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Fairy Tale Review The Aquamarine Issue Naoko Awa Naoko Carmen Lau Sarah Sarai Jessica Bozek Jessica G.C. Waldrep Sarah C. Bell Sam Martone Tara Goedjen Kelly Braffet John ColburnJohn Amy Schrader Toshiya Kamei Toshiya Sandy FlorianSandy Terese Svoboda Terese Kim Addonizio Annie Guthrie ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-5583-8 ISBN-10: 0-8173-5583-9 Connie Voisine Steve Tomasula Martine Bellen Maya Sonenberg Maya Edgar Allan Poe Ann Fisher-Wirth Dan Beachy-Quick Dan Natania RosenfeldNatania Joyelle McSweeneyJoyelle fairytalereview.com Angela Jane Fountas Hugh Behm-Steinberg Hugh Craig Teicher Morgan Bonnie Jean Michalski Carmen Giménez Smith This Book Belongs To:

Fairy Tale Review The Aquamarine Issue

Founder & Editor Kate Bernheimer

Advisory Board Lydia Millet, Tucson, AZ Donald Haase, Wayne State University Maria Tatar, Harvard University Marina Warner, University of Essex, UK Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

Assistant Editors Molly Dowd, Colleen Hollister, Whitney Holmes, Andy Johnson, Jessica Fordham Kidd, Sarah McClung, Nick Pincumbe, Laurence Ross (University of Alabama)

Assistant & Contributing Editor Timothy Schaffert (University of Nebraska–Lincoln)

Web Editor Brian Oliu

Web Design & Print Design J. Johnson, DesignFarm

Cover Art (inside frame) Kiki Smith, “Born” courtesy of the artist

Layout Meike Lenz, Michael Bunce, Tara Reeser English Department’s Publications Unit, Illinois State University

A co-publication of Fairy Tale Review Press and The University of Alabama Press Fairy Tale Review

www.fairytalereview.com

Fairy Tale Review (ISSN: 1556-6153) is an annual co-publication of Fairy Tale Review Press and The University of Alabama Press. Single-year subscription rates for 2009 are $20.00 for individuals, $25.00 for institutions, and an additional $8.00 for foreign delivery. Subscription orders and changes of address should be directed to Allie Harper, The University of Alabama Press, Box 870380, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487- 0380. Checks should be made payable to The University of Alabama Press.

Fairy Tale Review is devoted to literary fairy tales and to contemporary writers working with the aesthetics and motifs of fairy tales. How can fairy tales help us to go where it is we are going, like Jean Cocteau’s magical horse? We hope to learn. Fairy Tale Review also seeks to celebrate and preserve traditional fairy tales through its initiatives.

Fairy Tale Review considers unpublished works of fiction, poetry, drama, screenplay, and non-fiction. Guidelines may be found at www.fairytalereview.com.

No portion of Fairy Tale Review may be reprinted without permission.

ISBN-10: 0-8173-5583-9 ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-5583-8 Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Fairy Tale Review The Aquamarine Issue

ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS

Kate Bernheimer Editor’s Note • 15

The Aquamarine Issue is the fifth anniversary issue of Fairy Tale Review, and is appropriately its most oceanic, its most aesthetically diverse, issue to date.

Kim Addonizio Hansel • 17

We my sister Gretel, oh Gretel left our father’s house and scattered and lost did not stop at her old witch woman’s cottage candy hungry but kept on into the world, woods. Naoko Awa Translated by Toshiya Kamei Gifts from the Sea • 18

At summer’s end, the seaside town celebrated its annual festival. After all the bathers had gone home, some men carried the mikoshi shrine through the streets, while others beat the taiko drums. In the evenings the narrow path along the sea was lined on both sides with vendors.

Dan Beachy-Quick A Point that Flows • 24

Hugh Behm-Steinberg On Hair and Babies and the Goblin King • 43

She says I don’t want a baby brother I was the first baby and I want to stay that way. Her baby brother says you should run for office then, or make dad, if you want to be first baby. As for me, I’m looking forward to being the middle child, who wants to be the end of anything, he says.

Sarah C. Bell Urban Fairy Tale • 46 Martine Bellen Customers Who Have Bought Sleeping Beauty Have Also Bought This • 47

Jessica Bozek Five Poems • 50

In the theater of strapless extremity, they averted the tourists’ eyes. Not to the heavy curtains undrawn, their missing flutter-labor, but for the entrance the tourists gasped. The performers warbled a way to bird, raised bird to wolf, framed wolf for leopard, posed leopard for wolf. How would they take it all back?

Kelly Braffet The Pulley • 56

At the inquest it was said that the Contessa had killed a hundred young women, and maybe twice that. For the villagers, it was not a matter of how many; it was a matter of all.

John Colburn A Brief Tour of String Quartet no. 3 by Karel Husa • 75

As a boy, Karel Husa began to cry and nothing could stop him. Not even a cloud. Not even a talking flame. Ann Fisher-Wirth Two Poems • 81

I am Jenny, your beloved Jenny.

Sandy Florian The Flood • 83

Like this new thoughts rush in and my mind opens to the flowing tide with its ebb and flood, with its eighth, its quarter, its half moon, its half empty bowl, half full of fuller empty seas, and when it rains it pours and then the waters rise, which we call the flood, that fullest sea, and now again the waters rise while the highest schools of empty fish like empty sticks drift like wood.

Angela Jane Fountas God Bless a Girl Who Thinks Ahead • 84

Mary, Kate, Brigid, Anne, and Elin: sisters. Mary is the eldest, of course, that’s why her name comes first. “Mary put the kettle on. We’ll all have tea.”

Tara Goedjen Appendix to The Encyclopedia • 96

Four months we sailed upon the ocean (SEE: Travel, seafaring). Our ship slanted during storms and tossed us from wall to wall, and on calm days we were served noon meals of maggoty biscuits and cold stew that Father inspected for meat—pitching it out if he found any. Mid-trip the sea grew what Mother called “angry” and it became difficult for Sister to nudge me a space at the railing. Annie Guthrie *of poems • 113

Not knowing I came to find things colorful and kind

Carmen Lau Familiar • 121

The witch killed my family while I slept. I heard her singing in my dreams.

Sam Martone How to Make a List • 126

There are things they do not tell you about snow.

Joyelle McSweeney Salamandrine, My Kid • 137

The twittering machine lies in its crib, rehabilitating its connections. It nails up its habitation, darts up its habillement, it letters its joints, limbs, pistons, limpid injectors for easy filling stations, for stations of, for remote and E-Z filing.

Bonnie Jean Michalski O Empress, What Primal Spark? • 154

Belief in an I a primal giver of griefs, fever of gifts and giving yet. Edgar Allan Poe Annabel Lee • 155

It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; —

Natania Rosenfeld Princeling • 157

Oh blue- encrusted garden statue: how beautiful you are, framed against the green cardboard trees!

Sarah Sarai Letters, Crones Dont Worry Of • 159

I here relate an episode that befell me many years ago. I had lived near seventeen years, was big of rump and uncommonly meloned of bosoms surely for one with no babe suckling (as is the honor of woman).

Amy Schrader The Red Goblin • 162

You tell me: Don’t tell me. About the woods, cherie, Carmen Giménez Smith Three Poems from Goodbye Flicker • 163

Once for a moment once upon once there was there came one day a king a tailor princess the fisherman’s wife

Maya Sonenberg Inebriate of Air • 167

Bride: a virgin, of course. Drunk on anticipation, the guests laugh boisterously. We make predictions about the first sexual encounter, and some even place bets (position, duration), though it’s hard to imagine how such bets might be settled.

Terese Svoboda Excerpts from Pirate Talk or Mermelade • 173

I have examined all the varieties of jack-in-the-pulpits in the field, every one, and there are three, I believe, and none of them full-blooming which makes the naming of them that much more trying.

Craig Morgan Teicher The City • 179

In the city, there is a famous bakery where anyone with a little money can procure cakes and breads of the finest quality. Steve Tomasula The Kingdom’s Good • 181

Once upon a time, a king told his servant a story about a court buffoon who grew up as a prince, and then came to sit on the royal throne himself.

Connie Voisine Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? • 183

Where are they? The big nosed ones, the ones with thin hair who walked with serious faces towards me.

G.C. Waldrep Functions and Variables and Other Tales • 184

Scratch out the eyes. Of the saints in the advertisements. Of the swans in their man-boats. Use a stick, a scalpel, a rusty flange. Fingernails. Teeth: yours.

Contributor Notes • 195

Announcements • 207 Editor’s Note 

The Aquamarine Issue is the fifth anniversary issue of Fairy Tale Re- view, and is appropriately its most oceanic, its most aesthetically diverse, issue to date. I often refer to my own method of identifying fairy tales as my sensing (through feeling and through close reading) what I call a fairy-tale feel. The fairy-tale-ness of a work. I experienced fairy tales in every contribution you will find in The Aquamarine Issue. I felt a fairy-tale pulse.

I have been thinking, lately, in terms of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of affect. Applying his concept of affect to new fairy-tale literature, one sees how these works may be identified atmospherically, scientifically, telepathically: in certain works, fairy tales are water and air. In Gilles Deleuze, author Claire Colebrook illustrates this concept of affect as such: “A horror film presents horror; for beyond the fear of the characters of the viewer there is just a sense of the horror which the film draws upon. The film is not about horror, or a representation of horror; it is a sense or feeling of horror which we may or may not enter. Before the viewer or character is actually horrified we view within the affect or milieu of horror in general.”1 This Deleuzian notion of affect helps explain the range of writing that you’ll find here, as in every issue of Fairy Tale Review. The works are not about fairy tales, or a representation of fairy tales; it is a sense or feeling of fairy tales which we may or may not enter. In true fairy-tale fashion, I borrow her words: “Before the reader or character is actually enchanted, we view within the affect or milieu of fairy tales in general.”

Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers. The mind reels at their influence, omnipresence, phosphorescence: like a star or a planet, they shine, ubiquitous and necessary. Like the sea, threatened now by our changing climate, fairy tales, too, are in danger today—often forgotten by grown-up people afraid of wonder—and therefore endangered.

15 For me what also contains this issue and holds it within the salt palace of tiny sea horses is how the narratives and poems, taken together in here, can be seen to contribute not only to the very important living body of contemporary fairy tales—so nascent and now—but also to the conversation about what constitutes “a fairy tale,” that monumental type of art we so know and love. As such, I hope that Fairy Tale Review helps preserve and protect fairy tales for future generations of readers who wish to immerse in their bounty.

Kate Bernheimer Tucson, AZ

1. Colebrook, Claire, Gilles Deleuze, Routledge: 2002 (26).

16 Kim Addonizio HANSEL 

e my sister Gretel, oh Gretel left our father’s house and scat- w tered and lost did not stop at her old witch woman’s cottage candy hungry but kept on into the world, woods. We were set upon by rebels guerillas tribesmen revolutionaries who they raped cut off and stabbed left I my sister Gretel, Gretel for dead graves hands, for two days nearly to get we circled back; her cottage, burned ruin, hungry kept us alive. Then Gretel in the night died a creature something dragged her out and half-devoured her it. I filled my pockets I walked I Hansel out recognizing nothing birds circling above me I was a child who liked sweets this is my testimony what I broken know and don’t forget everything has to eat.

17 Naoko Awa Translated by Toshiya Kamei Gifts from the Sea 

t summer’s end, the seaside town celebrated its annual festival. a After all the bathers had gone home, some men carried the mikoshi shrine through the streets, while others beat the taiko drums. In the evenings the narrow path along the sea was lined on both sides with vendors. Even the hardest-working fisherman and the innkeeper took a break from work and had a good time. The townspeople drank sake and danced in broad daylight. At night they went out and strolled among the vendors. Peddlers came from faraway towns, displayed their various articles on makeshift stands, and hawked them with loud cries. Various goods lined the path lit by a soft light: fountain pens, cigarette lighters, toys, candies, and potted plants. A chill wind blew from the sea. Accompanying the roar of the small-town festival, the waves on the shore sang: “Autumn is here. Au- tumn is here.” Kanako had two fifty-yen coins in her skirt pocket. “Why don’t you buy something you like?” her sick mother had said, placing the coins in her palm. As she clutched them, Kanako decided to buy two things costing fifty yen each—one for herself and another for her mother. But there was hardly anything she could buy for fifty yen. A red crystal ring cost one hundred, a bead necklace cost one hundred fifty, and a pretty floral-print scarf cost five hundred. Young girls frolicked around in their best dresses, their hair tied in ribbons. While they bought rings and scarves, Kanako stood apart in her everyday clothes and looked at items she couldn’t afford to buy. But she was used to “window-shopping.” Kanako didn’t have a father. Her

18 mother had been sick as far back as she could remember. She was always poor and alone. Even so, she had spending money for the first time in a long time. Kanako walked with a light heart, wondering what she could buy for fifty yen. Then she heard a voice: “Fifty yen a bag.” Kanako stopped and saw a stand—an empty apple box—between an oden-stew stand and a goldfish booth. There sat an old woman with a scarf as blue as the midday sea, who stared at Kanako. Kanako went up to the old woman’s stand and saw small shiny items on the apple box. Are they buttons? she wondered, as she bent forward to take a closer look. They were shells. “Are you selling those?” asked Kanako. No one would want to buy shells because there are plenty of them on the beach, she thought, a bit disappointed. “They’re all cherry-blossom shells, miss,” said the old woman, flashing a friendly smile. No one had ever called her “miss” before, and Kanako felt embarrassed. “Take a look. You won’t find shiny shells like these anywhere else.” The old woman placed shells on her palm. They were beautiful—as beautiful as scattered cherry blossom petals. Kanako silently placed one fifty-yen coin in front of the old woman. The old woman took out a small paper bag and put a handful of shells into it. “Miss, why don’t you buy another bag?” she said, as if she knew Kanako had one more fifty-yen coin in her skirt pocket. “No. I’m going to buy something for my mother,” said Kanako, shaking her head. She grabbed the bag of shells and left the old woman’s stand. Kanako put the bag in her blouse pocket and began to walk. Then the shells made sounds like dry sand falling softly. “Crunch, crunch, crunch. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Kana-chan. Crunch, crunch, crunch.” The shells in her pocket sang to the rhythms of Kanako’s steps. Or rather Kanako walked to the tune of the shells’ song.

19 “Crunch, crunch, crunch. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Kana-chan, Ka- na-chan. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Why don’t you go to the beach?” As the shells sang, Kanako’s feet guided her toward the beach before she realized it. She walked along the vendor-lined path, passed an abandoned shed at a bend, and reached a beach lit softly by the yellow moon in the sky. “Crunch, crunch, crunch. Crunch, crunch, crunch,” the shells sang. “Why don’t you keep going? Why don’t you go to the Moonview Rock?” The Moonview Rock stood by the lighthouse. Was it called that because it was a great place to watch the moon? Or was it because the rock itself was as round as the moon? Led by the shells’ song, Kanako went up to the rock, then saw sev- eral figures: one, two, three, five old women in sea-blue scarves. The old women surrounded the rock as if it were a table and huddled together, as if holding a secret meeting, their scarves fluttering in the wind. As Kanako went up on tiptoe, one old woman suddenly clapped, saying, “I won! I won!” Then the old woman next to her said, “It’s my turn.” Kanako stood in a daze, as if she were dreaming. One of the old women turned around and beckoned her. “Why don’t you join us?” Kanako was speechless. “You have some shells, don’t you?” asked the old woman. Seeing Kanako give a slight nod, she added, “You can join us if you have cherry- blossom shells.” The old women moved over and made room for Kanako. One of them gestured for Kanako to sit, saying, “Come here, quick!” Kanako sat before the rock as she was told. Then she opened her eyes wide in astonishment. The smooth surface of the dark rock was covered with peach-colored shells shining in the moonlight. She stared admiringly at the shells. “Put your shells here,” said the old woman beside her, breaking Ka- nako’s reverie. Kanako nodded, took out the bag from her pocket, and spread her shells out on the rock.

20 “Let’s play again. Rock-paper-scissors, rock-paper-scissors!” cried the old woman with glasses on Kanako’s right. “We’re doing rock-paper-scissors to decide who goes first. We’re playing marbles,” the old woman on her left whispered as Kanako gaped in surprise. “You know how to play marbles, don’t you?” the old woman across from Kanako said impatiently. “Look, if you hit someone else’s shell, you keep it.” She pretended to pick up a shell with her long-nailed fingers and put it in the bosom of her kimono. Kanako nodded. “Are you ready? Let’s start!” cried the old woman with glasses. Then the six players started a strange marble tournament, taking turns as decided by rock-paper-scissors. The cherry-blossom shells slid on the smooth surface of the rock. Every time the old women won a shell, they jumped up with joy. But Kanako wasn’t doing well at all. Maybe her hands were too small and her nails weren’t sharp enough to shoot a shell. Kanako’s shell didn’t move an inch forward. “Too bad. Next!” the old women cried in chorus, every time Ka- nako failed. Her cheeks turned red, and her heart began to race. If I don’t do well this time, I’ll lose all my shells, she thought. No matter how hard she tried, Kanako couldn’t win a single shell. After Kanako shot dozens of times, the old woman next to her took the last shell, leaving the rock empty. The old woman with the most shells scooped them up in her hands and smiled: “Let’s play one more time!” Without a single shell, Kanako had no choice but to quit. No one wanted to play with her anymore. I should’ve bought another bag, Kanako thought. Surely she could get her shells back if she had one more bag. As she fumbled in her skirt pocket, the coin felt cold and hard against her fingers. “Wait. I’ll be back soon!” Kanako cried and began to run, her skirt swelling in the sea breeze.

21 Kanako went darting through the belt of orange light along the vendors, toward the old woman’s apple box, which was almost hidden between the goldfish booth and the steam rising from the oden-stew stand. She stopped, out of breath. She looked at the spot where the old woman had been, but she had disappeared without trace—the goldfish booth and the oden-stew stand stood right next to each other, with no space between them. There stood a man with a white hachimaki around his head. “How about oden stew, miss?” he said. “What happened to the stand here?” Kanako asked, gasping for breath. “No idea.” “An old woman with a blue scarf was selling cherry-blossom shells here,” said Kanako. Then the oden-stew vendor laughed, saying, “That was a sea witch.” “Excuse me?” “Yeah, a sea witch. She comes to the festival at night, sells strange things to kids, and tricks them out of their money before sneaking back into the sea.” Kanako turned pale. I was cheated, she thought. Bitterness filled her throat, as her heart began to throb. She stood still for a while, then turned and started running toward the beach. “I want my fifty yen back! Or my cherry-blossom shells!” she shouted inside her head as she ran. When she finally reached the beach, no one was there. Where did the old women go? Kanako wondered. Did they stop playing marbles? She felt as if she were dreaming. She plodded toward the Moonview Rock. There she found a lot of marbles—or rather cherry-blossom shells. She went closer. When she picked up one, one shell after another came with it, strung on a thin thread. While she was gone, the shells had turned into a pair of splendid necklaces. Kanako looked around again, but the beach was still empty—except for the waves breaking into white foam, which sounded like the old

22 women’s laughter. Kanako thought she heard their mischievous whisper. They seemed to say, “These are yours. These are yours.” The shell necklaces hanging from her arm, Kanako hurried home. “Mother, look what I’ve brought you. We have matching necklaces— gifts from a sea witch,” she whispered as she walked along the moonlit beach.

23 Dan Beachy-Quick A Point that Flows  The Sculpture Garden

The people walked across the surface of the koi pond. The fish static beneath the water—keeping their place against the machine that produced the current—looked like orange kites filled with wind, tied by unseen strings to a rock on the ground below them. The footbridge crossing the highway reflected on the water. I found the angle acciden- tally, walking in circles around the pond after teaching, conjuring the conversation again, replaying the small failures, the half-glimpsed ideas that promised secrets but led nowhere, the retreat to rhetoric—“What does it mean?” The day’s lesson was on Platonic philosophy. Spiritual geometry. Forms and shadows. Looking down I saw up. Workers and tourists stepping across the water, the impossible traffic of the day stepping on the backs of the ornamental fish below them, neither aware of the other’s presence, a slight wavering of both when a breeze rippled over the pond’s surface. The eye a little pivot between worlds. The surface of the pond like the surface of a page: thin boundary dividing above from below. To touch a woman would be to reach through her and scare the fish below. Both worlds were mine to see so long as I did not move. When the streetlights came on they dropped their constellations on the pond, charting the cosmic zones, sodium-yellow spots whose brightness obliterated the vision of the world their influence controlled. Time to go home. When I picked up my bag, filled with papers to grade, and turned my head from the pond to the path leading out of the sculpture garden, a pinpoint of white light caught my eye. Over the course of the weeks I’d been coming to the pond, I’d often noticed such aberrations in my vision. I explained the phenomenon as a kind of afterimage of the streetlights on the water’s surface, and to an extra susceptibility of my

24 mind after an hour or more of my odd meditations. The light looked as if it hovered ten feet from me, levitating in the air at the exact height of my eye. Usually, the point was dull yellow, or a glowing purple. Tonight, though, the point of light was phosphorescent bright, almost painful to look at directly. The statues scattered through the garden lurked vaguely in the periphery: a reclining woman in silhouette; an immense cube balanced on a corner, though in the strange light its girth looked flimsy, a tracing paper shadow that a breath could blow away; and a lion, in the classical style, modeled after Delacroix’s painting, lapping water from the gravel. I waited for my eye to adjust to the evening, but the light only grew in intensity, finally becoming almost painful, so bright a sympathetic ringing began in my ear, so bright I began to feel nauseous, weak-kneed, and dropping my bag to the ground, I bent over, my hands on my knees, and when I stood up again, my eye could bear the light without blinking. The light did not move when I moved; it was not evanescent. What I thought a trick of my eye was not a trick of my eye. The point seemed fixed, luminous. I orbited around it, nearing it with each circle, examining it from every angle. Within the piercing brightness I began to see a slow cycling of every color that, finally settling into a blue cast, or a violet one, would gain a sudden speed and return to white, and then slow again, settling into yellow, stilling into red. I neared it as I gazed, until I came close enough to hold it in my hand. Reaching toward it, my hand didn’t glow with its light, nor did its brightness cast a shadow on the ground. My presence didn’t affect it. Quite the opposite. As I neared it, the light seemed to affect me. My eyes dazzled but not blinded by its brilliance. I felt no heat emanating from it, but felt some other radiance, as one feels the slightest waves of water push against one’s ankles when standing still in the shallows. In my mouth, the slightest taste of saline. As I cupped my hand underneath it, as if to enclose it in my hand—an action that might destroy it or damage me—I heard a low, almost inau- dible drone, absolutely constant, without any variation in pitch, against which, it seemed to me, silence itself could be heard. As I bent my fingers around it, the point of light extended, drew itself out, as if to prove the old geometry: a line is “a point that flows.”

25 The line didn’t glow with the same intensity as the point hover- ing in the air. It looked like the thinnest of glass tubes, seen not by vir- tue of its own luminescence so much as the strange ability to turn the darkness around it slightly convex, as if indenting the space in which the phenomena occurred. The line extended to a tree whose secondary branch extended horizontally over the ground, and whose leaves hung down, as from a curtain, toward the ground beneath them. I followed the line. At every step memory cast in my mind images to stop my forward progress—or so it felt to me. I saw my deceased grandparents. I saw my mother sitting in a chair. I saw my wife and child at our dinner table. And when I reached the down-hanging leaves, I pushed them aside with my hand as one pushes aside a beaded curtain, and stepped into the darkness where the line led.

The Bedroom

I stepped through the leaves not to find the hedgerow blocking the sculpture garden from the north-driving traffic in the adjacent street, but found myself in a bedroom. Moments of true disorientation are marked by the sense of their absolute normalcy. The room was lit by a single oil-lamp, bathing the room in a warm glow that deepened the red tints of the woodwork around the windows. The faint line I followed into the room was still visible—if “visible” did justice to its actual appearance—bisecting the room, and pointing through the middle of a painting hanging on the wall farthest from me. The painting depicted a field of upturned sillion’s shine, purple-loam, and a child casting seed in the furrow. Opposite, facing a window reflecting the lamp sitting before it was a desk that I looked at and considered my own. Opposite the desk, a bed—and in the bed, a woman. Language fails beauty in expressing it. Is it enough to say: She slept. Enough that beneath her eyelids her eyes rolled, caught in a dream that quickened her fingers against her palms, that broke open the closed line of her lips, and then, in a sudden calm I could not guess at, her mouth closed, her eye stilled, and only the slight, quick pulsing at her neck

26 marked the danger just passed. The bed-sheets were pushed in a heap to the bottom of the bed. Only then did I notice that the window was open, that I could hear the wind move through the pines a distance away, could even hear the pinecones knock gently against each other like dull, wooden bells. Her breast was a shadow beneath the thin gown. The fabric rested against her skin as a fog rests against the ground, half-revealing the form it covers and which gives it shape. The longer I looked at her the less easy I grew. I thought: something in all beauty horrifies. As I watched this woman I became less and less convinced that she breathed. I heard no inhalation. I heard no sigh. Her chest neither rose nor fell. The vivid dream was gone. Every other appearance promised the most vital life—the tint of her cheek, the small animal motions of sleep, the finger that twitches and then curls out of itself. But I feared she was a corpse, or some sort of pupal life, death-like before returning to life, a body without breath, and to break the spell of my growing hysteria, I turned away toward the desk, and sat down. I knew without searching which drawer contained some blank pages. I knew where to find the pen and ink. The light from the lamp glowed against the impressed edges of some script etched into the wood, as if the woman, or whoever sat here to write, had once been in such haste to record her thoughts, that she took a single sheet of paper, and pushed the letters through the page she wrote on. I ran my fingers across the surface, and pulled out a sheaf of pages bound by twine looped through a hole in the pages’ middle, so that the binding pierced the notebook’s center. I caught my reflection in the window. I appeared in silhouette: no eyes, no mouth, no features. I looked as if I were leaving the room as I sat in it, and instead of my face gazing back into my own eyes, I was watching the back of my head as I departed. Time leaped ahead of itself. The present moment never reaching the present moment. I couldn’t escape the growing sense that my life was occurring elsewhere, ahead of me, lived by a self who I was but who I couldn’t be. I felt as if I were my own memory of myself. I was not living a life already lived, so much as a life that stepped forward into the past: memory as an open, indefinite realm, the impossible fact never eased by knowing the future it caused, as if an impenetrable screen drew across my vision, across my

27 mind, separating wholly my life-lived from my living life. Cause without consequence. The beauty behind me stirred, alive in her dream. I opened a drawer to take out a pen and ink, and saw a brass letter opener, the cutting edge shaped like a crow’s feather, the handle like a talon. It had a surprising heft, and the edge that tore open envelopes, cutting my finger as I ran it across, was honed needlessly sharp. I put it down and picked up the pen. I decided I should write down the events of the past hour, not trusting memory to remember, not trusting myself to recall, the intrinsicate knot of the day. I dipped the nib in ink and began: The people walked across the surface of the koi pond. As soon as I placed the period on the first sentence that came to my mind, almost a kind of vision of a sentence, not even written by me who wrote it, I heard a voice from behind me. “You’re back? You just left and now you’re back?” The woman had awoken. “I’m not back. I just arrived. You were sleeping. You didn’t hear me come in. My name is—“ “I know your name. Why would you tell me your name?” “I think there’s some kind of mistake. I followed a line—.” “Do you mean a road?” Her voice was unlike any voice I’d ever heard. It sounded as if a chorus spoke from her throat, the high pitch of a child’s voice above the low, rasping tone of an old woman, and the middle ground filled out the harmony with a young woman’s voice. “Not a road. A kind of line that flowed from a point of light—it’s hard to explain.” “It’s not hard to explain at all. That’s just as you described it when you left. I can faintly see it myself. If I stare at it directly, it disappears. But if I let my vision relax, and stare at the wall without any desire to see the wall, I can see the line in the periphery of my eye. You said you could see it directly, and so you should follow it. You thought it was a sign. And so you left.” “Where was I going?” “You said you were going to the fields, going to war, going to the river beneath the pond…you spoke about ice in relation to time, about the bees, about the trees, pollen’s relation to the bodies that bear it,

28 about the physiognomy of wind, about the clouds as bodies…you spoke of other things, unmentionable things, secrets between us, intimacies… you spoke of other women as other worlds…you were pale as you spoke… you spoke as if in a fever…you stared at me…I could see the vibration in your eyes…of your words…” She spoke with her head on her pillow, her eyes closed, as if still within the dream she’d awoken from. “You’d been acting strangely for days. You turned the mirror against the wall. You said you were leaving. But now you’re back.” “I’m not back. You’ve confused me with someone else.” She was silent for a moment. She closed her eyes. I expected her to sigh, but she sat deathly still, her hands on either side of her, dead weight against the mattress. The delicacy of her fingers mesmerized, the marble hue, the faint lines around her knuckles like crackle in porcelain, the lacustrine depth of her nails. Her hands looked as if they weighed more than themselves, as if they were anchors to keep her bound to the bed. Then, in her uncanny voice, she said, in a tone of absolute defeat, “You always tell me I’ve confused you with someone else. You always tell me that. You tell me I’ve made a mistake. You say it every time you return. If you’d just come to me, kiss me, lie down with me, you’d remember. You’d stop playing your games with me. You’d be at home with me, and life could be again what you’d promised when you brought me here, when you convinced me to leave my old home, in which I never had to suffer being alone.” “I don’t know what to say.” “Say what you usually say. Blame me for your misfortune. Grow angry. Begin your rant. You know the one. ‘The larval self, the pupal self, the exuviae of self, the slough of self, the imago of self, the winged-self.’ Your theories you write for hours at your desk, mumbling to yourself, sleepless, always on the ‘verge of discovery,’ say what you always say, or what you said before you left, when you grabbed the pages and lit them on fire, and ran out the door with them burning in your hand, saying, ‘The pages are part of the disease.’ Say what you always say, and then run out the door.” As she said this she lifted one hand very slowly, as if doing so required all the effort her body could muster, and pointed at a door in the wall. I hadn’t noticed the door. It was as if her pointing at it created

29 it, as if, in begging me to stay, she also implored me to leave, and provided the means for me to do so. I could faintly see the line I followed here. It pierced through the painting of the field that now seemed like the scen- ery through the window on the door. The door had no knob. I just pushed against the wood and the door swung noiselessly open into the night. The new atmosphere rushed in, and crossing the threshold, I looked back, and saw that the woman had lain back down, and pulled the sheets up against the night air, that settled down upon her, outlining her body with an unnatural accuracy, as if the sheets too possessed an unexplainable weight, and were woven, impossibly enough, from stone.

The Field

How imperceptibly the eye adjusts to dimness is only revealed by the sudden step into unexpected brightness. In walking through a door I stepped from midnight into noon, as if the doorframe’s lintel were all that separated day from night. I found myself on the crest of a hill, and a valley stretching out beneath me. I could still see the line that led me here: a thin concavity of blue against the blue sky. The line maintained its elevation, and to follow the road that led down the hill would take me away from it. I had little choice but to leave the line behind. The road curved down the hill into the valley, splitting an orchard in two. The orchard, from my elevation, looked like white blossoms dropped by a child in rows, as if, in substitution for toy soldiers, a boy had stolen his mother’s bouquet, and used the flowers to fill the ranks. The hill itself was covered in long grasses, creased in the middle. I picked one—unconsciously folding and unfolding the leaf—as I walked along. The heat of the day increased as I descended. No wind blew. The clouds were anchored in the sky. The dust settled behind my step. I stepped through the stillness of the world; I was the only moving thing. The dusty road silenced my motions. I heard no buzzing as of bees. I saw no butterflies, no moths. I had to speak my name to myself to break the silence.

30 The lower the path led me the closer the orchard came. As the time passed, as the miles passed, as I walked closer and closer to the orchard, the single flowers seen from such a height, expanded asI neared, radiating from their centers, clusters of blossoms separating from the singular mass, the unseen sweep of the curving branches visible in the sweep of the flowers, proximity revealing details the next steps proved were but vague abstractions in which more delicate features hid; and the white blossoms, each composed of intricately en- twined flowers whose shape mimicked exactly the shape of the larger whole, as if the atomic structure of the plant, could it be seen, would reveal the same tri-petal form in microscopic size, the labyrinth of the plant not a result of difference, but the never ceasing repetition of the same form. I remembered, when I finally entered the grove, and walking to a tree, inhaled the scent of the flower, a film from my school-age days, in which a single point inwardly glowing, but glowing as if with darkness rather than light, expanded over the course of an hour into the universe that made possible my own watching the birth of the universe. The flower’s scent was most discernable for its lack of scent. I felt as if breathing in the blossom made me more aware of the lack of scent in the air around me, and the fragrance was no fragrance, a lack perfuming lack. In that vacuum of sound, of scent, a noise suddenly startled me. I heard a faint shuffling of feet. Listening closer, another sound, as of the shaking of leaves. I stood still, looking around me, and as I did, the sounds grew louder, until I heard, faintly but unmistakably, a voice humming three notes in long, repetitive drone; and behind the tune, if it can be called a tune, I saw a boy. He looked hypnotically engaged in his work: grasping the stem of a blossom, holding a page beneath it, shaking the flower gently, looking at the page, and carefully, bending the page along a central fold, pouring what fell from the blossom into a bag lashed to his side. I worried I would startle him. But when he came to the tree I was standing below, he simply looked at me, no change of expression on his face, and asked me: “Why are you here?” “I walked down the hill.” “Which hill?”

31 I pointed back along the direction from which I had come. He looked off toward the horizon. “You came from the West?” he asked. “I suppose so.” “We’re all waiting for the men to return. But they walked East.” He pointed farther along the road I had been walking on. “But no one ever walks back from the East. Not yet.” He stepped to the branch nearest him, grasped the flower, put the page underneath it, and shook. A fine dust fell onto the white page, tinted black, so that it looked as if the page held its own ash. “What are you doing?” “I’m collecting the pollen from the trees in the orchard. This orchard is my job. Other children are in other orchards, and many of them are in the fields, shaking the grains.” “Why?” “You know. The bees.” “The bees?” “Yes. The bees are gone. The bees are gone and now we have to pollinate all our food. The men showed us what to do before they left, and then they left.” “Why did they leave?” The boy looked at me quizzically, seeing me, it felt, for the first time, as if by my question, I startled him out of the stupor of his work. “You aren’t from here?” “No. I’m from—” “The bees are gone,” he said, this time with emphasis. “Back behind the orchard are the hives we keep, built by our ancestors, interconnected, in which a single Queen harmonized the activity of every worker. The men cared for the bees.” “What happened? Why are there no bees now?” “The Queen is gone.” “She died?” “I don’t know. The voice arrived and the next day the Queen was gone. Then all the workers flew in circles. Some still are flying in circles. They die as they fly. We’d find them on the ground. Now hardly any are left. Sometimes you see one in the air, a little black dot in the sky, flying

32 in a circle. The voice came and the Queen disappeared. The men opened the central hive where she lived—a thing forbidden for us to do. They opened the hive and found the Queen’s chamber empty, each wall coated with a dust, a stony dust.” “What voice?” “You don’t hear it?” “Your voice is the first voice I’ve heard since I’ve been here.” “The voice in the air? Declaring the war? They erected an antenna far away, and it transmits the voice—that’s what the men say. There’s a war, it says. It says, Your freedom is threatened. It says, Join us. Join us, it says, and Be a hero. Our men walked East. Some wanted to join the war. Many of the men wanted to be heroes. I want to be a hero but I’m too young. I’m too young to hear the voice, the men said. Some people said the Queen obeyed the voice, and some people said the voice killed the Queen. Some said the frequency of the transmission confused her, or hurt her, or drove her away. Some people say she disappeared, and that old stories, stories never told now, said this has happened before, and because we’ve forgotten the story, we don’t know what to do. Some of the men went away to join the war, and some went away to find the antenna and destroy it. But they left a long time ago, and no one’s returned.” He looked at me for a long time. I thought he was going to ask me a question, but he put his hand out, reaching toward my face, not to touch it, but as if he wanted to see my head from a certain angle, as a distant relative might, to find the family resemblance. But he drew his hand back, turned toward the tree beside us, and began his work again. And, not knowing what else to do, I returned to the path, and continued my walk eastward. Silence returned. When I rose out of the orchard, I took another piece of grass, and rolled it around my finger, like a ring. It took a long time to reach the top of the hill. Above me, I found the line, a blue concavity against the blue, maintaining its elevation, lost again in the sky as I gazed after it, and looking down in the next valley, saw the grey clouds obscuring the land into which I now must enter.

33 The Town

The air smelled different in the new valley. The closer I came to the cloud-enveloped town, the more dingy the grey fog grew. Yellowish wisps took shape and rolled through the darker cloud dispersing again into the miasma. Something fetid in the air, a bog somewhere at the periphery, bugs clicking like empty rifle firing, the hammer hitting the charge-less plate; such was their mating song. A bird emerged from the dust as my foot neared it, scared out of its nest, two eggs mimicking stones in a shallow depression, the bird edging backward from me, slowly dragging one wing through the dirt, as it were broken, luring me away from the nest. To be seen as a predator made me feel like one. I thought about stepping on the eggs, watching the yolk spill out; my own desire horrified me. I saw myself as the threat. When I had passed it I turned around, and watched it move back to its brood, settle into the dust, and disappear. I don’t know how long I walked before I reached the outskirts of the town. The grain in the outlying fields had been trampled, in areas scorched, so that the charcoal looked like the shadows clouds cast on the ground, but darker. Somewhere cinders smoldered. A cow stood at the edge of the singe, grazing. Next to it another cow lay dead, eviscerated. Crows fought in the entrails, scavenging augers. I kept walking down the road that cut the fields in two. The dust gave way to crude macadam, the bitumen acrid in the air. The fog clung smoke-like to the ground. No demarcation separated the rural from the town. Suddenly I found myself walking on cobblestones, houses and storefronts on either side of me. Many of the buildings were burned or still burning. Even in the dull light the broken glass gleamed. A cart had been turned over in the middle of the town square. It had been carrying ice in large, straw-insulated crates. Now blocks of ice, larger than a tall man, broken through the wood, stood on the street among the wind-blown straw. The ice possessed an oddly blue hue. It looked as if blocks of the firmament had fallen randomly to the ground, and the people gathered around to watch the sky melt. I stepped among them; for a long while no one looked at me, thinking me another of the town. But then a young girl looked up, focused

34 on my face, lifted her arm, and pointing at me, began to cry. The others looked up. The women grabbed their children, and stepped back from the ice, stepped back from me. One man came forward, raising his hand in preparation, I thought, to strike me, but two other men held him back; he struggled against their arms, pushing against their hands, but they wouldn’t relent, and they pulled him away, down the street, into a store- front with a broken window. A young woman, younger than me, stared at me, tears running in straight lines down her pale face, her eyes wide, not blinking, the cornea tinted slightly blue, like the ice in the street. She pulled a locket from inside her blouse, and clutching it in her hand, stepped solemnly toward me, unclasped the locket, and holding in front of my face the picture of a young man; the locket shook slightly: the pulsing in her hand, the beating of her heart, her breathing. She opened her mouth; I thought she was going to speak to me, explain to me… But, link by link, she let the locket slowly lower from her grasp, until she held it by a last gold circlet; the locket moved in a slow circle; and then, with a motion that seemed impossibly slow, she let go her fingers, and the locket dropped. Then the young woman turned on her heels, and ran down the street. I picked up the locket, and yelled after her, “Please, wait!” I followed her, the necklace in my hand. I didn’t run; I couldn’t bring myself to run. I could feel the eyes of the townspeople on me. My heart, though, beat frantic in my throat. I could feel in myself a menace I could not explain. I couldn’t see where she had run to, into which building or alley she had turned. I heard doors slam as I walked down the street. I heard men yell for the families to stay inside. I saw a body face down on the sidewalk. A horse galloped blindly from a side street, rearing up on its hind legs and kicking out with the front, striking at an enemy that did not exist, and then bounding away in the direction it sprung from, an eye missing from its socket. I slowed my pace. I could feel something in the air, as an animal feels a storm before a cloud forms. The air felt thicker, full with some electric potential. I realized for many minutes I’d been hearing a low buzzing in my ear. Far down the street I saw a structure. With the locket in my hand, I walked toward it. At first, I thought it was a shed, but as I neared it, its bulk from a distance turned into scaffolding whose

35 substance was the shadow that the platform threw below it. One block away, I saw it was a gallows. Half a block away I saw a man stood on the gallows. His back was to me, a thin line vertical above his head. Then the pencil thin line expanded into a rope, and the rope circled his neck. I walked up the steps to the platform and stood behind him. I thought I would remove the noose and leave the town; walk away in the direction the man was staring. But, hearing my steps behind him, he spoke: “Is it you?” “I don’t know,” I answered. I stepped in front of him, to see his face. “It is you. You’ve returned. Just as you said you would.” “You’ve made a mistake,” I said. My voice sounded cold to me, without emotion, numb. “So you told me when you put this noose around my neck.” “I never put a noose around your neck.” “So you said as you tightened it. You said my own deeds have done this to me, not you. You said you were acting for Justice, which could not act for itself.” “What have you done?” The man was silent, staring at me. I stared back. Slowly, vaguely, I realized I’d seen him before, I recognized him. I opened my hand, and then I opened the locket. His face was in my hand, encircled in gold; and looking up, his face before me, his neck encircled with rope. “You asked me that before, and when I had no answer, you told me you’d return, and when you did, I must confess, and if I confessed, you could dismiss the sentence you declared against me.” I cannot say how I felt hearing the man speak; there are no words for a horror that ceases to be horror in becoming real. I said to him, again, “What have you done?” “I don’t know what I’ve done. I worked in the fields. I fell in love. I read books. I lusted. I enjoyed my food and drink. I tried to be kind. I fought against the army. I killed a nameless man who was my enemy. I prayed at night and then gave up praying. I sought solace in the body of my wife. I don’t know what I’ve done. I’ve lived my life like other men live theirs. I don’t want to beg for my life from you, but I will: Spare me. Let me stay.”

36 I listened, and when he finished speaking, I closed the locket, and drawing both hands simultaneously away from it, extended the chain to its full diameter. He closed his eyes, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, shook his head back and forth. His chin slightly quivered, and then, as if gathering a final strength, he calmed down, the line of his jaw eased; he tilted his head up, and opened his eyes. His left eye was so dark I couldn’t differentiate the pupil from the iris. But his right eye glowed with the brilliant light I saw in the sculpture garden, the light that led me here. He stared at me, unaware, I think, of the brilliance in his eye, unaffected by it, looking at me as if I was a Fate or a Fury, as if I were judging him. His eye was its own justice. It seemed as if his eye had changed its nature, and all the light that in a lifetime poured into the little hole, collected in the brain, bridging the distance between stars and selves, reached some terminal capacity and, reversing in the mind, shined out from what it had entered. I looked at him and began to cry. I wanted to ask him his forgiveness. I reached my arms toward him, as if to embrace him, and put around his neck the locket stretched between my hands, and as soon as the locket rested against his chest, my arms on either side of his face, the trapdoor beneath his feet sprang open, and together, we fell down into the shadow below.

The Salt Flat

The shadow ended in brightness; I ended up alone. I looked up, fearing I’d see the man’s feet dangling above me, suspended by the rope, but saw only the deep blue sky domed solid above me, light piercing through the vault, obliterating shadow. Not that any object existed to cast a shadow, save myself. I was standing on a vast salt flat, horizon in every direction. A thin surface of water stood on the surface of the salt. When I looked down at my feet the water was transparent, and I could see the minute particles of the salt underneath the surface, but looking up, the water became a mirror to the sky above it, so that, gazing around me, I stood in the center of the sky, heaven above and heaven below, stretching indefinitely in every direction to the horizon, a limit

37 un-seeable, where the body of the sky and the sky’s image clinched shut. I began walking; I didn’t know what else to do. I took a step in the direction I was facing, and continued into vertigo not of height, but of horizon, of lack of horizon, of no marker in the field of sight to judge distance gained, so that all distance felt like no distance at all, and every motion left me in the center, from which one could not escape, from which I could not escape. I walked, stepping on the sky below my feet, haunted by the feeling that another self was walking above me, his head balanced precisely on my head, his step matching my step, his thought matching my thought, except his feet stepped on some ground now denied me, dust or grass or gravel, and I stepped into the air through which I could not fall. I began to fear the next motion. Glancing ahead at the blue stretched out in equal depth above me and below me, so that up and down lost sense as oppositions, I felt the next moment could be the one in which I plummeted—a fall up or a fall down—not to my death, for what is death in such a world as this one, but fell without limit, without time, forever. So much did this paranoia affect me, agitate my nerves, that I found myself paralyzed, unable to, or unwilling to, take one more step. I stood still and stared at the missing horizon, my head aching from the glare, absolutely alone, not knowing if I looked down when I bent my head, or up, until at the farthest extreme I’d see my own feet, my legs, my hands and arms, and looking the opposite direction, see no body at all. And it was then, staring up into the blue surrounding me, that I saw the line. The line could hardly be discerned from the blue around it. Its character, or its nature, seemed to have changed. It no longer bore a trace of the radiance from which it flowed, nor did it seem a thin glass spicule visible by containing the element it pierced through, a shard of hollow ice in water, now it looked meager, looked miniscule, a pencil line perfectly straight, or a taut, black thread. My only hope was that the line that had led me here would lead me away from here. I followed it. To fight the vertigo I watched my feet as I walked, keeping my eye on the salt beneath me, watching as the saline water thickly rippled with my motion, and so rippled, briefly, to an extent, the sky. But I could not see the thread in the reflected sky below me, and found that I veered unintentionally away from my trajectory,

38 tending naturally into a curve, and if I didn’t look up at regular intervals, I would lose myself. I walked, rhythmically inclining my head upwards, then inclining my head down, witnessing the sky, witnessing my body, ceaselessly, the action a kind of mantra, almost a kind of prayer. Vision interrupting vision. Thought unspooled into memory and memory into mindlessness, into myth, into timelessness, a self below the self, a fungal contemplation among the bones. My journey stretched out in my mind, a mural painted on a winding sheet. Who was this me others met? Who was this me sentencing others to death? Sending the apiarists to the war? Whose voice was this voice? Whose wife this woman? I walked and the questions repeated, lost meaning, the words losing sense, the syntax un- done, the grammar buried in the folds of deeper meaning, until the self became a drone singing beneath the thought of itself, and it was then, at that moment in which thought ceased to be recognizable as thought, that I realized I had come to destroy myself. One would think, or so I would have thought, that suicide solved the problem. A man drowns in surfaces and shallows and does not need depths to drown. But the self with which I had to grapple was the self outside of me, this other self, it seems, I am. I walked; I do not know for how long I walked. Night never came, but days passed. There was time here, but what was time here? I walked and walked. And then, in the midst of my endless head-tilting, my eye caught what looked like a speck of dust, just a speck of dust, no larger, that marked for the first time the horizon. The thin thread above me led towards it, and so, ceasing to bend my head up and down, I focused on the dot in the distance, and walked towards it. Slowly, slowly, it grew larger—it was not evanescent. It was fixed, or if not fixed, nearing me as I neared it. It was hard to tell who moved, what moved. The mote elon- gated, a sapling, but a sapling in motion, then thicker, as if the sapling were springing into mature form, and then the tree in motion, branches moving, not as pushed by the wind, but by its own volition, until the tree became a man walking toward me as I walked toward him. I didn’t in- crease my pace, nor did he. The glare kept him in silhouette, and now, as near him as I was, I felt as if I were walking to meet a shadow. When he was but a fathom from me, he reached out a hand as I reached out mine.

39 I felt like my eyes couldn’t adjust to the light, couldn’t clarify his features even at such proximity. He must suffer the same problem, as neither of us slowed, nor did we slow when the eyes came into focus, and the face around them, nor at our mutual shock as we saw who the other was, nor did I stop until my held out hand, in reaching for his, rested against the surface of the mirror. I didn’t cry, or speak, or scream. I simply held my hand against the image of my hand, and stared into my own eyes. I worried he wasn’t only a reflection, but that, on the mirror’s other side, he was facing me in the same bewildered regard I was beholding him. I saw behind both of me the blue distance I had walked across. I could not tell what was reflection and what real, what an image and what an object. The thin, dark thread, or line, was above me, piercing into the mirror’s surface, but not reflected in the mirror itself, and it was then, thoughtlessly, without will, I turned my hand against the reflection of my hand, and a door in the mirror opened, and I walked in.

On a Stair

Such dark after such bright blinded me. My ear saw before my eye: low, cyclical thrum. As I heard my eye adjusted. The sound emanated from a dark orb spinning above my head. The orb darkly glowed with the color of a lightning strike at night when the lightning remains only in the eye. It didn’t rotate in any single direction, but rotated in every direction at once, spooling on to itself countless threads that glowing themselves joined the phosphorescent luster without adding to the orb’s brightness or bulk. The line I followed here was one such thread, now lost to me among the multitude. The eerie glow from the orb cast a faint light, and I saw, sitting, it seemed, on a stair, a girl reading a book. I walked over to her. She sat part way up a stair which ascended out of sight, a stair whose descent I couldn’t gauge, as the ground I stood seemed to have little relation to the stairs themselves, as if the floor, like the orb above it, hovered on a plane of its own, hidden nature. The girl looked up when I neared.

40 “Hello,” she said. “Where am I?” I asked her. “That’s not really a question I can answer.” I didn’t know what else to say. The world had left behind the fact of itself. “What is your name?” I asked. “No one calls me by a name. I sit on these stairs,” and saying so, she swept her arm in a circle, implying there were more stairs than I could perceive surrounding us, inclining away from this point in every direction, “and read.” “What are you reading?” “A book that told me you would be coming soon.” “Have you seen me before? Do you know me?” “It’s a strange book,” she said, ignoring my question. “The face of every open page is blank, but the pages underneath those I look at are filled with words. Turn a page over, and the words are gone. But I’ve learned to read by a certain light that sees through a page to read a page. And beneath this page,” she held up the book which, as she described, was open to blank pages, “it said you’d arrive.” “I am here to—” “I know why you’re here. No one comes here for another reason than yours.” “Then tell me where to find—” “I can’t do that. I’m just a girl who sits on the stairs and reads. I know little more than that you’d come, that we’d talk.” As I looked at her the stairs gained definition. “Am I supposed to walk up these stairs, these stairs you’re sitting on?” “I don’t know what you’re supposed to do.” I stepped on to the staircase, and climbed to where she sat. I looked at the book she was reading, and saw beneath the right-hand page a few disconnected though discernable words: The people the surface of water

reflected on water

41 When she saw I was reading the page beneath the page she closed the book. I looked up the stairs I was ascending, but had yet to take another step. It was a comfort being near the girl. I wanted to sit next to her, to learn to read the book she was reading. “You cannot read this book,” she said. “It isn’t allowed.” She didn’t say this with reprobation or regret. She spoke as one recites a law. I craned my neck upwards, straining to see where the stairs led. The darkness gradually changed. What I saw seemed to me a trick of the eyes, as happens when one stares too long in the darkness, or as a child amuses himself by pressing on his closed eyes to see the sudden, inexplicable lights playing against the screen of his own lids, lost in the little self-created cosmos. Far above me, a dimness of light in the dimness of dark, I saw orange circles floating in slow circles, a perimeter of liq- uid light around them all, and dimmer even than those, a light-colored smudge, oval in shape, floating as a leaf suspended in the air that, to me who was staring up at it, seemed to be staring back down.

42 Hugh Behm-Steinberg On Hair and Babies and the Goblin King 

1) She says I don’t want a baby brother I was the first baby and I want to stay that way. Her baby brother says you should run for office then, or make dad, if you want to be first baby. As for me, I’m looking forward to being the middle child, who wants to be the end of anything, he says. I still don’t want you she says, I’m going to sick the goblin king on you this time, and he’ll take you away to the goblin city, and he’ll turn you into a goblin, and all day you’ll have to live as a goblin, it’ll be just like now, only you’ll be uglier in every way. And he says oh really, who says you’re the only one talking to the goblin king?

2) The goblin king brushes the hair of his girlfriend, and she says what are you using for a comb and he says my fingers, love, my six inch nails, the thirty-one fingers of my eight hands. You have such lovely hair he says, I can’t help wanting to make an army out of it. Well you better not she says, remember the last time you did that. You don’t understand, the goblin king says, you have all this potential, I don’t want you to blow it, let me have just a little special forces squad, I’ll train them super carefully this time, and I’ll give them orders to protect civilians this time, and I’ll never let them leave the green zone. Not one hair she says.

3) She says I want a baby would you go to the store and pick one up for me? A nice juicy one. Do you want an older or middle baby; no she says, I want a baby baby, the youngest of seven, with pink little feet and bright brown eyes. I’ve got a date with the goblin king and I need to give him a present you know how sensitive he is. The goblin king is going to be my boyfriend so you better get me that baby he can get so ugly when he doesn’t get his baby; like when somebody tricks him he gets furious and when he gets furious everything goes wrong the last time he didn’t get his baby we were at peace with Iraq.

43 4) The goblin king is pictured, is considered, by his girlfriend, is of use, a comb, what are you using for a comb she says, my thoughts he says, for I am the most rigorous of kings. You have such lovely thoughts she says. I can’t help wanting to make an army, he says, and really mean the choices I make, or be someone who, an army out of the choices I make, a force out of that someone who’ll. Well you better not she says, remember I used to have sisters, I thought I had sisters. I thought before the war, that there was a time before the war, and before the dead we killed in the war spoke to us, they spoke to us and this was before they outnumbered us, and we had to do what they said.

5) She says I want peace with Iraq and the baby says don’t mess with the goblin king. He’s so nice and juicy, he says the sweetest things, you just have to love him and do what he wants. Think I’ll move to the south, he says, next day you’re hanging out with the penguins. Plus his hearing is notoriously bad, he likes to switch things. Don’t say peace because who knows what kind of chunk he’ll slip under your pillow, one kid I knew wound up with the left arm of the tooth fairy, and it was still twitching and leaking white blood. How would you even know if the goblin king gave what you asked for, he stuck you with me after all says the baby.

6) Turkish warplanes and helicopters on Wednesday attacked the broad mountain passes that Kurdish separatist rebels use to travel from hide- outs in northern Iraq she says I want peace with Iraq and they keep handing out smaller and smaller and smaller slices. Don’t mess with the president, he’s in the pocket of the goblin king. He’s so sticky he doesn’t know what’s stuck to him he thinks people still listen to him but nobody listens when they know where you’ve been. Twitching and leaking and white and baby, baby, baby, what’s the point of talking to a baby, he keeps trying to give you what you ask for, you just never knew you asked for this.

7) Everyone’s talking to the goblin king, but the goblin king is valorous, he doesn’t let your considerations influence his judgment. He says my memory, which hides or explains, I make choices they happen and no one hangs around to catch them except my memory, and it has holes. I

44 devour all of my spokesmen; I am the least rigorous of kings. I’m short and close, intimate and close, you get away and I’m close, my eye which is connected to your ring, I see only what you point to. Before the war was another more carefully hidden war, and beneath that another, and more, and you think the past is shut like dead poppy bulbs, and if you scrape them and/or wish hard enough, your pain will go away.

45 Sarah C. Bell Urban Fairy Tale 

Originally printed in La Niña, Paperdoll, 1999.

46 Martine Bellen Customers Who Have Bought Sleeping Beauty Have Also Bought This 

ME. Pron. The objective case of I. 1. A state in New England. 2. ME is a concept in the cosmology of Sumerian mythology. 3. Net energy available in certain foods. 4. A think group that resides in my head. A large, furry animal. A ME. The me. 5. A bullet’s point of entry.

Upon awakening from a story, before walking through the portal to the hallway into a land where language is required, I confirm I’m ME (a state in New England) (a think group). Some days I don’t arrive at the threshold of my body and a deep, cavernous loss resides where ME would have been. The cave paintings in Lascaux. Horses, bulls, and stags—motifs that repeat when I can’t see where I’m headed, when I’m in a forest. Some days I ingest donuts and sour dough, some days I sleep deep in mud like a fish that wants to stop drifting, day into night into day.

I stand before the portal/window/screen door (or other port of entry). Beside ME (a large, furry animal) appears another ME (of Sumerian mythology). Look, I have spread! Mother feels my finger and knows that it has grown.

A little girl with 100-year-old crone legs wakes from her blackout. She hands a poison apple to a drop-dead beauty. One must wonder What she’s hiding under her dress. In her heart. The apple spiked with E.

47 “Mirror, mirror inside ME Spinning out fate Who do WE hate?”

The beauty bites. SLEEPS (sleep meaning a cheap way of travel, a calming narcotic, a monk with mu mind—verb, passive and active).

She rushes through an hour like a hallway. The alarm rings as she attempts to outrun the wolf, the wind. Music imprisoned by its bars (the breath of bars and their throbbing beer-soaked walls). Flesh and time swap outfits—either way, a jailor enforces a life sentence. Either way we wither.

I eye her through a mirror. She eyes me as I sleep through life— lying/dreaming that I’m a fairy princess, A God-fearing goblin, A talking bird. I am none of these. not this knee, not this shyness, not this shiny halo… .

I take the shortcut through the forest. I ax down trees. I chop off hair. I revise the story. I win. I live; still, I am eternally forever after.

Smoothing out despair Isn’t as easy as steaming wrinkles from silk to be worn by Cinderella. She took the remedy out of an old story

48 By painting herself into a dream Of self. Mostly air disturbs The sea // mostly light (noon light), parabolic light, Finding the tree beneath its color. Poison knowledge. On the threshold of a land where language is required. I dream I am hiking among anorexic weinheimers that scamper through pet doors Into a past and recite Howl. We clap paws and run sharp claws Across a pearlescent perfect moon. Morning fog unwraps pond to reveal salami on rye. The wax paper is oily, transparent— Through it I see diverse divinities running The greatest show on Earth, now playing On a distant planet called Barnum & Bailey— Its deities: misfits, freaks, manifestations of me. In order to talk to her I have to enter her world And remember precisely who she is/I am. Once there, I arrive at Mother’s Who is cavernous, a dark space painted with primitive stags, bulls, horses.

49 Jessica Bozek Five Poems  the calendar was the safest thing they ever read

In the theater of strapless extremity, they averted the tourists’ eyes. Not to the heavy curtains undrawn, their missing flutter- labor, but for the entrance the tourists gasped. The performers warbled a way to bird, raised bird to wolf, framed wolf for leopard, posed leopard for wolf. How would they take it all back?

Drawers pulled out, slipped back in, other after another. One Ms. Wolf, two Mr. Szklar: glassy game-players from the journals they pretended to keep for themselves but left behind in a gouge of subway cars & folded into coat pockets evenings at the opera’s clothes-keep. Pimpek, their mutt, rumbled low over wide stone windowsills when the tenor began.

They slunk into the nether birdhouse & grew new animals to replace the dog, who had besides grown his own epistolary impulse. They promised to send stamps, to seek out fictile surfaces for their correspondence. Inside a birdhouse-for-big- birds they secreted the shuttering embraces, alarm-eyes & winnowed paint chips. Their collection of wheels they split by century. One set, from a kaiserin’s carriage, they sent to auction. He wrapped her wrap in tissue paper. She traded his teeth for hunting savvy. Plots in hand, they spent a last day in human quiet, wind a soft-pedaled animality.

50 Goodbye toothpaste & damage-sift. Goodbye calendrical urges. Goodbye they waved & wavered. Goodbye one peeked, goodbye the other pulled her umbrella closer.

51 from The Sequence between Molars

Dear Tented Leopard,

In a zoology I am taken on the plow. Picture my succumbing to the bulk & red & whisky-warm breath of restless men, clearing licked-fur snowfields.

But that is not the way to wolf. In the days before the pups knew to select the shortest route in their pursuit, I was their play prey. By age two months they could attack from all corners in high, curved jumps. Now accurate in seizing me, one grasped my neck, another my side, the third my rear, the fourth my leg, & the last placed her paws on my back, pushing me to the ground. The killing bite. & when blood appeared, the bite-and-shake.

Once, I tripped over your name, afraid to lose it. Once, I imagined your smell as the space between—winter & wild, snow & grass. I have come home to range. One letter shy of a drift. wolf

52 2.

Dear Wolf,

To make a leap of myself, I’d follow your orders, those of animal lunges and sudden lakes—what we know from our TV screens and marine shorts. You warmed to the jellyfish’s multiple modes of asexuality. But at the end of the night, it was the drama of male seahorse birth we remembered best. The wriggling for days to explode young. Reproduction remained a thing others did, another form of entertainment we weren’t buying.

We’ve dug our way to the beaches of Lowestoft, where the world is behind us and before us nothing but emptiness. The trees and silty waters, steppes and human quiet. Sepia tones, black and white, color: these affect perception, what I impose. I may not have looked straight enough. And now, in your germinal best, you can’t be specimen, my pinch-to- tensed-forearm prompt.

Unpacking is left: your skeleton to suit another skin. Undress eyes and astonish teeth to hasten the canines. The drama of our pressing was an uneven pressure. So this is the passing, pressed a rift.

One day I’ll find you by the knobby growth on your spinal column.

Impressed for(e)after, my cursive L

53 3.

Dear Leo,

I was on edge when I first fell in with the pups, but they were too young to suspect any difference.

Soon, I think, I will sleep with my ears & nose. A kind of never-forgetting. Never-remembering. The space that must be constantly clear or cleared, ready to be overwhelmed now, a movie-heightened scurry off-camera, the irretrievable arrival of another’s scent—what we tried to wash away afterwards.

When control is moot, whose? Will I seek out the ungulate, or the ungulate me, or we each other in fatalistic compliance with nature’s guide to predation? Yes, I will prey upon the old, the young, the sick, the healthy hampered by high snow. But isn’t this just compensatory & culling, a eugenicist aid to the enemy? I’d like to believe there’s no other way.

If we are both predators, is it as good as saying we’re gone & taken up with a new set?

Onward. I’ll dream to that. wolf

54 4.

Wolf!

I’ve been shooting from a hot-air balloon. The animals don’t even blink. It’s this proximity to variegated surface, this spiraling away, this birth on the wind dropping me closer to the ground.

My inventory at seven months: claws, not yet retractable; sensory whiskers; night sprints; the kind of raspy cough I once found attractive in you after so many cigarettes.

One day I’ll hide my food in trees.

Is it too late to admit I know nothing about hot-air balloons? I’m only doing my job. Fly-byes across the plains.

Leopard

55 Kelly Braffet The Pulley 

t the inquest it was said that the Contessa had killed a hundred a young women, and maybe twice that. For the villagers, it was not a matter of how many; it was a matter of all. In the end, it was decided that a lady of her rank couldn’t be executed no matter what crimes she’d committed, so she was placed in a chamber in the highest tower of her great house, and then the door and all of the windows save one were sealed with mortar and stone. The remaining window was large enough to admit a basket of food on every fourth day; the basket hung from a rope, the rope hung from a pulley, and the pulley was fixed outside her window. The window was too small to crawl through and leap from, and the rope was too weak to form any kind of a noose. She would live in the tower and she would die there. At the inquest the villagers knew this was the best they could hope for. Her family was old and vast and wealthy, and money had a way of making its own justice. The magistrate appointed thirty men from the village to take turns standing guard at the base of the tower. After ten years of watching their daughters disappear into the Contessa’s house, the villagers were thought to be more of a danger to the Contessa than the other way around, and so he also announced that he would be traveling to the village every week to make sure that her food was being delivered and that she wasn’t being unduly harassed. Sorin, who had lost his younger sister, took his turns with the rest of them: one week a month, from sunrise to sunset. On every fourth day, the Contessa’s white hands would reach out of her one small window to pull on the rope and haul up her food, and the first time Sorin saw this, his stomach turned and he felt twisted with hate. Those hands—from this distance, little more than pale white blotches on the gray stone—those hands had killed his sister. And if what had been said at the inquest was true then Erzebet’s had not been a quiet death by illness or an honest death by childbirth; if she had died like the rest of

56 the Contessa’s victims, she had died a slow death, full of pain inflicted carefully, deliberately, with precision instruments special-ordered from Germany. The Contessa had wanted their blood because she believed it would keep her young, but by all accounts she had enjoyed the taking of it. The sight of her hands had, at first, made Sorin’s own vision red and hazy. But once he got over the horror of it, keeping watch was pleas- ant enough. There was a stream that ran by the tower, and a tree to sit under. Sometimes Geza would come by during Sorin’s watch, as Sorin sometimes did during his, and the two men would talk about livestock or the best way to repair a roof. Each time he saw her hands the horror faded just a bit, and now the hands were little more than birds to him, funny featherless birds in a cold stone cage. When it occurred to him, he supposed that it was odd that he and Geza could sit by the stream in the shadow of the house where so many had died so horribly, eating bread and discussing the best way to thatch a roof. So he tried to remember, and when he did, he would pour some wine out onto the soil or pitch a soft knob of bread into the stream. “Erzebet,” he would say. Geza would nod. “Erzebet,” he would say, and the two men would sit silently for a moment, awkward and solemn. Then one or the other of them would say something like, “You know that heifer of mine, with the white face?” because that was the way of life. It marched. On days when Geza did not come, Sorin’s mind wandered. Away from his fires, away from his forge: for the first time since he was young and working by his father’s side, his head wasn’t smoke-burnt and echo- ing with the loud ring of the hammer on iron. He could watch the sparrows in the trees and wonder what it was like to be a sparrow, see ants disappear into the earth and wonder what it was like to be an ant. He even wondered once what it was like to be the Contessa, alone in that high cold room, but that led to thoughts of what it had been like to be Erzebet deep beneath the tower and so he didn’t let his thoughts go there again. He thought about food: roast pullet with dark crisp skin and juicy flesh, the soft steaming insides of bread just out of the oven, a hot sugary

57 pie he had eaten years ago at a fair. (The fruit inside had been sharp and sweet, the crust almost burned; he had been a child then and he remembered how bitterly he had hated to stop eating the pie halfway through and hand it to Erzebet, who had never known how much poison he had wished into it.) How good it was to smell food, to feel it between your teeth, to taste it; to drink cold water fresh from the well on a hot day, to splash the water over the back of your neck and feel the sweat and smoke-stains wash away. Being drunk, being merry, that lovely soft feeling of slowness that came to the world when you were just drunk enough but not too drunk. He thought how good it was to sate hunger and not be hungry; to drink and not be worried; to sleep and not be tired. He thought of all of these things. But mostly he thought about women, because there were none left. Once, after the inquest, a carriage drove through the village, and its wheels stuck in the mud. Sorin and half a dozen other men had been pressed into digging them free. When the job was done and they were standing by the side of the road waiting for the horseman to gather his reins and drive away, a voice had come through the window. “Give them something,” the voice said, commanding and sweet, and they had caught a glimpse at the window of a mass of soft dark curls. Sorin had felt those curls like a knife in his innards, and when he looked around, he saw the same pain in all of the men’s eyes. Even the married men pined: not for the sexual act itself but for the small harmless pleasure of resting your eyes on a pretty girl, of imagining that her smile was for you, of imagining your hands unlacing her dress. Sorin had no pity for them. At least they had wives; and if the wives no longer smiled or felt—in heart or under hand—the way they once had, at least they were there. The unmarried men—in such a small village, there were hardly a dozen of them—had nothing but married women, old women, and children. The prettiest of the latter was Anica, who had dark hair and a laugh like bells. Anica was nine; in six years or maybe five, she would be a beautiful girl, and Sorin knew he was not the only man in the village who took pains to speak sweetly to her. When he saw her, Geza would shake his head and say, “That girl, that girl! What I wouldn’t give—” He

58 never said what it was that he would give anything to do, but Sorin knew. What they wouldn’t give for Anica to be six years older (maybe five), what they wouldn’t give for her to like them best, what they wouldn’t give if there could somehow be two of her, a dozen, so that they could each have one. But to Anica, Sorin and Geza and all of the other unmarried men were just funny grown-ups. What Sorin loved best about her, more than her pale skin or her dark hair, was that she was entirely as she should be. There was nothing dark or corrupt about her, nothing secret, nothing wrong. Sorin knew that Anica would get older and taller, that she would be first a young woman and then a young wife and finally a mother with her own pretty children, and at no time would she need to seek refuge from life with the gracious noblewoman on the hill, who offered her high wages for light work and then cut her living body into pieces until God took pity on her and let her die. Anica’s life would be as it should be. As Erzebet’s should have been.

Sorin carved the seven letters of his sister’s name into the Con- tessa’s bread. On the top, where she couldn’t help but see it. There were two loaves of bread in the bag, a flask of water, some dried meat. It wasn’t enough (especially when Geza was in charge of delivering it, because he always took half ). Nobody wanted her to have enough, to be comfort- able. Even now, as Sorin brushed breadcrumbs onto the ground, he knew she was waiting above, her empty stomach gnawing at her. He lay down on the grass in the shade of the tower. He thought about women. Tall women, plump women, the feel of soft female flesh over delicate female bones. Warm damp female breath. Strong female necks and throats and shoulders and arms, female arms and legs wrapped around his body and tuneful female voices sighing in his ear. He rolled over onto his stomach and dug his fingers into the dark soil, breathed deeply of the rotting growth-rich scent of it and thought Dirt, planting, harvests, potatoes, earthworms but still the imaginary women paraded in front of his screwed-shut eyes. Faceless women, but smiling, speaking in low tones of invitation and lust.

59 Kiss us, Sorin— When he could stand it no longer, he opened his eyes very wide and made himself think about the patterns the leaves made against the sky. Then he stood up, crossed the small stream with one leap—his legs were long—and walked to the base of the tower. There was a bell there, from the Contessa’s own carriage; he dropped the bag in the basket and rang the bell. Sorin knew that if he chose to look up, he would see the pale white birds of the Contessa’s hands dart out of the window. The rope would begin to shake and buck as she pulled on it, and the basket would lift off the ground as if by some supernatural agency. It would lift into the air as easily as the Contessa had lifted the girls out of the village. The loose end of the rope, tied into a knot to prevent it from passing through the pulley, would drift down out of the sky like a snake to lay limp on the ground: a dead snake, corrupted by its proximity to her. Sorin never trusted the knot. Instead of looking up, he pressed his forehead against the cold stone of the tower, and waited. But even now, waiting for the rope to begin to shake and the laden basket to rise—even now the faceless voices whispered obscenities into his ears. Kiss me, the women pleaded, their voices tremulous with long- ing; kiss me, hold me, touch me, fuck me. Sometimes, when he was alone—here on the stream bank, at the forge or the woods, on his thin cold cot at night—Sorin could not resist saying these things aloud, to hear how they sounded. In his cracked voice they sounded ludicrous, pathetic, and he was always ashamed. Eyes still closed, Sorin pressed harder against the rough stone and waited for the faint squeak of the pulley. When it didn’t come, when he waited and waited and it still didn’t come, he finally opened his eyes and squinted up at the window. There were the pale white birds, fluttering and flocking around the rope—one even appeared to strike furiously at the support from which the pulley hung—but the basket did not move. Sorin, unsure what was happening, squinted harder. Soon the bird-hands withdrew. A moment later, something hit the ground next to Sorin. It was a shoe, dainty and pale green like a new

60 sprout, covered over with delicate embroidered flowers. Sorin had seen it before, on the Contessa’s foot the day she was imprisoned. Stuffed into it was a piece of paper with writing on it, the wan and wavering ink looking like ash and water mixed together, which is what it probably was. Sorin took the note to Father Petre in the village, who read it aloud. “Pulley broken,” the old man said, and then shrugged. “How will we fix it?” Sorin asked him. “Fix it?” The priest laughed. Then he saw Sorin’s face, and sighed. “It’s almost a week before the magistrate comes again,” he said, not un- kindly. “We’ll figure something out.” “And in the meantime?” Sorin said. “In the meantime,” Father Petre said, “I’d say that God is just, and our lady the Contessa due a small share of privation. Wouldn’t you?”

Sorin was good with machines, and the pulley was his. He had forged it in his own fires, on his own anvil, and stood by as one of the other village men had affixed it to the outside of her window. He had watched as a woman from the village—both of her daughters were dead—stood still and allowed the rope to be tied around her neck and then hoisted over a beam in the ceiling, to make sure that any noose made from it would not hold the Contessa’s weight long enough to kill her. The entire village had wanted to be there, but the chamber wasn’t big enough. He had been proud to be allowed in the room, and he had taken great care with the pulley, working through the night and into the morning. What had gone wrong? Why had it broken? Had it rusted already, or had it been bent somehow, so that the wheel wouldn’t spin inside the casing? Sorin couldn’t stop thinking about it. If it was God’s will that the Contessa die so easily and so soon, then so be it, but God was God and could be unfair if he wished. If the pulley had broken through Sorin’s own careless workmanship, though, that was another matter. He left the church and found Geza loafing by the well. “The pulley’s broken up at the tower,” Sorin told him. “She couldn’t pull up her food.”

61 “I hope you brought it to me,” Geza said, although from the crumbs and grease in his friend’s beard, Sorin thought it was unlikely that Geza’s stomach was empty. “It’s at the forge. I was worried that the wolves and beasts would get it.” And not just the wolves and beasts on four legs, he thought. Geza nodded. “Later, then. What’s wrong with the pulley?” “I don’t know. There’s no way to know without looking.” But looking was exactly what Geza was doing now, although not at Sorin. Anica had appeared around the bend in the lane, swinging an empty water-bucket in one hand. In her free hand she held a carrot which she occasionally brought to her mouth to munch, and her tiny feet sent delicate clouds of dust up with each step. Geza sighed. “There she is. My angel from heaven.” “Geza, the pulley,” Sorin said. “What are we going to do about it?” “Do?” Geza said. “Do?” Anica was at the well now, dropping her bucket into the water and pulling it, with some difficulty, back up to the surface. “You think God can’t break a pulley?” “I don’t think He spends much time thinking about pulleys,” Sorin said, but Geza was already striding away from him. “Anica!” he called. “That bucket’s too heavy, let me carry it. See this jay feather I found today on the ground, isn’t it pretty?” After that, Sorin could not hear, but he saw that Anica smiled, and let Geza take her heavy bucket. She twirled the jay’s feather against her cheek, and Sorin wished that he had thought to give it to her, that it had been his to give.

When they were children, Geza once told Sorin that someday he wanted to marry Sorin’s sister. Sorin thought that was a fine idea—then they would truly be brothers—and promptly forgot about it until Erze- bet was old enough to be married and their father was dead. Then Geza came to him and reminded him of the conversation, making it sound like a joke at first but finally adding, “Still, it wouldn’t be the worst fate in the world for a girl. I’d take good care of her and she wouldn’t be a burden on you anymore.”

62 Later Sorin knew that he had been proud to be asked; with his father dead, marrying Erzebet off to someone who would take care of her seemed in line with his new duties as head of the household. His mother acquiesced, because Geza was a loafer but his farm brought in good harvests, and Erzebet should be married, anyway. Erzebet was milking when Sorin told her about the plan, and she balked. “No, no, no, and no,” she’d said, her nose wrinkled so tightly that it seemed almost to disappear into her face. It was a comical expression, but her hands on the cow’s udder moved more fiercely. “Geza’s nose is crooked, and he’s always drunk. Besides, he’s an ox, and I’m tiny. Can you imagine me underneath him? I’d break!” “Geza is my friend,” Sorin had said, bristling, “and you shouldn’t talk like a whore.” “It was a joke,” Erzebet said, staring fixedly at the milk squirting into the pail. Sorin fixed her with a stony glare. “I think it’s a good match,” he said, trying to sound imperious and paternal. Erzebet stood up and laughed. “Now you’re just trying to act like Father, but you’re nowhere near tall enough. No matter how much you draw yourself up.” Sorin realized that it was true. He had been holding his shoulders higher, trying to look taller. This just made him angrier. He said, “I can make you do it. I can go to Father Petre and he’ll make you do it.” Erzebet stopped laughing. She tilted her head and gazed at him for a moment, as if trying to judge how serious he was. “You could,” she said. “But I wouldn’t love you anymore.” For a moment, brother and sister stood and stared at each other. Neither said a word. Sorin’s threat was real, but he knew Erzebet’s was, too. “You need to be married,” he said, finally. “What’s wrong with Geza?” “I told you. He’s always drunk and he beats his livestock.” “He doesn’t,” Sorin said, although he wasn’t entirely sure. “And even if he did, that doesn’t mean he’d beat you.”

63 “As good as,” Erzebet said. She lifted the pail of milk and turned to leave the stable. “You’re not livestock,” Sorin argued. Whirling around to face him, sloshing half the milk out onto the barn floor, she said, “Really? Then why are you giving me away like a cow you can’t afford to feed?” She looked down, saw the dark spot where the warm milk was sinking into the ground, and swore. “Look what you made me do,” she said. “You have to be married,” Sorin said stubbornly. But he hadn’t been sure, and he had put off going to Father Petre for one day, and then two, and then an entire week, and then Erzebet went to work for the Contessa and Look what you made me do were the last words she ever said to her brother. For a long time, he told himself that she was lucky to be working at such a great house. He told himself that she was happy and well. A year later the investigations began. After the investigations came the dungeons, the spiked cages, the vats and vials and goblets of blood. The ash piles full of scorched human teeth nestled like pearls in the dust; the pits of bones, the sad ragged bitten and impaled victims that almost survived. Geza was too good a friend to say it, but Sorin knew what he was thinking because it was what he himself was thinking: if Sorin had moved faster, if he had forced Erzebet to marry, she would have been miserable, and she would no longer have loved him. But she would have been alive.

The next day, Sorin brought the sack of food back to the tower with him, the water inside one day staler and the bread one day harder. The edges of Erzebet’s carved name were sharp under his fingers. Once more he put the bread in the basket, once more he rang the bell; once more the pale bird-hands flocked to the rope, and once more the rope did not move. Maybe God had finally realized the injustice of the sentence, and had frozen the pulley to right the wrong. Or maybe Sorin had not greased it carefully enough, or maybe the grease had worn away. Or maybe some

64 part of him had wanted it to freeze. To die of hunger and thirst would be unpleasant, although not as unpleasant as being bitten to death or slowly impaled on spikes. After a moment a second shoe dropped to the ground, the green embroidered fellow of the one from the previous day. This time, instead of a slip of paper, the message was scrawled on a piece of pale cloth, ragged around the edges as if it had been torn from a nightgown or a pet- ticoat. Words, again, that Sorin couldn’t read. He stuffed it in his pocket, so that he could take it to Father Petre later. In case the Contessa was looking on, he lifted his hands to the sky and shrugged, exaggeratedly, so that she could see it from her lofty perch. Then he sat down once more on the bank of the stream. The sun was warm and the grass was soft on the back of his neck. His thoughts were of pulleys. Iron pulleys, rusted pulleys, small pulleys made large enough to take apart and examine, to see where they’d gone wrong. Such a simple machine, the pulley. Three parts: the casing, the wheel, the axle on which the wheel spun. Perhaps it was the axle, he thought suddenly. Perhaps he had not oiled it sufficiently. The week of the inquest had been strange and hurried and almost nonsensical, events following one after another in a manner that was baffling but undeniable, as in a dream. The Contessa hidden away for the duration of the inquest, his own rough boots on her smooth stone floors. Erzebet gone (vanished like a stick of burned fire- wood, and who was to say which of the ashes, which of the bones, were hers?). The long sleepless night of the pulley’s creation, when by morning his thoughts had felt like glimpses of trees through fog. He remembered oiling the axle before sliding the wheel over it—Geza and Father Petre and the rest standing by, waiting impatiently for him to finish—but was that remembered coat the first coat, or the last? If the first, it was the only, and that was bad. Iron was porous. Eventually the oil would soak into the metal and its lubricating properties would vanish. Many coats were necessary. How many had he done? He could not remember. He imagined the pulley in his hands. He imagined it warm from the forge, as it would have been when it was new, and he imagined it cold, as it would have been the morning they went

65 to the great house. He imagined himself applying coats of oil at different times—in the darkness, or alone in the forge—and all of the images seemed real, but so did the voices of the women in his ear. Even now he could hear them. He could feel their breath on his neck. Kiss me, Sorin— He had applied one coat in the darkness, he decided. That image felt more right than the others. But how many others? How many coats? Kiss me. Hold me. Touch me. Fuck me. His thoughts whirled like a pinwheel on fair day, only now the cheery colors had turned bright and vicious, and they were pulleys and women, pulleys and women. Spinning, flashing, mixing together, and it didn’t matter because both of them suddenly made his skin feel like it was being nibbled away by a thousand cruel white-as-pearls teeth and a thousand soft red-as-blood lips. He pressed his hands to his forehead, trying to blot away the racing thoughts, and then he heard it: Faint as smoke in the rafters, and somehow also shrill as a knife on the grindstone. She was calling to him; the Contessa was calling to him. The same phrase, over and over. At first he could not understand her at all—something ought, it sounded like, something ought something rest—but then a gust of wind caught her words and brought them down to him. This time he heard her clearly. Licentious thoughts are death! Sorin’s skin broke out in a thin film of cold sweat. Licentious thoughts are death! she cried again, and the women in his head cried louder and then Sorin cried out, too. He stumbled to his feet—left bag, left food, left all behind, because the Contessa was surely a witch and she had heard his thoughts and who would know better than her that licentious thoughts were death? The voices chased him home—all of them chased him home. The women, the Contessa. Kiss me, hold me, licentious thoughts are death. Touch me, Sorin. Fuck me, Sorin. Back at his forge, Sorin furiously stoked the coals, hitting hammer on anvil just to feel the pain of impact run up his arms, to hear the fierce

66 clang that would drive them away. He pounded until his hands burned and his shoulders ached and his eyes stung from the smoke. The voices receded but they did not fade entirely.

When the sun began to set he set out to meet Geza at the well, as he always did. Walking through the village he was vaguely aware that something felt different, that the villagers were doing more standing and talking, that there was a feeling in the air like before a thunderstorm. And when he came to the well he saw not only Geza, but Father Petre, and Marius the carter, and others. As he approached, the small gathering dissolved. It seemed final, somehow, as if a decision had been made or a consensus reached. It was Father Petre who met him first, who clapped him on the shoulder and said, “God is good, Sorin. God is very good.” The palms of Sorin’s hands were numb, the joints sore; his face felt roasted, as if he had been turned over a fire on a spit, and his eyeballs were hot and scratchy in their sockets. “How,” he said. Geza, grinning broadly, said, “The magistrate. Kicked in the head by a bull he was trying to take in tax, two villages over.” “Is he dead?” Sorin asked. “As good as,” Geza said. “And you know how these things work. It’ll take a month at least for a new magistrate to be appointed. Probably two.” “First the pulley, and now this,” Father Petre said, and crossed himself. “God has blessed us.” Sorin looked from his friend to the priest and back again. “Let her starve, you mean,” he said. “Let her die up there.” “God’s will be done,” the priest said serenely, and bade them both good night. When he was gone Geza said, “Really, it’s almost enough to make a man believe,” and then looked more closely at his friend. “Sorin, are you ill? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.” That was the kind of phrase that the villagers tended to avoid these days. Trust Geza to forget, to not think. “There are enough around here to see,” Sorin said shortly.

67 Geza hummed. “True, but we’re alive,” he said, and clapped his friend on the shoulder. “And the living must live, am I right? As much as we can,” he added, “under the circumstances.” Sorin did not answer. Geza brushed some crumbs out of his beard. “You’re getting strange, Sorin.” “It’s a strange world we live in,” Sorin answered. Laughing, Geza said, “My god, is that what’s bothering you? The women? You want a woman?” “It’s the pulley,” Sorin said, but Geza did not seem to notice. “Don’t despair, my friend. The girls will grow up, others will come. Be patient.” Geza clapped him on the shoulder once more. “But now, my friend—I’m afraid I have to go. Miss Anica approaches with her water bucket,” he said with a wink. Sorin shook his head. “You say to be patient, but then off you go, carrying water for girls who are barely nine.” “She won’t be nine forever,” Geza said with a laugh. “And when that day comes, who will she look on most fondly, of all the sad broken- down men in this village? Kindly old Geza, who carried her water and brought her jay feathers to play with.” “You’re cheating,” Sorin said, and Geza answered, “Of course I am. I said to be patient, not stupid.” And some part of Sorin knew that he was right. Even now, when he looked at pretty Anica with her snapping eyes, he could see the beautiful woman that she would soon be. Six years (maybe five); it was not so long to wait. At the well, he saw Geza take Anica’s water bucket from her with a silly, playful bow, and the two of them set off down the lane. Anica was skipping, her hair dancing up from her shoulders into the air with each skip. Licentious thoughts are death! Sorin looked away from Anica’s dancing hair. He found he could not bear to look back, but even when he closed his eyes, her hair still danced on the insides of his eyelids.

68 Sorin spent a fitful night, tossing on his pallet, pressing his hands to his face so that he could smell the smoke and grease of the day on them. When the women called to him he would think fixedly of pulleys. By morning he was absolutely positive that the coat of oil he’d applied while the men waited—the last coat—had also been the first coat. It was not God’s will that the pulley had broken; it was Sorin’s own mistake. Sorin’s careless workmanship. He tried to convince himself that God had willed him to forget the other coats of oil, but he could not. Toward dawn, it occurred to him that the Contessa’s sentence had been to live her life alone, with no companionship at all, and that ended his deliberations. Did anybody know the pain of that life better than he did? Death would have been too easy for the Contessa. It would be too easy now. But how to solve the problem? How to fix the unoiled pulley? He had been there when the plans for the Contessa’s prison had been drawn; he had been there when the door to the Contessa’s bedchamber had been bricked into non-existence. There was no way out, and no way in. If he could just get her some oil, then it would be over, and he could stop thinking about it. Sorin could solve the problem. He knew he could. He was good with machines; he had always been good with machines, and problems, too. (Not with women. Never with women, even if one counted Erzebet, which he didn’t.) But he had to see the pieces of the puzzle laid out before him, to see how they fit together and how they might be made to fit together in another way. He had to see the Contessa’s cell. So as soon as the sun came up, he put some tools and a rope and a flask of oil in a sack and set out for the Contessa’s tower. It was Geza’s turn on the night watch, anyway, so at best he would have some help, and at worst he would have no interference. When he arrived at the tower, however, of course Geza was nowhere to be seen. The bag of food, which Sorin in his haste and fear had left in the basket the previous morning, was also gone. Unsurprised, Sorin decided that it didn’t matter. There would be more food for the Contessa soon, as long as he could fix the pulley. The massive door of the house was locked and sealed. The Con- tessa’s relatives had come, after her imprisonment, and taken what they

69 wanted from the house, but being unwanted didn’t make a bowl or a tapestry any less their property, and so the doors had been locked. That didn’t matter, either. Sorin knew another way in; there was a shutter with a broken latch. He had seen it when they had walled the Contessa into her cell, and he had moved the latch to hide its uselessness, thinking that maybe he would come back, that there might be something of Erzebet’s in the house. He never had. It had been nearly a year. Dust was thick on everything, on the smooth-hewn floors and the few remaining tapestries. Sorin remembered the house as grand, bright, and luxurious, but now all the colors were muted by dust and neglect. In one niche a bowl of dead flowers crumbled away, the rotten water inside long since merged with the stems into a solid green-black mass. The kitchens were empty, the great ovens cold. A dead sparrow lay in the corner of the dining hall. There must have been another shutter with a broken latch, somewhere in the house. Sorin made his way through the house like a grave-robber, even though he knew there was nobody but the Contessa to hear his footsteps. Being there did not feel like he’d expected it to feel. He had expected it to feel haunted, like a graveyard. Instead it felt unreal, almost illusory; as if at any moment it would pop and vanish like a daydream. Off the kitchen, he found a small room, plain and undecorated, furnished with a narrow bed and nothing else. As an experiment he lay down on the dusty bed and closed his eyes. To live in such a grand house as this, surrounded by such silence—in this place even the voices of the women were stilled. No. Not stilled. Calmed. The house was a grave and he had disappeared into it. He could stay as long as he liked, as silent and secret as one long-dead; undisturbed by the living, he could attend to the women. He could kiss them; he could hold them. They could be his. They could be almost real. His eyes flew open. Licentious thoughts are death. He stood up quickly. Was that how the Contessa had felt, the grand lady who had never left her house but sent her underlings out into the village to bring back virgins to slaughter for her amusement? That the rest of the world was unreal, that her actions had no consequences?

70 The Contessa had wanted women just as Sorin wanted women, but the women that the Contessa wanted had been real. They had been named Izabela and Elena and Erzebet, and they had belonged in the village, where men named Sorin and Geza and Marius wanted to marry them and kiss them and hold them and touch them and fuck them but the men could now do none of those things, because their women had stepped into the Contessa’s world, that place where her desires lived, and had been lost forever. Sorin left the small room. He walked through the halls, no longer bothering to be quiet, until he came to the rough-bricked place where the mortar didn’t match, where the Contessa’s door had once been. He did not bother tapping; the walls were too thick. But as he examined the wall, he saw that the wall was not entirely sealed; there was a hole left near the top of where the door had been, probably for ventilation. A tiny hole. Big enough for a rat to crawl through. By the time the men with the stones and mortar had built the wall this high, Sorin had left, unable to bear the Contessa’s fierce unblinking eyes. He wondered if the men, emboldened, had teased her when they left the hole open: Here, Contessa, we’ve left the door open, so that you may have charming company for dinner, so that the rats may eat you when you’re dead! Sorin found a small table, pulled it under the hole and climbed atop it. “Contessa,” he called through the hole. He pressed his ear against the opening and heard a faint rustling. Then something heavy and soft hit the other end with a wet sound, and a foul stench rushed through the hole. Decay. A dead rat, perhaps, thrown against the wall. The Contessa had good aim. “I’ve brought you oil for the pulley,” Sorin said. The rustling came closer. There was a pause. “Where do I put it?” she said finally. Her voice was rusty. It sounded as if she had a cold. “The axle,” Sorin told her. “In the middle of the wheel.” Something dragged across the floor in the cell and suddenly the faint light coming through the hole was blocked out. Her face was in shadow, and he could not see her features.

71 Sorin pulled away. “Give it to me,” she hissed. Taking the flask out of the bag he carried with him, Sorin pushed it through the ventilation hole. He used a length of wood he’d brought. He hadn’t intended to leave the wood, but the Contessa grabbed it and would not let go, so he did. That was all, then; she had the oil. There was nothing else he could do. But still, he paused. He had thought that there were many things he would like to ask the Contessa; why she had done what she’d done, and if she remembered Erzebet. How she, the Contessa, slept at night. If Erze- bet had died badly, relatively speaking. If the dead girls haunted her. Instead, he said, “Licentious thoughts are death.” The Contessa laughed, a short, sharp animal sound. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. “You said that to me,” Sorin said. “Yesterday morning, after the pulley didn’t work. Licentious thoughts are death.” “I said—.” She stopped. Then she said, “You’re that one, then?” and was it possible that even in her current situation, she still sounded haughty? “The one who lays around under trees staring at the sky like an idiot?” She laughed again. “Better I should say that to your friend with the beard. He’s the one who can’t seem to keep his snake trousered for more than ten minutes at a time.” There was a pause. “You’re the one with the fair hair, aren’t you?” Her voice was now soft, seductive, almost cloying. “Tell me, fair-hair, why don’t you ever give it a tug? Won’t it come when you call? Is that it, all of this licentious thoughts are death nonsense?” Something shifted on the other side of the wall. Her breathing changed, and she did not say it but he knew: she would show him everything he wanted to see. He only had to break through the wall. It would be easy. He had the tools back at his forge. He closed his eyes and opened them again. “I’m leaving now,” he said. “My sentence is not death,” she said, and now she sounded cold and bitter. “That’s what I said. You misheard me.” She laughed again. “I don’t care about your thoughts, fair-hair. Think all the licentious thoughts you like. Come and tell me about them, even.”

72 Sorin jumped down from the table. His boots hit the floor with a solid thud. “Tell me about them,” she said, and now she sounded desperate. “Stay and tell me about them.” As he walked away, she began to scream—vile things, cajoling things, pleading things, mad things—and her cries echoed in the dead house, following him out into the air.

Outside, the sun had risen. Geza was still nowhere to be seen, but a small figure sat on the stream bank. When Sorin got closer he saw that it was Anica. “You’re a long way from home, so early in the morning,” he said to her, when he was close enough. She did not look at him. She was staring down into the stream. There were leaves in her hair, he noticed. “I have not been home yet,” she said. Sorin dropped his bag of tools on the ground, and considered the girl. She was very small, and thin; her arms were wrapped tightly around her body despite the warm sun, and her feet were very dirty. “Your father will be worried,” was all that Sorin said. “This stream is very shallow,” she said. Sorin sat down next to her. “It is that,” he agreed. “Is there any water here that’s deeper?” she asked. Sorin thought for a moment. “I suppose only the well in the village,” he said. “That’s deep.” “Is it very deep?” she said. “Yes,” Sorin said. “I would say that it is.” She nodded. “I need water that is very deep,” she said. Without thinking, Sorin reached out to pluck a leaf from her hair. Her hair was like silk under his fingers. She flinched away from him, and then he saw the bruises on her neck. She reached up self-consciously to touch the place on her hair that he had touched, and then he saw the bruises on her arms. He crumbled the leaf between his fingers. “You know,” he said, “our well has a wall around it, to keep the

73 water inside clean. But in some villages, there is no wall. And those villagers have to be very careful, because a dog or a sheep or a goat could fall into the well and drown. Then the carcass would rot, and putrefy in the water, and the water would become undrinkable. Poison.” From behind her hair, Sorin felt Anica’s dark eyes on him. There was no snap in them at all. “How long does the poison last?” she said after a while. Sorin didn’t answer, because he didn’t know. But he would think on it. All that day, all through the next night, he would think on it. Wait- ing in a dark corner of Geza’s hut, knife in hand, he would think on it still. Geza would come home. And even then, even after, Sorin would think, and he wouldn’t know.

74 John Colburn A Brief Tour of String Quartet no. 3 by Karel Husa  1.

As a boy, Karel Husa began to cry and nothing could stop him. Not even a cloud. Not even a talking flame. He did not enjoy birth; he felt reduced to human size. All the rats and mice in Prague came forth from his tears. He pictured himself as a rock or a steaming kettle or a god. He continued to cry. His cries became music.

I will be your guide. Everything I’m saying came from these four rooms. How can you know if you are a constant size? You have to trust the room.

Karel Husa placed bandages on the earth. Those bandages rose to the sky and became birds, then a sudden storm, a driving wind like a river in the air. He discerned no difference between feeling and sound. The bandages helped him avoid misunderstandings.

To understand the first room, consider: What does a ghost pull out of its chest?

You entered this room by listening to it. What you can see is not important. For example, birds trapped here try to spell a name. The name is you. Feel around for a bird. Address yourself with this motion. Imagine this: Four birds try to spell all the names in a room. When I say feel around I mean listen.

You see a ghost pull a bird out of its chest and set it on the floor. The new bird walks around. Try to understand this room.

75 As a boy, Karel Husa began to make trees. They were easy to climb. They were made from sounds. We drum on this earth all our lives; now we must sit down and listen. We are here because it is forbidden. This is just the first room.

The birds in this room make four sounds. Whenever one bird sings, the room fills with light. Whenever another bird sings the eyes forget. Shall we recollect our proper mission? We are here to obtain new feelings by listening. Another bird sings exclusively by waking up. It’s a small sound. Whenever the fourth bird sings you are in the wrong place, please step to the left.

As a boy, Karel Husa learned to handle arrows. They burned the air. They brought home a song’s head, piece by piece. He placed bandages on the earth where these arrows fell, and the bandages flew up. One tribe of birds has only heads, one has only wings, it is confusing. Listen to how the four sounds change, according to wind blowing through the buildings of Prague. Then there is the bird pulled from the ghost.

The first room contains evil spirits, to be used for food. In Prague Karel Husa often disappeared, only to reappear five steps later as a deer. The fires of Karel Husa rise out of distant caves. It is confusing.

In this room, one must eat like Karel Husa. Who does not understand? My name is listen. This is just the first room. Before you walk into any room you might die. Have you forgotten this? The bird pulled from the ghost is silence. That’s the secret of the first room. Shall we move on?

Try to arrange yourselves aesthetically. Notice how night falls like a thick old bottle. Outside the trolleys sound dangerous, correct? Notice how the second room seems to be built over a canyon.

76 Our tour continues: Karel Husa once picked up a pen in this room. He put some flowers inside the pen. He grew the ink. He wrote this song. Birds ate the flowers. Do you see?

The second room makes a slow breath happen around us. Rain falls around corners here. Keep looking. You are in this room for a reason.

Karel Husa built an altar in each corner of this room. Each altar invoked a voice. Each voice lives in this song, as do we.

Another voice is also the voice of the bedroom door, but that’s nothing. We have to keep thinking of the room or it withdraws beyond human events.

Notice the white paintings. Aren’t they like sacred ears? That’s called interpretation.

If we consult the documents we see a territorial passage here. We see that insects rejoice. A dead fish floats by. Karel Husa invited this frequency and it passed through the elements. If we move carefully, if we step over the souvenirs, if we refrain from rubbing or anointing, if we listen to what is woven into the room, we arrive at an initiation.

In this room the legend of Karel Husa emerges like a forehead. The legend drinks from a pit. The altars are governed by the question, and the question is governed by the voice.

Has your voice fallen into disuse?

We may ask about the circuit of the will. We may be touched and pro- nounce the name. Remember, he became Karel Husa by thunder, by a sudden calling. In this room we resemble each other. We become mem- bers of a secret.

77 My recommendation is to ask a question at each altar. My recommendation is to voice.

Do you have the sense that this room is being built as we think of it? At times you may have to crawl across. When I say keep looking I mean listen. A voice will come to you.

This room falls through space, like anything. The voice does not mention it. Shall we?

Now the questions begin. You’ll know because the body hollows out. That’s how questions start. The third room may be a train. Clocks appear on the walls. We call that rhythm.

The word now may be deceptive in relation to the subject. Notice how the sound here tries to prove that every disturbance of equilibrium is a fantasy. The celestial cycles right themselves, the next world passes through us constantly, maybe we change into a fish. Each disturbance is part of a larger harmony.

One example of a question: Are we on a train? Watch for motion in your thoughts. Other questions will emerge.

In the center of the room, the jar full of water becomes a listening device, a way to make sound appear from beyond the grave. We prepare for the inevitable. The other side of a jar of water is a question. From there, Karel Husa’s music searches for us.

The third room operates on a kinship system. There may have been folk dancing here. Do you realize how many things are being born in this room? The onrushing particles?

78 Your task is to make a question. For example, Are we lost? This room is not the answer to the question, but the receptacle. The room holds the question, like the jar holds the water.

Listen. The hand tears in two and keeps becoming a bird. Do you remember? What if this room is the interior of a mountain? Listen for the place your question will live. Do you remember?

The rats of Karel Husa spring to retrieve his tears. When I say remember I mean listen. I also mean caress, hinder, chase, corner, attack. Each wall translates the sound. You should never forget the third room. Please step through.

Karel Husa gathers now at the entrance to other people. We are found in the third room expressing our solidarity. This is not the place where one amuses oneself.

For a while Karel Husa tried to become this door. Can you hear that? Remember, a question comes from the stomach, not the brain. Then the ceremony of opening your mouth.

Do you notice how the threshold of sleep has changed? How can you be sure you have not crossed it? You have to trust the room.

Note the insects. This is Prague, after all.

We are beyond the grave. When we leave this room we renew our mysti- cal bond with the earth. Are you ready?

Picture a sky full of stars; you’ve entered the fourth room. A silent film begins. Someone shaves an ice cube. Listen: Here comes the future. We’ve been waiting for it, haven’t we?

79 The problem with the fourth room is it’s broken, it ends. And we can’t fly. Notice how another time leaps out. A smaller time. We’re not exactly in darkness, right?

That’s because electricity has a hard time passing through music. Gener- ally, it goes the other way.

This is our last stop. After this room, no one can follow. Remember the bird in the first room? From the chest of the ghost? Silence is bigger here, near the end. We welcome the mindless giant.

But first, let’s sing about this room. Let’s be mountains in this room. Or air rushing over them. Whatever we had on earth was like food we ate to get to this room.

Sorry, I skipped ahead. How did we fade into just air?

Karel Husa is now 87 years old. This room is forty years old. The pattern it’s made from antedates. Do you understand the word now?

Perhaps as a result of our hands love comes shimmering into each bird. And don’t you think maybe there’s a fireplace somewhere. Can you feel that? Have you noticed how each direction also makes a sound? Do you understand your sound?

Air from a bird, air from a fire. If you weigh fifty pounds in the first room, you weigh ten ounces more in this room. It’s the silence.

Also, when I say sound, I mean feeling. When I say wait I mean listen. Do you understand?

The earth is smart like Santa Claus. This room is flesh and spirit. Karel Husa arranged your existence and your name. The earth receives us. No one sees what is in the air. Karel Husa composed everything in these rooms. Our eyes fall asleep. We welcome the mindless giant. We will remember, correct?

80 Ann Fisher-Wirth Two Poems  Carry Me Along, Taddy, Like You Done Through the Toy Fair

I am Jenny, your beloved Jenny.

Here where the locusts flay the night strip me clean. Here where the locusts weave thick music swaddle me, carry me.

No that’s just poses. I have not seen you for so long I do not remember your voice, your hands, I barely remember anything about you.

But when November comes and rain I think of you. When November comes and the beautiful spider chrysanthemums draggle in wet earth I think of you. You walked the whole city with me on your shoulders.

You walked the whole toy fair with me on your shoulders.

81 Less-Than

For Less-Than the sun did not burst over the horizon. The swallows and sparrows did not dart above the roof tiles, nor did the lavender butterfly hover outside her window.

Less-Than went hunting in the land of perpetual winter. Only this would appease her hunger for hunger. Only this would appease the lynx-eyed child inside her.

The child of Less-Than was born beneath a snow bank, a wet, furred thing. Where they rested, steam rose. The child rooted beneath her clothing, found her nipple, its teeth like needles.

82 Sandy Florian The Flood 

ike this new thoughts rush in and my mind opens to the flow- l ing tide with its ebb and flood, with its eighth, its quarter, its half moon, its half empty bowl, half full of fuller empty seas, and when it rains it pours and then the waters rise, which we call the flood, that fullest sea, and now again the waters rise while the highest schools of empty fish like empty sticks drift like wood.

Through this flood I wander everywhere cornered in my humiliating illumination, waked and wounded, having once heard of the flood of tears. Of course, it’s the most horrible sight at night against this painted darkness, like when St. Peter’s lights ignite and make its million stones seem translucent, like cold, like ice, like sheets of glass, like when St. Peter’s lights illuminate the arid self-righteousness, the timid impreci- sions, the appalling amateurishness of those garish gargoyles. I wander through this flood, waked and wounded, like those cold and slippery fish that grow in oceans, while still others in this menagerie have had the good fortune of being saved by god. I wander in squares and circles and ovals until the skies break, until the gulls settle on the fields, until the cows come wandering home, and I can breathe all at once and again.

It’s like that memorable deluge of the thirteenth century out of which the Zuyder Zee was born. It’s like the time of the Great Pumpkin Flood that floated all the way to Harrisburg those orange and yellow jack-a- lopes and laughing lanterns. It’s like the Saint Elisabeth Flood, the All Saints’ Day flood. I’ll weep the world so dry in such a strain, if it should deluge once again. And when the sky promises a series of sequestering showers, I shake my nimble fists at the clouds, like the acres that shake their center, I shake my nimble fists at those dark and shimmering green delugings.

83 Angela Jane Fountas God Bless a Girl Who Thinks Ahead 

ary, Kate, Brigid, Anne, and Elin: sisters. Mary is the eldest, of m course, that’s why her name comes first. “Mary put the kettle on. We’ll all have tea.” They sit at the hearth, toasting boxty on the hearthstone. Kate grated the potatoes; Brigid poured the water; Anne wrapped the pulp in cloth and squeezed it dry. “Elin, oh, she thinks she’s queen,” Mary sings, who made the tea. “I don’t,” Elin says. “She does,” Mary follows. Elin stands to flip the cakes, all five. “There,” she says, waiting for them to toast their other sides. They all stare straight into the fire, eyes tired, stomachs empty. Mother and father just passed. Gone! Mary and Kate can barely move their fingers to undo the lace to see how it’s done to make new lace to pay their landlord. They don’t ask each other: “Whatever will we do?”

Mary, oh Mary, Mary thinks, whatever will we do? One after the other the townfolk are dying, of hunger, the fever, black foot. It’s time to scavenge cockles, seaweed, limpets, blood from cows. This is how you do it: slit the vein, collect the blood, sew the wound with horse’s hair, salt the blood, bake it. Quite the feast! (Not really.) Their parents had been too proud. But all the other townfolk do the same. There is only so much to go round. That’s when the nightmare begins: Kate’s teeth working at straw; Brigid’s chin green from grass; Anne’s lips stung with nettles; Elin’s mouth packed with peat. They all turn toward their eldest sister,

84 wide-eyed. Mary smacks Kate on the back, Brigid, Anne, and even Elin, then stuffs strips of paper through the O’s of their mouths. What does it mean? The schoolmaster, a learned man. He must know something. “I will go to him,” Mary says. And she did. He promised to fill her belly, but not like this. Now she is hungrier than ever, and feels her body swelling. Mary says: “Fuck the skirts.” She trims her father’s trousers for one and all. Now they can scramble down cliffs to raid nests, climb trees to gather nuts, row their father’s boat out to sea. Their stomachs grow from valleys to plains. But Mary grows a mountain. “You’ll have to care for the wee one,” Kate says. But how? “I’ll have to move to the city,” Mary says aloud. Everybody knows the city is on the other side of the forest. Mary lines her coat with nuts, dried berries, slices of bread. “It’s all the same to us,” Brigid, Anne, and Elin say. “We’ll always be the younger.” “We’ll manage,” Kate says, arms crossed. Mary hangs a rosary around each of her sister’s necks. “Think of me,” she says, and they wave their hankies and cry.

The forest is above and beside her, brown and green. Moss glowing brighter than she’s ever seen. “This is like a fairy tale,” she says. “Mary Meets the Enchanted Forest.” The pine needles smell sweet enough to eat. “Don’t mind if I do.” Perfect for picking teeth. “I am not the least bit tired or hungry,” Mary says. “Do you hear me?” A bird chirps and a chipmunk twits. “At least I’m not alone.” She tries hard not to think. “That is the sky beyond the canopies. This is the path that my feet follow, my feet that I cannot see. This is my belly full of a wee one, boy or girl, half of me.” But she is tired and the sun is falling behind and she hasn’t reached the witch’s cottage yet because she’s walking for two. “Well, this looks

85 like a good place to sleep.” She pulls a felt cap over her head, wraps a wool scarf around her throat, pushes her fingers into kidskin gloves, and bur- rows her body in a pile of pine needles. “Kate on my head, Brigid round my neck, Anne on my hands, Elin in my thoughts. Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the darkness bite.”

The witch’s cottage is halfway between the town and the city. “I see it,” Mary says to no one. No one sees it too. They’ve been walking side-by-side since daybreak. A thatched roof, just like the cottage Mary lives in, used to live in, may or may not live in again. She knocks on the wooden door. “Come in,” the witch shouts. “Hello,” Mary says. “I’ve forgotten my name.” The witch motions toward the fire, where Mary sits, and brews tea. A tiny cottage, bed against the wall, two rockers facing the hearth, the wall with the door, and a wall lined with shelves filled with books. “That final book is still unfolding,” the witch says. Mary knows she knows the story; she’s living it. The witch says, “Hold out your palm,” and sets down a porcelain cup so fine it almost takes flight. Mary knows she doesn’t have to say where she’s off to and why, so she sips and waits for the witch to speak. “You’ll have to leave the wee one with the Sisters,” the witch says. “But I’ve left them behind.” “Not those. The Sisters of Mercy, who run an orphanage on the edge of the forest for wee ones from girls like you. But first, you’ll spend the night.” “You’re ever so kind,” Mary says. “This is what witches do.” “One question,” Mary says. “If the Sisters care for the wee one, who do I care for with my wages?” “Why, Kate, Brigid, Anne, and Elin, of course.” “You’re ever so wise.”

86 Mary drifts to dream with a triangle in her head. In the morning, the witch fills a bladder with raspberry leaf tea and tells Mary she’ll deliver in no time. They kiss each other on their cheeks and bid farewell. They mean it. As Mary walks, she feels the wee one unfurling and for a moment it fills her, throat to birth hole. It comes out, feet first, and she takes it by the hand. “My little Mary,” she says, and licks her clean. They curl up, mouth to breast, and Mary sleeps.

The Sisters wear navy blue veils rimmed with white, dresses of the same blue that fall below the knee, practical. Mary sits in the waiting chair, waiting, while little Mary totters about, still getting used to her land legs. The Sister who sits on the other side of the counter calls out, “Next!” “Had yours already? Well, you’re not from the city, that’s clear. We’ll have to fatten this one up.” The Sister hands Mary a form, white on top, black in the middle, white on the bottom.

Section I

Name: From: DOB: Wee One: DOB: Adopt out?  Yes  No

If Yes, sign and date at the bottom. If No, fill in section II.

Mary sits over the one question, sipping tea, and finally checks No. “Good choice,” the Sister says.

87 Section II

I, , agree to claim no later than 1,095 days from today. I understand that The Sisters of Mercy will feed, clothe, bathe, and school the wee one. If the wee one stays the full course, she or he (please circle) will learn to diagram sentences. I agree that if the wee one is not claimed in due time, he or she (please circle) will be sent to either (a) a monastery or (b) a convent. I also agree to limit my visits to the Christmas and Easter holidays.

Signature

Print Name

Date

The Sister takes Mary’s pointer finger, presses it on an ink pad, and pushes it into a square at the bottom of the form. Then she does the same with little Mary’s finger. “Here’s your copy,” the Sister says. “The bus leaves for the city every hour on the hour. If you hurry, you can catch the next one.” Mary kisses little Mary on the head and says, “I’ll be back.”

Mary looks at her black finger and thinks, What have I done? The bus pulls up, a monster on wheels coughing steam. “All aboard!” the bus driver shouts, and Mary climbs three steps. An hour later, the bus driver shouts, “First and last stop! The Home for Wayward Girls.” Mary stands on the sidewalk, only she doesn’t know it’s called a sidewalk, has never seen a sidewalk. The roads back home are dirt. No thatched cottages in sight. The Sisters of Mercy don’t occupy a cottage

88 either, but this is just striking Mary. The city was talked about, there were tales, but who knew this tale had a tail. Mary circles the block, reading street signs, and then climbs the stoop of The Home for Wayward Girls. She knows what wayward means, and she supposes there’s no way round it. She turns the knob, but it doesn’t turn. A sign above what looks like a brass key says “Turn here,” so Mary turns the key and hears a “tring, tring,” and the door opens. “Mary Flood?” “How’d you know?” “Follow me,” Miss says, and then, “Sit.” And Mary does, in the seat Miss pointed to, which is at a table, not a hearth. The table is set with a plate, cup on saucer, a basket filled with breads, ramekin of butter, jar of honey, and then, after Miss sets them down, a pot of tea and pitcher of milk. Mary is starved, but tightened. She manages a piece of bread with butter and two cups of tea. When she’s done, she’s given another form, this time listing things she can and cannot do: read, write, type (yes, yes, no); iron, sew, tailor (no, yes, yes); sew by hand or machine (hand); cook for 4 or more (yes); how many? (7); how many courses? (1); mind children (yes); mind children other than your siblings? (no); dust, vacuum, mop (no, no, no). “We don’t get many girls from the other side of the forest,” Miss says, looking over Mary’s answers. “But you look strong, despite what you’ve been through. I’ll show you to your room. Tomorrow is another day.” “Where are all the other girls?” Mary says. “It’s the slow season.”

Little Mary sits at a little table on a little chair with two other wee ones her age. She doesn’t understand what the Sisters say, but she under- stands the cries and whines of the others. “I want my mam” is what they mean, what she means. But she isn’t even sure what a Mam is, who her

89 Mam was, where she went. little Mary is still adjusting to the light of this world, its sounds and discomforts. A Sister walks up to the table with a pitcher, points to it, and says, “Milk.” She lowers it so that each wee one can look inside. Then she fills three bottles and hands them round. Mary sucks and tastes her mother, milk.

Mary is sent to The School for Wayward Girls, a one-room school- house two streets over. The schoolmistress opens the door before Mary knocks and says, “Let’s get started. Much to do.” She hands Mary a Syl- labus for the Semester.

Today Typing I: 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Lunch: 12:00 p.m. to 12:15 p.m. Sewing & Ironing I: 12:15 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. Tea: 4:15 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Review: 4:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Tomorrow Typing II: 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. Sewing & Ironing II: 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Lunch: 12:00 p.m. to 12:15 p.m. Cleaning I & II: 12:15 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. Tea: 4:15 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Review: 4:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Day after Tomorrow Cooking Courses I: 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. Minding Children I: 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Lunch: 12:00 p.m. to 12:15 p.m.

90 Cooking Courses II: 12:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. Minding Children II: 2:15 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. Tea: 4:15 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Review: 4:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

“Your syllabus was typed,” the schoolmistress says. The morning taps and dings by, and then it’s time for lunch: pork chops, applesauce, and mashed potatoes. It’s all on the menu that Mary typed out during class. The woman who brought Mary her lunch sits with her to eat her own. The schoolmistress sits at her desk, a napkin tucked into her collar. Mary eats with her mouth and with her mind salivates for her sisters, who sit by the hearth nibbling oat cakes. “Are you a single mum?” Mary whispers. “Was,” the woman says. “Did you go back for yours?” “We can’t have it both ways.” “How long have you been here?” “A hundred years.” Oh, no—no, no, no! Mary only wanted to be full.

“Ring-a-ring o’roses, a pocketful of posies, ah-tishoo, ah-tishoo, we all fall down,” Mary recites, dipping her keep in their tub, their skin pink from her love of scrubbing. She rubs them down and carries them off to bed, bright and shining. Tucked between sheets, they call out for another rhyme and Mary obliges. “Once there was a mother who gave up her daughter to care for another’s including a son. ‘Feed them, clothe them, give them some fun.’ Every single morning she took away a bun. She never goes to bed hungry, it’s another organ that’s empty, can you guess which one?” Mary tucks herself into bed and opens to The Book of Floods to see what her sisters are up to. Before blowing out the candle, she pulls a calendar from under her pillow and crosses off the day.

91 “I’m your mother,” Mary says. “Are you?” “Am.” “Mam?” Mary pulls out her breast, which has dried up, and little Mary sniffs it. You are my milk. She stands and recites the Lord’s Prayer, but she doesn’t know what she’s said. Mary looks to the Sisters, who say, “Clap.” Little Mary has learned her ABC’s and 123’s. She draws two stick figures and two arrows and writes: m a r y and MARY. For tea they eat ham sandwiches, frosted cakes, and chestnuts. “Time to go,” the Sisters say. “See you with the spring lambs. Hap- py Christmas to one and all.” “So soon?” Mary says. “W-E M-U-S-T N-O-T U-P-S-E-T T-H-E W-E-E O-N-E.” “What?” Mary says. “We must not upset the wee one,” little Mary says. “Bravo,” the Sisters say. “A gold star.” “Where are all the other mothers?” Mary asks the Sister who walks her out. “Oh, them,” she says, and waves her hand as she pushes Mary out the door, closing it tight. Mary thinks, Something is not right.

After a month of Saturdays pass, Mary licks her finger and says, “I’ll try my luck.” She stands at the bus stop and the driver drives by. The next week, she flags him down and he says, “Only wayward girls can ride the bus.” “But I’ve made the trip from there to here and the trip from here to there on Christmas. Now I’d like to go back.” “I’m sorry miss, but without a bun in the oven or Easter Sunday, I can’t help you.”

92 The next week, she stands at the corner, a whole basket of buns in her oven, a red wig on her head, and her madam’s spare glasses on her nose. Everything is fuzzy. “All aboard!” the bus driver shouts. Mary sits in the waiting chair until the Sister calls out, “Next!” This time when she reaches the question she checks Yes. “Excellent choice,” the Sister says. “Skip to the bottom, read, and sign.”

I, , agree that my wee one will be taken from me at the moment of birth and will be united with a mother who will love the wee one as if it is her own and they will live happily ever after. The end.

Signature

Print Name

Date

Nothing fishy going on there,Mary thinks. Little Mary sits at a table with a group of wee ones, counting rocks. Mary watches, content to see, but thinks: This is not how I want it to be. Then when the Sisters are busy prepar- ing tea, she discreetly births her buns on a table and slips out the back door. “An angel?” the Sisters ask, when they discover their loss, and gain.

Mary sits feeding her keep their supper, absentmindedly. Accord- ing to Floods, Kate, Brigid, Anne, and Elin are still scraping their fingers against trees and eating stirabout.

93 This is what the good book says Kate does: Sews the four shillings Mary sent home into her slip. This is what it says Kate says: “We’ll not be caught with our hands full.” Mary sings her keep to sleep, and falls too. Snoring quietly, she grabs a bunch of nettles. Stung awake, she looks at her hand—empty now. She climbs the steps to her room in the attic and dreams of Kate, weighed down by loaves of bread sewn into her tattered skirt, dropping a loaf with every step, the loaves plowed under by Brigid, Anne, and Elin, who follow. Out of the ground sprout tall green stalks, swaying in a wind that turns to a kind of fog that wilts the stalks and turns them black. Kate pulls a loaf from the ground and it falls apart in her hands, weeping.

Mary, in blonde wig and falsely pregnant: “Who’s your mother?” “Mother Superior,” little Mary says, hoping for a star. Something must be done about this, Mary thinks, gives birth, and goes. “The angel strikes again,” the Sisters praise. From the bus, Mary watches a lone cloud drifting in the sky.

Mary touches the pencil tip to her tongue and starts scribbling, rearranging pounds and shillings and pence, but no matter the pattern, she can’t even keep her sisters fed, let alone save money to spring little Mary. What is wrong with this equation? “Mary,” her madam wails, and Mary is up and running. She finds Madam in her boudoir flinging gloves against the wall. “I’m tired of taking twenty minutes to button these up,” she pouts. “Bring me yours.” Mary hands over hers, rough-and-bruised from goats that ate greens and bumped about in the fields. “I simply adore them. Consider them mine,” her mistress says. Spoiled, Mary thinks, and then, Made to order via my very own cottage industry! Famine chic is in.

94 What does Mary want? Mary wants it all. “Well, you aren’t a very good nanny,” her madam admits. “I’ll back you, I’m bored.”

“God bless a girl who thinks ahead,” the Sisters say, waving goodbye. “Where are we going?” little Mary says. “Over the river and through the woods,” Mary sings. “Will I not have to climb back up inside you?” she asks. Mary smiles and says, “Yes, you will not.”

95 Tara Goedjen Appendix to The Encyclopedia 

our months we sailed upon the ocean (SEE: Travel, seafaring). Our f ship slanted during storms and tossed us from wall to wall, and on calm days we were served noon meals of maggoty biscuits and cold stew that Father inspected for meat—pitching it out if he found any. Mid-trip the sea grew what Mother called “angry” and it became difficult for Sis- ter to nudge me a space at the railing. I wasn’t certain whether the other passengers were also vomiting because they, like me, were decaying, or if they were only sea-sick like Mother. Finally! Sister said we landed at a hot, forsaken port town called Harbor City, which smelled of dead fish and the salinity of the ocean. We staggered off the ship. Other passengers elbowed me as they debarked, and the end of the dock became a gorge of mud and phlegm. The ya-man sent by Father’s new post held up a sign with his name printed in spidery lettering. Beyond him was a make-shift stage where people crowded around a mallet-fisted auctioneer yelling Sold! Sold! A young girl holding her father’s hand burst into tears on the platform as a blue-eyed wolf next to her gave her a luxurious lick on the cheek. Father left us with Ya-man to buy supplies from an old family friend—a man he’d known before leaving the New Country for Eng- land, to marry his betrothed. Ya-man was swarthy like Father, both countrymen, and even in the heat wore a dark cape and pants fashioned from what Mother called denim. His lead horse, a tall black mare, nuzzled his pockets and then my own as I stood reading my encyclopedia. Ya-man called her coltish and then threw a handful of oats which drew a flutter of cawing birds. One landed on Sister’s shoulder and she grimaced as its claws dug into her sleeve. It flew away when our Father returned from the tented market, next to the slender gray tenements where I saw signs posted above the doors. Biting Prohibited. Two-Legs Only!

96 From his satchel, Father pulled out a necklace laced with seashells for Mother. He said it was made of Venus Combs—white spiraled shells with sharp protrusions like the needles of a porcupine. She cried out when he pulled it tight, claiming it pierced her. How suitable, Father said. Wear it. Mother, who was usually stubborn, flushed and said nothing. Since we’d left England, her life-long home, she’d been especially quiet, as if drawing inward (SEE: Seashell, cochlear chamber). For Sister, Father brought a yarn and needle to practice domestic duties. She yawned. And for me he didn’t have the scribe’s pen and paper I wanted, but instead a bush- el of caramel apples, bruised just like my scarred head. It never fails to make others stare—Ya-man did. Mother asked him if we’d live in Harbor City while Father tended to his post. Besides the market, there were timber storefronts and a walkway where three women gave berth to a gentleman escorting a tiger quoll, ribbons and bells tied to its fur. Here? Ya-man said to Mother. But your husband’s the Lighthouse Keeper. You see anything tall and pointy near? Perhaps she’d like to, Father said, and laughed for the first time in months. Please, Mother said, dabbing at the sweat along her forehead. She’d rather live in the city, Father said. Known in London for her parties. Civilized parties? Ya-man asked. No crawlers, slurpers, or lickers? What has my husband been telling you! Mother cried. She scur- ried to the wagon, beckoning us to follow. As Sister pulled me up, I saw a bobcat’s gleaming eyes as it sank to its haunches in an alleyway. A naked woman—a prostitute, maybe—sat on a metal canister beside it, stroking its tawny tail. I didn’t think there’d be animals like that here, I said, flipping through my encyclopedia. That’s not an animal, Ya-man said. Besides, there’s all kinds of everything here. Don’t frighten him, Sister said, twisting my ear. My dear little brother.

97 I was smaller than her, but we were the same age—twins. We each had bright red hair and pale skin, though Sister’s cheeks were flushed and mine sallow (SEE: Death, head trauma). In the wagon we sat elbow to elbow as the wheels jostled us down the road. Trees lined our path and serpents dangled from branches as we passed; above us a dull half-moon promised nightfall. Ya-man snapped the reins and spoke of travelers rav- aged by bushrangers or carried off in the mouths of hungry animals. So we’ve twice the enemies, Sister said. Men and animals. They’re all the same, Ya-man said. Wanting to fill the belly or the heart, yes? Enough, Mother said. They’ll be awake all night. A straight spine’s needed here, mates and ladies, Ya-man whispered. I nuzzled Sister and shivered, though, because of the heat, the sweat could’ve been wrung out of my shirt. Sister put her fingers across my broken forehead as she’d done daily since my accident. She was a believer in the resilience of the human body, and that all scars heal good as new. He’s burning again, Mother, she said. It’s the wind giving me chills, I insisted. Liar, Sister sang. Father looked at Mother, did his profiled eye not glint? Gales o’r the ocean, Ya-man said. He tossed his cape aside like the wind had caught it. Father turned and glared at me from his seat beside Mother—her shell-studded neck scratched and bleeding—where his big hand rested firmly on her knee. He took off his hat and wiped his sable hair, damp with sweat. The wheels clicked over the dirt, and when I looked away from Father I spied a dark-furred beast at the edge of a clearing. I was sure it was our very flesh the animal desired. To claw out our beating hearts and bite down. Dare you to jump out, Sister said. I clutched my encyclopedia to my chest and shook my head, having followed Sister’s dare four months ago, before we’d left England. That day was remarkable because of Mother’s party in the third-story

98 ballroom, and also because I viewed the festivities from the tree branches where Sister sent me with her dare. Clinging to bark, I was level with the window and the ladies inside. Their quivering bustles and lace, their curls drawn up with ribbons. Mother wore in her hair a brooch with a pearl like an eye. Next to her swayed an Irishman whose face looked familiar to me, though I couldn’t quite place it. Higher! Sister had yelled from below as a swarm of black rooks flayed out from the leaves. I drew myself up to the top limb—the one that stuck out like a fork—when it snapped. The dry break of the branch echoed in my bones, and then with a wind gust, the leaves waved goodbye to me as I fell and rammed into the flagstones below. Yet when I hit the ground, I somehow kept sinking into the earth where soon everything hollowed into blackness. For awhile there was no sound and I kept tumbling down, and the deeper I tunneled the blacker it became, and presently there began a buzzing sound like a thousand hornets in my ear, the rustle of a thousand insects burrowing into my body, tingling and whirring. A change was happening inside of me (SEE: Decay, stage one), until suddenly I was lifted from the darkness and awoke in Mother’s bed, staring at Doctor’s horn-rimmed glasses. Sister, adorned in her school uniform, grinned beside him. Father’s hand rested on Sister’s head and his other gripped the bodice of Moth- er’s dress so tightly that she stood flush against him. Pallid-faced, with a smudge of what might have been charcoal on her cheek and her neck dappled by red blotches. Her ordinarily kempt dress was tousled—she’d missed the top buttons in the back and had forgotten to tie her sash, which I saw in the mirror behind her. Mother, I croaked. Your dress is untied. Mother went white and fainted. Father, preoccupied over my state, was slow to catch her. She hit her head against a table and then sat up woozily, her cheekbone already bruising. Mother! I said, but I was too weak to raise myself. Fresh air might be good for his recovery, Doctor said. I know just the place, Father said. Far from here. He looked at my Mother and his eyes seemed to be shimmering with tears, though it could’ve been that my vision was only blurred.

99 We’ll return to my country at once, Father said. Sister clapped but Mother began to sob. Later that day, hunched over my encyclopedia, I coughed and stained the pages red. As I read on, I realized that my fall had resulted in not just injury, but decay. (SEE: Delayed Corporeal Disintegration).

We passed our first night in the New Country in a tent that Ya-man tied from the lantern hitch on the wagon and spiked into the ground. In the dark we held perfectly still, listening to our own breathing and the susurrus of insects and animals outside. I lifted the side of the tent and saw a white opossum with matted fur and two beady, red eyes blinking at me. I gave a start—for beside the creature stood a boy, not much older than me. What do you see? Sister asked. Not sure, I said. Nothing. Liar, she sang. Mother crawled to a corner of the tent and began to weep. Tell your bonny Mother to quiet, Ya-man said. She’s attracting attention. Not only does she smell— —Of perfume and powder, Sister said. But worse, she’s making a racket, Ya-man finished. There’s animals in these parts we’d best watch out for. Mother cried louder. No woman of mine, Father said, shall ever fear danger. Mother shuddered and drew Sister close. A thin strand of her bright hair draped across Mother’s neck, just below her necklace. Come to me, my only boy, Mother said. Under Father’s narrowed gaze I crawled to her bowed head of tangled black hair and laid my head on her ribs until her breath was long and even and she fell into a deep slumber. Father drew open the tent flap and sat outside with a rifle, keeping watch. Could we make a fire? Sister asked, but Father’s answer was muf- fled.

100 A fire might protect us from the creatures outside, Ya-man told her, but its smoke would draw the bushrangers. He spat. The sorrowful truth being, he said, neither fire nor darkness will stop the ones who are both man and animal. Not a word’s true, Sister said. Watch then, for men who crawl and walk, he said, and animals that do the same. Is a wife waiting for you? Sister asked, her head nodding sleepily. Does she mind you’re always working? I’ve a wife, he said. But she’s always working too. She’s the lead horse. Sister laughed. Liar, she said. At sun-up Ya-man tethered the horses, kissing the mare’s nose as we clambered into the wagon. I bit into a piece of dried fruit and felt a pang in my gums as I chewed down upon a mysterious, hard square. I spat it out. A molar. I carefully tucked it into the pages of my encyclopedia (wishing to document my decay, as I continue to do—for now I have a collection of teeth, finger- and toenails, and hair strands enough to sew to an entire scalp). Just like the day before, the road to Father’s new post wound through trees and open fields, where a pack of hyenas ran with their jaws wide in laughter. Ya-man lit a torch and ordered me to hold it. Whoever controls the light controls the animals, he said. Is that in your encyclopedia? Before sun-down we reached the shore and Father grinned, the tip of his incisor tagging his lip. Wedged into the sand was a sliver of a boat, nothing we’d sailed from England—that six-hundred foot steamer with her saloons and berths. Oh! Mother gasped. See there! She outstretched her finger and it was as narrow as the lighthouse ahead. An island lighthouse with a great fire, looking like a golden eye in the night, I was sure. Ya-man told us that it was the highest point for miles, with a view of every animal and human as far as Harbor City. A lighthouse fire so large and hot it would keep the wild animals at bay. I imagined this while we unloaded the trunks from the wagon to the boat,

101 lodged against the sand. Soon I had to rest on a rock, for my insides burned in sharp pains along the undersides of my ribs. As I bent gasping, Sister marched past carrying a crate. Not a good country for wraiths, Ya-man said. He’s small because he reads all the time, Sister said. Not true, I said, I’m suffering from my accident. I didn’t tell her the entirety—that my skin had gone waxy (SEE: Decay, corruption of organic matter) so that even my encyclopedia slipped in my hands. What’s more, the sight of three sunbathing crocodiles made my breath catch in my lungs and I nearly fainted. Sister, always stronger, always fearless, only laughed. What horrible snouts they have, Mother said. All the better to keep your lips away, then, Father said. Ya-man grunted and grabbed the oars. To your lighthouse post? he asked Father. On the island, Sister said. We’ll have it to ourselves? Plenty there to keep you company, Ya-man said. What? I asked. Who? (SEE: Haunts and Phantasms, eidolons; kelpies; will- o’-the-wisps.) But Ya-man would say no more. The animals, Ya-man said, and Sister bared her teeth. Yes, Father said. Best to keep your distance. Surely you tease, Mother said. Like me, she was surprised by his words. Father had always been fond of animals, had a kinship with them even. Sister leapt onto a trunk as Mother held up her petticoats, sighing loudly until Ya-man looked away. As she lifted one leg into the boat, her dress angled in such a way that I saw her bare knee, bruised black by a large thumbprint. The sight of the smarting skin reminded me of my head, damaged from the fall. The fall. Tree limb still in my hands when Sister found me, egg- shells scattered about my body. She prodded me with her boot and then ran off to fetch Father at the Fort. It felt like hours, days, months until finally—through a sudden, sharp beam of sunlight—a figure in a dark suit appeared. Prismatic orbs for eyes. It was no demon, but Doctor raising me in his arms. I was propped against pillows in the bedroom while the maid tried to find Mother. It seemed that she’d disappeared from the

102 party she was hosting on the third floor, where boots and shoes stomped in fast waltzes. Doctor raised my head to give me a large white pill and through the window I saw the tree Sister dared me to climb. The tree that had flung me from its branches, I was sure (SEE: Sentient Beings, plants). Child didn’t even scream, Doctor said. Finding her brother like that. She’s very brave, Father said. Gets it from her mother. I shut my eyes and remembered how it felt to die. They were all doting on Sister and it was I who’d adventured under the earth and come back with my head cracked open! My head itself was a whorl of blackness— it felt as though I needed Doctor to set a lantern between my ears. Up now, Doctor said, pouring me something to drink. The whiskey down my throat dulled the pain inside my body, the feeling like a thousand barbs in my flesh. I moaned and he gave me two more capfuls. A dose for men, he said. The music upstairs pounded faster as Father pulled bloody sheets from beneath my raised head. Doctor’s scissors and scalpels were arranged in a row beside the table (SEE: Surgery, bloodletting). We’ll proceed soon, Doctor said. He handed Sister a blade. Set this in boiling water, he said. As I lay on Father’s feathered mattress, my head throbbing, Sister ran through the doorway and Father stole out of the room, wanting to find Mother. Doctor wet his hands in a basin and scrubbed them together, making bubbles. Then, from behind my headboard, I heard a rustling—a gentle, rhythmic pounding against the wall—followed by a gasp, and a sharp clap of knuckles on bone. A man yelled (it sounded like Father) and a woman shrieked. What was that? I asked Doctor, only his face had colored and he was intent on wiping his hands with a cloth. Spry one, Doctor said gratefully when Sister returned from her chore. I raised my head to see her holding a sickle, her cheeks fat in a grin, her hair shining. I wished with every aching bone that it was her Doctor

103 had to cut instead of me—for she seemed robust enough to be sectioned off like a worm and still live.

The island of Nobby’s Head, Ya-man said, pointing at the lighthouse. Just like this one, Sister said, knuckling my skull. I shrugged away from her to see the center of the island, covered in high grass that disappeared into slate rocks under an indigo sky. Did you bring matches and candles? Ya-man asked. Of course, Father said from the prow. One box. That’s hardly enough for four of you, Ya-man said. He warned us it’s always dark there! Mother carped. You’ve never been one to heed warnings, Father said. The four of us won’t be needing candles, anyhow. Of course, Sister said. We’ll have the lighthouse for light. Father said nothing and Ya-man only churned the cerulean water, seeping into the boat. I sucked in my breath and feared the worst (SEE: Sea Creatures, jellyfish; octopi; piranha). Tighten your fists, lad, Ya-man whispered to me. You’ll surely need them here. Soon our boat docked on Nobby’s Head next to another boat— small but sturdy with moss growing over the sides. This is yours, Ya-man said, pointing. For emergencies and transport. With thick rope he tied the hull to a tree and then relit my torch. The light on the island was twilight; everything was cast in a filmy gray, much like an English bog. Father helped Mother out of the boat so she wouldn’t ruin her boots. I tried to do the same for Sister, but she was so heavy that we both fell onto shore—its rim of luminescent sand. Good Lord, Mother said, straightening Sister’s blue dress. Not likely to be found in these parts, Ya-man warned. He led us to the front door of the orange-roofed cottage that Fa- ther said reminded him of his childhood home. Beside it were rounded,

104 stacked stones—the base of the lighthouse shooting up into the dark ether. From his belt, Ya-man drew a key ring and opened the door, our little light carrying us inside. At first I thought the cottage was certainly haunted (though now I know there are worse things than lingering spirits, such as a solid body, lingering after death). Great white shapes loomed about us like the ghosts of large animals—the bears and wolves of our forests in England. I grabbed Sister’s hand and she swatted me. It’s just a sheet, Brother! She yanked the nearest ghost, revealing it to be a velvet couch. Mother took a candle, firm as her finger, and put its wick to Ya-man’s torch. There’s fresh linens everywhere, Ya-man said. Well, Mother said, inspecting the cottage. There’s no sitting room. She sighed. What shall we do with our guests? What do you usually do with them? Father asked. He gazed out the dark window to the lighthouse—white and slender like a thigh bone picked clean. Your company here, Ya-man said, won’t much care for sitting rooms. Mother opened the lid of her trunk—so long it could have served as my coffin. I collapsed on a feather mattress, feeling a throbbing inside my spleen so deep and painful that I became terrified of what was to become of me. I’d never feared death and what followed it until that cool afternoon when Sister found the bird at the base of the tree. The music from Mother’s party at the house filtered through the windows behind us. A bird, Sister said, nudging its black feathered throat with her boot. When it didn’t fly away, she squatted beside it. It’s dead, I said. It isn’t. She picked it up by its wing and flung it into the air. It fell back to the dirt. It’s dead. She held it to her cheek and only then noticed the congregation of red ants along its breast.

105 They’re crawling on it! They’re eating it. Why? Because it’s dead. I explained to her the food chain. Men, then women and children. Bears and tigers, the meat-eaters. Rabbits and squirrels. Insects. Why? How do you know? I read it, I said. She pulled a beetle off the rook’s wing. But the bird should eat the insects then! Dead things get eaten by insects. Or their own body fluids. Well, she said. I suppose there are worse things than death. She tilted her head back and peered at the branches of the oak. I’ll take it to its nest, she said, tucking the rook into the neck of her dress. Its beak met her chin in a pointy kiss. Father’d be furious if he saw you, I said. Father’s at the Fort. She grinned. Mother, then, I said. Ladies aren’t supposed to climb trees. If ladies aren’t, then who is? Boys, I said, men. Please proceed, she said, motioning with her hand. Outdone, I grabbed the stiff rook and hoisted myself onto the nearest branch, Sister boosting my legs as I squirmed. Up! she shouted. I climbed up and up into the blue sky, past the slant of the rooftop. Inside the third-story window, I saw people swirling in their bright cloaks and dresses and above them was the hard blue of the sky. Mother was at the window, her hair pinned with the pearl brooch. The Irishman tilted his head and gave her neck a wet kiss.

Torch in hand, Ya-man led us to the lighthouse—the shadowy stone spire with a rime of glass windows. He swung open the thick door with his shoulder and a swarm of bats fled shrieking into the night. I held my encyclopedia in front of my face like a shield.

106 Below is the cellar, to store goods and such, Ya-man said. Mother peered at the stairwell leading both above and below into murky blackness. She swooned. As Father and Ya-man gathered around her, I saw Sister flee down to the cellar. Finally, after a few jagged breaths, Mother stirred and Ya-man lifted her to her feet. I always prided myself on being such a strong woman, she said softly, as if mumbling in a dream. Pride can make us do the strangest things, Father said. Mother nodded and retired to the cottage, leaving just the four of us—including Sister, who’d returned from the cellar’s depths. Ya-man led the way, his rickety white knees bending up the stairs as the lantern, shaking in his hand, drew circles of light across the floor. Our passage was narrow and the steps twisted up and up into the gloom, a thin iron railing on one side. Father and Ya-man were quite fast. I soon lost sight of them and turned to Sister, for reassurance that it was her breathing behind me, and not some demon or animal. Don’t misstep, I said, though I knew it was my arm that shook while gripping the rail. There are tins of food in the cellar, she whispered. It’s what a cellar’s for, I said. And behind the tins, she said breathlessly, are shackles. I shook my head, certain she was lying. And below the shackles, she said, are bones. I don’t believe you, I said, though my voice quavered. As Sister tugged at my shirt, trying to lure me to the cellar, Ya- man shouted ahead. Up, up! Around the next spiral I caromed off Father, nearly invisible in the dark except for his jaundiced eyes. You smell of fear, he said, which startled me all the more. I tried to calm myself by imagining what we’d find at the top: a fire flaming, smoke fluting up the chimney, the warm, salty air eddying round our skin. When we finally reached the upper landing, the room glittered black and gold around us, but not from an enormous barrel of fire, as I’d first thought, but instead from a lantern (SEE: Lighthouse, operation). Beyond the lantern was a large object, bulbous and clear—resembling an eyeball or a hornet’s belly.

107 The prisms, Father said. He reached into his pocket for his spec- tacles. I went to the window and pressed my forehead against the glass, cupping my hands around my eyes. Below were little black tents of water where pelicans dove and swooped in white flashes like ghosts of birds. They might shatter the glass and peck you to death! Sister squealed, flinging her arms around my waist and laughing. For the whole evening Ya-man and Father spun the lens before them, their timed movements making patterns of dark and light into words, sentences—a language. Father knew the combinations from his military training and his light stippled the salted air. We’d receive messages ourselves, signals from men on shore, Ya-man told me. And from ships? I asked, but he said no more. He tipped his head and left for mainland and Sister followed him down the stairs. I stood, watching Father’s swaggering gait as he moved about the room, busy as a cobbler. His black beard hadn’t been clipped since we left England and it hung eight inches past his chin, tapering into a point at the end. He sighed and for a moment I recognized a trace of my old Father—the one who’d pick up a book and read, languorously, until it was time for dinner. You, he said, when he finally looked up, his eyes glittering in the light. You will trade shifts with me, he said. For weeks we slaved, Father intent at work. From the cottage we saw flashes around us as Father was signaled, and we saw flashes from the lighthouse as he signaled back. He received thank-you letters delivered by Ya-man in overflowing bushels of envelopes, full of hair clippings or gold coins and sometimes scented with oil or even urine—a strange cus- tom, I thought. On my shift, I began to interpret the messages flashed from the shoreline—Are you the Keeper?—though sometimes they hardly made sense—I have a human daughter. I’d answer as Father instructed. One long light and three short ones, all separated by darkness. The Keeper isn’t here. Father worked mornings until midnight, when I took my shift, though day and night were indistinguishable since there was never any sun on the island, only an unending twilight. Despite this, it was very

108 hot, as if the unceasing lighthouse fire warmed the air. Mother wore only her white muslin underthings in the house and Sister ran around the woods without a shirt, her long hair covering her back. Things seemed fine, tranquil even, until the day Father spotted Sister prancing the yard half-naked and lunged at Mother, who woke with a start, her face whiter than the sheets that she slept on. What’ve you taught her? he yelled. Shedding her clothes! He shook Mother by the shoulders. She’s ruining her prospects! Prospects! she blubbered. We’re alone on this island! Are we? he screeched. Then his demeanor abruptly changed—his lips curled into a hint of a smile. We are the only humans, true, he said softly. He pointed at me. You. Lighthouse duty. He turned on his heel and slammed the door on his way out. I ran to my post, ignoring Mother’s sobs. Later that night I heard someone tiptoeing up the lighthouse stairs. I waited by the doorway, the encyclopedia poised over my head, its hard leather binding ready to come down upon the skull of any beast or goblin that would enter my lighthouse lair. But it was only Sister’s head that passed through my door. I sighed, my raised arms trembling, weak from holding the heavy book. Father’s not here, she said. No, I said. Not for eight hours. Two left tonight. He never stays at home, she said. Just fetches you and leaves. I’d noticed Father would wake me for my shift smelling of sweat and sand, but when he entered the lighthouse to relieve me of my duties, he’d smell of smoke and brew (SEE: Harbor City, Taverns). I want to watch for him, she said. But what shall we do until he comes? She began skipping around the prisms, which dizzied me. Sweat collected in beads under my shirt and along my arms and face. What’s wrong with you? she asked. You’re feverish. I’m dead, I said. You are not! she said, and slapped my cheek. I gasped. See? she said. Saying no more, I opened my encyclopedia and showed her a marked passage. Corporeal Disintegration. Prolonged Death. She flipped

109 through the pages and studied the pictures. How? she finally asked. The fall, I said. Prove it, she said. I dare you. I summoned courage. Bring me a knife, I said. From Father’s tool drawer. I pointed at the black box beside the door. Sister came quickly with a blade which I took and put to my forehead, cutting away the threads woven into my flesh. Open up, I said. Up, up. Sister didn’t flinch or faint as I would have, were our positions reversed. Sister who’d pick up dead birds by their wings and toss them to flying again. Sister, who’d dare me to climb trees. Who laughed when I fell, and scoffed at my broken head. Sister wasn’t laughing. I opened up my scar and reached in with my fingers. I shoved my hand deep enough to bloody my elbow. I searched down down down into the blackness and closed my eyes until I found it. I pulled it out and gave it to Sister. Not a hornet, as I’d thought. A maggot. It wriggled in her palm and then curled into a ball. This is a sign of decay, I said. I closed her hand around the maggot. This is what happened to the dead bird. This is what’s happening to me. What will happen to you. I couldn’t stop. Sister’s face went ashen which made her hair seem all the more bright. I reached and pulled her close, comforted by her like I was in the womb. It’ll happen to Mother, I continued. And Father. Father! she cried. We raced to the window where, in the depths of the blackness, we made out the gray outline of the little boat as it was drug onto the sand. We saw Father stepping along the path to the lighthouse, his silhouette glowing as the green eyes of animals gleamed lustily (SEE: Unions, mam- mal and rodent) from the high grass to light his way. Father has changed, Sister said. I fear the worst. Go to Mother, I told her. I’ll think of a plan!

110 She ran down the steps and out the door. Minutes later I heard it open. Instead of taking his post, Father yelled for me to come to him, and I obeyed. Outside the sky was tinted green and birds flitted around the sifting clouds. Gales of wind hurled at the cottage where Mother and Sister, each with a small bag, stood at its door. We’re going inland today, Father said. The storm, I said. The shutters on the cottage flew open and Mother shrieked. No women or child of mine, Father said, shall ever fear danger. But I’m terrified! Mother said. Father only barked out a laugh and pointed toward Harbor City. We bent our heads in the wind and ran over grass and mud to the little boat whipping in the water, churned up like Mother taking a paddle to milk. I held my hand out for Mother and she climbed in, but Sis- ter slipped and fell into the waves (SEE: Escape attempt, swimming). Father reached in with one giant hand and pulled her out by the nape of her neck. You’re fine, he said. Collect yourself. You look like a wet bitch. Enough! Mother screamed. Leave our children out of this! Our? Father asked. Our? He howled with laughter and slapped his knee. You! He pointed at me. Row! Ya-man was waiting for us on the mainland with a light in hand, team and wagon beside him. His light flashed a message. Hurry. It’s time. Father and I paddled hard until my lungs burned like my rotting insides. A yellow hue settled over the trees, some putrid line of clouds and air. Some light that I didn’t want to be under, some light that spoke a language I didn’t know, that I was just beginning to fathom. Here you are! Ya-man shouted. His yell was faint in the wind as he caught the rope and heaved. Father grabbed Mother’s wrist and they trudged through the water, dry land not seven meters away. I stayed in the boat until he came back for Sister, swooping her in his arms like a bride, her legs loose and dangling. It was then that I saw it. Some fin cutting the gray waves and Father blind to it. I screamed as the shark charged in the shallow water and then shot onto shore, crawling for a moment over the sand with its fins

111 and tail writhing, having overshot its mark. Sister tumbled from Father’s arms and into the water as the beast struggled free from land. Mother screamed as the shark closed its jaws upon the lace of Sister’s dress and then dove into a wave, yanking her down and away. The dark water rippled where I last saw Sister, underwater, the red of her hair waving like coral. Then I heard laughing—it was Father, the beastly man he’d become. I’ve sold your bastard children, he said to my sobbing mother. Your horror was payment enough. He brandished a rope and looped it around her head where it caught on her necklace of shells. No woman of mine shall ever fear danger, he said. But then, you aren’t my woman anymore. I was never! Mother screamed, as she was drug into the water by Father. He yanked me from the boat by my ankles and slung me once around his head, then tossed me onto shore. I lay in a shivering heap by Ya-man’s stamping horses, resigned to a fate worse than death. You, Father said to me, I intended to sell as feed. But the animals told me you smelled of decay, he said. Ya-man has offered to take you as an apprentice. My old mare grows tired, Ya-man whispered, his cool hand on my forehead. And she’s always wanted a child. He held out his hand. Up, he said. I turned away and watched as Father slung Mother into the boat and picked up an oar, waving it above his head like a prize. I last saw Mother (SEE: Cellar Imprisonment) struggling with her leash as Father grinned and steered toward the lighthouse, traversing the same waves that swallowed Sister. My sister, wed to the blackest, strangest ocean. My brave, brave sister, delivered to her mate.

112 Annie Guthrie *of poems  *of environment

Not knowing I came to find things colorful and kind

I in lawful cinders find, unkindred, one flower on the sill, wilting, just when the next is opening. Naturally falls the will to ash, when expectation

- -

Loves, loves not. the last petal-drop leaf space I leave to stem

(as ankles hold in place feet sent away)

(as a stump keeps its roots from changing altogether direction)

What if wish & love would open at the same time?

I ask the vase with a kind of dare

113 (The difference between fantasy and prayer is innocence.)

114 *of the oracle

What can I make of Autumn? A given situation

What is melancholy? A formidable opponent, dressed sweetly

What is nature? Enclosed in dark pockets, sealed and earned

Why am I secret? Humble are those made alone

How to find modesty? Fall for a true landing

What is the truth? Your breath knocked out, and read

What is this power of breath? The gift you first forget

115 *of the Gossip

The tavern is damp, dark, filled with enough to feel invisible. The Visible a violent character here.

He’s tethered to a game. The lady there will play the ground. She’ll get irritated with his moves:

“What the hell are you doing, protecting your rook?” she says, taking the queen. “Trying to find a good place to hide,” he’ll say, letting her down.

116 *

There is nothing to tell on the trees. The leaves left their despair, wicked bare air, revealing. A Gossip is passing out functions by the river. Gypsies circle her in raggedy reds and dirty yellows. They too feel the need to be told their role. “You two make orange,” the Gossip sums. She is invent- ing the lives of others. She calls out my name as I hurry by, but I am devoted; I don’t answer.

“What do I give up, if I let the Gossip in my house?” I ask the Oracle when I arrive.

One point-of-view may be avoided for many reasons.

“Give me two.”

You want to hide or to tell more sides.

“But I’m piecing a heart into a book, so of course there are many characters.”

But there isn’t a comprehensive heart to break.

“Oh.”

Therefore don’t make your words your ribcage.

“ .”

117 *of the Gossip

When she was a girl she was an inventor. Lies would fly out her mouth, bright wings, bright world. At first the children would flock to her like a colorful mother. But then the room took on a greenish hue, signaling the falsity of her statements, and feeling the feel of too-heavy wings, the too-heavy bird fluttered and tottered and fell.

118 *of the Gossip made up everything - the stars the trees, her own self

119 *of the book

What “never” in the bloom. What “ever” on dream’s shelf, in sleep, is wilting?

To clip bliss from its opposite: silence. Yet on top the night’s helm my howling, starless stark “Ahems,” the tyrant “Ahas.”

Mouth hoofs and scrapes thought’s stable.

Only the heart’s able, beating, unmoored from port of stem, to hold like words do, quiet ground: briefly.

120 Carmen Lau Familiar  I.

The witch killed my family while I slept. I heard her singing in my dreams. When I woke I saw her leaning over my bed, her long white hair over her face. I screamed and screamed but she did not kill me. She liked me too much, she said. I asked her why, and she sang to me:

Remember, remember The time you watched the cat Tear a bird apart How you did not try to save it

Remember, remember The times you locked your sister In the closet, in the bathroom How you liked to hear her beg

Remember, remember All the things you did With the neighbor boy— O, all the things he did to you All the things you did to him

Aren’t you likeable? she said, and held me up to the bathroom mirror. I could see it then, the evil in my eyes. I cried. I want my family, I said. When my weeping escalated to howls, she sewed my mouth shut. I watched, my hands fluttering, as she assembled for me a gown of butterfly wings. She stripped me of my PJs, slipped the butterfly dress

121 onto my shaking body and said, How pretty you are! Whenever I brushed a hand over the loosely stitched wings my touch dislodged tiny, glittering scales. The dead were everywhere around me, on my skin, caressing me. From this I was supposed to learn silence. When she removed the stitches from my mouth, I asked to see my family’s bodies. I want to say goodbye to them, I said. I want to kiss my mother one last time. The witch laughed. She laughed and laughed and laughed, until I could take it no longer and covered my ears with my hands. Even then I could not pull my gaze away from her shaking form, doubled over in laughter.

Every night the witch killed people in their sleep, cut them into parts and brought them back in a canvas bag. She sat me on the counter and fed me sparrow eggs while she baked their flesh. To preserve my life, I pretended to love those eggs. I pretended to love her. All the while I thought of redemption. For I remembered my mother’s words: A bad person can always re- deem herself with good acts. I could still become good if I killed the witch. I waited for her to fall asleep, at which point I would stab her, or choke her. With what? A kitchen knife, maybe, or her own long hair. But I never saw her sleep. While I lived with her I needed no sleep either. It was hard to plan other ways to kill her. We were often busy; I had little time to think. Every day I helped the witch sew skins. Bear skin, fish skin, worm skin. She could slip one on and be anything. The skins fell apart upon undressing, so most of the time we sat mending in the living room. I admit I grew to like the feel of fur against my palms. The puncture of a needle through scales gave me deep satisfaction. Sometimes she draped a skin loosely about me, urged me to act like an animal while she watched and clapped. She sang her songs and I moved my body and sang along with her.

122 O thorn who waits in ice How I long for you O ice who rimes the ground How I long for you

The witch, behind her hair, was beautiful as snow. She hugged me and kissed me and she was everywhere cold. It was easy to forget. Will you eat me, I asked one day when feeling brave, like you eat the other people? She laughed and wound a necklace of tiny seeds around my neck, wrapped it around and around my throat. What do you think? she said. I was becoming her dog. Indeed, the only skin she let me wear was a jackal skin. I followed her every night to people’s homes buttoned up in that mottled pelt. I helped her carry the bag in my slender jaws; I marveled too much at the elegance of my new skull to mind the smell of blood. And no—I did not turn away when she killed. It all looked unreal in the darkness, her quiet slicing of throats. In the jackal’s guise, it was easy to think like an animal.

One night as she was fiddling with the oven and I was still in my jackal skin, I managed to clear my mind enough to remember redemption. I knocked the witch to the floor—I tore at her throat. In my mind I screamed, For Father, for Mother, for Sister, for everyone! When I finished she lay bleeding on the linoleum, her breath coming out shallow, uneven, ragged. I circled her. I knew I should try to sever her head completely from her body, but I could not bring myself to apply my teeth to her savaged neck again. I went to the living room, slipped my skin off and turned the television on. I watched what might have been sitcoms, or nothing at all—I couldn’t tell because of the snow. When morning came I returned to the kitchen. Upon hearing my footsteps she rose and wrapped a towel around her neck.

123 How I love you, she said. I did, at least, try to be a hero.

II.

Years passed in a haze. After my failure, there was nothing for me to do but shrink. Let me be a faded photograph, I said to myself. Let me be so many seeds in ashes. I sang quietly to myself:

Once I was a small girl Once I was a bumble bee Once I burrowed my fumbling way Into the heart of a willow tree

Then my breasts began to grow. Blood stained my butterfly frock. Day by day my hips and thighs became more conspicuous. I longed for the clean straightness of my child body. In order to hide the changes I took to staying in my jackal skin indoors, while mending, while dancing. At last the witch said, Take that off. When I refused she caught me by the ear and unbuttoned my skin. It fell off me in pieces. Let me stay in it forever, I said. She presented me with a pile of curtains from the house of an artist she’d killed. The material was of the smell and feel of hospital gauze. You can make a corset from this, she said. She was growing tired of me, I knew. While she sat with her back to me sewing skins and singing quietly to herself, I cut and pieced sheets of gauze together, using rose stems from the backyard as boning. I tried to show her my progress but she did not care. With every stitch, it seemed, I faded. I did not mind. After three days I finished the corset. It would at least flatten my chest. To lace it I used strands of my own hair, grown long as the witch’s by then.

124 I asked her to help me with the lace. She set her work aside and stood behind me. Pull it tight, I said. I wanted to feel the fabric in my bones. I wanted it to shrink my flesh into neatness. She pulled it until I whined in pain. That should be enough, she said. I shook my head and began to cry. She laid me gently on the floor, placed her foot against my back and pulled hard. I lost my breath; I fell asleep. When I awoke, she was gone. I waited for her for days. I turned the television on, but there was nothing but snow. When I realized she would not return, I peeled the corset off, put it in the oven and watched it catch on fire. Then I went outside into daylight for the first time since the witch came. The sun burned my skin and the air smelled of mown grass. Little birds sat sleeping in the unten- ded lawn. At first I didn’t see them and almost kicked one, but I stopped myself in time. I blinked at the stark green of the neighborhood trees and I hailed the first person I saw. It was the neighbor boy, grown tall and lean and handsome, walking to his door with mail in his hand. “Hey,” I said. “Do you remember me?” I thought to myself, How I have changed. “Yes,” he said. “We used to fuck.” The birds erupted upward. Feathers everywhere, scalding. I could not stop laughing. Behind me, the house burst into flames.

125 Sam Martone How to Make a List  t here are things they do not tell you about snow: 1. The way it arrives without warning.

At first, no one knew what it was. My father stepped outside that morning, and upon seeing the ground and the houses blanketed in white, he looked at me solemnly. “The sky is falling,” he said. The rest of the village had been roused as we had been by an un- bearable cold, and they too had found their windows clouded by an impenetrable white. We all stood outside, looking at the ground and at the sky in wonder and fear. My father stepped cautiously across the fallen sky and made his way towards the courtyard in the center of town, where shivering people had already started to gather around the fountain, its water crystallized, frozen in mid-ripple. My mother and I followed with the same caution, though she did so as if mimicking my father, feigning frightened looks at the sky, both above and below. Everyone was shouting. Men were pushing to get to the front of the crowd. Women were crying. Only my mother said nothing, beside my father now with a quiet look of amusement on her face, a shadow of a smirk. She thought the village often got too worked up over nothing, and that everyone fed on each other’s hysterics. My father stood up on the ledge of the fountain, his booming voice elevating among the rest as he took charge, which he normally did in situations like this. Last year, he established a rotating schedule for how often wishes could be made by throwing coins into the fountain. The year before that, he had been the one to show how mothers could keep track of their children by sewing fireflies into their shirts.

126 “The sky is falling,” he repeated to the village with the same so- lemnity as when he said it to me, only now he said it louder, more confi- dent. Now he was saying it as a leader. The voice is the most important thing, he told me once. My father was by no means the most intimidat- ing looking man physically, being only an average size, and he had a kind, warm face; boyish, even. But it was his voice, the one that could shake the walls of houses and cause birds to take flight, that got him noticed. It was because of his voice that he was considered by many to be head of the village. “It’s never been this cold before,” someone said. “The world is ending!” shouted someone else. “We have to move away from here immediately,” said one woman. “If you catch some in your hand, it turns to water,” said a child quietly, but his words were carried away by the cold. My father thought for a moment. “If the world is ending, to where can we escape?” he asked. “And if the sky is falling, it is only in small pieces right now. If larger chunks start falling, we may need to move, but there may be nowhere to escape from that either; I have never heard of a land without sky. We should wait to see what happens. For now, stay inside by your fireplace, so no one freezes to a statue.” The mapmaker Johann Hewel insisted it was pieces of the moon falling down to earth. Sure enough, more and more of the moon disappeared each night until the sky was an empty black. In our panic, we forgot we had seen this happen many times before, so we breathed a collective sigh of relief when the moon began to carve itself into the sky once more. Johann Hewel then determined the white powder was made up of falling stars. But Johann Hewel was also convinced the world was round, like an orange, and that was a ridiculous theory, said my father. A week passed with the white falling down in varying degrees of intensity, sometimes in great flurries, sometimes not at all. When the sky did not fall and the world did not end, my father decided we would talk to Alwyn.

127 2. The way it stings your cheeks.

I don’t remember what I wore that day, only that it was not enough. No one in the village had clothes warm enough for this kind of weather; there was never any need before—it had been cold, but never enough to make one’s fingers go stiff and blue if one stayed out too long. Now, one could see children outside with freshly baked bread their mothers had tied around them. Men took to fashioning cloaks out of curtains, much to the chagrin of their wives. The inventor Morgan Wi- esmann built wrist braces that suspended a lit candle under each of his hands at all times. Our village was a small one, comprised of rows of houses that spider-webbed outwards. In the center was the courtyard, and where the houses ended were a few large crop fields and the old mill. Past the fields, we were surrounded on all sides by acres and acres of trees, an endless forest. We knew little about other villages, only that they existed. We knew this because of my mother, who had been born elsewhere and arrived in this village when she was still a young girl. She was the only evidence of other villages we had ever seen; there was never any reason for us to venture out in search of other places. Alwyn’s house was at the outskirts of the village, where the woods began, so my father and I trudged through the inches of white, our feet sinking, our faces numbing against the wind. My father, smiling, waved hello to everyone who passed. “Boy,” my father said to me. “I’m not going to be around forever. And if you’re ever going to become man of this village, you’ll need Al- wyn.” The day my father wouldn’t be able to lead seemed so far away then, so I almost didn’t hear the seriousness of his voice. I focused instead on concealing my excitement about going to see Alwyn. Boys get excited, not men. In times past when my father would make the trek to Alwyn’s house, I would have to stay home and tend to the chores with my mother. But not this time. I was now a man walking alongside my father.

128 No one knew how old Alwyn was. Some said he had lived for one hundred and fifty years. He rarely left his windowless house, but my father went to see him in times of need. Alwyn had also once been the leader of the village. He retired when he woke up one morning unable to speak. When his voice returned, he found it to be a withered and broken remnant of what it once was. But his wisdom was still unmatched, and he was the only one who could read the language of the Stories. My father knocked three times on the door before entering. Al- wyn’s house had no furniture or windows. Instead, the rooms were filled with piles of timeworn tortoise shells stacked to the ceiling, each one with a different Story written on it. Alwyn emerged soundlessly from a backroom, his face sunken and wrinkled. He looked as though he had just woken up, but he always looked like that, my father told me. His arms were twisted and knobby, so that I could barely tell where his left hand ended and his wooden cane began. My father began at the beginning: how the village had found itself buried in a mysterious whiteness one morning. Alwyn started at this, but he let my father finish the whole story, about how cold it had become and how we thought the world was ending. Alwyn said nothing for a long while. Then, he walked past my father and around the shells and stepped outside for the first time in four years. And then he smiled. “It’s snowing,” he said in a voice that sounded like the cracking of an old tree as my father and I joined him in the cold. He was the only one who had ever seen snow before. It wasn’t like the snow we heard about in the Stories, and it wasn’t like the snow we saw in our dreams. It was softer, somehow, and whiter. The next morning my father called a meeting in the courtyard where he only said one word: “snow.” The first snow in a century. Johann Hewel claimed he knew it all along. It was then that my father decided we should start making lists.

129 37. The way it is one thing and a million things and nothing all at once.

“The Stories are not enough. We have to start compiling our own knowledge,” my father said, and the village listened. “We must make lists of all the things we know, so that future generations can share the same ideas and information.” People cheered. My mother looked on smiling. “If we didn’t know about snow, of what else are we unaware?” My father went on. “What of the inner workings of clocks? And how letters get delivered? And how dreams can present the future before it happens? We must make lists of things we don’t know, too, so that we may be aware of what we don’t know.” And so it began. The mapmaker Johann Hewel made lists like How To Make Maps and Ways To Chart The Continents Accurately. The inventor Morgan Wiesmann made lists about all his inventions, and another one called Ways In Which To Avoid Burning The Palms Of One’s Hands. Mothers made lists of how to take care of children. Mothers made lists of how to take care of mothers once they become old and you become an adult with responsibilities and a family of your own. Children made lists about their favorite games and animals. My father glowed as the village set to work, and I glowed with him, proud to be his son. In every home in the village, people could be found scribbling furiously. Alwyn spent most days out of his house now, hob- bling through the snow, beaming. He would throw snowballs and laugh at anyone who approached him. Some said he had gone mad, but my father was happy to see him enjoying life so thoroughly. “With his mind, think of the lists he could make,” my father said. Our village did not have a proper name. Every member of the village had a name for it, but those names varied greatly and rarely aligned with another. It was the one thing my father could never get anyone to agree upon. He considered it his great failure, so he set about making a list of all the names for the village. Johan Hewel called it Northsouth, and Morgan Wiesmann called it Witherbeam. One child called it Snow. My mother called it Home. I proposed we name the village after my father, but he didn’t like the idea. The multitude of

130 names was never confusing, because there were no other villages to talk about. I began my very first list that night: Things They Do Not Tell You About Snow. It was a list of things I didn’t know once, but knew now. With my list, everyone would know these things, forever.

68. The way it grays when it ages.

A few weeks later, we awoke to find the snow melted into a miniature flood. My father plodded once again to Alwyn’s house to inform him of this very wet development. There, he found Alwyn dead in his bed, smiling. Though some of us were distressed, we did not stop making lists. A hasty funeral was put on, though whether it was for the snow or Alwyn, no one was sure. The strongest men in the village, walking ankle-deep in water, carried Alwyn’s casket, which was shaped like a tortoise shell. My father slipped a list, Things Alwyn Taught Us, into the casket beside the man’s gnarled body. Some of the children, the ones too young to understand what had happened, played and splashed in what once was the snow. Then we returned to our work. That’s when the fighting began. My mother had been initially amused by the village making lists, but when there was no end in sight, she became angry. She didn’t believe in the lists. She thought they were a waste of time, a waste of life. She would yell at my father for sitting at his desk all day, making lists. Every day she said the same things: “Are you going to live like Alwyn did? Never going outside your own home, deciphering make- believe stories from patterns on tortoise shells?” He never once lost his temper with her. He only suggested lists for her to read that might calm her. I was not so easy on her. It was a sign of weakness, if a leader’s own wife disagreed with him, and I told her so. She shouted at me, told me I was still a boy, that I couldn’t possibly understand any of this. But I had read the lists. I knew. “I’ve put up with this long enough,” she said. She stopped arguing and started taking the matter into her own hands.

131 74. The way the ground freezes beneath it.

From my bedroom window, I could see my mother in the front yard, planting seeds in the still-wet earth. Her dress hung heavy from the mud, her fingernails blackened by the dirt. Though it was still cold outside, her hair was tangled by sweat. From our yard, she moved to the next, weeding and planting. This is how I saw her spend every day: planting in gardens, caring for animals, sowing fields. Not just ours, but everyone’s. Through the window, I saw my father approach her, put his hands on her shoulders. I saw their mouths move, but heard no words, their voices deadened by the glass. I couldn’t focus on the list I was writing; I just watched their pantomime play out, imagining what they were saying to each other, because it was the same things they always said now, when they talked at all. My father would say she should rest, that she was working herself to death, and she in turn would insist nothing was getting done around the village, and that someone had to do it. He had watched her rise from their bed every night, sneaking out to the mill, grinding grain sometimes until morning. The village my mother grew up in was one plagued by drought and disease. She always said this village knew nothing of hardship, but before the lists, as far back as I could remember, she had been happy, always playfully teasing my father about the village’s “problems.” Once, and only once, my father told me of how my mother came to this village. She had simply stumbled out of the woods one evening, a girl no older than sixteen, her clothes in shreds and her body covered in burns, bruises, and cuts. One side of her head had a large gash in it. She shook constantly and wouldn’t say a word. My father himself nursed her back to health, and though she would say little of the world from which she had come, and claimed she had no memory of how her body and mind had been so maimed, she was slowly able to lead a normal life in the village, and eventually married my father. Had our village had any desire to learn of other places and people, that desire disappeared with the arrival of my mother. Why would anyone want to discover a world where young girls were robbed of their

132 ability to speak by inexplicable scars? It made the village become content with its solitude. My mother would tell me she loved me every chance she had, because as a girl in her village, she never knew if she would see her loved ones again. Every day was a question of survival. It was the only thing she ever said to me anymore: “I love you.” I didn’t respond. And no matter how hard my father tried, the night would still be filled with the endless sound of millstones circling.

83. The way it is gone when you wake up.

My mother left soundlessly one morning, to another village somewhere, maybe, or perhaps just disappearing into the thick fog of trees, her arms becoming branches; her feet, roots. She left only a single piece of paper folded under my father’s pillow. He would not show me what it said. He continued writing lists for many years after that, but he no longer went about it with the same joy and wonder. It was always with a stony, dazed look. One night, I heard sounds coming from his bedroom and found him sobbing. I didn’t say anything, so as not to embarrass him. He was working on a list he hadn’t told anyone in the village about: How To Love Someone. One, tell them you love them. Two, kiss them. Three, hug them. Like a reflection, I took on the same sort of sadness, though I still loved making lists, no matter where my mother chose to be. The lists were the only things that mattered, anymore. Years passed. As my father withdrew more and more, I began taking over. Some of the younger children weren’t even aware that I was a different man from my father, so alike as we were, in face and voice. Fifteen, make love to them. Sixteen, pick them a bouquet of flowers. Eventually, he died. The village wept in unison, all except me. When someone would ask why I did not mourn over my father, I would reply, “Because that is not my father anymore. That is a shell, with every

133 wrinkle telling the stories of his life. You would know these things if you read What Happens To A Man After Death.” Thirty-Five, show them your favorite star. Eighty-Nine, write them a letter, even if you don’t know how the letter is delivered. Ninety- Four, tell them a story with a happy ending. The real reason I did not mourn was because men, especially lead- ers, should never cry in front of the village. One Hundred Fifty-Nine, invent a word to describe the color of their hair. Two Hundred Forty-Five, name a village after them. He left behind his secret list, How To Love Someone, forever unfinished. Three Hundred Seventeen, hold them closer than you’ve ever held anyone before. Three Hundred Eighteen, tell them you love them again. Three Hundred Nineteen, never leave them. Three Hundred Twenty, always And then nothing. The thought died with him.

121. The way it is only water.

Eventually, no one in the village had children anymore. We didn’t have the time. We were too busy, making lists. All the children had grown up knowing only that, so that is what we continued to do. Some couples feared bringing children into the world because of things they had read about in lists. The few babies that were born died as infants, because their parents were too absorbed in writing How To Raise Chil- dren Properly to notice when they cried. When we ran out of paper, we took to drawing on walls. Johann Hewel wrote his lists on maps. Soon the entire village was blanketed in words as it had once been blanketed in snow. Doors were pages to be turned. The paths were instructions to follow. We took to writing on our skin. The lists became us. As leader of the village, I discovered that it was not as easy as my father had once made it appear. I also found that maybe not all of the village had looked up to my father as I had. Maybe not all those people had

134 waved and smiled back as my father passed; I was always only looking at his face. I was met with hostility and resistance whenever I tried to make a decision, though now those decisions usually had to do with what lists should be valued over others in The Most Important Lists. Every night I sat sleepless, staring at my father’s last unfinished list, and I understood why my father wrote it, because I loved him as he loved my mother. We both loved her. Without him, though, without his voice, I could not understand what words came next. There I was still writing about snow.

122. The way it always was water.

I am the only one left, now. Most died of old age or ailments or other causes found in Ways A Person Can Die. Because the doors in the village were always left open, so that the lists on both sides could be read by anyone, the remaining families were devoured by a pack of wolves, entering houses in the night, slashing through their lists and their flesh (but who could tell the difference anymore?). The hunter of the village, who had been unable to sleep that night, was writing a list called Ways To Kill Wolves when the creatures found him.

It was in this solitude that I realized we never wrote lists of things we didn’t know. We were all too concerned with what we knew, what we thought we knew. But Johann Hewel didn’t know how to chart the continents accurately; all his maps were of this village alone. The children didn’t know enough about what they didn’t know about to write about it. My father didn’t know why my mother left. And I was too proud to admit there were things I didn’t know.

None of us knew how everything would end.

The lists no longer contain things I know. They have all become lists of things I knew once, maybe. I have come to find that the things worth knowing could never be made into a list, and I have found that

135 love is not some grand, majestic thing; it is small, small enough you can fold it up and carry it in your pocket, to take with you always. And that’s all it needs to be. He only wanted the best for everyone in the village. He only wanted the best for her.

Here is my father, not in a list, but in a portrait on the wall that I pieced together from memories and a list of his distinguishing features— the only list my mother ever made. Here are his feet and legs. Here is his stomach and his chest. Here are the words that fill his lungs. Here are the paths of his veins and the geometry of his limbs, the angles in his hair, beneath which all his thoughts and dreams roam soundlessly. Here are his hands that held the quills with which he wrote and wrote and wrote. Here are the echoes of his voice. Here is every wrinkle in his face. I know his face, because it is my face now, though I have not seen my face in years; Ways To Repair Broken Mirrors was written backwards, and all the mirrors had been shattered long ago by a mad Morgan Wiesmann, who believed he could create more snow by doing so. It has never snowed again. My father never finished his list, but I know what he knew, and it is something that could never be written in words. I pick up a quill and begin to write: Three Hundred Twenty, always. Always. Always. Always, until it covers the walls and windows, the roofs, overtakes all my lists, all our lists, and I can no longer remember what the word means. I write it on my arms and legs and head and chest and if anyone from somewhere else should discover this village, even years after my skin has rotted, always will be written on my bones, always, circling around, always, winding into the marrow. Always. Always. Always.

136 Joyelle McSweeney Salamandrine, My Kid 

he twittering machine lies in its crib, rehabilitating its connec- t tions. It nails up its habitation, darts up its habillement, it letters its joints, limbs, pistons, limpid injectors for easy filling stations, for stations of, for remote and E-Z filing. It files under ‘pay.’ It flies by night. It learns by rote. It rotors. It knocks the bars into its head.

It crawls out of the snake grass, snuckering. It crawls out of the camera. It pads the walls of the retinal box: remember?

I’m crawling over the carpet to demonstrate a torpedo roll. My kid hoists her kid belly like eight months of night-shifts she’s a kid Demosthenes and the pack of dalmations is snapping at her back. The episodic ice floes flow. Amid a mouth full of buttons and nuts, squirrely philosopher, around a mouth full of wuh, sorry, weeds, she winks her wax teeth at me. Her wheat tax. Eat lead, kid. That there’s the writing on the wall.

Every night the sun shows its negative side, it rolls over from China and sprays us with its lead gun and our heads just melt. I say, no, it’s not China, baby, it’s America, and then we both take a belt. We belt up our mouths. We mute it for different seasons.

Then we leg it over to the corner to chew on cords. We go over.

We go over like a lead balloon. Like a baleen in the punched-out mouth of a whale. Like one ounce of plastic in a healthy albatross’s gut, two ounces equals a dead albatross. Which is why

137 I’m under the pinchcrib looking for a sock.

I’m under the sock-muck looking for a mug. I’m looking for a warm-up and a pick-me and a tune. To pick the lock of a sleeping baby wearing its millstone of candy around its neck. Noone can slip nothing past me and my baby.

Or pull one over on us.

Or push us over.

Not noone can.

In which my kid proves a hero of the injection. Next stop a wrestly Mer- cury-mask, stops up the ears, stops up the nose, swims in the blood, sews painful wings onto those baby ankles, but they’ll thank you for it. My kid’s got her own pod of roll-up dolphins in her spangly blood, swimming and seiving in her alien scenes.

After the check-up, I see the doctor in the parking lot. Can she recognize my kid without her chart? I want desperately for my kid’s face to be recognizable; I wouldn’t recognize it myself if it weren’t tied on. I try to draw the doctor’s attention to us. I ring the stroller ’round my car. My kid’s dingle tires sink deeper into the tar.

In which the tar is mud. Girasol tamales, Parish of St. Bavo, Women, In- fant and Children’s clinics all stipple-cell all sinking into the mud. No such lug today. Burning bright. Which makes the tar for melting. Which makes a Melchior.

138 Alchemist’s bauble or philosopher’s stone stowed on the shelf amid the unused Pampers and summer togs. Salamandrine, my kid is burning in the back seat. Shit.

For my kid, I’m reorganizing songs by degree of scratchiness. Pod of whales in the developer bath: check. Voice of the buried ear-strumpet: check check. How she scratched at the earth from where she was buried. How she scratched at the box to come out.

It can only come through in negative, the math which is take-away, so feel it out. We’re two bats short of a deck. Two bats. A nighttime visit to Père Lachaise, a lifetime visit to Salome this veil of shadows, on the verso, hat-trick, hat-check, headless, consciousness, you have to boot up to port into it, please, boot up. I’m going to wrap you and then wrap you again and then the spirit will rap you and then you can throw up.

Throw out the grave digger’s song. Soil and response.

The arc with which it falls into the grass all around. The crass grass which clasps us all to its seedy boosum, sang the seedy vegan, the scribal eunuch bending at his song. Oh, enough obscene adam’s apple. Obscene ‘adam’s choice’. Raunchy early Modern- istic occultist, I’ve got a child, here, varmit. Ghost up!

In the cactile forest, my kid and I slouch the shadows. Bale the fence. Cut the current. Fray the forest. Barb the wire. Come on in. Long horns shift in the moonlight, it’s like a sea in your head for you to wrastle in. It’s like a tire burns. I wave her low. I wave her eyes closed. We look through cattle eyes, smoke through our noses, tags in our hairy ears. Our

139 shoulders shift in ridges. Then we’re up on the ridge, we hunch through the eyes of six deputy-lawmen. We’ve got us in our sights. Then we close like the iron in the red in the ridge.

Slink out of sight like a species salamander you’re paid to change now change.

I need to buy socks but which socks? What can the kid not kick off? And why won’t the kid sleep? I ask the mirror. It’s certainly nighttime you can tell just by looking in the mirror, the way it slumps and tries to shie away. The mirror is cracked from too many launchings and each launch is a foothold where my kid can lodge or sag but instead she’s fitful, insists on jerking in time to the jumps she makes in the quarter. In the quarter, in the quarter, just jitter and skitter on down. Catch a knife when it’s falling, drive the spittle into the ground. Find me a fateful woman if you can. Find me a fateful woman if you can. I’m clocked in junk, it’s a racket, it keeps the kid awake, I have to hack it, I have to hack it up. I have to empty out the junkdrawer of the grave.

In the quarter, in the quarter, in the nickel in the dime, in the cash drawer, honey, that’s where you find a real good time. Draw the ewer full of water draw the sewer full of lime, won’t you stay the same forever, won’t you ford that never twice.

My kid’s alive a live live wire like Lethe the nevermore. Skinny kid, for a baby, everybody says. How she jumps right out the window through the eye of the needle and into the eye of the grave.

140 The doctor says if the kid won’t start gaining soon we’re going to have to take measures. Since we measure her constantly I say like what. The doctor is half-corralled, half-wild, skinny in the face. She turns her back to me to write in a chart. Her little stool shrieks as she turns around. It’s freezing in here. That’s what my kid says to the sock it’s shoved in its mouth.

I’m in love with the doctor.

You should pay more attention to that kid.

Who has the money for that? We’re on a launch splitting over the sand. The wind touches everything, it’s making an anthology. The sand is making a blessing. It flies up to smack the launch out of the air. It’s a better parent than the launch. It cares about my kid, really cares. It sticks to all the bits and places in her plan.

As we clamber off the launch, the wind can’t resist, can’t let it rest, licks its blade and rifles my kid’s breathweight hair. My kid’s eyes split and tear. The ocean is feeling compulsive, whack whack whacking its head against the sand. My kid rocks on mini-knees, takes a step step then lifts its feet when it wants to get closer. Knocks itself down. Cuts feet face hands on the sand. Silica and rotwort, rotwort and slime-bladder.

Some girls make lists. Poets and witches. And botanists, botanists.

I scoop up my kid and go island maiden, swaying my hipswitch all over the sand. My kid turns and turns and makes a turbine I let her drill into the sand.

The drill needs water to keep it from smoking.

Water comes out to fill the hole the drill bites with its bit.

141 Polyps for polyps. Fishbone eyes. Knucklebone corset. The whole corpse. The whole corpus. Like a porpoise, but with a purpose. Anima o’ mine.

I gather up my kid. We’re on a cigarette boat. We’re on the moon which is the mom of the ocean.

The ocean, dumb like a kid.

The ocean is over and we didn’t even get a chance to fire our guns.

I forgot, we’re vipers. I forgot, we’re snipers. I forgot, we’re on a big- breasted schooner which is also known as Death-in-Life.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

I have a minute to myself because my kid is sleeping. I leave the house. I stand in the driveway. The house is not a house but one end of a condo unit that hangs out on stilts over a useless hill. The decks were built by teenage meth addicts on a Christian recovery plan. Close-eyed youth. Chain smoking. Our end juts up asymmetrically in a way that is impossible to photograph. You have to look at it. I am. I am standing in the driveway. I have been away from my kid for six minutes. Now I am standing in the cul-de-sac. A praying mantis is actually also here at my feet, and it does bend over itself like a mildmannered classical music deejay. I get in my car and listen to a mildmannered classical music deejay who can barely bring himself to emit. I let the engine run, which eats up the air and makes it bad in the future for my kid.

Then I go put black roses on the graves at Père Lachaise. You can get them at Kroger, and the leaves are red. It takes petroleum, but you have to do your homework, as the girl standing on the back of the bike said to the pedaling boy when they got just nudged by a bumper. You have to put in some effort. As they flew into the air like a roll of quarters or a

142 wheel of fortune or any kind of wheel. I go put black roses on the graves. Then while my lipstick is burning off my face I drink a diet coke and my teeth smoke and then I go back to my kid. It’s hot in her room and smells like diapers. I put her in her sundress, but then, when I take her outside, it’s cold. Her shoulders are cold. I’m hoping we’ll find her red shoe before her grandmother arrives. That would be my mother. We should take the axe when we go on walks like this, with our lips on.

My kid and I are vampires which means we’re not supposed to get any sun. Her father is not related to us so he’s not a vampire. I’m explaining this to the nurse who asks for our insurance card. Has any of your information changed. Yes I remembered we’re vampires. She takes my card and scans it. The scanner won’t take the image. The reason is obvious— we have no souls to photograph. We leave them at home when we have to go out in the day.

There are cemeteries in Mishawaka and the cemeteries are covered with the Chevys and Buicks of people driving across the grass to get to their fathers’ graves. Everyone keeps the graves real nice and hardly lets the little flags bleach out or the little black roses you can get at Kroger when you’re checking out. There is not much for my kid and I to do at these cemeteries except sit in the exhaust fumes and get hot in our black clothing. Black baby clothing: you can find it.

Your kid is not gaining weight what do you feed her. Applesauce. Ivory. Buttons. Shoerubber. Newsprint. A toy dog. That sounds fine that should be working but she’s not gaining. I’m going to ask you to keep this diary for a week. We’ll send a technician from our home health team to review your diary. If we can’t find a practical solu- tion we’re going to have to begin a rather expensive round of tests.

143 I have to look at round things to catch what the doctor says. They have to collect. Stethoscope mouth, diploma seals, safety whirlwind, plastic cup, the stool she has to sit on to write up her reports, it must be mandated, stool only, big lolling wheels, my kid’s eyes with their schools inside and all the pupils shrinking in the light.

Thomas Hardy I’m thinking of selling my kid but not my wife on the Internet. Not my wife because I don’t have my wife on hand she left me, and by my wife I mean myself, and by my husband, my kid’s father, who is always pretending not to be a vampire, through no fault of his own, someone has to pay the bills and sleep at night and purchase the allnight Internet service. I’m thinking of selling my kid for some grog, because my kid is getting in the way of my destiny. Is it gruel or grog? Without my kid I have a better chance of becoming the mayor of casterbridge, and of grog, and of my destiny.

Seriously. When I look at my kid it’s like my flesh falling off my face it’s like aging many granite centuries it’s like being in sunlight. The gentle, corrosive enchantment on my skin.

My kid and I are trying harder. I’m setting the example, here. We con- sume a field of corn. It’s gold and burns the throat, all husks and sep- ulchres. When we see a harvester we duck into our car. The harvester burns by, of course like a harbinger, and like a harviture, indestitude, what’s that. It’s strong and paltry because defined, it moves its mass up and down the gridded field, the field is in fibrous layers like muscle but made of a husky matter, the combine’s bustle must burn to the touch but who could touch it but the huge exhaustive grainy investiture it tugs behind it like a shower of gold. Like a randy god that got too close got its toe caught in the mechanicals.

144 I got my eye caught in the mangle. I’m seeing mash-eyed. My kid is squinnying thru the marrow in the pork chop on the wide dull luck of the plate. The tabletop pretends to be wood for awhile. Font of life. It’s wide as a windshield, greased with love. We swallow a lot of bullshit about small towns, co-ops, steely cylinders of feed, pie, flags, groaning semis, a lot of bullshit about coffee, three-wheelers, quarters, American breakfast, trailers, hardtops, hair salons, a lot of peepshow about a motel. No semis here except bobtails. The fencerails and highwires are thick with bobtails, they perch their horseless cabooses in system-busting po- lygagging flocks.

American owned. Family operated.

Owe owe owe owe owe we owe owe we owe owe owe owe we owe wowed Owe owe owe owe owe we owe owe we owe wowed. Owened. Speedthrift. Windered, spedthru, spider wow. Owed and wowed. Owed and wounded. Owned and windowed. Owed and wow. Wondrous wow. Wondrous eyed. Wondrous forehead. Owed and owed, owed and opened Fabled, vapored. Walking woman wove an oval novel vow. Vowelled O be wed. O be done it. Down and dusted. Ode and wowed. Ode and wowed and wounded. Oven-saw, that everyone has heard. Sewed a windburn everyone has wowed. Severed an ode owned ode crowed inlet winded crowd and wow. Wined and dinedn’t, didn’t owe woe, didn’t debit didn’t credit didn’t wow didn’t winded didn’t ow-ow didn’t wow

145 didn’t voodoo didn’t double didn’t woah-woah didn’t wow didn’t dixit didn’t vincit didn’t vow then and now the toe-hold is a lariat loosed a loose noose over now posse

Robert Frost? Kara Walker.

At Tar-mart, I buy my kid a pink hooded bone shirt. Now she looks like a fossile. Her bones glow green in the dark of the tar. Dressed as a deodor- ized death, my kid can ooze through the ozoneless truckwash like any other child bride. I have a rendezvous with destiny. Noone can stop it. Noone can know it’s Death-in-life, also known as waking-death, also known as potential, pessimistic, also failure-to-thrive. My little pony draws death by the noose, by the nose, she likes to grab my nose or pull my lazy hair while she’s nursing which waters my eyes and makes my crazy come out. But it brings death to noone, except me. Mine, the bit my kid holds in its mouth.

The councilman from Florida talks to the virtual mother about her virtual five-year-old Q. But what should I tell my daughter A. Tell her you found her a sweet boyfriend who will bring her presents. Virtual but not virtuous, non-present, bring her presence, bring her a decoy posed as a mother the five-year-old posed as nowhere splayed out in the lap of the eye of the councilman’s mind in snapshots of nowhere flat squares without vanishing points and it’s nowhere that’s so frightening the blank nowhere in their eyes.

146 My kid and I have rituals to decoy time we have a chalice, a red cloth, and a deck of cards. A tarot pack. I deal from the top. The little hand switches. The little doll barrel rolls with a spear in its gut, hiccuping, bubbles. The big hand rotates grave. The cat comes back: I sing to my kid while trying to recall the sign language from ressuscitation class. Of our future, the cards say this: a gas album, an albatross, a big ice floe, a dancing double bear. A cloud furrows and grave inches closer. Make that a drowning bear, fear death by warming. The table shifts its legs restively, the pharmacy-themed bar hovers into view, opens its magazine, grins its staple teeth, its caplets, its buttons, only say the word and I’ll no longer be a capulet, a children’s chewable, an art-n-choke.

Ask the dead of the plot: how many square inches? I wave my hand over a trove of blocks, a plaything, a conceit. A wraith materializes. Come closer. Answer me.

My kid just materialized ten minutes ago. Ten seconds. Half a life. A half-life. A minuet. I’m doing the mathwork on the back of the form. We need to go on stamps. We need to fill out the fugal, slotted paper. My husband is working the graveyard shift—naturally. Religion? Blood type? I’d lost hope but now it’s only a matter of time before he’s a convert to our way of non-life.

At the farmer’s market, the working poor and the working poor face off over piles of sustenance. The working poor points at a potato, and the working poor says ‘dollar a bucket.’ The working poor picks out four peppers and the working poor shakes out a sack. Two bucks. The sustenance piles in different molecular arrangements, here adding up to a head of cabbage, and here of head cheese. Jalepeños not covered by stamps. Eggrolls not covered by stamps. One dozen, three bucks. The kids in tight orbitals are perambulated. Fifty cents. The crowd pushes by (like death-in-life, slim channels, alley of stalls), there are puppies ticking, little things have faster heartrates, no charge, everyone says to

147 my kid hey bright eyes, he don’t miss a thing now does he. It’s a little girl, I say, deflating the exchange. The flow drags us along for awhile. My kid woofs at the pumpkins.

My kid and I are out of line out of whack out of order off the plot off the reservation in closed talks in tandem in negotiations in a thrilling star- studded race against time in which we play the stars and time plays the entire circumference of circumstantial evidence. We make waste and we make our case. The paper piles up around us, as do the guest stars.

My kid has blue eyes, I don’t know why, although my husband has blue eyes, that’s not a reason. That’s not an argument. This cold we’re passing back and forth ropes in my husband and now we all flop together in the Kiddie Corral like a bunch of half-dead cowboys without cows, without boys, without ropes, without hats, without songs, without nothin but a demonstrable exhaustedness which flattens us like a herd of hooves. My kid demonstrates the barrel roll and gets a rug burn. I demonstrate the torpedo roll but my kid won’t try it; it can be wimpy like that. I demonstrate salmon, flying skate, I display on ice with my fat eye clear and non-wandering. I once was lost but now I’m found and now I’m for sale by the ounce and the pound. I’m slender, spender, so it’s gloves-off while supplies last. Offer not good in conjunction with other offers and void where prohibitive by law. In the case of two, the lesser value applies.

I’m not bought. I tick nervously.

The home nurse sits on a couch sipping the diet coke I brought her. I ask her how is it and she tells me good. But why do you think your baby stopped gaining weight. The tests came back fine, she should be fine. In reply I wave my hand vaguely. Everything in this time zone enters and stagnates, turns over, is used and used up. The milk rots in my nose. The meat gels on the plate. The vegetables stain and corrode. I show her the refrigerator and it’s all there, cold, all the food you could want, in place

148 and corroding. The problem is it’s not blood. The problem is all available blood comes from animals, even human animals, and that disgusts me. My kid and I need synthetic blood. Machine blood. I heard they have that for soldiers. Is it true? I ask the nurse. Now I recall that maple syrup circulates nutrients in the tree which makes it a kind of blood. Is syrup blood? I ask the nurse.

My kid has six teeth. The first two were a fine, razory pair but now she hosts a clunky array like family portraits smuggled out of the closed em- pire in the darned skirt of her mouth.

I give her stakes to chew, steaks, a bracelet, a bracelet of hair around the bone, a relic, the loose skin of my arm, my gaze, an epithelial reliquary where variety-of-experience used to lodge.

Night is swollen at the gum but pain makes the day grain through and accumulate in a frieze of severalness and stacked sufficiency. I strap my kid to my back and we strike our gaze into windshields and chrome de- tailing. The faces of flowers, the grate of a flag, the airplane’s loud belly, any hide with a face. We jump out into day clock-clad and waving our moveable parts.

We bury our gaze there like a bone.

The compound arrives. The home nurse brings the first month’s dose in her hatchback, packed with pamphlets and poorly photocopied check- lists I can barely make out. I can barely make it. I can dose my kid with a bottle or a port will be implanted in its gut. I have to fill out more forms to pay for next month’s and the forms crowd around me like an infection like an infarction like an epithelial farce.

149 Nightwatch in the cemetery. A searching, a scratching which is a cross- hatching. The engraving comes into view.

Dead stratified squamous, keratinized epithelial cells.

Even at night, we move around inside the dead parts of ourselves.

My kid is asleep in her carseat in a nest of sweatshirts. The moon is a hopeful zero in a nest of debt.

In my kid and in myself, mucous membranes are lining the inside of the mouth, the esophagus, and part of the rectum. Other, open-to-outside body cavities are lined by simple squamous or columnar epithelial cells.

A gust comes through the cemetery and it’s an idea, I can stand on knife- point on the edge of it. My shoes are off so I can feel my bones through the cold. Stasis, metastasis, tap tap tap. If the soles of my feet are pierced then nutrition will run into the grass. I jump back. The idea is nixed, then razed. Vines lock my wrists to the car.

The insides of the lungs, the gastrointestinal tract, the reproductive and urinary tracts, the exocrine and endocrine glands. The outer surface of the cornea are all lined with such cells.

Without ideas I call to my familiars:

Secretion, absorption, protection, transcellular transport, sensation de- tection, and selective permeability.

I wrest my wrists away from the livid plants and climb back into the car. Through the gunmetal doors, through the wind-braced windows, I snake the pedestal locks. Again I’m with my kid.

150 Endothelium (the inner lining of blood vessels, the heart, and lymphatic vessels) is a specialized form of epithelium. Another type, mesothelium, forms the walls of the pericardium, pleurae, and peritoneum.

You connective tissue. You nervous tissue. You’re fine by me. Fly by.

It’s Halloween. I shove my kid into a duck costume her uncle sent. I shove her into the car. Families are mustering in front of the town hall, its duct-shaped parking lot with a little numb flagpole ticking up across from the Wendys, the Arbys, the Burger King, and the Taco World. It’s five o’clock, seventy degrees. The traffic in the drivethrus is thick, digests wraiths and witches through lanes marked out with plastic guidelines and plastic characters fitted with speakers. Thank you for your order please drive around.

The mayor will hand out candy, but for now he’s caught in the peristalsis outside Wendys. He waves to the crowd from the cab of his stuck truck.

It’s five o’clock and a rank of men descends from the shelter with pillow- sacks in hand, only under and overdressed for the weather, in workshirts or sports-team cerements, with the raked-gaits of their former profes- sions, artists and workmen and accountants, their bones and wrecked joints remembering. They mount bikes in a decomposed phalanx or stalk on in their buttoned-on fat, their hair shorn or furled stiff as con- quistadors’ helmets, as upraised pikes and scythes, they course against traffic with their fused-socket gazes held high above our heads. They pass by with the purposefulness of the dead and glint off down the road like a ghost army.

The mayor is extruded from the Wendys, crosses traffic, the kids sur- round the smoking face of his truck which could part and birth a giant burger from its hood

151 but doesn’t.

Someone puts candy in my kid’s hand and it chews the purple wrapper rapturously, dropping the melting chocolate buds onto the street.

I tug my kid out of the duck costume in the backseat of the car and cruise home with the windows down so dark can come inside. So dark can cool it tenderly, black like me.

Back at the complex, the kids ring the bell, scrape their carpals against the emptying belly of the plastic bowl where I’ve dumped damp sticks of gum.

Be safe! I hear wringing from the other doorsteps. Be safe! I chime.

My kid’s lying on the carpet in a wet diaper, coughing at a cartoon dad to get his attention. Be safe!

Then it’s real night and the bell is silent, the streets are silent. My husband is home and folded up in sleep, his work van parked outside like a plot device, one of those vans with the ladder on the side.

When the bell picks up again it wakes up Salamandrine. I don’t answer the door. An egg breaks on the window, nutritiously. The weathermap frays the tv. The counties jump all over each other. Then it suddenly clears and we watch some innings, unzippered by the storm, the legs of the umpire walking around with the head of the slugger over its head. Salamandrine claps her hands and the heads jump bodies, run bases headless, animated by the game.

152 When the sirens pick up we sit in the basement. We still have power but hold our flashlights anyway. The sound rolls over to one side, the light snuffs out and the storm heaves by.

Out in the morning light, garbage, paper bones, broken pumpkins, shattered sugar litters the streets. The mailbox is passed out in the gutter. Neighbors eat breakfast behind the broken windows, peering out as if the world were on tv. Egg yolks plaster leaves to the van. My husband hoses it down with a flood of curses. The ladder smiles like a punched out street.

The nurse is needed at the hospital and cancels her visit.

Salamandrine is growing!

153 Bonnie Jean Michalski O Empress, What Primal Spark? 

Belief in an I a primal giver of griefs, fever of gifts and giving yet. Grafts a shiver if ever I Changeling like taken away got back barren and barren a land backed into. Grows and grows fallacy in abundance skirt gathering a silverer of Prim Rose up rose-rose tuft I said what to it and it un-risen why her symbology is unleavened. I baked it from an invented receipt. I bought it for the house to look nicer than. I laid it just across and lay in it and was Kidnapped. Just as planned I failed to lay it womblike, failed just to womb. One death to it then found my self aloft, puissant and ruling over it in anger. And some She can rear back in just the form to untime me. I stay uniform and you are near ready to be born, high Magician of the really real. The unusual real. The sensual all things of the proven realm under stood as Primal, as the first and likeliest genitive.

154 Edgar Allan Poe Annabel Lee 

It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;— And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

She was a child and I was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love— I and my Annabel Lee— With a love that the wingéd seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud by night Chilling my Annabel Lee; So that her high-born kinsmen came And bore her away from me, To shut her up, in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, Went envying her and me; Yes! that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling And killing my Annabel Lee.

155 But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we— Of many far wiser than we— And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:—

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride In her sepulchre there by the sea — In her tomb by the side of the sea. 1849

156 Natania Rosenfeld Princeling 

Oh blue- encrusted garden statue: how beautiful you are, framed against the green cardboard trees! How I admire your discus-thrower’s posture: that arm held back, that effortful glower.

You have an artery around your body—a noble band, so sturdy, so elastic, it pulls you back when you strain forward. I would like to dive in your clear space, my grave athlete, but your blue rim hinders me. It isn’t ice—it gives—bounces like a rubber carpet. Sometimes I pack you beneath my arm, I put you in my red car, we drive to the sea, we stride toward the waves, in step. You have your own wetsuit to keep the prying fish away. Your eyes are lucent as you direct your limbs in fine straight motions.

157 On sand, the rigor mortis returns.

We drive home then. I talk nicely, describing the garden to which we’ll return. Your place is still there, I say, just outside the house. Meanwhile, my heart pumps terribly, like surf, my net of veins inflates, legs shiver, fingers shake—breath heaves like gunshots. I turn and see you smiling, smiling. I am happy for you, my friend, so happy I could die.

158 Sarah Sarai Letters, Crones Dont Worry Of 

here relate an episode that befell me many years ago. I had lived i near seventeen years, was big of rump and uncommonly meloned of bosoms surely for one with no babe suckling (as is the honor of woman). My frocks held close against my comely portions, such was the common fashion in those years as ladies so begarbed themselves in swaths of silk, as station allowed. And yet it should not matter to this tale what was my look nor how I hid my shame, as Eve never did from Adam whilst the Lord’s bounty was theirs. For I am but she the teller, one person and female amid all the wonders of man, and it is only my own mannish pride, I am supposing, which compels me in the telling. Back when my life was fine, I never thought about the Crones. It is just the wind, I always allowed, crying to the frozen stars. Now, in the house in which I was girled and womaned there were four, being as I transcribe. My father, Albinus, tall as a spire and learned as all ministers of universities, but his own man who hoed and planted, then retired to the elm’s shade to read his volumes, his French and his Latin and Greek. His hands were callused from work honest as sweet Mother of God’s blessed soul. His fingertips smoothed from brushing vellum in the evenings to guide his eyes from page to page. My mother Mary was like her holiest namesake a devout woman who implored the rest of us to clutch faith within our hearts; hope was her gift as learning was my father’s. He was stern it is true but kind in soul whilst my mother, to bring a contrast, was gently sad, like a cloud that cannot stay in any one place. When, like the cloud, her sadness lifted as if had been plucked by angels on high, she would tell us that was how evil would flee those who, being hearttrue, were worthy of eternity with the heavenly saints. Of saints what did the Crones know? My mother was not the sort of woman to know of the howling Crones.

159 Scotus was my brother and whilst owing to a palsied body he could never leave his bed of goosey, was dear as smallest feathered creature, fluttering to learn whatever he could in his mock terrain. Scotus and my humblest self, myself being Constance, meaningless tho it is for me to say, never wearied of reading to one another in what languages we mus- tered, tho I never have the gift of ease with the foreign. Scotus was the more learned of us, his time abed conspiring with his patience of which I have so little, to enable his efforts as a lettered man. Letters were not something Crones put a thought to, not there in their darkened moor. We were a happy family until the shadow from nowhere a geogra- pher could name darkened our last few days together like the mist the Lord of All sent over the new land, as is written so early in the Holy Bible’s old testament of creation. For a fifth soul was to be added to our simple family and she was a sister. Id have had a sister, younger, whose golden hair I might have plaited and whose girlish glee and plumpness would have filled my days. Yet she did not live out the passage from my mother’s belly to this vale of tears, nor did my mother keep breath in her bellows and soon from grief and to be with them both, did my father so die. And as we comforted one each to the other, Scotus and I, his health turned quick awful and he returned to dust. God has willed all to die, and those who alive are left are sad and punished. I buried my brother in the cold earth that never is lifted like a cloud by the angels cept the one time a rock was rolled from the cave to return God to God. Even the King of Brits and His Cousins upon the Continent or in Spain are not spared from the final bed of dust and mud. And the shrieks of the Crones confirmed what I say. The shrieks of the Crones were the shrieks of the soul. I found no consoling thought or deed to turn light to my sorrows, tho townspeople were generous in the way we are one to another, leaving turnips, sprigs of hollyhock or horsefloppy dried to flare a flagging flame. Suitors came to court, to save me from the worst you might con- ceive, a woman of her own means, but I was inconsolable.

160 And inconsolable, began to heed the crones’ eerie laughs I heard at times from thicket and heath. Id sit by the hearth grown cold as the Devil’s brass throne and clutch my sides and grip so strong my flesh that marks would bloom like a goblin’s heather, blue against my pale. I felt not my cutting and pinch- ing, but was like to the Dear Women weeping at Our Lord on the cross. Distance there was between me and living, a cushion of air thick and foreboding as that before a storm descends to ravage innocent nature. Yes, the shrieks of the Crones will flame at your ears when you weep the sadness of life on earth. The Crones lived away from the town in a hut or a manse, it is hard to say, that made mock of the snugness of our cottage. Wind whipped through its walls yet candles didnt flicker. As I think now, Id always knew they were there, gray and great of hair bundled white and black about their shrewd faces. Feeling I must join my family, began I to pack our trove to spare the villagers who had laid turnips at my door from needing to finish my family grief. And then I was to walk to the riverbank and hurl my meaningless form into its icicle depths and hope mercy and forgiveness would guide my spirit. But as I packed my father’s New Testament, in the Greek which is sad so few can read, I saw the words of the Apostle who divinely spoke. In the Beginning. Oh the shrieks of the Crones, oh, the shrieks of the Crones, they fought with my brain and my thinking. My black eyes held to the word meaning word, which I knew meant {and pardon if I sound like a learned person which you must know if you are this far into my tale I am not} Rationality and Reason. In the beginning was Reason? No Reason there was to the wails of the Crones but comfort perverse, o comfort perverse. And I knew. When God the Jesu asked God the Almighty why He forsook Him, the world felt the shrieks of the Crones. The Crones were older than God, and they shrieked for Our Lord and my family. So I will join them; I will be a Crone and I will shriek o I will shriek, I will shriek as a Crone for us all.

161 Amy Schrader The Red Goblin 

You tell me: Don’t tell me. About the woods, cherie, there’s little left to say. Hidey-hole turned away or out like a pocket. Plucked like a rabbit from a velvet-lined coat: that’s me. You say: C’est la vie, c’est moi. A paw, a claw, don’t say at all.

I and I, burning you in the trees. Say please.

162 Carmen GimÉnez Smith Three Poems from Goodbye Flicker  We Shall Hear Now What Happened

Once for a moment once upon once there was there came one day a king a tailor princess the fisherman’s wife shepherdess a girl poor lazy clever long and golden hands like milk like silk stout and kind true and faithful she floated that she was dreamt of cross, clever daughter of wife to sister witch miller farmer tailor very fine indeed good at heart in tiny cottage the larder the edge the under the in-between and beyond sister, mule, nanny who loved her best nightingale swallow swineherd who envied her who sent her to that she became in the deep deep as she had a because she was to to take to draw to find left there into the deep deep over in the corner of far inside

163 one day on an errand to the sea shore the king’s to her nana’s for bread left there of as promise loss debt worry at once in the forest on the path pins needles trees around her sinister stones roses egg slipper basket teapot farthings a bottle of wine found and kept it hid it stole it gave it away an old crone bitter a stepmother a sister mine three things three times seven ways four trolls twelve sticks and so and so then so then a bone, a secret the stone sang a mouse a mirror a charm gave her later counting praying and then across the hills riding horses carrying a box a shoe a cloud three wishes one kiss a last prayer one cage the song she’d sing all she thought she prayed begged and reasoned she saw she cut

164 To Become an Exemplary Girl

I got wrapped into puppetry string the fingers that guide and the flopping limbs doing anything I can think. Got wrapped and thought I might become something bona fide. I was a stir that dangled and was dangled, made stage exits wrong. trapped inside and waiting for the giant yawn to release me.

165 For the Tale hated it. whored myself out for it. shined the truth on it. vacated its premises when asked. but then busted windows in the complex. factory sealed it. gibbous mooned it. slacked into its corners unmoored my dignity. made it gritty. so like a limp. and the interior. and the interior. and the interior. what a vacate. except for Natasha unslumbered and pissed. the fragments of a stage with cobwebs. I would fruition then leave it. I started you, didn’t I?

166 Maya Sonenberg Inebriate of Air  Wedding Plans

Bride: a virgin, of course. Drunk on anticipation, the guests laugh boisterously. We make predictions about the first sexual encounter, and some even place bets (position, duration), though it’s hard to imagine how such bets might be settled. Date: midsummer’s eve. The sun stays up for hours and hours, long past her usual bedtime, as we also stay up past ours. Flowers: blue foxgloves and white starflowers, yellow buttercups aplenty. Her mother says, Are you sure about the buttercups? They last such a short time. Her father says, Are you sure about the foxglove? Could be poisonous. Wedding dress: deep v-neck and wing-like sleeves; a sash of silver wrapped round and round the bride’s tiny waist, kimono-style; a flowing skirt— white, of course, then glimmering gray and pink; the bodice beaded with pearls, each one sewn on separately with golden thread. Married or not, in love or not, we covet her—or it. Tuxedo: lapis lazuli—not really, just the color. Music: Vivaldi for the ceremony, the dulcet strains of Spring and Sum- mer. During the reception: Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, Old Blue Eyes croon- ing The Summer Wind, the repeated throbbing notes of Janis Joplin’s Sum- mertime. Drink: dewdrops—imagine champagne muddled with purple plum, in glasses rimmed with nacre. Food: we need none, sated with love.

167 Dances: not reels—more like waltzes, on the portable dance floor workmen have placed in the meadow behind the inn. Though reel we do. Wedding cake: angel food layered with divinity, topped with ceramic seraphs. We see the bride lick fondant from a wing. Wedding favor: an oyster shell, containing a pearl. Release: white butterflies, as the bride and groom walk away through grass just beginning to dew, under maple leaves blooming a tender green—if leaves can be said to bloom, blessed by a blue night sky—midnight to the east and cobalt to the west where the sun has only just set.

Questions

What do the bride and groom do once they’re finally alone, no longer drunk on champagne and wedding gifts, tossing tissue paper at each other and giggling as they unwrap plate after useless plate? Inebria- tion doesn’t last, that’s why we write poems about it. Eventually, they will wake up, hung-over, with ribbons knotted in her hair and frosting stuck to his chin. I’ll not write what happens next, except to say she doesn’t lick the frosting off; he wipes it away roughly with the sheet, embarrassed. Let’s leave them, avert our eyes from the first time they touch the soft skin above each other’s waists, afraid to move their hands. What’s the after in their happily ever? Have her parents guessed correctly, with their worries about the flowers—a short-lived and poisonous marriage? I could invent one, or a happy one, or dull, or long, or violent, or amusing, but their marriage remains mysterious, closed like the bedroom door on Sunday mornings. Nor will their children surmise their secrets, even after their parents are dead, their mother first becoming a skinny old woman and their father a fat old man who still proudly wears the same size pants as the day he married but now they’re buckled under his gut. What secrets do they have, the bride and groom? Secret ways of inflicting pleasure and lavishing pain that only they know, that are only effective when applied to each other, and that I cannot even guess at here.

168 Letter

Dear Mother (the bride writes, no longer a bride), Please forgive my long delay in answering your last note—and I’ve so much to tell from this far country. I never knew the world could be so enchanting—pearl-gleaming and golden, the children’s little faces when I rouse them in the morning, and out they run to lick dew from the grass with their pink tongues like cats or snails. “Why does the dog eat bees?” they ask. “Don’t they sting his poor mouth?” They jump and spin. The baby toddles after her older brothers. Later, I lie on the grass with them, certainly ruining my skirts, and listen as they turn the clouds into dragons, castles, and ponies. When their father comes from the city on Friday afternoons and scoops them up, I lie there still, gaze up at dragonflies that hover in a mating dance (I hope you don’t blush to see me write such things), breathe deep of foxglove and clover and wait for the sun to shift west and spread the shade of the maple tree over me. I read of my sister’s wedding with enthusiasm and was gladdened to hear of the pleasure our gift brought her. The blue pottery is native to these parts, the color a quality of the clay dug from the cliffs here rather than a glaze. I wish my sister the greatest happiness and will be most pleased to meet her husband, Mr. B, when I return home. I must inform you, though, that such a trip will not be possible, at least until next summer, for the journey by ship is long and the boys start their schooling in the fall. Soon the autumn mists will come here like little gray foxes, and the leaves turn, and the snows fall, and you would not want us to miss all that, would you? Your daughter, Emily

Diary

Fourteen years later, the bride’s daughter, Jennifer, writes in her diary: Now I know what they’re all going on about! She seals her knowledge with a red lipstick print.

169 Jennifer spends her high school years avoiding her older brothers, partying, fucking, coasting her bike down the dark streets by the ware- houses late at night, where one light might mark a steel-shuttered door. She likes, when she’s had a few beers, to choose a boy and wrap his hair around her thumb and pull his head toward her own and kiss him until she forgets everything except the shape of his teeth and the gravity of his tongue and the sweet/salt balance of his saliva. The summer after graduation, she takes the only job she can get—given her poor perfor- mance in school—companion for a bedridden old lady who lives on the outskirts of town. For years, the girl has slept through the days, woken only at sunset, but her job requires her to wake early, and strangely, she finds it no burden, for the old lady has wisely removed the curtains from all the windows of her house. Indeed, the girl barely sleeps at all now. At dawn, she sees pearl-like light, dew on the rosemary, and later, when she wheels the old lady outside in her chair, sun on the buttercups. They sit in the middle of the garden, and the old lady tells her: there’s red-orange tiger lily, that’s good for restlessness. Yes, dear, stew the bulbs and sleep tonight. There is poppy, that’s for anxiety, and chrysanthemum cures colds. Pink rose petals, chewed, ease depression. Foxglove is good for the heart. Jennifer abandons her diary, friend through her long adolescence. She spends every spare moment out of doors. She even sleeps outside the last night of summer, and before sleeping she asks the hippie farmer neighbor to join her in a reel. She’s been looking, she says, into ways of making dandelion wine. Will he share his recipe? She’s seen him drink- ing something from a big brown jug, and though he argues that it’s only ginger water, she persists, dancing with him, teasing, dancing, even under the stars, even in the cold grass by the river’s edge and the mud there traced with snail tracks. It all enthralls her—day and night, wet and dry, sun and moon, the bee and the butterfly. You don’t need wine, he says, catching her under the willow tree. Finally, toward dawn, he says, I can’t help you, and pats her ass one last time. Even I need to rest. The animals need care. In the evening, after a day spent ragged in the hedges and bur- nished by the sun, eating berries with muddy fingers, she returns to the

170 old lady who has managed to get herself into bed, using her last strength perhaps. They watch the sunset together through the bedroom window, a particularly bloody sunset, and then, through the other window, they watch the rise of the harvest moon, so large and orange it looks as if it might swallow them up or roll down out of the sky and crush them, so large and close the girl thinks she could reach through the window and touch it—or no, maybe if she just climbed up to the roof of the house. The old lady gives a deep sigh. She believes that in the morning she will be dead, but in the morning, when he sees no smoke rising from their chimney, the farmer comes over and finds her gently asleep, under a soft quilt, her breath frosting the first autumn air, tissues and water glass placed lovingly within reach on the bedside table. He finds the girl too, her back broken by the maple limb she landed on when she fell from the roof.

Letter

Dearest Mother, I regret writing with distressing news so soon after hearing of my beloved father’s passing, but we have faced sorrow here too. Your darling Jennifer, your only granddaughter… (Here the letter dissolves into a jumble of tear-streaked words, a lock of the girl’s hair twisted into a delicate bow and fashioned into a brooch, a newspaper clipping describing the local fire fighters’ attempts to revive her. It only emerges a page later to describe how the bride and her husband have invited the old lady, their daughter’s employer, to live with them.) For dear mother, in her sweetness and kindness, she reminds me of you. And as the distance is so great between us, and as I am denied the pleasure of your company and of caring for you in these last years, I will avail myself of this opportunity to provide comfort to her. Your loving daughter, Emily.

171 Coda

Sprays of orange leaves, red holly berries, chartreuse hellebores, golden daffodils to decorate the room. Clean water to drink in a green glass that glistens like mother-of-pearl. The old lady lasts through the winter and spring, and dies when the bluebottles rise to swarm in the next summer’s heat. The bride holds her hand as she goes, holds her hand through the last breaths that rattle on and on, then watches the blood drain from her face. An hour later, the old lady’s back is still warm.

172 Terese Svoboda Excerpts from Pirate Talk or Mermelade  4

I have examined all the varieties of jack-in-the-pulpits in the field, every one, and there are three, I believe, and none of them full-blooming which makes the naming of them that much more trying. And I also bring a specimen of penny frog for you that I have caught here in the folds. Girls don’t take off their bonnets to catch frogs. I am not a girl. You are Cap’n Peters’ girl. Why do I bother with you? My brother says you can have too many frogs in a field. He said they push up the dead man’s fingers for one thing and I told him— Alive, alive-o. This one is squashed about the foot. What can I learn from that? It is a frog from the inside that is most worthy of examination, very like a person perhaps. Dead man’s fingers are not so much a part of a person, are they? A plant I believe, like the mushroom, their companions. Many of those fingers grow behind, in the marsh, the one that is home to all these frogs. Catch the frog, kiss the frog and like it. I’m not going to play your silly game. These are lessons for the boy really, and you’d best not be about at all. Teacher, teacher. I know all the ropes, I can tie a Hugenot. I am sixteen, you know. Almost old for a teacher. My brother is the same. I don’t even like your brother. He is uneducated. He is not ugly to you, Miss Count-Your-Pupils. The fiddler last night played only for his feet I suppose.

173 I made my way. Your canes burned the floor you moved so fast. For a cripple, you can dance. The hung pirate taught me. But both you and your brother cannot even sign your name to a paper. The pirate could sign a paper with his whole name and an x to boot. I am familiar with every family of seabird and all mathematics up to geometry, so long as I don’t have to write the sums out. That is what you claim. And you? How about the sum-making you puzzle over in your teaching, your froggy subtractions? I have added all the varieties and those that I counted four paces from the tree bear a name from Linnaeus that the boy studies. Of them all, the sum is one hundred thirty-six, in other words, taking the three plantings of snowberries minus 136 makes 122 posies, added and sub- tracted both. But where, I am now asking, are all those posies now to make up such a sum? What’s become of them? Here you are. From my brother, who is behind the hedge, himself counting the minutes when you might agree to walk with him again. Oh, no! Oh, no! Tell your brother the posies are very fine to the eye but that they were supposed to provide lessons in adding and subtract- ing for all of the next week. This picking them into bunches is very bad. Now I will have to go back to the book, I will have to teach the boy from the book. Why did I ever leave the sea? Don’t screech so. My brother will hear and blame me. Oh, dear, oh, dear. If the boy’s father hears, Peters will— Stand just here, where my brother can’t see. Please don’t sob. Cry- ing won’t obtain for you a way out of teaching. My brother will, though. Your brother will fill me up with children before I’m grown. I am the first of my family to become a teacher, a family in which no one has ever read before, or even pretended to. Cannot Cap’n Peters read? He is less my family than you know. Some say that. It is nothing shameful. It is—can I trust you despite your brother?

174 And not because of myself? I was combing my hair on a rock. You were almost hanged. That was a mistake. And Peters? He is—too manly. It is the way of men. Not all men. I saw you weeping at the whale. You did not. I am your teacher and your better, I know what I’ve seen. And I know where the bone of the whale is, those bloody bones. Of course you do. Don’t stand so close. Surely your brother is watching. Or was that a ruse—your brother watching—one you’ve devised so you can come close and make me talk to you so? I wish to trap the small insect you described as comely where it has landed on your shoulder. Oh—of the genus which includes the beetle of which there are thousands? But this is the only one with its seven or nine marks on its wing. Nine marks. I make good progress but you will not bless the work. You steal the lessons. Please—there should be more than ample room on this escarpment for both of us. Room for twenty more angels like yourself? You must practice the writing of your name. Already a fortnight ago I showed you the E. You must form it in the air every day, and on the ground if you are lacking the paper. A noble letter, E. If you can’t write your name, you will be beholding to many. Beholding to you, perhaps? My brother says he will make his mark upon the world and not the paper. He says the letters bend and float away and will not stay. Reading is like a sea voyage, you either attend to it and see the world or you stay at home. Tristram Shandy was tossed over many a ship, which is how I at last learned the reading.

175 You know nothing about the sea—you never teach it. Nothing that is known about the sea is true. So you say. I shall teach you just the beginning: How The Sea Is Formed. First there is the bridge to build: A carpenter cuts down trees and lays them flat to each other, he nails them together with the teeth of all the birds which is why so few birds have teeth now. When he has finished with the nailing, this wood makes the bridge from one land to the other. Still, it must be painted. The carpenter has blue powders left over from coloring the sky. The strength of this paint to adhere to the air is very great but the power of it to stick to the wood is so much more that the paint rushes to stick to the wood and then what is left puddles before the carpenter can put down rags to stop it. In most places, where the blue collects, it shines darker than the sky but elsewhere it runs into the sky and joins it. Under the strength of this blue, the birds’ teeth loosen and fall out and then the teeth sink into the sea, only later to float up to beaches as shells. The boards themselves, as blue and as lively as they are, come loose and change into the rafts that drift by the drowning who can’t see the bridge. I would not guess it. Man cannot fly but he can swim. Some, I have heard. Water has always crept up and filled my shoes with trouble or taken our roof. Only when it buoys a boat do I want to venture upon it. My Ma screams in fear of it. Your Ma has been taken too much by it. Some sailors have had her, even from the far seas, and roughly too. I think it is why she loves the rope so, she dreams of belaying herself to land at last. Pirates live the real sea life, not the floating village of the sailor with his pastors and judges. If I did not have these curls to keep, I would show you how gently the waves lift and hold your arms. You will always have curls to mind. I will. Dust to dust, as the church says, not water to water. Water to water.

176 I get seasick just hearing you say that. The way you move your hand. Water is ever more prevalent than even the earth. How many days can you journey by sea? How many by land? I do not journey. I am a poor boy who studies but what you tell him. Let me say then I think it is time for you to try the water. Come, come— But your curls— Over here. Through the rocks. There are currents. There are terrible fish. The waves— Waves to hold you, waves to—ah, the boy. Snake! Snake! Unbanded. I believe it is harmless, but you can’t be certain about one so orange along the tail. Hold it tight about the head, or it will bite you. Count the colors as it dies. It’s death, boy. You’re going to die. Don’t put the fear into him. He might tell his father and his father will have you jailed for stealing his lessons. The boy is slow, and will be slower. Leave the snake in the thicket and go along. That’s a fine boy. A boy with a fine purse. The water— No. My brother requires a word with you now, if not another walk. He is sawing at a bough, practicing his cutting. My brother wants no more to do with water, he wants a berth on shore, with the whale’s bones and a woman who can carve its bone where he instructs. It is your own Cap’n Peters whom he fears has drunk the bone down. Your Ma is ill over Cap’n Peters. Cap’n Peters is ill over you. My brother will give you his name, make you a fortunate wife with an honest hearth. The time is near when a woman will not need to set her hand in contract. Why not give her merely a set of numbers as can be found in

177 any book to suffice for a term of possession, and not the name? There are surely enough numbers, and more. You are certainly a clever teacher and will make a clever wife and sister-in-law. Cease tempest-crying over that bite, boy, and press the burdock against it. Keep your hand over the wound where it swells too, that’s right. You know so much about these things? You must address me with belief in your voice. Belief is a learned thing, like writing. Your brother does not learn his way to me. Ways open daily like routes between blocks of ice athwart the bow that the brave sailor faces so often before his triumphant return home after voyaging. You stand too close again but your words speak well for your brother. Tell him I will find the whalebone if he returns the coat he removed from Peters’ kit that dark rainstormed night when I first laid eyes on him. The one you tried twice to steal from our mother? I will have the boy’s father lash your back to ribbons, with Cap’n Peters providing the whip. Oh, yes, and I will mention the coat that warms the confession. Dead-man’s-fingers. Keep those pointed toward the sky, boy. Point them up to where the blue clouds await their carpenter. You speak pretty enough with your carpenters and clouds. Here, open your hand. The eye bone? My brother will want it. It’s yours. My brother is not watching? He will see nothing? Nothing, I swear it. He cuts his thumb and sucks it.

178 Craig Morgan Teicher The City 

n the city, there is a famous bakery where anyone with a little mon- i ey can procure cakes and breads of the finest quality. And then, anyone with a little more money, and who knows the right question to ask the baker, will be led into the back room behind the kitchen, where the baker keeps his most special creations: cookies and cakes which look more like weathered stones or gnarled things dredged up from the sea, but which possess powers unlike normal foods. These pastries, strange looking though they may be, can infinitely extend life, cure the direst illness, and even erase a person, and all memory of that person, from the face of the earth. This baker is an unusual man indeed, but this is not his story. In the rooms above the bakery lives a woman whose age no one knows. She does not look particularly old, though she has lived in those rooms for as long as anyone can remember. There, she spends all day knitting, which is what everyone remembers she has always done. And, for as long as anyone can remember, when a child in the city turns nine years old, he or she is sent to visit the woman, who gives the child a scarf. Some of these scarves are of unspeakable beauty, and some are as plain and rough as the dirty back of a sheep. But, somewhere in the home of everyone who grew up in the city, there is one of these unusual gifts. Some wear them day in and day out, and some lock them away. But everyone, old or young, has a scarf knitted by this strange, ageless woman, though this is not her story either. On one particular day, a stranger was seen passing the bakery and the windows of the knitting woman’s rooms. No one had ever seen him before. Where had he come from? Why was he here? People who said they had seen him tried to describe him to each other, and to people who said they had not. He was not quite handsome, but certainly not ugly. His clothes looked rugged, but certainly not poor. He wore an odd cap,

179 they all agreed, with a large feather stuck in the brim, the kind of hat a rich man might wear, or a ranger. Who was this man? What did he want? Some people were sure they had seen him that day walking through the city streets, or rubbing the muzzle of a tethered horse, or down on his knees speaking to children in a language that only children know. Others thought they saw a man with a feathered cap, but then, perhaps, they did not. Perhaps, their curiosity excited to such a degree, they had imagined seeing the man and his cap weaving through the crowded alleys. With- out a doubt, this singular man left his mark on the city, though, to be sure, this story is not about him. Perhaps this is the story of someone still to come, or someone who has always been here but whom no one ever notices. Perhaps it is a story no one has ever told, or one told so often no one thinks of it as a story any longer. It could be a story that has yet to begin, or one so long over that it has been forgotten. Perhaps the story is still going on, and until it ends, no one knows how to tell it.

180 Steve Tomasula The Kingdom’s Good 

nce upon a time, a king told his servant a story about a court o buffoon who grew up as a prince, and then came to sit on the royal throne himself. How a buffoon became king was an amazing tale in itself though this did not seem to be the point of the story, or the reason the king was telling it: a dark tale, full of spells and mirrors and twisted forests and dank, secret dungeons—as well as a terrible war that could only be ended by the king’s minions funneling filth down their captives’ gullets until they were white as maggots or confessed their plans for breeching the kingdom’s walls. The more the servant listened, the more concerned he became, for the kingdom of the story bore a troubling resemblance to their own kingdom at that time. And yet if that were true, then the king seemed to be muddling some of the details, unable to remember how the story really went; or else he had actually come to believe in the walking scare- crows that they blamed for the confusion permeating the land. Indeed, as the servant listened, he began to perspire, for the king told it all with a passion unseemly for mere fiction—as if he himself were being called upon to explain—nay, to justify himself and his reign. Most fearsome of all, the servant realized, was the reality that if his king, his master, was in truth the Diamond Monarch in the tale, then that would make of him the Servant of Clay who was being accused in the tale of all sorts of bad deeds, deeds whose true nature he wouldn’t be able to recognize until he was ‘Singing in Anguish,’ as outcries of sin and guilt were called, gush- ing forth from the mouths of witches pressed onto their throne: an iron chair that had been heated red hot in order to help God grant them the grace of clear sight. Sweating, the king’s servant wracked his brain to remember if he had ever done the slightest thing that could resemble the wrong that his counterpart within the story was being accused of, a betrayal he would

181 NEVER intend. Far from it: all his life he had wanted nothing but good for his master and their kingdom; all his life he had devoted his body and service to the will of the king, a monarch whose name, like that of his kingdom, was synonymous with good. Indeed, so good was the king and his kingdom that the servant had willingly, when asked, ground pestles of salt into the eyes of suspects to make them see the wickedness of their plans; yea, if the king willed it, he would hold the hands of suspects in boiling water, throw infants down wells, and do far more, for the kingdom was good, which meant that anything done in its name was good while anything done against it was bad, so even an act that might be bad in the hands of others was good if done in the name of the kingdom. And yet because not everyone knew just how good the king and his intentions were, the king often had to hide his role in the many good acts that his servants carried out in his name. And the servant often had to profess good as bad to protect the name of his king even though he knew it was good, or say that bad was good when everyone thought it was bad, and that was the most confusing thing of all. For as the king’s tale wound to its end, and the subjects in the tale began to suspect their king to be a false king and true buffoon, and the king outside the tale asked the servant what he thought the punishment of the servant inside the tale should be, the servant couldn’t tell if he was being tested. That is, he couldn’t tell if he was being asked to say that good was bad and should be punished for the good of the kingdom, or if bad was good and should be rewarded for the good of the kingdom; or if good should be rewarded even if it appeared bad or if bad should be punished even if it appeared good. He couldn’t tell, that is, if he was inside or outside the tale, or whether, as the king unsheathed his sword, he was being asked to expose his neck to receive some boon, say knighthood, or some bane, say beheading. For the good of the kingdom.

182 Connie Voisine Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?1 

Where are they? The big nosed ones, the ones with thin hair who walked with serious faces towards me. The pale girl who wanted nothing, the Indian boy who wanted me, who caught all girls and put them in jail. There’s the teacher in her fur, she rings a bell and there’s her baby Angelo who never breathed. There’s a hole in the day, one about as big as a dove and there are fig trees and feathers from the dove the cat ate. There’s a skin of green on the birdbath and a swarm of black flies returning to the garbage at the curb. Where is the one who fell under, who trusted that one to sing her home? Where is the cream of horizon, the snug passage, the arms of night?

Where did my arms go? Where did my skin? The way I, unashamed and bare, leaned back against piles of pillows. The beetle with red wings you couldn’t walk without crushing everywhere.

There is the woman who brings me food on Sundays and the sweat that sticks me to the chair. Gone is the boat that will cross me over and here is my house of bones.

1. Where are they who before us came

183 G.C. Waldrep Functions and Variables and Other Tales  Functions and Variables

Scratch out the eyes. Of the saints in the advertisements. Of the swans in their man-boats. Use a stick, a scalpel, a rusty flange. Fingernails. Teeth: yours. Or another’s. In the soft plaster of the damaged fresco. In the slick photogravure of the magazine page. Scratch out the eyes. Left, right. In profile. Open, or. Shut, as if dreaming. Scratch them out. So that the men in the marketplace go blind. At once, as if by plague or. Cursing. So that the surgeons slip with their silver instruments. So that the telephone psychics gabble stock market quotes to their desperate clients. Scratch out the eyes of the psychics. Scratch out the eyes of the clients. With a bent coathanger. With a guitar pick. There are other dreamers, other dreams, other pending Actions. As if in court. We think of Justice, blind or. Blinded. Her marble elegance. How she longs to walk: away from her plinth, across the smooth water. Beneath her dreaming feet the fishes genuflect. Scratch out the eyes of the fishermen. Scratch out the eyes of the fish. With a swan’s broken bill. With the sharpened edge of a dime. Turn the page of the magazine. In the language of Braille you’ve sewn a silence. Scratch out the eyes of that silence. Children on the far bank shout and point. You hear, you guess, you. Picture. In your mind. Scratch out the eyes of the children. As broken wings, or recompense. You do not need your sight to sweep. The corridors. Of the night palace. In which the sultan whiles away the ordinal hours with his toy tiger. So cunningly made: of jewels and. Precious metals. You’ve been told. How its eyes glint in the firelight. How the sultan caresses its sleek body, winds it up with a golden key. Sometimes, you think you can hear. That tinny, miniature roar. A small sound, as if a wing. Had lifted. (Pointed.) And some gavel: fell. You hear the children now, closer. Jeering. You hear the stones they throw, and feel them, when they strike. Scratch out the eyes

184 of the stones, of the sultan. Of the toy tiger. Like miraculous clockwork opening, then closing. An old penalty for usury. As in ballet, indivisible. To the soldiers lying beneath the surface. Scratch out the living eye of the water. Scratch out the eyes of the soldiers. Scratch out the eyes of their dogs. We are getting to the best part. In which the toy tiger, blinded, leaps at the blind sultan’s throat. In which the soldiers return to the children from the tendrils of the marsh. Scratch out the eyes of the violin- ists, the maitre d’. The lake is a scale kept in perfect balance. A cutlass pressed. Into. Your willing hands.

185 And All That Circus Dove with Us into Hearths of Earth & Stone

Prepared for the stun of the firedrake we offered our hands as parch- ments, as palimpsests. The silence of the bay was itself a sort of fire we allowed, the way the buskers swallowed swords, treaties, marmosets. From inside the firedrake we heard the masquerading of turquoise in the shimmering sheet of the city’s brilliant lamps. The brilliant lamps of our city were lowered another three inches. We could see each others’ faces clearly, as if for the first time: sheen of sweat, of sister-surface and women weeping for their children.

In the albums of the firedrake we placed carefully the reverse inscriptions of our handprints, in between the construction of the wooden beasts that littered the outskirts. The brilliant lamps of our city were lowered another three inches, so that we could see each other’s chests clearly, as if for the first time: the badges and siphons, the curiously embroidered comets and yellow stars.

In our efforts to ensure competition over the firedrake’s bequest we stumbled into a substance curiously like both wedding-crust and mourn- ing. Within days it had flooded the markets, raw or powdered, tinctured or distilled: a cure for any melancholy ill. As it was the Season of Festivals we purchased vast quantities in vials and lacquered boxes and offered these as gifts to our relatives and friends, to the soldiers guarding the museums and to the silence of the bay itself, loading our offerings onto small wagons and letting them run the length of the beach, out into the murmuring shallows.

The brilliant lamps of our city continued to descend: now we could make out each others’ stomachs and waists, thighs and knees; finally, of course, our feet, or at least the colorful, misshapen outlines of our slip- pers and shoes. Still the firedrake tarried, and with it the dreams of our young women, the prophecies of young men. And so we began to dig, in that season of alabaster and orchids. We passed the concrete and stone

186 foundations of our great buildings, the electrical conduits, the hollow tubes through which our subways ran. We staved off the dark, swifting currents of underground rivers and streams.

We could see nothing of ourselves now, in the subterranean darkness, as the brilliant lamps of our city burrowed deeper and deeper into the earth. It seemed to us that at some point we had burned our clothing; that the city itself, our beautiful city, was but a dream of a city, the way a city is itself always a dream of some other city on fire. It seemed to us that perhaps we had always dwelt inside the firedrake, and that it moved with us in the sweltering darkness, in the interstices of our hardened muscles churning.

In the silence and stealth of the firedrake’s ambition we tried to sing the old songs, the ones in which the city had been a handsome warrior from some foreign country, or else her lover: O Moon, we sang, lend us your white uniform, your milk-arbors; lend us your chloroform knife. By now, though, the moon was little more than a faint memory that hung like wax paper over our memories of the city, just as the dreams of commerce, of perfect exchange once hung over even the most bitter haggling in the marketplac- es. There would be, we understood, a need for new coinage, new songs. In which the crescent of the moon became the sharp edge of a shovel, in which the wooden beasts of the suburbs became altars of stone. In which our city and its brilliant lamps were mapped onto the surfaces of our own bodies, which would, in time, give off their own light: by which the firedrake might suffer, and believe.

187 The Autoharp Conventicle

Nobody came to the Autoharp Conventicle. All the fast cars were loung- ing in the parking lots. There were both patrons and contestants at the other booths along the midway: the Undying Signature, the Whack- a-Sponge, the Significant Thunderbolt. There was laughter, there was commerce, all the hurly-burly of late summer, the plenitude, the vamp- ing tragedy.

Inside the Autoharp Conventicle, the shadows played a game in which they used the near-darkness of perpetual dusk to cast people on the dingy walls. These people walked, talked, slept, and copulated just like other people. They paced the ground inside the Conventicle in circuits, as if around the next octagonal bend they might find a funnel-cake vendor or a restroom. Every now and then two or more of them would get into a brawl. The shadows would take bets on the outcome.

Perhaps the problem was that from the outside the Autoharp Conven- ticle looked like, well, nothing much. An outbuilding at the edge of the fairgrounds, some said, later, a storage shed for the off-season. A weathered gazebo, others maintained, with rotting steps. Like nothing at all, some said. A blank space. Like grass, said one boy. Like a forest, said a girl—even younger than the boy—in which someone has died, only the people outside the forest don’t know about it yet.

Like wax, said the recently disgraced congressman. Like the sea at midnight, only you’re in Oklahoma, so you have to imagine it, only this isn’t the way you imagine it, this is the way it really is, or would be, if you were there, which you’re not, said the butcher’s wife.

As evening wore on, the people inside the Conventicle became more frantic, the octagonal screens within which their lives seemed fixed less satisfying, more sinister. Inside the Conventicle the shadows began to argue over just when they (the shadows) would be permitted to leave.

188 Along the midway the lights began to blink out, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Jam-in-a-Basket, the Spectator Plunge. The crowds drifted back toward the parking lots, where all the fast cars were waiting, drunk on ethanol.

At the precise moment the near-dark outside the Autoharp Conventicle matched the near-dark inside, the shadows emerged. Only a janitor and a carnie saw. The shadows burst from the Conventicle—“were torn from it,” the carnie said, later, sucked into the larger darkness at the precise moment of their egress, one by one. None of the shadows had a chance to so much as whisper, or cry.

The people inside the Conventicle beat the walls, their chests, each other. Without the shadows they were forced to admit they were just people, after all, albeit in a curious existential predicament. Eventually they settled down. Some had families of their own, sent their children to the public school. They came up with other, more plausible legends of their advent. What they seemed to fear most was the sun.

189 The Abandoned Radio

The generous farmer set the glass back on the slab of granite where he had found it. The glass formed a sphere, or almost a sphere, flattened at one end (if spheres have ends) to keep it from rolling. The generous farmer understood this accommodation in the same way he understood the flatness of the granite slab, here in the midst of his field. For as long as he could remember the granite slab had stood in the field, and the glass had rested on the slab. When he was a very small child he was too short for the slab and so did not know of the glass’s existence. When he was old enough to see the glass he thought that it was a small sun that had fallen from the sky and come delicately to rest on the slab. How it winked in the light of the afternoon sun! Later he decided that this theory was mythical, that is, childish. He put the glass out of his mind, which was easy to do, being a young man and in season.

As he aged, eventually taking over the care of the farm from his ailing father, the generous farmer occasionally stopped in his labors to gaze at the glass. When he asked his father about it, now and again, his father merely shrugged.

Inside the glass there were, it seemed to him, figures, small figures that sometimes seemed to move: not unlike those of glass paperweights, the snow globes he had seen in town at the novelty shops. He wondered whether perhaps he should shake the glass. He asked his father, who said “No.”

The slab was field granite, natural in spite of its table-like appearance. It was neither a dolmen nor a memorial, though it was sufficiently inter- ruptive of the landscape that it was often mistaken for such from the road.

On the evening that he finally picked up the glass, the generous farmer was tired, fiftyish, no longer in possession of the physical strength of his youth and yet unable to commit his mind or his body to some less strenuous occupation. There was gray at his temples and in the thatch of

190 his chest. He had a wife, but no sons of his own to whom he might hand over the farm; his daughter worked as a librarian in a distant city. Had his wife borne sons, they probably would have perished in the war. His farm was of a reasonable acreage, subject neither to flood nor drought; it had been well-tilled for many generations and yielded its fruits easily, almost gratefully the generous farmer thought, when he thought about it, before disabusing himself of the conceit. But he was getting tired more often, and earlier, than before, and when he came home in the evenings his wife looked more tired to him too, and when they sat together at the wooden table in the kitchen of the farmhouse, the blonde wood felt warm to his touch, warmer than his wife, warmer than his own flesh, which is why earlier that day when he had finally lifted the glass from its granite plinth (if plinth it was, could be said to be) and felt the warmth he assumed originated with the afternoon sun and which the glass, being glass, both reflected and absorbed, must reflect and must absorb, he had just as quickly set it down again. It was late in the seduction, after all. Inside the glass, small figures appeared to be moving.

191 Never in Such Low-Flying Planes

Foil wrapper. As metonym for disappearance. The heart-shaped sweet inside the heart-shaped wrapper inside the heart-shaped box. Such il- lusion.

The gaunt god of corridors has demanded a sacrifice. In the telephone nook, opposite the water cooler, sweet stench of incense. The supplicants shuffle by fearfully, into the offices. Some shuffle back out. Some don’t.

It is the season of garlanding, in which late-afternoon light is refracted into specially-repaired crystals which are in turn strung together on silver wire and draped over the ambient architecture. The crystals cor- uscate fitfully in the moonlight, forgetting what they were supposed to remember and then remembering again.

Outside the municipal walls, experiments in chocolate and electricity are conducted. Youths from the city, both male and female, volunteer enthusiastically as test subjects.

On the appointed day a live snake and a live dove are brought into the audience chambers of the Lord Mayor, who makes a choice. Squadrons of small boys are charged with collecting the discarded foil wrappers from the cobbles of the city squares. They planish and collate.

There is an ordinance for the cleansing of the hands, but it is rarely followed, except by those who work in the offices.

The gaunt god of corridors is never satisfied. The incense sputters, burns low. The supplicants continue to shuffle into and back out of the offices.

In the cycle of mystery plays associated with this city there is, in addition to the gaunt and demanding god of corridors, a god of electricity. She appears in the plays dressed in a flowing gown made of foil wrappers

192 sewn with gold thread. She never interferes with the action. No one has seen her faces.

193 On the Death of Louise Talma

A room named in your honor has a door. A door named in your honor has a plaque. The plaque named in your honor contains your name. A door leads to a room, just as a plaque leads to another plaque. This door has been nailed shut. The doorframe, on the other side, has been plas- tered over. Another door has been cut, through the closet. This door has no plaque. This door has not been named in your honor, though it leads into the same room.

The room is a square room with a bed, a dresser, two chairs, a night- stand. There are three windows, one on the north side and two on the west. The windows are covered with chintz drapes. The bed is awash in whitework. To enter this room one must pass through the unmarked door and then the unmarked closet, which extends on both sides of the space between the door and the room as if it were the narthex of a tiny cathedral.

There is no place to kneel in this cathedral. There is no altar; there is no font; no one has left candles burning. This is the cathedral of the room of your honor, the basilica of your name. The one door nailed shut, the other open but unmarked. In the closet clean shirts organize themselves like musical notes on a staff. Here come the carpenters with their screws and hammers, the bronzesmith with more plaques. Night burns the lid from this box.

194 Contributor Notes

Kim Addonizio’s latest book is Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet With- in (W.W. Norton). A new collection, Lucifer at the Starlite, is due from Norton in October 09. Addonizio lives in Oakland, CA. www.kimad- donizio.com.

I was working on a chapter titled “Enchantments” for my new book on writing, Ordinary Genius, and thinking about ways of reinventing myths and fairy tales. One of the poems I included and discussed was Louise Gluck’s “Gretel in Darkness,” which got me thinking about Hansel, and how I might spin his character. One of the meanings of that story, for me, is survival of trauma. So my discovery of what might have happened to this alternate Hansel was informed by thinking about wars in Rwanda, Congo, and elsewhere. As testimony, it seemed to need the prose form; the syntax is fractured because I made a typo, found it interesting, and decided that fractured speech might also embody something about his psyche.

Naoko Awa (1943-1993) was an award-winning writer of modern fairy tales. As a child, she read fairy tales by Grimm, Andersen, and Hauff, as well as The Arabian Nights. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Japa- nese literature from Japan Women’s University. While still in college, Awa made her literary debut in the magazine Mejiro jido bungaku (Me- jiro Children’s Literature). English translations of her stories have appeared in Crow Toes Quarterly, Kyoto Journal, Magpie Magazine, Metamorpho- ses, Weave, and elsewhere. Her translator, Toshiya Kamei, is the translator of The Curse of Eve and Other Stories (2008) by Liliana Blum and La Canasta: An Anthology of Latin American Women Poets (2008), as well as selected works by Naoko Awa. Kamei writes:

As I grew up reading Naoko Awa’s fairy tales, translating “Gifts from the Sea” brought back my childhood. Now as an adult, I still enjoy the magical qualities of her stories that captivated me years ago. I would like to thank Mr. Akira Minegishi for granting permission to

195 translate his late wife’s work. I feel honored to introduce Naoko Awa to English-speaking readers.

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Mulberry (Tupelo Press). A collection of interlinked essays on Moby- Dick, A Whaler’s Dictionary, was published by Milkweed Editions. He is the recent recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency, and is an assistant professor of English at Colorado State University.

I’ve had an ongoing wondering in and of fairy tales for a long time. I’ve been much concerned with the ways in which mythic patterns repeat themselves into modern life—and the fairy tale seems one of the most important means of doing so. Heroic cycles, rituals of initiation, confrontation with the self as archetype—well, all of it feels vastly important to me. It wasn’t until reading George MacDonald, though, that I decided I needed to try and write such tales myself.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and two recent chapbooks: Sorcery (Dusie) and The Great Wheel (MaCaHu Press). He teaches at California College of the Arts, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven. With composer Guillermo Galindo, he is currently working on an opera about the Donner Party.

What I dig about fairy tales are their repeating structures, the way they use and reuse imaginative elements until they become lacquered with meaning. I’m especially drawn to the villains and their charming futility, their perpetual return for the next story. The jealous siblings who never know when to quit.

Sarah C. Bell’s comix have been published by Fantagraphics Press and the University of California Press, as well as by other small, independent publishers. Her first full-length comic,La Niña, Paperdoll, was published in 1999 by Baksun Books, and was funded by the Boulder Arts Com- mission. Her work has been displayed variously in exhibitions including Black and White and Red All Over (also curated by Bell), and Rebel Art at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. She lives and works in San Francisco.

196 Martine Bellen is the author of six collections of poetry including The Vulnerability of Order (Copper Canyon Press); Further Adventures of the Monkey God (Spuyten Duyvil); Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems (Sun & Moon Press), which won the National Poetry Series Award; and Places People Dare Not Enter (Potes & Poets Press).

Fairy Tales feed both my childlike heart and my ancient soul. They allow for deep comfort and thrillingly edgy dark shadows.

Kate Bernheimer founded and edits Fairy Tale Review. She is the author of the novels The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold and The Complete Tales of Merry Gold and editor of the essay collections Mirror, Mirror on The Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales and Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales. She is also the author of children’s books, including The Girl in The Castle inside The Museum and The Lonely Book (the latter forthcoming). Her fairy-tale themed essays and short stories regularly appear in such journals as Tin House, The Massachusetts Review, Western Hu- manities Review, and Marvels & Tales.

Jessica Bozek has lived in Russia, England, Spain, and Costa Rica, but currently walks the dog in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of cor·re·spond·ence (Dusie), a chapbook collaboration with Eli Queen, and The Bodyfeel Lexicon (forthcoming from Switchback Books). She likes fairy tales for their momentous animal transformations and for the secrets they can’t not reveal.

Kelly Braffet is the author of the novels Josie and Jack (Houghton-Mifflin/ Mariner, 2005) and Last Seen Leaving (Houghton-Mifflin, 2006). Her writing has also appeared in the anthologies When I Was A Loser (Free Press, 2007) and Who Can Save Us Now (Free Press, 2008). She currently lives in New York, where she spends her days writing her third novel and herding cats.

When I was about seven years old, my grandmother—in a desperate bid to entertain me during a weeklong visit—brought me a stack of books from the local library, including a collection of fairy tales (she

197 can’t possibly have known what that meant, or she wouldn’t have given it to me). These were the good fairy tales, the ones that most adults think kids can’t handle: gory, macabre, and completely unexpurgated. One of the stories was the version of Cinderella where the stepsisters cut off pieces of their feet with a sharp knife in order to fit into the glass slipper, which promptly filled with blood and gave them away. (And yes, the book specified that the knife was sharp.) I loved that story, and reread it obsessively all week, knowing all the while that I had to keep it secret, because any adult who actually bothered to read what I was reading would have taken it away from me instantly. Too brutal, they would have said; but that was why I loved it. Because life can be brutal, can’t it? Sure, it’s joy and beauty and laughter, but it’s also pain and death and illness and slaughter, as much as we’d like to cover that up with singing bluebirds and helpful field mice. Fairy tales come from a time when that brutality happened everywhere and every day, when none of it was tucked away and sanitized. They’re about humanity in its rawest form. If your life is hard enough, and your prospects dim enough, and cutting off your big toe might get you out, you take the sharp knife and you do it and then you go meet the prince and you smile.

John Colburn is originally from Mantorville, MN, and is an editor and co-publisher at Spout Press. His poetry chapbook, Kissing, was published by Fuori Editions in 2002. His writing has appeared in such journals as Jubilat, Black Warrior Review, Spinning Jenny, South Dakota Review, Forklift, OH., and Post Road.

Most of my writing now is informed by fairy tales and folk tales; it’s what I read for research. The images and situations I find there seem so much closer to the subconscious, and that’s where I’m trying to get as a writer. I’m trying to get to that more immediate place before rationality, where you can go down a tunnel, meet a giant talking frog and receive the answer to your dilemma. Often I am such a dimwit about the processes of the subconscious, and these stories, especially stories about fools, help me to recognize and follow my intuition.

198 Ann Fisher-Wirth’s third book of poems, Carta Marina, will appear from Wings Press in 2009. She is also the author of Five Terraces and Blue Window, and of the chapbooks The Trinket Poems and Walking Wu-Wei’s Scroll. Her poetry has received numerous awards and is published widely. With Laura-Gray Street she is co-editing a contemporary eco- poetry anthology, Earth’s Body. She teaches at the University of Missis- sippi. The title “Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair” is from James Joyce, Finnegans Wake.

As a child I was fascinated with, terrified of, and repelled by the Grimm fairy tale “The Robber Bridegroom.” Not surprisingly, it is rarely anthologized; the tale of a cannibalistic robber band who chop young virgins up in their forest stronghold, and of the girl betrothed to the leader of the gang who outwits him to expose him, takes sa- domasochism to a pretty sick extreme. But I found the lure of secret knowledge compelling, and the conjunction between death and love. This is what links “The Robber Bridegroom” with the myth of Perse- phone, the maiden who goes down into the underworld to become the bride of death. Transformed, they must rejoin the daylit world full of ambivalence because of what they have seen, the dark kingdom where they have been.

Sandy Florian is the author of 4 books: Telescope, 32 Pedals & 47 Stops, The Tree of No, and Of Wonderland & Waste (forthcoming). She’s the current Writer in Residence at New College of Florida. Her blog is http:// boxingthecompass.blogspot.com

A cold moon adds to any fairy tale scene.

Angela Jane Fountas is a writer-in-residence at Richard Hugo House in Seattle. Her work has appeared in Quick Fiction, Sentence, Redivider, Diagram, and elsewhere. In 2006, she was awarded grants from 4Cul- ture and the City of Seattle.

On my desk stands Aschenputtel, or Cinderella, delicately carved from wood. She is feeding the birds. I bought her in Germany to in- spire me, which she continues to do, whether or not I am writing fairy

199 tales. What I love about fairy tales is their wonder and timelessness, and that they remind me to be brave when I write.

Tara Goedjen’s stories have appeared in Agni and Denver Quarterly, and are forthcoming in BOMB Magazine and Quarterly West. She lives in An- chorage, Alaska, where she is working on a very cold novel.

I love the idea resonating in many fairy tales that nothing is forever. That if a shard of glass lodges in a child’s heart, he may still live. That a kingdom cursed with eternal sleep will one day awake. Fairy tales are visceral worlds where no bodily form is permanent. Swans become humans become swans again. Princesses are toads by night. When I was a child, one of my most adored books was artist Michael Hague’s collection of Hans Christian Andersen tales. I was fascinated by the illustrations—full of odd-looking, strangely gritty people in landscapes populated with goblins and fairies. My favorite picture was (and still is) of the little robber girl, sinking teeth into her bearded mother’s ear.

Annie Guthrie is a jeweler and writer living in Tucson, Arizona. She is co-owner of “The Jewel Smithery” in the Lost Barrio. She works at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She has poems in the current issues of Tarpaulin Sky and In Posse Review.

These poems come from a book length series called “The Selfer.” I am interested in the ways in which the “self” is created by the stories we were told as children, and by the stories that we continue to tell ourselves.

Carmen Lau is a candidate in UC Davis’s creative writing program, where she also completed her undergraduate education. Her stories have won first place in the 2006 Diana Lynn Bogart short story contest and second place in the 2007 Pamela Maus short story contest, both held by the UC Davis English department. She completed a creative writing honors thesis last year, which won “Best Creative Thesis” in the department. She has had a short story, “Breathless,” published in the UC Davis undergraduate literary journal Produce.

200 My interest in fairy tales began when I took an undergraduate com- parative literature class called Fairy Tales and Fables. The class intro- duced me to the psychological complexity and rich symbols that fairy tales offer. I have only recently begun exploring the fairy tales and fairy-tale inspired works of modern writers, and I am excited and happy that the art of the fairy tale is still being practiced and rejuve- nated. I think it is a great form for exploring the psyche, and facets of femininity.

Sam Martone is currently studying creative writing at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, but he spent most of his life in Tuscaloosa, Ala- bama, where fire ants and boiling-hot summers ate away most of his skin. “How to Make a List” won the 2008 Davenport Fiction Contest at Knox.

When I was little, I wanted to be a seven dwarf when I grew up. Not any one of the dwarves specifically, just a seven dwarf. To limit myself to a particular characteristic seemed unwise, because maybe I’d be a little crankier when I got older, or maybe I’d just be tired. It was best to leave my options open. I think that’s why I (still) love fairy tales: there is nothing impossible, there are always more options, more paths through the forest to follow. There is always an opportunity to transform. These transformations occur both within the stories (frog to a prince, wolf to a grandmother) and to the stories themselves, as new stories are written, old stories are retold, and familiar characters are further unraveled. At this point, I am probably too tall to be a seven dwarf, but then again, anything is possible, right?

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of the eco-sci-fi Flet (Fence Books) and Nylund the Sarcographer, a baroque noir published by Tarpaulin Sky Press. She is co-publisher of Action Books and Action, Yes.

My favorite fairy tale right now is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. I know I am in the presence of a fairy tale with this work because I can view it like a child, that is, with perfect narcissism: every part of it appears to be ‘about’ me. If I am a writer I am an obnoxious, criminal writer. If I am a mother I’m a loathe-worthy, squeaky-weak mother. If I am a

201 child, I am an annoying, double-voiced child. If I am a hotel I am the Overlook Hotel, sprawling and high-maintenance. If I am a retainer I am an elderly black retainer. I keep a gold-plated bachelor’s den, but I leave it to fly back to Colorado and take it from the ax-wielding mad- man. I take it up the heart.

Bonnie Jean Michalski lives in Tucson where she works in the Uni- versity of Arizona Poetry Center library. She has poems in mid)rib, APOCRYPHALTEXT, Little Red Leaves, and GlitterPony.

I can’t seem to get over my addiction to fantasy books written for young adults. As adults, we want to improve the world we live in, but we are constrained by what we already know. I think we will always wonder whether a better way might be to discover a whole other world that is better—not at all perfect, but bigger and wilder and stranger and more fertile—and then begin the important work on this world using all that wonderment as a guide. Fairy tales dig into that place that is filled with the unknown, yet we all know it is there.

Natania Rosenfeld is Associate Professor of English at Knox College and the author of a critical book, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Her fiction and poetry are published and forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at The American Poetry Review.

Fairy tales, to me, are a way of plumbing the psyche in words and images without sounding as if you’re in the shrink’s office. They are also a way of connecting with every other human being who’s had a childhood, and who has suffered or loved in adult life in a way that recalls childhood fears and hopes.

Sarah Sarai’s poetry and fiction have been published in The Minnesota Re- view, The Threepenny Review, Potomac Review, South Dakota Review, The Colum- bia Review, and other journals. She lives in New York City, where she haunts Central Park in search of fireflies.

202 In the beginning was The Golden Book of Fairies. Possible distractions— naptimes, older sisters, wearied creatures called Mom and Pop, cross- country relocation—intensified my focus on the life-and-death re- alities of space and time as flexible and frightening; as inhabited by princesses and jinni (more books, more tales) who stoked my zealous defiance of concepts of real and world. However seductive the plea- sures of breezes dancing on leaves and the flesh, everything since my first fairy tale has been both add-on and palliative.

Amy Schrader holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Washing- ton. She was a semi-finalist for the 2006 and 2007 “Discovery”/The Nation poetry contests, and her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Tin Parachute Postcard Review, RHINO, and Willow Springs. She lives in Seattle.

One of my earliest memories of a favorite book is the thick, red- bound, slightly musty Grimm’s Fairy Tales that sat (and still sits!) on my parents’ bookshelf. The dark stories gave me the shivers, for reasons that I couldn’t articulate at that young age. They still make me shiver, with both fear & delight, and I think now that it is because fairy tales address both the strength & fundamental wickedness in each of us.

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona Press, 2009) and Casanova Variations (Dos Press, 2008). Her poetry has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Poetry, Boston Review, Colorado Review, and American Letters and Commentary. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University, the publisher of Noemi Press, and the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol.

Maya Sonenberg’s second collection of short fiction, Voices from the Blue Hotel, was published by Chiasmus Press in 2007. Her first collection, Cartographies, received the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. She lives in Se- attle where she directs the creative writing program at the University of Washington.

203 Fairy tales, their repetitions and variations, open the door to the uncanny for me, and I love being in that fascinating and fearful place where the familiar and unfamiliar overlap, where I might see, revealed, the darkest private life, a bared secret. For me, fairy tales bare our iridescent emotional guts without resorting to psychological or sociological explanation.

Pirate Talk or Mermelade, Terese Svoboda’s fifth novel, will be published by Dzanc in 2010. Her memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, was named one of the best books of 2008 by The Japan Times.

The single kiss that seals everything—for good or ill—has always fascinated me. Pucker up! Only in fairy tales does the gesture clarify what is often the most ambiguous of human responses. Love, life, death, betrayal—the kiss contains it all. No kiss is committed in this excerpt of Pirate Talk but there’s always its threat.

Craig Morgan Teicher’s first book,Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems won the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry. His second, a collection of fables from which the one in this issue is taken, called Cradle Book, will appear from BOA Editions in 2010.

I think of poetry as language that tries to resist time, tries to last forever, or is at least not content to check the same kind of clock that we are, whereas prose is language that agrees to be bound by time, that keeps to the schedule. Prose is a place where a minute is 60 seconds long. In poetry the value of a minute changes constantly. So then what do you get when you cross poetry and prose? A paragraph you can’t get to the end of? A line that ends before its first syllable? One thing you definitely get is a fable.

Steve Tomasula is the author of the novels In & Oz, Vas: An Opera in Flat- land, and The Book of Portraiture. His short fiction appears often in magazines such as McSweeney’s, The Denver Quarterly, and The Iowa Review. TOC, a never-never-land tale of time, was published in 2009.

204 Whose blood hasn’t raced (at least once upon a time) at the words, “Once upon a time”? Why? Why does this opening have the power, like some magic spell, to evoke such visceral reactions? Part of the reason seems to be the oxymoron that is the phrase itself: an opening that announces that what follows might have happened long ago or be going on right now—in some changeling fashion—maybe right in your own bed. Or the bed of your baby. Just as importantly, the opening also signals that in the story that follows, anything can happen: the dead can speak, as they do through our collective unconscious; a magic rabbit can glow green—if it’s been engineered to carry the genes of a fish. Fairy tales remind us, in other words, how common the unbeliev- able really is, how pedestrian unimaginable cruelty and goodness really are, how ordinary are extraordinary times and events. A twist in fate can turn any of us into Little Red Riding Hood. Or The Wolf. Or Cinderella, or her stepsisters.

Connie Voisine is the author of Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (University of Chicago Press). Her first book,Cathedral of the North, won the Associated Writing Program’s Award in Poetry. Her poems have been published in The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Her work was recently featured at The Lab at Belmar, a museum show pairing prehistoric stone tools with poems.

My interest in fairy tales isn’t so much to retell the familiar tales— other people have done such wonderful jobs of it. What I love about fairy tales is the language of mystery (who is telling these stories and why?), the music of spells, the character’s relationships to Freudian goodies, the power of mundane detail to become icon. This current series of poems tries to connect to the magic of spells, the way cause and effect are askew and the local becomes a tale. The ubi sunt is a medieval form about the dead who’ve come before us, but it’s not an elegiac form.

G.C. Waldrep’s first collection, Goldbeater’s Skin, won the 2003 Colorado Prize for Poetry; his second, Disclamor, came out in September 2007 from BOA Editions. His third manuscript, Archicembalo, just won the

205 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press and will be published in 2009. He has other work in recent or forthcoming issues of Ploughshares, New Eng- land Review, Denver Quarterly, and other journals. He lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania., where he teaches at Bucknell University.

206 Announcements  Fairy Tale Review Press Titles Distributed by Small Press Distribution www.spdbooks.org

Lily Hoang Changing ISBN 978-0-9799954-2-2 $14 139 pp. Fiction

At once a fairy tale, a fortune, and a translation told through the I Ching, Vietnamese-American author Lily Hoang’s Changing is a ghostly and miniature novel. Mysterious and lucid, the book follows Little Girl down a century-old path into her family’s story. Changing is Little Girl’s fate, and in Changing she finds an unsettling, beautiful home. Like a topsy-turvy horoscope writer, Hoang weaves a modern novella into the classical form of the I Ching. In her glassine sentences, fragmented and new, Jack and Jill fall down the hill over and over again, weaving intricate and ancient patterns. Here is a wonder story for 21st-century America. Here is a calligraphic patchwork of sadness.

207 Joy Williams The Changeling ISBN 978-0-9799954-0-8 $16 200 pp. Fiction

This 3oth Anniversary Edition of The Changeling by Joy Williams will include a Foreword by Rick Moody. An overlooked and spectacular novel, The Changeling is a visionary fairy tale, a work of mythic genius. Terrifying, poetic revelations follow The Changeling’s abandoned heroine Pearl everywhere she goes, whether by air, land, or sea. Joy Williams has won the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, among other prizes. Her first novel, State of Grace, was a National Book Award Finalist. “An inverse odyssey of a 20th-century feminine sensibility—our simpleton heroine ends a depraved alcoholic—the witty and horrifying Changeling establishes Williams as a major contemporary novelist” (Virginia Quarterly Review, 1978). The 3oth Anniversary Edition seeks to reintroduce this novel to contemporary readers as one of the most original and alarming fairy-tale books ever written.

208 Johannes Göransson Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”) ISBN 978-0-9799954-1-5 $12 165 pp.

Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”) is television shot through Artaud’s Momo- body. It is the fairy tale of Deleuze’s Body without Organs. Hugo Ball restaged in Los Angeles. And, without end, Pilot is an assemblage, a book of nursery rhymes gone wrong in translation. Its strange characters, abandoned from other texts, include Lilja, the Pearls of Stockholm, and assorted imperiled girls. Here, in Johannes Göransson’s glittering exocity, they find a new and beautifully stitched home. Göransson was born and raised in Skåne, Sweden, but has lived in the US for many years. He is co-editor of Action Books and has translated the work of Aase Berg, Henry Parland, Ann Jäderlund, and other Swedish and Finland Swedish poets.

209 The End eview s s u e I R

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