and arched it up. She ducked under it and they continued plodding through the undergrowth that became more and more dense the deeper they plunged into the unkempt parkland. Soon they came to a clearing of sorts. The willow trees and thorns they had been methodically plucking their way through abruptly ceased. They were in a semicircular enclosure. Opposite of where they stood was a twenty-foot sandstone wall that disappeared to the left and right into the vegetation. Jelly wondered if there was graffiti on the other side. To their left was a fountain. There was no water in it. The sculpture in the middle looked like it was once a male figure, but was now only a set of well defined muscular legs with a metal tube sticking out of the middle, bent and rusted at its broken tip. The rest of the sculpture now existed as a collection of debris scattered about the base. Some of the chunks hinted at human form; the curve of some muscle, a shoulder maybe, or perhaps an ear.
Andy looked at Jelly for a while, like he was expecting her to say something.
“Did I ever tell you about my mom?” she asked.
“She’s in a mental hospital, right?”
Jelly nodded. “I just got a letter saying they’ve moved her to another hospital upstate, one where they can watch her more closely. She’s been in eight altogether now. I keep all the letters the doctors send me. I don’t know why they send me letters, I’ve never visited her.”
“Why?”
Jelly shook her head. “I’ve been remembering a bunch of things today. Things.” Jelly crouched down and dug her finger into the dirt. “Things I either decided not to think about, or,” she frowned, pulled a small blue pebble out of the earth, rolled it between her thumb and forefinger then let it rest in her palm. “Or, maybe, I just wanted to forget.” She dropped the pebble. “Do you know how many foster homes I’ve been in?”
Andy shook his head.
“Me neither.”
“So, does this place remind you of you too?”
Jelly looked around, arms crossed. “I dunno. Everything reminds me of me. That’s the problem. I’m inundated by myself at every turn.”
Andy shrugged.
Jelly cocked her head to the side. “Is this it?”
“What?”
“This. Is this what you wanted to show me?” She opened her arms and gestured. “This stupid wall? Those trees? I ripped my shirt back there you know.” She pulled her shirt out and showed him the small jagged hole.
Andy turned around, faced the wall and pulled a cigarette from his pack. He didn’t light it, just tapped the filter end on the back of his palm and stared at the wall. “There’s one more thing,” he walked toward the wall, reached out, touched it with his left hand and turned right. He walked thirty paces, his hand dragging along the coarse sandstone till he came to small fissure in the wall that ran top to bottom. He kneeled in the grass there. “Come here.” He motioned without looking up.
Jelly followed Andy’s path of flattened grass along the wall and looked over his shoulder.
“It’s a mannequin.”
“It’s you.”
“No, it’s a mannequin.”
“Yes, it is a mannequin, but its also you, don’t you see?”
Jelly looked closer at the form. It was lying on its stomach. It had no legs. The left arm was missing. The right arm was stretched out above the head; forefinger extended, pointing, no, its finger was inside the crack in the wall. “No. I don’t”
“Remember the dream you told me about?”
“What dream?”
“The one where you find yourself at a wall? Where you think there is some part of you on the other side?”
“That wall is gray. This one is brown.”
“But it’s a wall.”
“A gray wall.”
“The color doesn’t matter. It’s a symbol.”
“What are you saying?”
“This is a key.” Andy put his hand on the mannequin’s back. “There’s something here for you.” He ran his hand up and down the mannequin’s spine. “I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
Andy flipped the mannequin onto its back. “Give me your knife.” He held out his hand.
“Why?” She fingered the contour of her knife through her jeans.
“Please.”
“It’s mine.”
“I know, trust me.” He stared intensely. His pupils were pinpricks.
Jelly scratched her neck then pulled the knife out of her pocket and put it in his palm.
“Kneel beside me,” he said. “Look at this arm.”
She did. It was mostly smooth with small dirt encrusted abrasions.
“Does it remind you of your arm?”
“No.” Jelly started to stand but he grabbed her by the arm and made her stay.
“Make it look like your arm then.” He held her knife out. “Do it. Cut it like you cut yourself.”
“No.”
He squeezed her arm. “Cut it like you cut yourself,” he said again. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the mannequin, still holding her knife out by the blade. “Do it,” he whispered.
Jelly reached for the knife. Her hand was shaking. She didn’t know exactly why she was doing what he wanted. She felt disembodied. She heard her voice in her head as if it were coming out of a tiny speaker in a cavernous ballroom,
“Fine,” she said.
She took the knife in her right hand and grasped the mannequin’s arm at the elbow with her left. She placed the point of the knife right below her own hand and pushed the tip in. Jelly glanced up at the mannequin’s face. Its pale blue eyes stared vapidly underneath faded brown eyebrows. The lips were the same bland cream color as the rest of the body. Jelly pulled the knife slowly toward her own body, down the mannequin’s forearm and stopped just before the wrist began.
“Again.”
“No.” Jelly felt hungry.
“Again.” Andy squeezed her arm, tighter this time. “This time deeper.”
She did. She kept going this time, carving gashes that flowed into the palm of the hand, tiny little scratches with curlicues on the tip of the pinky. She kept going, created grids, maps, drew the entire world on the mannequin’s arm.
“Are those tears?”
“It’s sweat.”
“And there you are.” He ran his hand up and down her spine while she wiped away her tears. “I want you to do one more thing for me.” He smiled.
“I don’t want to do anything else for you.” Jelly’s head was throbbing. She felt an immense pressure somewhere inside. Her body was trying to remember something. Her brain fought against it.
“Then do it for yourself.”
“I don’t want to do anything.” She held her head between her hands.
“This will help. I know it will.”
“No.”
He squeezed her arm again and leaned close to her ear. He whispered, “You have to.”
Jelly tried to squirm away but could not. “What do you want?”
“Cut off her arm.”
“I don’t-”
“Cut her fucking arm off!”
It took Jelly a while to cut off the mannequin’s arm. When she was done, Andy stood over her.
“Wasn’t that cathartic?”
Jelly pressed the blister that had grown on her palm. She scratched at it until the tender flesh was exposed underneath and pressed that. The little stabs of pain helped her head. The enemy was no longer at the gates. She was exhausted.
“Pick it up and c’mon. Leave the knife.”
She picked up the mutilated arm by the finger and dragged it as she followed Andy back to the entrance of the park. This time she didn’t care about the thorns ripping at her clothing and scratching her flesh, but she still savored the complex smells.
She tossed the arm over the gate and climbed out after Andy. As soon as her shoes hit the broken sidewalk she immediately began to sweat. She wished she could stop breathing. The black air filled her lungs again- sickeningly sweet, made her ribs ache like they were teeth riddled with cavities.
Andy turned to her, smiling a little, put his arm on her shoulder and asked, “Do you remember when we first met?”
Jelly counted how many times the crack in the sidewalk splintered off into smaller cracks. She thought of the smaller cracks as tributaries.
“You were reading on your steps. I walked up and said ‘Do you like dancing?’ And you said-”
“No. I like sitting.” If the tiny cracks are tributaries, and the big crack is a river, the road must be an ocean.
“Yeah, that’s it. And I said ‘me too’”
“Uh-huh.” An ocean. That doesn’t make any sense at all. The grass must be the ocean.
“Well. I was thinking. Maybe we should go dancing.”
“Sure.” The grass moves like an ocean. Roads don’t move.
“Okay. We’ll make plans later.” Andy lit a cigarette turned and walked down the street. Jelly watched him slouch away down the street past the rusted dumpsters filled with black and white and green bags split open like bellies baking in the sun. She watched him stride over rivers and tributaries- flick ashes into the ocean- exhale smoke like a giant machine. She watched his back as he got smaller and smaller then held up her hand, squinted, got him in between her thumb and forefinger and squashed him. Jelly turned the opposite direction and towed her arm behind her a few blocks ‘til she came to a small corner store. She tossed the arm into a dumpster, went inside and bought a pocketknife and a soda.
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