Still July 26, 2008

He has taken up with a ballerina. Taken up, as they say.

We saw her first from our balcony seats in the theater, after having squabbled over Marcus’s refusal to change into khakis for the ballet. His jeans make him look very devil-may-care, but then again my mother has always said that jeans should not be worn by anyone but maintenance men and their children. My mother died in an accident six years ago. I am not sure how this has affected my personal feelings toward denim. The ballerina with whom Marcus has taken up was not the dark Giselle in the theater that night. His ballerina was quite the opposite; pale to the point of consumption. She was the only girl in the corps who faded into her dress as she danced as a deadly ghost of the bride betrayed. Marcus traced her name in the program by the light of intermission. Molly. What a plain name, Molly. He read her name out loud as if to taste her.

Perhaps you would think that sexual relations with a ballerina would be somehow more graceful, or acrobatic. This is not the case with Marcus and Molly. I know this because I am watching Marcus from the closet and half-reading a book with falsely torn pages, meant to mimic the old days. Our closet is very large, large enough for the bookcase from which I have taken the book and the white leather sectional with the chaise on which I am lounging and the ottoman where I am resting my feet. I am half-reading a book and trying on my mother’s heels which are technically mine and have been ever since her car was hit by an oncoming vehicle and watching Marcus make love to Molly, a process which involves a range of grunts and pulled faces and the pushing back of sweat-slicked hair with palms. Don’t break Molly, Marcus! She is so thin I fear she will snap before you are finished. Have you ever read this book, Marcus? I would like to hear your opinion on the main character. Did you cut your fingers on the rough edges, Marcus? With purpose, Marcus?

Molly does not wear a tutu everywhere, which I was inexplicably surprised to learn. We saw her again at the benefit that Marcus held with the sole purpose of meeting Molly face to face. She was not wearing a tutu, but a black dress that hung loosely on her frame and fell low at her back. I drank eight cocktails and counted the steps of her spine. Marcus flirted like a schoolboy, running back and forth from my father’s mahogany liquor cabinet to refresh Molly’s drink: an embarrassing display. Marcus never knew my father, but he could have learned a thing or two from him. My father was the one who showed me as a child that the slats in my mother’s closet doors—my doors, since the driver ran the red—afforded an unobstructed view of the bed that he shared with my mother (and the others), that Marcus shares with me (and Molly). Stay perfectly still, whispered my father through the slats as we watched a woman undress to lay herself on the bed before us, you could learn a thing or two.

Only diamond can cut diamond. They pulled my mother’s fifteen carats from the wreckage still attached to the finger but not the hand. My father called from a California number when he heard that she had died. Gruesome, he said. Call Saul and he’ll reset the stone for you. 

marguerite October 21, 2007

jonathan has a doll. jonathan’s doll is thin and life-sized and her breasts are small things, the size of plums, of palms. jonathan’s doll is named marguerite, not margaret, marguerite; he imagines she speaks with a french accent, delicately spitting out words like olive pits into a napkin. her skin is clammy and her mouth is open, always. she lies still under his weight. after he ejaculates in her he must reach a wet cloth inside her, string himself out of her. he talks to her calmly as he does this. don’t worry, he says, don’t worry. this will only hurt for a little.

jonathan is forty-two and jonathan supervises label placement at the factory. no one ever really told him how to supervise, but he guesses at it for eight hours a day, monday through friday, counting down the minutes until he can come home to marguerite. marguerite is so beautiful. marguerite’s hairs have been placed in her scalp one at a time. sometimes they come out in his hand when he is too rough but she does not scream, she does not scream. marguerite’s skin is starting to smell like a body from his body rubbing off on her body. this makes him uncomfortable so once a week he runs a bath for marguerite and sits on the side of the tub, washing her hair, scrubbing her skin. she never raws. once he put the soap inside her, but he immediately regretted it.

jonathan had a real girl, once. her breasts were heavy, too heavy, and when he fucked her she screamed and he had to yell shut up, shut up, and she wouldn’t shut up even when he hit her and then she was bleeding and she still wouldn’t shut up even when he hit her again and she was bleeding and bleeding and choking and shut up, shut up, and the blood. marguerite is a lady. marguerite does not bleed.

marguerite’s skin split at her side. when he ignored the crack it began to peel away from her rib cage like a puckering wound. when he made love to her the next evening his hand slid through the hole and he could see his fingers moving beneath her skin, feel the steel that keeps her solid. marguerite as exoskeleton made him lose his erection but it was only eight thirty so he drove to the hardware store and bought a tube of caulking and he got half-hard again waiting in line, waiting, and he half-hoped the cashier would notice his erection because he likes to make marguerite jealous and when he walked to his car he put the tube of caulking on the passenger seat where marguerite sometimes sat when they talked in the garage because she didn’t like it when he smoked cigarettes indoors and driving, he put his hand down the front of his jeans and whispered marguerite, marguerite, through all the green lights. marguerite was waiting. she was easy to fix. jonathan likes the hardware store because it makes things easy to fix. jonathan has bought bleach at the hardware store, has bought lye. his house smelled thick and basey until marguerite came, until she filled the rooms with her plastic smell. jonathan knows that women hardly ever smell brand new.

jonathan talks to marguerite every night before falling asleep. he trusts marguerite. marguerite knows where things are hidden. sometimes he does not trust marguerite, and before he leaves for work he trains a camcorder on marguerite to catch her standing, to catch her dancing, to catch her crawling two fingers down her body, past her small breasts, rubbing herself to orgasm. he decides he will watch the tape before punishing marguerite for touching herself, naughty girl. he will give her a chance; if she says his name, jonathan, she will have to close her mouth around the j, the first time he has ever seen it close, when she says his name he will lessen her punishment. he skips lunch and masturbates in the break room. when he comes home marguerite is still. she does not yet know he has caught her, silly girl. the tape whirs in the vcr and she is still, she is still, for two hours she is still, for five hours she is still and it is late, he nods off and when he wakes up he rewinds, just in case she moved while he was sleeping, but she is still, for eight hours she is still. an even worse offense; marguerite has lied to him. marguerite is pretending. marguerite is lucky that she does not bleed. jonathan keeps extra tubes of caulking in the cabinet beneath his sink. jonathan knows that women are always needing to be put back together.

canon September 1, 2007

we live where we grow wine and honey. our mothers collect porcelain saints and, to pass days between seasons, we sit cross-legged on the kitchen floor and make alphabet saints spell the dirty words we know: seraphim of sarov (beat with his own axe), elpis (holy virgin), xanthippe (saved by jesus as a beautiful youth). sometimes we roll the small saints in our palms and spill them out to divine the name of our future husband, the father who will bring us dull, fat children. our mothers tipped honey into our milk and so we are all of us rolling and round like our mothers and our mothers’ mothers and our mothers’ mothers’ mothers.

as children of vineyards, we will never be more than our terroir allows. as children of honeycomb, we know we are all that is holy. a counting: the bible counts honey sixty-one times. john the baptist survived on honey and locusts. samson found swarming bees and their pride buzzing in the belly of a lion. when the honey makes us sick our mothers call upon saint ambrose, the patron saint of bees, of honeyed tongues. a bad batch, tainted with rhododendrons or mountain laurel, a bad batch makes us sweat and weaken; a bad batch makes our hearts skip beats. tainted with tutu bush, the honey makes us giddy, then convulsive. our mothers pray to ambrose, mouths languid with sweets and hands ticking rosaries.

wine also makes us ill as it mixes in our blood. if we close our eyes and try hard enough we can feel christ form inside us; we can hear two heartbeats, each a half count off. communion dyes our mouths purple and we pretend we are our fathers, gulping after sunday study from invisible jugs. when christ grows too strong in our fathers our mothers pray to never-martyred saint martin, the saint of vintners and beggars and change: our mothers know there is no patron saint of bruised fruit.

if i were a girl not in god i would wish to see past what i can. to wander the breadth of our lands, to see the vines as pregnant with grapes as the hives are with sound, makes my knees sore and my thighs ache from the climb. to fully explore is impossible and so we have given up and instead spend our time memorizing verse and putting things inside of each other. i confess: sometimes i wish to be simon, to see our stretch of wine and honey from above. sometimes i think i would break my knees and accept the stones: to fall from the air is to have flown.

tarasios, hallvard, ides, simplicius
ignatius loyola, sabbas the goth
abanoub, linus, luke the evangelist
timothy, hildegard, abundius, teath
wilfrid of ripon, ephrem the syrian
willibrord, innocent, lazarus, luke
eligius, veronica, emmeram, romuald
brendan the navigator, eucherius of lyon.

seventy-three August 25, 2007

it would have been different if he hadn’t died so embarassingly. he and his father built go-karts, trappy little wood-and-wheel machines, with engines that puttered through turns and balked at the gentlest of hills. the son raced them around and around the track while his father sat bundled on makeshift bleachers, sipping hot chocolate his wife had thermosed and exhaling warmth into his palms and nudging the shoulders of his neighbors, saying, that’s my boy, number seventy-three, that’s my boy. it would have been different if they didn’t live so deep in the country, if the track hadn’t been lined so low with hay bales, if more deer had been venison that season. but the boy was whipping around the corner in the lead and his father stood to punch his fist in triumph and spilled his cocoa all down his jacket, and a buck, horns budding, leapt over the hay bales and full-stopped in front of the boy’s barreling go-kart and there was a collision and the buck took off again, limping, and the father laughed–a buck, in this season, and right on the go-kart track!–and the go-kart was still going and the boy’s goggles were still on on but his hands were limp and his neck was hanging at some funny angle like a broken toy and the father stopped laughing and jumped down from the bleachers all milky from the spill saying no, no and the boy’s mouth was open like he was about to speak but he wasn’t and the father was still saying no, no, no, and he was cradiling his son’s sagging head in his hands but there was no blood save a spot on the ground that had fallen from the buck where the wheel had sliced open its leg.

boys are supposed to die like boys; how boys should, with blood, whipping around dead man’s curve with the radio on, saying i’ve got one more left in me, coach, taking a bullet for their comrade in the muggy world corners to which they are deployed. boys are not supposed to die in freak accidents. boys do not have their necks snapped with their go-kart numbers on by teenaged whitetails. the father does not open the cupboard anymore. he eats yogurt for breakfast because when he opens the cupboard there is only muesli; there is no teeth-rotting, tummy-aching cereal because his tooth-rotter, his tummy-acher, is dead. he does not like yogurt and sometimes at night he thinks about asking his wife to buy the sugary cereal again, as a prop, but he doesn’t like to bother her when she is crying.

no one ever asks the cause of death but he likes to volunteer. we were out hunting, he says. those deer are a real menace. i didn’t make him wear his safety vest because it wasn’t the season. somebody else was out there and they thought him a deer. he folds both hands over his chest. right through the heart. never seen so much blood in my life. he tells this lie over and over until one day he wakes up believing it and in his memory he is in the woods, he is running towards, he is saying no, no, no and when he cradles his son’s head he gets blood all over his hands, his son’s blood all over his hands.

stem August 22, 2007

when i was seven i found my daddy face down on the bathroom floor, head bloodying up the side of the tub. he was so small i had to get down on my hands and knees and press my cheek to the tile to find him. my daddy was an epileptic and i sure didn’t mean to marry another one. i met him volunteering, i always liked that word, volunteer, as if i was that girl in school who was always so filled to bursting with the answer that her fingers splayed off her raised hand and her little bottom lifted right off her seat. “something to volunteer?” the teacher would ask. summers i drove seven hours upstate to watch over a bunk of five epileptic girls, girls who wore helmets so they wouldn’t crash their skulls when they seized at the breakfast table, girls whose first kisses were a long time coming. his name was randy and he counseled the boys cabin and his seizures were small, almost sweet. his eyes flickered, glazed, looked through and past you with a dreamy look. i imagined his neurons misfiring like fireworks, like some big sparkling show. i was a good pill counter and he had a shoulder tattoo so when he asked me to marry him i said i guess so. we were nineteen and my dress cost seventy-nine dollars and i hardly loved him at all.

when i miscarried he stayed up with me all night, crying into my big t-shirt, crying the biggest tears i’d ever seen. i held his head in my hands while he pushed his nose into my stomach, his blue ribbon tears soaking through and running down my thighs. when he seized he stopped sobbing but his eyes still ran. i felt mostly relief but i did not tell him so. two weeks later i made up some story about how every time i saw his face i felt like i’d failed him. i left; i was twenty-one and hollow and it was time to go home.

my daddy was getting sicker. his seizures were always more violent, like some devil had wormed his way inside him and slipped on his skin like a fancy coat to protect his own hide when he threw himself to the floor to thrash and roll. people were always putting wallets in my daddy’s mouth; i was forever explaining that you can’t really swallow your tongue. he shook his way through life. the lesion–lesion, what a sour word!–it had settled itself right next to his memory and he was forgetting fast.
“where’s randy?” he asked. “i’m so sorry about the baby.”
“randy got this great job in pennsylvania and he went out there to make some money and find us a house,” i lied. “remember, dad?”
“sure,” he answered. “sure, sure.” he put his hand on my stomach. “i think i felt it kick!”
“i bet you did, dad,” i said. “he’s a real good kicker.”

his neurologist was tall with dark blonde curls, thirty-three and happily married. we had graspy, ragged sex in a closet full of syringes. it unnerved me that he knew the shape of my brain and when we lay together after i imagined him twisting my skull off like the top half of a peach.
“your father’s going to be just fine,” he said. “we’ll just pop right in there and pluck out the bad part.” we were all living euphemistically. his fingers tasted like me and i wondered whether i reminded him of the brains he sloshed himself around in. he wiggled back into his scrubs and snapped on some rubber gloves.
“well,” he said. “back to work!”

i tried to imagine my daddy as a vegetable: like some cauliflower man, with carrot sticks for arms and a bell pepper face. his neurologist gave us a packet stuffed with likelihoods but that night i couldn’t read it because randy showed up at my front door, looking thin and lost. i stood at the doorway like wronged women do, hip cocked and fist bent to my waist.
“i’m seeing a doctor now, randy,” i said. “i’m sorry about the baby but i just can’t think of you without thinking about our son.” i was fake-trembling my chin and everything, really piling on the bullshit.
“is that what this is about?” said randy. “is this about money? i’ll get you money, sweetheart, i’ll get you all the money you could ever ask for. just give me a chance, i’ll make you so happy.” his eyes were blinking real fast like they always did right before he seized. my daddy came to the door and stood behind me, bending to rest his chin in between my shoulder and my collarbone.
“hey randy,” he said brightly. “how’s pennsylvania? don’t worry, we’re taking real good care of her and the baby.” randy was looking through us both, all starry-eyed. i lead him to his car and shut the door. in the kitchen, my daddy had set himself at the table to read the newspaper.
“now who was that at the door?” he asked.

his neurologist explained to me that if all went according to plan my father would regain most of his brain function, that with the lesion gone the only thing pressing against his memory would be his age. he explained this to me while he was nibbling my shoulder, bedded in some bed and breakfast self-consciously nestled two hours out of town. his wife thought he was presenting at a remote neurosurgery symposium in california.
“you can watch if you like,” he said, “but i wouldn’t recommend it. most people can’t stomach brains.”
“i don’t think i will,” i said. “too wet and too damn gray.” i wrinkled my nose. i didn’t tell him that what i really couldn’t stand would be watching his hands flex when he put down the scalpel, the same way his hands flexed after he came. he kissed the tip of my ear. “good. it’s probably best that you don’t.” his fake flight was fake landing at seven so i breakfasted alone.

i kissed my daddy for good luck and squeezed his hand and said don’t worry, don’t worry, more for me than for him. he laughed and said, “it’s just my tonsils, dear. why would i be worried?” i waited in the waiting room for eight hours. i threw back coffees and floated a danish in them. before i could count the ninth hour his neurologist came bustling towards. i knew before he opened his mouth; he’d shrunken into his body; his smallness betrayed him.
“i’m so sorry,” he said. “there was nothing we could do.” his voice floated up tinnily from a few inches above the floor. “sometimes things don’t go according to plan.” he patted my shoulder and his touch made me gag. he leaned in close to me and whispered: “i need to talk to you.”
he dragged me into the closet where we first fucked standing up. he wiped the tears out from under my eyes with the back of his hand and pressed his body around mine. “your father told me,” he said into my hair.
“my father told you what?”
he smiled, all teeth. “he told me you were pregnant. he told me about the baby. i understand why you didn’t tell me, you thought i’d tell you to get rid of it.” he twisted me to face him. “but i couldn’t be happier. i think we should keep it. don’t worry, i’ll take care of you and i’ll take care of our baby, i’ll leave my wife, i’ll do anything.”
i cupped my hand on my stomach protectively. “thank you,” i said. “thank you for being there for us.”
“of course,” he said, and he wrapped his arms around me and put both hands on what was missing.

volunteer work August 14, 2007

i fuck the way some ladies ladle soup at the shelter for the homeless, the shuffling. they know as well as i that it is important to give back to the community that has given us so much, e.g. public schooling (how to best approximate buck skin for an oral report) and the health care system (the relief of blood on the cusp of abortion), etc. it is possible that i do not know how to love. similarly, i do not know how to pit peaches for pie or how to test the temperature of milk. these are things i have avoided with purpose.

i am not particularly beautiful. it is important to recognize your strengths as well as your weaknesses. it might have been jesus who said we must accept the things we cannot change. it might have also been my ninth grade history teacher as he was biting my knees. these are the things that blur as if my thumb has smudged my memory. focus instead on posture and comportment: think of a string threaded through your spine like a marionette (if this metaphor is too fitting there are always alternatives).

giving is its own reward, isn’t that what they say? i don’t believe they’ve ever said that kneeling in a gas station bathroom with a cock hot from piss in your throat is its own reward. that would take an awful long time to cross-stitch.

a man and a women will never share a sadness. women know the empty sort of sad, a craving sort of sorrow. for men, sad is too full. sad is brimming over. the world does not allow enough tube socks or shower drains to hold all the sadness of men. i have dedicated my life’s work, i once heard a man say to a woman. he was looking at her all hangdog, as if his life’s work might change her mind. to what have you been dedicated? i asked him four hours later in a dirty buzz of a motel, after he’d settled for me. to the blind? to model trains? to the spaces between letters? he’d invented a machine to protect tomato plants, a machine that electrifies the surrounding dirt and stops voles like the electric chair, his words, smiling, like the goddamn electric chair. he was filling back up again, slowly, like a bicycle tire. i fucked the execution right out of him.

thuzie August 14, 2007

i kick her in the shin and bite her shoulder. pigtails are for pulling, didn’t you know? dirt clods are for face-mashing. see-saws: i see london, i saw france, i see thighs and underpants. her skin looks like dirt but tastes much better–i’d trade my juice box for a promise that she’ll pick me for her kickball team. teacher says teacher says teacher says i’m crazy. teacher says i’m wild-eyed. teacher says i’m wielding glue. mother says no dinner and when i try to tell her i’m in love i break the vase in the hallway and bruise my knuckles on the table’s nape.

fasten my helmet just loose enough that it won’t work and i’m down the block to suzie’s, sweet sweet suzie’s where i can pull her skirt up long enough to get a look and maybe today i’ll throw her gerbil or give her a black eye the size of my little fist. i hope her mother calls my mother and they get into a big fat loud screaming telephone row and father will sigh and roll his eyes and cuff me on my arm in the place that waits for my bicep to grow.

suzie’s so buty-ful, once we both were running fevers and mother dragged me to the doctor (i didn’t want to go). but in the waiting room was fever suzie, shivering teeth-chattering reading a magazine (upside down). nurse called her a towhead (mystery)–all’s i know’s her head has curls white like grandma’s porcelain angels (the ones that smash so well) and i sure hope suzie’s still got that lump from the stick that i winged at her head on tuesday.

last week father sat me down, put out his cigarette like he meant business! i sure was scared but all he did was tell me that girls like it nice, girls like flowers and choc-o-lates, girls like dinner and girls like to dance and haven’t i felt any changes? suzie might like carnations and caramel creams but i like her wet-faced, lips plumped with boo-hoos, and no, i haven’t felt any changes.

on sundays mother makes me see a fat old man named doctor z. doctor z’s got jimmy dean fingers and a mustache that wiggles like my hamster wiggled before he died, caught in a crack in the basement floor. doctor z asks me am i tired? frustrated? over-worked? am i nervous, sad, can i focus in school? he shows me pictures of dark alleys like comic books and girls dead or dying and asks me how they make me feel. like a cheeseburger! i say, and i laugh and i laugh and i laugh.

suzie’s the best g-d kickballer in the whole g-d world. she paws at the ground when she steps up to the plate and she can kick that g-d ball straight outta the stadium, even in a g-d sundress covered in g-d flowers. she’s got freckled friends, snub-nosed friends, skinned-knee friends, sometimes when they get all tuckered out from kickball they lay in the grass and make dandylion crowns. when my dandylion princess isn’t looking and her court is occupied by a particularly slimy frog i tackle her to the ground and in her struggle her finger slides in my mouth and the lunch lady blows her whistle and all through math class my lips taste like girl and dandylion milk, sharp and sour and thicker than division.

suzie loves: cinderella, the yellow kickball (never red), her best friend sammy, lasagna. i call her cindersmelly and deflate the yellow kickball and tell her best friend sammy that suzie told me that she thinks her birthmark’s ugly but there’s really nothing i can do about her mother’s lasagna except once i stole one out of suzie’s mother’s freezer but i guess she just went to the grocery store because that night at t-ball practice suzie’s white jersey was still bleeding marinara.

next year i’ll be in third grade. next year i’ll learn to whistle, probably. when father drinks he says how old are you again? and he laughs and laughs and when i tell him i’ll be in the third grade next year he says goddamn, goddamnit, maybe next year i’ll teach you how to drive and he lets out a long, low, slow whistle like the ones i’m going to make and i say i’d love to drive the goddamn car and mother slaps me first and then my father, for language. it hurts but i don’t think she means it to because then she laughs and that is better than when she cries in the car with the windows rolled down while i watch my hand swim in the side mirror and she holds the wheel real, real tight.

i’m a bad speller and i’m even worse at science. teacher says i read at a first grade level and she calls my mother in for a conference to suggest summer school and have you considered speech therapy? not thpeech therapy! i thcream. not thummer thcool! thummer days are for three more hours of thuzie before the thun goes down. summer days are for suzie’s brown calves and a fully loaded supersoaker right to suzie’s face. i promise to read a book every day and to practice my sssssss’s like a stupid snake because that is how much i love wet and sweaty summer suzie, damp-armpit suzie, the suzie who cries when i turn the hose on her like my father does to the neighbor’s nosy, noisy basset hound.

mother crushes pills up in my apple sauce and flashes flashcards at the breakfast table. she says we’re all worried about you and i say who’s all worried about me? and she says well, i am, and your father, and doctor z. but i know that’s not true because father’s still sleeping and doctor z’s probably somewhere wiggling his mustache to try and shake out the scrambled eggs stuck in it and i gobble up the applesauce like a good boy even though it makes me feel all buzzy and sad. i can see suzie in the treehouse through the window and i know the sooner i finish breakfast the sooner i can go fill up water balloons with pebbles and kool-aid; the sooner i can make suzie all bruise-y; the sooner i can make her scream and send sammy scurrying down to find rocks for return fire; the sooner she’ll be all alone up in her treehouse, backed in the corner and armed with the sour cherries that she plucked from the low-lying branches; the sooner i can scramble up the tree, leaving a scab from my knee on a violent knot; the sooner i can pin suzie up against the trunk, smear her cherries down her dress to mix with the kool-aid shrapnel; the sooner i can kiss suzie, crying suzie, trembly-chinned suzie, the sooner i can taste suzie, hand pressed against her neck and tongue dislodging the cupcake sprinkle stuck in her molar, the sooner i can love sweet, trapped suzie for hours and hours and hours, at least until sammy’s aim improves or mother calls me in for dinner.

medical incredible August 13, 2007

the scott falater case

i was sleeping violently; please find it in your heart to forgive my trespasses.

i was not aware. i know that it was not the me before you that watched her go under, under, because when i close my eyes i do not see her gasping, struggling, wrapping her little hand around my wrist. please stop discussing it with me at length; please stop asking how did her hair look? i’m sure it looked dark, but i know this by heart, from the habit of picking her hairs off my sweaters at work. i never throw them away; i keep them in my littlest desk drawer. to prove my innocence, go find the ball of her hair in my littlest desk drawer. i will tell you that i have not slept since, but please do not take this as admission of guilt. i have not slept out of the fear that i will be holding another wet, blue girl upon waking.

i have had these dreams since childhood. i have woken with blood on my hands before. if i recalled the family bird’s name i would tell it to you but i do not. i do recall his lifeless form in my palm as i roused. his feathers were somehow softer when separated from their host. i know that she was not a bird, but i loved her like one. i loved her the same way you love a bird: clutchingly. why do i say loved, not love? why have i tensed her in the past? how can you love someone who cannot receive? try; it is impossible.

the monica anderson case

my bones are closing in. my bones are closing in and my muscles are turning to bones and those bones are closing in, too. my toes were first, followed by my elbows, which locked in at curved angles as if to parenthesize my body. neck last, they say. you will have your neck until the end. please explain to me what good a neck is if my fingers are hanging solidly from my palms. father tells me the story of pygmalion as if having an opposite would be better than having nothing at all. you are aetalag, he says. god is sculpting you as we speak. my wrists are foreign and do not feel like god’s work, but he does have a history of flooding bodies with hardnesses.

if you watch closely you can see my ribs turn to sheets. watch them bulge my skin until they have no room left to curve inside, until they pierce themselves right out of me. if you could peel off my rind you would be disgusted. my bones fall and ripple like curtains starched still, like lead trapped haphazard in ice. please promise that one day you will look straight at my skull. please promise that one day my face will be separated from the bone that hides below it like some monster pressing the skin of my face over his own. his is the kind of face that puts your teeth on edge, that makes your lip curl just a little in disgust before you catch yourself and smile too wide and talk to me slowly, loudly, as if my ugliness retards me.

before my neck last, i’d like to hear you call me beautiful without choking or changing the meaning.

jacko August 12, 2007

if a girl is running and running, one day she’s just got to realize that all she’s got, at the absolute most, is her wits and the way that she laughs. an old woman would say she’s got to just slow down and let herself be caught, but the old men know better. it’s the girls caught in mid-leap, hair flying and faces turned half-back like lot’s salty little wife, it’s the girls chased down like hares and pinned down at the breath of escape, it’s the girls who are still running and running who love the hardest and the most memorably.

jacko’s been chasing the girls for thirty-five years. he’s watched his friends bag and tag the girls for thirty-five years, even seen his friends release the girls back to the wild when they get too domesticated, yowling into the night like a pack of puppies content to play until they find they’ve forgotten how to survive the night. “jacko!” his friends scream. “jackoooo,” like wolves. “jacko, what do you do with yourself? jacko, when are you going to find yourself a girl?” jacko does not tell them that he is a furious and chronic masturbator or that he once forced himself on a woman from behind in the dark but her screams were different than he thought they’d be or that he takes pictures of girls on the train, girls with skirts whose legs loll open as they fall into sleep on their way to their secretarial jobs. jacko rides the eight o clock train even though he does not work. jackson senior, jacko the first, he left jacko deux enough money to keep himself neck-deep in perversion until the day he dies alone.

tonight jacko is at a party. tonight jacko is at a party with his friends tom and bill and cutler. tom is blonde and sloppy-tall, a sort of dangling ape that the girls go crazy for. tom does not bother with the chase; he likes his girls soft and sorry. bill likes breasts and is in the corner waving one of jacko’s franklins at two brunettes who are trying to pass as twins for attention. he slides the bill into one of their bras and they move their faces close to press their tongues into each others mouths. their tongues flick and twirl and they keep their eyes open, always. bill offers up another hundred, presumably to join, and jacko looks away. cutler’s been with his girl for ten years, ten years after the most exhausting and hard-won chase jacko’s ever seen. cutler’s got his hand on the knee of a sixteen year old with flitty hands and nervous feet, wiry and slit-eyed, a real live hot runner. the slow fall of the thrill of the chase has left him old and tired and his stasis makes her look all the more alive. he reeks of stagnation and she smells it, you can see it in her eyes, she knows she’ll give him the easy slip the minute he looks away, the minute he instinctively turns towards the sound of an opening door.

there’s a girl circling jacko, a girl who is most definitely a hooker.

“what’s your name?” she asks.
“martin.” the man loves to lie. but it’s not a lie, really; martin is jacko and jacko is martin.
“well, martin,” (she tastes the name like she knows it’s not the truth), “you look like you could show me a real fun time.”
he considers. she’s young and she might let him draw some blood, might let him tie her up real uncomfortable and just sit in the corner and watch her cry. she used to be a runner, he can tell by the way she tests the balls of her feet while she talks. looks like somebody caught her real good not too long ago, tossed her right in a firefly jar and watched her light go flicker-flicker-quiet. she’s not all that pretty, a little mousey, mostly forehead and the kind of too-skinny that’s all sad and no slender. martin’s not feeling very cruel tonight, maybe he’s had a few more or less drinks than usual. martin’s actually feeling sort of compassionate. maybe after he fucks her he’ll ask if her stepfather’s kind. he even reaches for her hand; the prospect of her warm little fingers in his seems small, homey, like it might warm some cold corner of the world. she pulls a face and gestures with her head up the stairs. jacko takes it in stride but martin gets real, real angry.

jacko acknowledges his climb with a chin-lift to bill. bill flashes a smile through a mouthful of nipple that says he’s not going anywhere. jacko’s friends know what a twisted fuck he is, they don’t know the details but they know enough to make them wary and false. he knows he is merely tolerable. he is a person to be tolerated until his death, until his funeral where the air will be thick and sticky with relief. the hooker climbs stairs on the tips of her toes; he’s been waiting for her heels to kiss wood but they haven’t, not for four flights, not even when she fell a little, slippery from vodka, fell into his waiting arms. he caught her like a gentleman but when she didn’t thank him he pinched her, hard enough to make her scream. she’s still nursing her wound when they get to the door; she pushes at the doorknob without even looking at him. jacko’s sick of her pouting. he slams the door shut hard enough to catch her little finger in the jamb, pins her wrists together with one hand and yanks her head back by a fistful of hair with the other.
“i’ve got two thousand dollars in my pocket,” says martin. “are you going to be good?”
she nods but he doesn’t let go until a tiny pool fills her lower eyelid. as soon as he frees her wrist she brings her finger to her mouth to suck at the blood blister he’s made and jacko smiles.

the room is a bed and the sheets are dirty and the walls are covered in a dust so thick it makes jacko think of the skin it once was. the whore is making little tears and wiping them away with the backs of her wrists.
“listen,” jacko says, “i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to hurt you. you shouldn’t have made me so mad.”
“i’m fine.” she climbs on the bed on her hands and knees, pulling back to rest her chest on her legs like a stretching cat. “are you ready?”
he sits on the end of the bed and catches her bottom lip between his two fingers. “two thousand dollars is a lot of money.”
she mouths the words: i know.
he takes his bag off from his shoulder, the bag he takes to parties, to the only kind of parties he goes to, the parties with sad strange girls who will let you pull at their mouths with your dirty fingers. “you can sit,” he says. “i’ll be ready in a minute.”
he likes to take his favorite part as slow as he can. he keeps things in his bag that he doesn’t even use, things like wrenches and toothy blades that he carries just so martin can see the looks in their eyes, the flash of flight. he uncoils the rope and the girl looks at it coolly. she sucks her injured finger deeper into her mouth, in defiance. he pulls out his knife case and looks at the knives, then at her, with all the silence of a doctor in preparation. she shifts but makes no move for the door. martin wants her to stay and bleed but jacko wants her to go, go, go. martin wants to use these clamps he’s pulling out of his bag, wants to leave marks but jacko wants her to fake left and sock him in the face and dive for the door and run down the stairs, heels slapping. he checks the bag; it is empty. he counts and shines and lines up and counts again, more for her benefit than for his. the fight has fallen out of her eyes and now she is crying softly, quietly, all salty collarbones and potato knees, probably thinking about what she’ll buy with the two thousand dollars he promised her. martin rearranges his needles and jacko hopes she’s thinking about buying a dress or a kitty cat or a big fat juicy hamburger that will bleed out of the side of her mouth and make her moan a little with delight. martin wants to start quiet, slow play his hand, but jacko grabs for his biggest knife and widest smile. the girl screams and there it is, the speed that had all but been run out of her, and she grabs for a smaller knife and before he can stop her she puts it right in his ribs and pounds down the stairs, past dull tom and slow, dirty bill and cutler, who chased, and he can still hear her screaming and wishes he could see her, wishes he could watch her run like a doe, endangered and running, running as if her lungs or legs don’t have a say in the matter, running always with the fear, and the safety, of knowing one day she’ll be caught.

act two August 11, 2007

My neighbor is fat and hairy and his gut hangs over his pants like a child with a beachball in his shirt. We dress together. Underwear first, then pants. I hook my bra at the front and upside down–he waits until I have turned it and put the straps on my shoulders before he reaches for his shirt. He is watching me get thinner. Everyday I examine my progress–clinically, scientifically. I pinch my stomach between my fingers. I lie down on the bed and measure the empty space between my pubis and the stretch of the top of my panties, to gauge the height of my hipbones. I feel for sharpness. Through our unblinded windows I watch my neighbor poke his head through the hole of his shirt to watch me. He has a beard, glasses. His hair is dark and long and a bicycle hangs from his ceiling. My neighbor and I will not have sex. I can tell by his posture that he is the kind of man who would stand over me, masturbating furiously while breathlessly, pathetically instructing me to squeeze my tits together, to beg him to come on my big tits with his hard cock like some weary porn star.

I’m in love but not quite. My boyfriend is tall and thin and I like his fingers. I do not like: the way he laughs, the way he runs, the way he pulls his penis out of the hole in his boxers as if it were a gift, the way he peels mangoes. He sleeps while I dress and for hours after I leave. When I come home our pillows smells like marijuana and the kitchen smells like garlic or gorgonzola. “Hungry?” he asks. He rubs my feet and I give him shit for smoking too much weed, for not having a job, for is it so much to ask that you help out a little with the goddamn dishes?

When my lightbulb burns out, I do not have a ladder. “Go ask our neighbor,” says my boyfriend. I put on a sweater and knock on my neighbor’s door. My neighbor and I put on a play called “I Have Not Seen You Naked.” Act One: Hello. Do you have a ladder? Yes, I’ll be right back with it. How have you been? Haven’t seen you around much. I mostly stay indoors. Laugh. Thank you, I’ll bring it right back. Act Two: I do not bring the ladder back until I see him masturbating through the window, head back and mouth open like a disgusting little fish. When I knock, he does not answer.

“Why don’t we have sex anymore?” my boyfriend asks, crying. I am looking in the mirror with my breasts in my hands. I turn to ask him if he thinks my nipples are symmetrical but he has his face in the sheets.

I need my neighbor’s ladder. My fire alarm is beeping and it sounds like a crying child. I feel as if I am going crazy, Chinese water torture or something just as cruel. I can taste the silence in the hallway. My neighbor opens the door in his shorts and glasses. His tank top is greasy, yellow-green around the armpits. There is a sandwich in his hand–a slice of onion hangs past lettuce like a lolling tongue. Shit, I think. We are going to fuck.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“Yes,” I answer.
His refridgerator has real mayonnaise. It has swiss cheese and pink ham veined with fat the color of piano keys. I have forgotten what mayonnaise tastes like. He spreads it on the bread with more care than I would have imagined. I step close enough to make him uncomfortable. I want to make my neighbor hard, right in front of me while he’s making a goddamn sandwich. Mayonnaise glistens on his finger like sex, so I put his finger in my mouth and push down until I can feel his nail in my throat. His mouth opens. My neighbor and I open a new play. It is called “I Am Fucking My Neighbor.” Act One: Pants off, skirt up. Scramble for condom, fumble with condom. Lift me up and push me down on the counter. There is a tomato against my spine. I can feel its redness. He does not beg at all. He smells like a new dog. The heel of his hand in my mouth, the heel of his hand on my collarbone. I am afraid it will snap under his weight, but it doesn’t and I come again. After he finishes he bends himself in half, presses his forehead to the counter as if he is exhausted. He lights a cigarette and sucks on it, offering me one with a gesture. I arch my back to free the tomato and toss it to him. Sex has dulled his reflexes and I laugh at the face he makes when he catches it.