Funerals, 1994

Dad was supposed to drive. He usually did. But he was crying too much to see the road, so Mama made him pull over at a rest stop with a McDonald’s. I asked if we could go in and get a strawberry milkshake, but she said now was not the time for milkshakes. I told her I was hungry. She said that there’d be food after Auntie’s funeral.

Mama gripped the wheel and nervously crunched on Pep-O-Mint Lifesavers, one after the other. She forgot to look when switching lanes twice. Dad had taught her how to drive some. In her village in Poland women didn’t really learn to drive, never mind at sixteen.

My sister, Jane, who had just gotten her Massachusetts driver’s license, was reading Sassy magazine and rhythmically pulling out loose strands from her blonde hair and letting them fall to the carpet. Jane had beautiful hair, the same light texture as cotton candy. She had wanted to dye it pink, but Mama wouldn’t let her.

“Mo-om, would you just let me drive?” she asked when Mama hit the brakes a little too hard.

“You make me too nervous when you drive. We’ll be there soon, Janey. And Owen, will you turn off that Game Boy?” Mama asked me. “You’re going to give us all a conniption.”

I looked to my father sitting in the passenger seat. His face was slick with tears and he was trying to sleep. I was eleven years old and it was the second time I’d seen my father cry. I shut the volume off and watched Donkey Kong avoid fireballs and rivet holes in silence.

A month before Auntie died, Jane and I stayed in her apartment for the weekend because our parents were taking a respite in Nantucket. Auntie and Dad were five years apart, the same as Jane and I. She made a bed for us out of the sofa and taught us how to turn on her television.

“Jane, how’s high school going?” Auntie asked while making us hotdogs for dinner.

“It’s okay,” Jane said. She was trying to pay attention to an episode of the Real World where everyone screamed at each other.

“She wants to be a celebrity writer in Hollywood,” I offered.

“Shut up, Owen,” Jane said. It was April. Kurt Cobain had just killed himself, so Jane was especially sullen.

“Oh, don’t give up on acting, Jane. I thought you were perfect as Anne Frank. And Owen, have you dreamed up any new domino patterns?”

“I’ve learned how to make the dominos fall so that they turn on my K’nex Ferris wheel.”

The next day Auntie sent us out with some pocket money to explore the neighborhood. I was nervous because it was my first time being in Cambridge without a grown-up. Before leaving I said to Auntie, “I know you don’t have any kids, but usually they need some supervision.” She laughed and shook her head.

Jane and I spent most the weekend in a shop called Cheapo Records. We’d return in the evening to listen to our finds. One of the nights Jane and I were lying on the sofa bed, staring at the ceiling fan and listening to the songs Kurt Cobain never thought anyone would hear. He had recorded a few songs on a boom box before he fired a shotgun in his head. The record store owner found it for Jane after she bought In Utero. The song we were listening to sounded tinny and odd.

“It sounds like he’s praying,” I said quietly to Jane. On the day that Jane found out Cobain killed himself, a week before our visit to Auntie’s, she stayed home from school and played his music at top volume. She wore her black Nirvana T-shirt until Mama begged her to wear anything else, even offering up a rare shopping trip. Jane refused. Then she wore it until Mama begged her just to let her wash it for an hour.

“He’s not praying. He’s pleading. He’s asking us to let him go. To wish him night.”

Auntie came into the room and loomed over us, her head fuzzy in the lamplight. “Pretty song,” she said.

“He killed himself,” Jane said.

“I know. I’m sorry,” Auntie said and she seemed to really mean it. Mama and Dad had thought Jane was being a ridiculous fan. I did too.

“It’s not like she knows him,” I said. Jane twisted herself deeper into the sheets.

“No, Owen, I know she’s never met him. But I think Janey knows him better than you or I ever could,” Auntie said and Jane smiled at her.

On the drive to Auntie’s funeral, as I marveled at the power of being in a procession of cars no one could legally cut into, as if we were a thick river of grief, I became painfully aware of what was really making Dad cry that much. Within the span of only a month, my father had held two sets of cold hands while kneeling beside a hospital bed. First was his daughter’s hands, then his older sister’s. Dad had rushed Jane to the hospital after she swallowed pills. Auntie was rushed to the hospital three weeks later, after she suffered a brain aneurysm. She died. Jane lived.

Each of the funeral home’s rooms were monochromatic. The room with the body was all shades of peach, with some cherry-wood chairs lining the walls. I was too afraid to go in there. I stayed in a pistachio room, sitting on a celadon-colored sofa. If I learned over, to the far right, I could just barely see the casket. It looked like any other casket, and if it had not been for Auntie’s large nose sticking out, I would have thought we were in the wrong place entirely.

My father stood near the casket, next to his father, my Dziadziu. Dad gripped Dziadziu’s shoulder every now and then. His hands had the power to say what his mouth could not.

Dziadzu is the reason my parents met. He and my Babcia came to America when Dad was two. Dad forgot most of his Polish, but his parents kept him involved in community events. He met Mama when they were both eighteen. She was at a bake sale, nibbling on chrusciki and surrounded by fruit pies. She arrived in America only a month prior, and needed an English teacher and a tour guide, and my father found her very beautiful. They married by the sea two years later.

Mama wandered around the parlor, touching people’s elbows, consoling them and offering cups of coffee with condensed milk. I watched Jane wander from room to room, shuffling in her Doc Martens. By that point most family members had heard of her suicide attempt. They regarded her with mild surprise, as if she were not really there. No one knew what to say to her in the few months that followed the attempt, myself included. She had only been out of the psych ward two weeks.

She sat next to me on the couch, taking no care to smooth her baby doll dress as Mama said ladies should.

“Are you going to go in there?” she asked. I shook my head.

“It’s no big deal. It’s not Auntie lying in there. It’s just her body.”

“There’s no difference.”

“Sure there is. You’re such a baby. Here, I’ll go with you.” She snatched my hand and pulled me into the peach room. Dziadzu ruffled my hair and stepped aside so I could kneel at the casket. Jane stood behind me and pushed my head to look down at Auntie.

Her skin seemed papery and she was wearing more blush than she ever would have in life. She looked stiller than sleep and her hands were bound together by a rosary. I had the worst desire to touch her hands so I shoved my own in my suit pockets.

“They put a lens with a metal spike in to keep her eyes closed,” Jane whispered in my ear. “Otherwise they’d keep popping open.”

“I’m out of here,” I said. For the rest of the services I stood outside in the offensively bright sunshine. The ground was too wet for her to be buried that day. Every now and then a friend of Auntie’s from the city came out for a cigarette and told me that she had loved me very much.

I often think of the morning Jane tried to kill herself. Did she walk around that morning with the idea that it’d be her last, wading through the thought like it was the deep end of a swimming pool? Is it why she ate Frosted Flakes with me instead taking the bowl to her room to be with her music?

I remember that it was hot, even for late April. Our parents were upstairs, getting ready, and Jane and I were still in pajamas, eating the cereal. I’m not sure if Jane was actually sad, but now I remember her that way. She was picking at the blue polish on her toenails. I kept shouting, “They’re grrrrreat!” like that tiger. The grains of sugar melted off the wheat and sprayed as I spoke.

“Oh my God, Owen, if you say that one more time, I swear to God,” Jane said. I stayed quiet for a moment, glared at her, and sang even louder, “They’re grrrrreeeeaaaattttt!”

She darted her hand out to my arm and caught a chunk of my lingering baby fat between her fingers.

“You’re so fucking annoying,” she said, pinching as I struggled to pull away. “This is exactly why you have no friends. Just a bunch of dominos.”

“Mooooom,” I began to call, but Jane suctioned her hand to my mouth and stopped pinching. Her hand was warm, and smelled slightly like the bottom of my hamster’s cage.

“Don’t tell Mama. Owen, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” Jane said. And then: “Listen, I promise that life will be a lot easier when you just grow up.”

She peeled her hand away, and I didn’t call for Mama. My sister looked at me for a long time, and I know now that she looked at me that way because she thought it would be the last time she’d ever see me.

When I said goodbye to her from the doorway, she said, “You’re a dork, but I love you.” Which was weird because we usually only admitted we loved each other on Christmas.

I caught the bus to day camp, I built a birdhouse, I passed my swim test and I got a sunburn. Dad went to his firm to research a case and met with a client whose story he didn’t believe, and Mama went to the shop to help women buy baby cribs and bedding. That afternoon Jane went into our parent’s pink, porcelain bathroom and swallowed every pill in their medicine cabinet. She washed down everything from the dental surgery codeine to ambiguous-looking vitamins with tap water.

Because life is funny, or because life is a miracle, Dad came home from work a few hours early. His client fired him because he could tell Dad disliked him. He found my sister lying in his clean, dry bathtub, a pink froth bubbling from her nose and mouth.

He told me this story much later. He told it as if he forgot whom he was talking to. But it was his story, the one he held and recited in his mind endlessly, unwillingly. The one he sometimes just had to say aloud—maybe he hoped that the words would finally disintegrate for good once he let them leave his mouth.

He told me how he stood there in the bathroom with his daughter at his feet for nearly a full minute. How everything was so quiet, so still, that he forced himself to scream just to break through what he thought was the universe collapsing into a pinprick of star. How he went to Jane, searched her neck for a pulse and, once discovered, how he kept the weak, beating plum under his fingertips in wonderment. Snapping out of his awe, he shook her and begged her to wake up. He doesn’t really remember the rest, but he called the ambulance, his hands still coated in Jane’s foamy spit, and rode with her to the hospital. He watched them pump her stomach. He saw the contents laid out on a metal tray; pills misappropriated in his mind as wet jewels.

I knew something was wrong when no one picked me up from camp that day. A boy who doesn’t like me because I couldn’t do the rope course or play flag-football was forced by his mother to offer me a ride home. I used to keep a house key around my neck so I let myself in. Because no one was home I got to eat Pop Tarts for dinner, watch Casper cartoons, and work on my domino patterns without anyone threatening to knock them down.

At seven o’clock when the sun cast the living room in a such a way that it looked like we lived inside a tangerine, Dad called. He hoarsely told me what had happened, and that Auntie would come and stay with me. He and Mama would spend the night at the hospital with Jane.

Auntie arrived an hour later and shook her head a lot, as if the shaking would make her brain figure out Jane’s reasons.

“Did Jane have a boyfriend?” Auntie asked me.

“Sort of.” After the New Year Jane had dated a Shaw’s checkout boy for a few months. Our parents hated him. He skipped class all the time and spit tobacco into soda cans. Jane had loved him, but he left her by the time the snow melted.

“Does she have friends?”

“In a way.” Jane used to be really popular, but then a lot of her friends stopped coming around. She sometimes snuck out for parties with them, though.

I kept the television on but I wasn’t really watching it or thinking about it. I wasn’t thinking about anything, really. I just let the cartoons slip over my eyes. It was still Casper, still ghosts. Auntie told me to go to bed, and I got into bed. And I tried to sleep and I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep.

I went into Jane’s room. Her walls were covered with music posters she had bought at the mall. As I went to the shoebox where she kept her cassette tapes, Lou Reed, Kathleen Hanna, and Iggy Pop stared down at me. I felt as though they were hoping to see Jane instead and I wanted more than anything to be her, for them. Not just for them, but for my parents, too, if ever Jane was truly gone.

I found the Nirvana tape we had listened to at Auntie’s, but I did not want to leave her room just then. It felt like museum—everything was just as she had left it. Her bed kept the shape of her and the pillow smelled like her clover shampoo. The little things on her dresser, crusted nail polishes and chipped unicorn figurines she used to collect, remained lined up. I touched everything carefully, searching for what her fingertips remembered.

Her shoes were not arranged, but scattered about the floor. I found a pair of purple high heels. I put my bare feet into them, left stab marks in the carpet as I went to the mirror. I allowed myself to be fascinated by the reflection for only a few seconds before I leapt from my sister’s shoes.

I took the tape to my room, put it in my old Fischer Price cassette player and planned to listen to that song until I understood everything about Jane, but I fell asleep before that could happen.

For the first week Jane was in the hospital, Mama spoke no English. No one in my family had learned much Polish, so none of us knew what she was saying. It was like a zombie movie; she moved slowly, her skin turned into a dull gray, and she spoke in guttural moans.

Dad told us that, once she came to America twenty years ago, she left her mother tongue in her mother country. She needed, he said, to a draw a line between her two lives. She took classes and read every bit of English she could, everything from Huck Finn to supermarket tabloids. She gave us American names and only spoke Polish when she was mad enough at us that her mind couldn’t keep up with her mouth.

Though she spoke English very well, she could never loose her accent. She was afraid that it spoke louder to Americans than her words. People often smiled politely at her, nodding, waiting for their chance to ask, “So, where did you immigrate from, honey?”

She learned that no matter how many issues of InStyle she read she would never belong here. And so she saw many of the faults with America she hadn’t seen when she was a new bride picking out generic baby names. But the line was drawn and she would not speak Polish. That is, not until her daughter, her daughter who knew only English, who hated polka but loved grunge, hated tales of the village, but loved stories of Kate Moss’ exploits, tried to kill herself. Only when all her visions of the good life had fully disintegrated, could she speak Polish.

She sat at Jane’s bedside, rolling her daughter’s fingers between her own, and letting words pour out more rapidly and surely than she ever could in English. I think that none of us actually knew that she had that many words in her. But of course she did. Of course she did.

“I don’t understand, Mom. I don’t understand,” Jane would repeat, tears welling in her eyes. Even in the pysch ward of the state hospital Jane still lined her eyes in dark kohl.

Dad became the quiet one. I’ve tried to imagine what exactly he felt in that week and the months to come. But I cannot. What it must have been like to not only have the possibility of loosing your child, but to know it was their choice.

And so, wordlessly he filled her room with flowers and teddy bears bought at the hospital gift shop. He bought her Crunch bars and Jujubees. He held her chilly hand, or hugged her gingerly, as if he were afraid of squeezing the weak pieces of life from her.

Jane sat there in the hospital bed, making a coffin of that sweet-smelling room. She looked amazed to still be here and at times her eyes seemed empty. On one of my visits I realized that rather than empty, they were just drinking everything in, savoring all details. Hopeful at my discovery, I talked to her about happy things, in part because I didn’t know what else to say. She nodded and smiled at all the right times. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so like Dad, I held onto hers.

On one of the earlier visits I asked a question no one had yet dared to.

“Why did you do that?”

She was quiet for a long time, and then she said, “Because I’m really, really sad.”

“That’s a stupid reason. Nothing was even wrong with your life.”

“Whatever, you don’t know me,” she said. We were both quiet for a little while, and then I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. I used to cry all the time when I was little, like if I tripped or got picked last for T-ball, and the kids at school called me a baby. So I tried to never cry. And yet.

“Owen, please don’t cry,” Jane said even though she was, too. Some of the black makeup melted away from her eyes in streaks.

“It’s just that, well you know that part of sleep when you’re not having any dreams? That part is the best part and I wanted it to be like that always.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. She shrugged.

My father resumed his position as driver on the way home. Jane had barely spoken all afternoon; she just kept playing with her hair.

Looking out the window, she said, “First, Auntie’s cells will turn into a liquid to feed the bacteria. Bacteria breed more bacteria and she’ll start to smell terrible.”

“Jane, now’s really not the time,” Mama said, shifting in the passenger seat. But Jane continued.

“The bacteria create gas and her body will balloon, getting even fatter. There will be worms and maggots, of course. Everything inside her will be a soup. Her brain will pour out of her ears and mouth.”

“That’s enough, Jane!” Mama shouted. “Is this what they’re teaching you in these schools? Owen, is it?”

“No, Jane’s just a freak.”

“I swear, in America you don’t love your dead, but you love your death! Who ever heard of crying for a dead rock star? Who ever heard of killing yourself for one?” Then, to no one it particular, “This place is going to murder my babies!”

The car was silent for a while.

“Because Auntie was embalmed it will take decades for her bones to disintegrate. But the last organ to go will be her uterus. Funny, she never got use of it in life, either.”

At that my father spun the wheel, bringing the car to the side of the highway. He slammed on the brakes and we all lurched forward and back. Mama and I were both whimpering.

Dad smacked the wheel with the flat of his hand, leaned his head back and cried with no tears. Just his mouth open like a fledgling bird, aching for something.

“Jane, Jane, my Jane, why?” he choked out, his whole body shuddering.

I looked to my sister but she had covered her face with her hands. My father got out of the car and crossed the guardrail into the woods. He looked thin and broken, sad in his wrinkled funeral suit.

Jane got out of the car and went after him.

“Come, Owen. Sit on my lap,” Mama said once the car was empty. I climbed to the front seat, and curled into my mother’s lap, though I was much too big even then. After about ten minutes, we saw Jane and Dad walking up the tree-clogged hill to the car. His arm was around her shoulders. I stayed in Mama’s lap and we drove home that way.

Later, I asked Jane what she said to Dad. I thought maybe she’d talked about how our souls become stars pinpricking the bluish-black sky like in The Lion King. But she said, “I just told him I was sorry for it all and that I love him very much.”

And then she looked at me, with those eyes I used to wish were my own, and said, “I told him I didn't want to die anymore. And he believed me."

Ryan Teitman

I randomly found this Indiana University MFA student's poetry and I'm really happy I did:

Prayer to Saint Anthony, Finder of Lost Things

I have lost: churches cupped in my hands, the moon drowned in a glass, pocket watches tied to tree stumps, watchdogs swimming in lakes of whiskey, hungry fingers to the night’s saw teeth. Keep those. Please find my hearts, those thousand knotted plums fled from my body. Return the small one in the pit of my stomach, worn smooth as marble. Return the one in my left hand that beats with the stroke of a hammer. Return the cilia-pricked one in my ear that hears the memories of animals. Return the one in my knee that sings like a bellows. The one in my wrist that stutters my pulse like a skipping record. The one in my right hand that spins sand into glass. The one in my eye that plucks the streets from the city. The one in my tongue that shakes the sea from the shoreline. Return the one in my heart that builds ships in a bottle, with its small surgeon hands.

Ode, Elegy, Aubade, Pslam

1

The songbird that escapes

from a burning house

will build its nest

in the shape of a cage.

2

This is one thing

we know: song begs

for the places that make it

grow from seed to starling,

3

places that put the heart's hemlock

in an empty rowboat

and heave it from the shore.

4

We only praise what we cannot

keep: violin strings berried with rain,

teacups overflowing with brandywine,

radios sickened with static.

5

Glass tossed out with the tide

will come back smoother and stranger,

but never to the same person.

6

This is something we want

to know. The woman in love

never touches her ears.

7

The man in his house is always lost

without her.

8

Morning pulls light

from the dark like a boy

hoisting a trout from the lake

by its clean, pink gills.

9

When the woman escapes

from a burning house

she will know the path of the wind,

10

how it writes its scripture

in peach blossoms blown

into a baby's empty pram.

11

She'll feel it compose its words

against her body, against the night,

against the water, in an endless, artless psalm.

Smut

(This is fictional and yet it still makes people think badly of me.)

Kai wanted to traipse from motel to motel like an outlaw. She wanted the frantic haircut in a gas station bathroom, the alias with a name that isn’t her own, and for the mouth of her suitcase to always drool blouses. She liked the dark sunglasses of it, the all-night truck stops, and the ribbons of freeways stretching out, always leading away.
Instead, this motel is just a bus ride from her house, and she’s isn’t going anywhere. Just sits on the slippery bedspread, the one stitched with periwinkles, telling herself, There are dirtier things, There are dirtier things.
She’s been having dreams where she calls for ambulances but when they get there, nothing is wrong. It’s just her, barefoot in a dingy nightgown, attempting to say she’s sorry. There are other dreams too: Kai robbing a bodega at knifepoint, Kai drowning kittens in tin pails, Kai seducing you at parties, then leaving you bruised and alone. Each morning she wakes up with stones quaking in her stomach, as if shame could solidify.

Jackson has yellow teeth but beautiful hands. He and Kai sip cream sodas bought from the motel’s rusted vending machine. Everything in the room has its pair: twin beds, twin sinks, twin water-stained highball glasses. They are filming a movie, Jackson’s movie, Eros Circus, and Kai is the star.
“It’s too bad we don’t have a couch in here, like the pros. But it’ll be great. You look ravishing, darling.”
Hers is the sumptuous body, ripened with butter cakes drowned in plum sauce, or overly sweetened lemon tea. She is not fat, but she is full. Her hunger has unwittingly formed a body whose symptom for others is lechery. Her body is her only option, as she is frequently silent—not for lack of things to say, but for lack of opportunity or allowance to say them. Her body speaks. So when Jackson says, “You are ravishing,” what he really means is, “You look ravenous.”
The room, with its carpet like rock-sand, watery paintings of seagull beach-scenes, and moth-eaten yellow curtains, starts to close in on them so the pair go outside. They sit by the swimming pool, green in spite of the chlorine heavy in the air. They keep looking through the fence to see if the others will arrive soon. But the July night is falling glassy-blue and it’s hard to see through the bougainvillea growing in the chain link.
Eventually a battered Chevy shakes the gravel and twin men get out. Both are tall and thin with wavy blonde hair. One wears a polyester Superman costume, the cape limply spread across his shoulders. The other is Clark Kent, in a gray suit and tortoise shell glasses.
“No, no, no!” Jackson shouts running toward them. “I asked for conjoined freak twins. This is a circus, not some boyhood, comic strip fantasy!”
Kai looks at her own costume: all ballet slippers and trapeze artist sequins, and laughs.
Clark Kent sheepishly apologizes and Superman stares at Kai. They all go inside the room and the men set up the camera equipment and Kai paints on more lipstick until she looks like someone else.
Kai never wanted to be herself. She does not just want a change. She wants to be an other.
A knock on the door reveals a stout woman with gelled hair and a eyeliner beard.
“Ah ha! Our cunning linguist has arrived,” Jackson says. The dyke rolls her eyes and calls him a fruit. She is the bearded lady.
“Does anyone want to do a line of K? I cooked plenty last night,” Jackson says, producing a small bag of ketamine. Everyone in the room nods and Kai finds a coaster for him. The coaster has a picture of a jungle bird none of them have seen in real life. Jackson cuts a few lines and pulls a straw from his pocket.
“Our movie star, my applejack, you first,” he says to Kai. She whisks her hair away and vacuums two lines.
“Easy,” Superman says. “You don’t want to fall into a K-hole.”
Everyone snorts one line or just a bump, which makes her feel greedy.
“Guess we should get naked then,” the dyke says.
“There’s the spirit.” Jackson says, lifting his camera, “Ready, aim, fire on Eros Circus.”
“Don’t you mean, lights, camera, action?” Superman asks.
“There’s really little difference in this movie. Now remember, you are actors. Here, in this motel room, you are not you, now.”
There is the plot of course, but we’ve heard it before. The trapeze artist and Superman are in love and he owns her, but his brother, Clark Kent, loves her too. And then there is the pesky bearded lady, always trying to lure the trapeze artist into her tent. Under this Big Top, the sunlight splitting into pink and white stripes, will they find a way to figure it out, to love and fuck her all at once? How many times can Kai dissect her heart?
Many times, it seems. The ketamine kicks in just as they maneuver a four-way kiss. Kai learns that the world is made of layers, and each one opens like stage curtains on a loop. While three people undress her, she looks into a motel painting of a stormy sea. She is on that wave, going up and up, but it feels as though her stomach was left on the ocean floor.
Hands moving over her, hands crawling and skating with certainty, with a destination. She had wanted to be the sort of person who knew what to do with her hands. Everyone moves over her like maple syrup—they are translucent and shining golden. Superman stands over her, now just wearing his cape, and tightens her hair into his fist. She looks down at his cock and before she can make the connection of what it actually is, because nothing is connecting, it is in the back of her throat and he is telling her to keep her eyes open. With her eyes peeled she sees that the dyke’s cock is bigger than either of the twins, offensively big, really. It is the color of a creamsicle and is flecked with glitter.
Superman leaves her mouth, pulling out spit like moon thread, and he is replaced by Clark. Clark comes suddenly, like a toothpaste tube squeezed too hard. This lack of professionalism upsets Jackson, but the dyke saves the scene by rubbing it into a froth on their bodies.
Then it’s all hands and mouths, and noises. The syrup of the room turns into flames. All at once, everything is on fire, everything is burning. Not just their bodies, but the room too. The curtains eaten away by tongues of fire, each brick in the wall melting like sugar cubes. The fire catches onto the outer world, too. Trees on fire, birds aflame flying from them, cutting the night sky in a comet’s arch. Kai is on the smoldering ceiling, watching them tug at her body below. They are relentless.
“There are rubies in your stomach. They’re blue,” Clark Kent says to Kai. His pupils are gone.
“Then wouldn’t they be sapphires?” the dyke asks.
“No, they’re blue rubies. I need to get them out,” he dives into her. She still doesn’t know what to with her hands. If she did, she couldn’t do it anyway. She is lost in a K-hole, and she is the only one. She tries to move but her mind has frozen her neurons. Wiggling a toe is like lifting a cement block.
And Jackson is there with the camera, he is the ringmaster, he tells them what to do.
“Twins, put Kai between you both. Remember how much you love her, how you would do anything for her. There, that’s it. Perfect.”

With everyone pounding inside her at once: the dyke at her mouth, Superman at her ass, and Clark Kent in her cunt, everything falls away. The room gone, the twin beds with the twin boys gone. The motel, the street, this circle of sky, scratched at the edges by pine and telephone pole, all gone. The ten hands in the room catching fire like the birds. Their burning hands fly away from them, out the window that is no longer a window. Everything receding into itself, everyone’s ribs caving, puncturing their lungs, their last breaths escaping into the yellow ether of the singed curtains. Words too, and her name, dissolving like salt in sea. All this, until there are no words, and all she can do is scream so loud.
EEEEE eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee O,O,O,O.
They carry her to the bath and submerge her in cold water until the marrow soaks back into her bones and she finally stops screaming.

When Kai wakes up she is in the passenger seat of the Chevy, slipping down the highway through foggy dawn. Clark Kent is driving next to her humming quieter than a radio ever could. He has laid his wool jacket over her. She doesn’t know where they are going. She doesn't know if he'll stab her to death and scatter her from the open window, or if he’ll bring her to a river she’s never seen, and wash her off, sweetly. She doesn’t know what he will do to her, but she takes his hand in hers and holds it between her palms.
“How did you end up there, pretty girl?” Clark Kent asks.
He wants a justification that makes sense, a reason why she would do something like that. He wants her to say that maybe she was in that motel room because a bad man held her too close when she was still in diapers, that the rent is due tomorrow, or that she really is ravenous, hungry enough to pull things into her that aren’t her own. But her reasons aren’t problems, unless the absence of reasons is a problem.
“I was there, like you were there.” She drops his hand.
She’s materialized out of a biography that doesn’t exist. Not because it wasn’t written, but because the hand erased the words once they began to settle—like forgetting, like forgiveness.
“Your voice is beautiful. Like a song I haven’t heard in awhile,” he says.
They drive and drive, until suddenly—sunrise.

Some Sunday in April

I submitted this to Gangsters in Concrete the other day, and I like it a lot better than the short-short I wrote for Stork, which just came out. Plain face.

I’ve been feeling like an orphan lately. My clothes are worn and could use some patches. There’s always dirt behind my ears and no one there to take a bar of soap to them.

So I wander the city, looking for things.

Today the sidewalks are lined with lilies wrapped in cellophane and the buds on the trees are bursting yellow. I can feel a pollen paste sitting in the back of my throat. I stop at a pharmacy and debate over antihistamine pills for half an hour. I have pocket money from feeding an old woman’s cats. She has more than twenty and I’m allergic to them, too. She should really just pay me in these pink pills.

I buy a generic brand and two Cadbury eggs. I sit on the stone steps of a church and watch pastel families go in and out. I swallow the pills and lap the grainy cream from the chocolate shells.

A woman who looks a lot like my mother, all beige skirt and clean fingernails, stands on the steps to smoke a cigarette. I nearly tapped her on the shoulder, nearly cried out, “Well, take me home already!” I wanted to be in her arms, chewing ice clusters from a glass of too-cold milk, my head rising and falling against her lungs.

But I’m an orphan, so instead I decided to take a train somewhere.

Across from my seat there is a little boy sucking on a red lollipop, turning the cardboard stick into a wet pulp. He is an orphan too, I can tell. We send out these secret signals. I want to ask him if he’ll be my little brother, but then he starts making video game bleeps and beeps for no reason and jumping in his seat. I’m probably better off alone.

At each stop the driver says through the intercom, “Thank you for riding. Thank you so much. Have a beautiful day.” He seems so grateful for all these people whose faces he can’t even see.

I imagine him driving the train to his house, his family still in the yard, waiting for him. The sun is just setting and everything seems to be happening on the inside of a tangerine.

“Hiya daddy!” his grass-stained children will shout.

“Welcome home, sweetheart,” his perfumed wife will say.

And they’ll go inside, say prayers over lamb with mint jelly, and leave the tangerine to sleep in the icebox of moonlight.

I ride the train to the last stop. Instead of breaking from the tracks it just moves in reverse. So I get off at a stop I know and sleep on my friend’s couch.

Your Name is Katherine

Author's Note: (I've been reading too many theoretical author's notes in Critical Fictions. So apologies if I get lofty here.) This story is in second person. I know everyone has something against second person but it was truly the only facility I had to write this story. In workshop everyone thought it worked well, and felt it was distancing and personalizing all at once, which was what I was going for in this story. This story was so hard to tell because, though it is thinly veiled, it is ultimately nonfiction. The fictionalization came from second person and accurate details, both of which are sort of veils.

Your Name is Katherine

Your mother says she named you for Saint Katherine of Alexandria because she wanted you to marry someone grand. But it is also your mother’s name. You call her Kathy. When you were sixteen you renamed yourself Kit. That was four years ago. In that time you’ve done a lot of things. You moved out of the house and went to college. You worked the night shift in a 24-hour IHop. You went to Paris and smoked romantic cigarettes. You kissed a lot of boys, and some girls too, but that comes later.

Inside of you there’s a tumor but it isn’t cancer. For just a moment, and secretly, maybe you hoped it was cancer. You ran your fingers over this lump, the size of a grape, and thought about how your life could change. It would have been a reason to eat organic raw food and practice yoga. It would have been a reason to yell at people for no reason and they’d love you still. They’d love you more.

But none of that would happen. The tumor was benign. “A lipoma,” the doctor said. A hard deposit of fat clogging up that hole in the hipbone and compressing nerves. “Don’t worry! Even the thinnest people in the world can get them!” he sang and you half-expected him to give you a light punch in the arm. Kathy made the appointment to remove the tumor for later that month.

Back in the city you go to a friend’s party and drink gin and tonics and wish you had remembered to buy some limes. The host comes up to you and you touch his elbow. “Happy birthday, darling,” you shout, cutting through the music. Someone is playing the Stones, and the host thanks you and touches the satin on your dress. There are playing cards scattered on tables like dried leaves across a swimming pool. It feels like a movie—it’s always love in the movies, it’s always Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Then you realize you’re drunk. Your girlfriend, Bee, is drunk too. She’s in the bathroom throwing up, so you wipe her mouth and take her home, pull the covers up to her chin. That morning, in your favorite diner you eat raspberry pancakes and sip what must be instant coffee. The girl you love sits across from you, eating eggs.

When you get back to your apartment late that afternoon your bedroom is filled with orange light. Take in a lungful of this light, hold it in you, and let it rumble inside you like it’s always been there. Think of the tumor. Let it go.

Kathy hasn’t called in a week and some part of you knows she is drinking again. It doesn’t surprise you. Her sobriety has been a revolving door since she was your age.

After the morning of a different party (this one with Diet Coke and watermelon vodka, this one with Daft Punk and denim) you’re sleeping next to your girlfriend in the milky light of nine a.m. Your father calls you out of the blue, which he never does, and tells you Kathy had to be taken to detox in an ambulance.

“I’m sorry, Kit. We all know by now that this is your mother’s demon, and it’s a hard one to beat,” he says. This renaming of things is his ritual. It soothes him.

“How long has she been drinking for this time?” you ask. He sighs.

“It’s really hard to say.”

They watch television in separate rooms every night. During the day he’s an ear nose and throat doctor. He lives by the Hippocratic oath. Don’t harm. Never tell.

“Should I still come home for my operation? It’s in three days, I think.”

“Yeah, might as well come home. We’ll get this whole mess straightened out.” All of his words come in a groggy exhale, as if he was sleeping.

When you hang up, Bee asks if you are okay. You’ve told her about Kathy. Bee understands that nothing about Kathy’s drinking is reasonable. Bee sits on the outside, while you, under the warm beery breath, try to find definitive reasons Kathy bounces from sober to drunk every other month.

It’s because I’ve left the house and she has no one to mother. It’s because alcoholism is as regular and familial as telephone lines. It’s because I’ve told her things I wished I hadn’t. Until you inevitably arrive at the only grain you can attempt accept as logical: the dopamine must move like syrup in her brain, reaching the synapses much too slowly. Instead of waiting it out, she opens a bottle of wine, and then another.

You’ve told Bee these things because you want someone to scoop you out of the river and dress you in warm clothes again. You want to be in her arms, drinking tomato soup from a blue bowl, your head rising and falling against her lungs. She’ll tell you it’s okay to cry. You probably wouldn’t cry, but it’d be nice to know it was ok.

You want something to add up to an answer you can swallow. There was the Christmas Eve Kathy promised you a sober holiday, a sober new year, a sober forever. Christmas morning you tried to wake her up and she was still drunk from the night before. The presents remained in shopping bags in the attic.

Then, on your first day of college she helped you move into the dorms and pressed every button in the elevator. The other elevator riders tried not to laugh when she flung you into her arms and squealed, “I’m so sad you’re leaving!” Later she passed out on the common room couch.

There was the time you came home for the summer and had to find her sponsor’s number hand-written in a copy of One Day At A Time. You called because Kathy hadn’t left her bed in a week, except to go to the liquor store. She smelled metallic, her hair was coated and slick and she never stopped crying but you couldn’t understand what she was saying. Only that it was a hundred personal betrayals all spelling out I need you. Can’t you see that I need you?

During one white wine summer she watched the news everyday about a missing little girl. She cried for that little girl, squeezed your hands in hers and slurred, “Oh Kit! I couldn’t imagine losing you. I just couldn’t imagine it!” You can imagine losing her.

In the car, your father tells you that they wanted to keep her until Tuesday, but she got them to let her out today, a Sunday, because she wanted to hold your hand during the operation.

“Oh, God,” you say and slide on dark sunglasses. It’s four o’clock in the dead of winter and there are no leaves on the trees. “They should have kept her.”

“I guess we figured two days wouldn’t make much difference.”

When your father first picked you up at your apartment he turned the car radio volume down to an inaudible five or six on the dial. Neither of you are brave enough to turn it back up so you make the journey in silence. She probably told the detox center that it was a major operation she couldn’t miss. It’s not supposed to be. It a novocain surgery and you’ll be walking that very day. They’ve just got to open you up an inch and get under the skin, pull the tumor out.

Here is the town you left behind. Here are the old houses and older oaks. Here is the house you grew up in. Inside it are the things you left: holes in the walls from hanging your paintings, a fish bowl with dried algae, and a stuffed pink elephant named Galileo.

You find Kathy in the laundry room, wearing pajamas. She is crying and she cries more when she hugs you. Her bones feel like splinters in your arms and she is shaking. You ask her the usual questions: how she’s feeling (shitty), how long she’s been drinking for this time (since October, a little less than four months), and you want so badly to tell her to stop doing laundry. She’s sorting the lights and the darks and talking about a young man who said in group, “‘Ever since the first time I did crack every cell in my body oozed for more’—wait, maybe he didn’t say ‘ooze’. But that’s what it’s like.”

“Ache?” you offer.

“How are you? I didn’t even ask,” Kathy says.

You smile because it doesn’t matter how you are. Tell her you’re good.

“I can tell you’re good because you look it. Did you dye your hair?”

“No.”

“Ah, that means it’s getting dark like mine.” This makes her happy.

In the refrigerator there seems to be nothing but meat and molding cheeses. You’ve been a vegetarian for four years. You have pistachios and buttered toast for dinner while you watch reality television. As you’re sitting there, your back has never hurt more than it does now. But you can hear your mother wailing upstairs and bumping into things. She must have mixed the medications the doctors gave her with whatever wine she hid in the house. You’re afraid to go upstairs so you tell your father to help her.

You know that tomorrow’s surgery isn’t an option. You’re afraid to have them open you up, but mostly you want this thing out of you. Your mother has them, small ones in her arms. “Feel it, it’s right there,” she said after your doctor appointment. But you refuse. “I’ll take your word for it,” you tell her. The doctor said lipomas are genetic.

When you get bored that night, you attempt to make macarons like the ones you adored on the Champs-Élysées last year. When Kathy was your age she wanted to be a translator in French publishing houses. But she had to leave college because of her drinking, and she’s never left the country.

Kathy stumbles down the stairs and asks what you are doing. You tell her and try to give her a spoonful of the almondy batter. She refuses. She’s always on a diet. You used to always be on diets together, even though neither of you have much weight to lose.

“Mom, should you go back upstairs? Back to bed?” She’s standing there, swaying.

“You said that if I ever drank again you’d never trust me or love me or talk to me again.” She’s still crying, hasn’t stopped crying.

“When did I say that?”

“I don’t know, two years ago. You said you wouldn’t love me or trust me!” the words gurgle out.

“I was young. I’m sorry. I don’t even remember saying that.”

“You said it!”

“I didn’t mean it. I love you. I wouldn’t take love away from you.”

In high school you took a psychology class. In it you learned about unconditional love—no matter what someone does, you love them anyways. It’s what parents should have for their children. Last summer, you sat next to your drunk mother in a lawn chair, attempting to get as tan as her. You don’t love me anymore. I can tell, she said when you gave her a short answer to some question. That’s not true, you said. A girl always loves her mother.

No, it ebbs and flows, until one day it stops, she said, waving her hands in the air.

You couldn’t understand this, or why she said it. Your love for her has always been homeostatic.

Your father is upstairs with Kathy. He comes down now and then, shakes his head. “She’s crazy, she’s going crazy. She just repeats the same things over and over. I’m sorry, Kit. I really am. She never should have left there.” Your father is older, and Kathy was his receptionist when they met. When he married this bright, young thing he couldn’t have expected this.

“What about my surgery?”

“I could take you.”

“I’m too nervous to do it without her. If she stays sober for a while, I’d still like her to take me,” you say. You’re not angry with her. That ended years ago.

“We can try to get an appointment for next week. We’ll just have to keep in touch about if Kathy’s going to meetings or not. I’ll bring you back to your apartment tomorrow.”

You hug him goodnight and go to your old bedroom. You call Bee and she asks how everything is going. You can’t tell her, not yet, you don’t have the words. So you say, “Please, tell me what you did today. Tell me every little thing. Just talk.” And she does. She talks and talks and you listen to the thread of her voice until you fall asleep and wake up to the static of telephone lines.

Last year you told your mother you fell in love with a girl. Up until that moment, you believed Kathy understood everything about people and about you. Kathy always told you, “it takes all kinds in this world.” But her silence that day made you this strange, weird girl who possibly would not marry someone as grand as your namesake dictates. She can’t understand why you’re like this. “I thought you told me everything,” Kathy said.

The truth is, you were surprised too when you found yourself in a stairwell asking Bee to kiss you. Was this just what you’ve always done—make friends into lovers because you want everything from anyone? And yet, possibly you were meant to kiss this girl in that stairwell. Fibers of you ached for it, and not only for the kiss. You ached to diverge from the heavily wooded path you saw yourself following blindly. The one with brambles that stick to your clothing like mundane annoyances, rather than the quick drop-offs and sharp corners you felt would be a welcome alternative.

“You’re only going to hurt her in the end,” Kathy had said. “You’ll find some boy and she’ll have been lied to that whole time.”

Because that’s what you do, you take the things you love and you carve them a new face with a dull blade, just to leave your mark. When you were little you threw a rock at another child in the schoolyard. Your mother said you had a mean streak running through you, and you imagined a bolt of lightning.

The day after you told Kathy you were a girl who likes boys and girls she relapsed. She had been sober for almost a eight months, one of her longest stretches, and you ruined it. You did.

“I’ve got nothing against it! But being gay, or bi, or whatever, just makes life harder,” she after refilling her glass for the fourth time.

“Kathy, the hardest part of all this has been you.”

In a fit of hunger this morning you drive to the grocery store. You find yourself standing in the frozen food aisle next the dinners, for ten minutes. There are goose bumps on your arms. Do you want mushroom masala with wheat pasta? Or black bean mango rice? It feels like forever since you’ve eaten real food and your heart is fluttering from having only cups of coffee for breakfast. Indecisive, you walk to the produce section. Under the florescent lights you marvel at the mathematically stacked fruit, at all those colors. Each orange seems perfect until you pick it up. Consider an avocado. One summer you ate a tomato and avocado salad everyday for lunch. You were beautiful.

Eventually you get cucumber sushi and a carton of raspberries. Your back hurts. You feel plain and empty. You imagine that everyone can see the hole in your torso, can look right through you into the lines of cash registers. That afternoon, your father takes you back to your apartment and you and Bee watch foreign films together all week and go to theme parties all weekend (cults of the 1970’s, white trash and mustaches). At one, with a fake mustache scratching your nose, you see a boy you used to sleep with. You catch up with him for a few minutes until you and Bee have to dash for a train. Each morning you wake up with your head swimming until it is time to go home again for the operation.

This time it is really happening. Kathy is driving you to the outpatient surgery center. It is raining, but it shouldn’t be. It’s February and this should be snow. Kathy is trying to be positive—she has not had a drink in five days and she’s convinced herself that things are going to be different this time.

“Do you think you want to go to lunch after, sweetie?” she asks, exhaling a stream of smoke into the rain through a cracked window.

“I’m not sure if I’ll feel like eating after.”

“You’re still nervous?” she asks and you nod. “You’ll be okay. I’m here.” She touches your hair.

In the waiting room she tries to make small talk. She’s proud of your grades and proud of your internship. She asks how you and Bee are.

“We have our ups and downs, but we’re mostly good.”

“I can tell you don’t like talking about her with me.”

It’s true, you don’t, even though you know Kathy is trying to accept things. Still, you tell Kathy you’re just tired.

When the nurse brings you to a small room she tells you to take your pants off. You didn’t realize this would happen, and your underwear is pink and lacy and possibly dirty. She wraps you in a sheet and asks if you’ve eaten.

“No, I was too nervous,” you say. So the nurse gets you a can of warm Pepsi and two graham crackers held in a Kleenex. You need something in your stomach—they don’t want you to faint. The doctor comes in and lays you on your stomach.

As he washes your hip he and the nurse speak to you sweetly. You’re being so brave, so very brave, their voices seem to say. You’ve stopped listening. You’re concentrating on the needle going in, trying to numb you. You keep pouting until the doctor says he cannot give you anymore novocain. You skin doesn’t feel like your skin anymore—it feels like rubber. Then the operation starts. You hear your skin being cut, then there are a lot of slimy noises and squishes. It feels like he is trying to pull the flesh right off of your body. You’ve gone white with the idea that you are open back there, that he’s got his hands inside you. You’re moaning like you have before, in sangria hazes when your body crashes into another’s so fast you swear you’d both ignite, and that’s embarrassing. The nurse pulls the hair from your face with a purple gloved hand.

“Almost done, hang in there, Kit,” the doctor says and you think he is stitching you up then. You feel him put the gauze dressings on and he tells you to stand. You rise from the table, still unsure if you really can. You body feels new and open. The pair leaves the room so you can put your pants back on. The nurse comes back in to wash the instruments. You see she washes two shot glasses and you find that funny.

“Will I get the tumor back?” you ask. It’s yours, after all.

“Oh, no. We send it to the lab and they biopsy it, just in case. But lipomas are rarely cancerous. Nothing to worry about.” She is washing scissors now.

When you get to the waiting room there is nothing but your coat in one of the stained chairs. You take the elevator down and walk towards the car. Kathy is there, smoking a cigarette.

“I was just about to come up! Hold on, I’ve got to go give them the co-pay,” she says, tossing you the car keys. You sit in the car, listening to nothing but the rain on the sunroof. The words That was awful keep playing in your mind and you start to weep. That was awful and my mom left me. You feel young for thinking this.

When Kathy is back in the car she says to you, “Are you glad you got it over with? No more nerve pain?” You tell her no and she sees you crying.

“Aw, baby, what’s wrong?”

“That was horrible and disgusting and you weren’t there!” you cry, snot running out of your nose.

“I was about to come up, I swear. Katherine, come on, I love you. I was about to come up.”

“Fine. Just take me to my place.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come home? Aren’t you hungry?” she asks and hugs you, but it pulls at your back and you yelp. Think about the bottles on the windowsills in your mother’s home. Some were red, and some were blue, but most were white. Light streamed out through them and always looked so wrong. The shadows created phantoms stretching across the floors. You want to be back in your apartment where the light is red like watery blood because the sun hits the windowpanes just so.

“No, I want to go to my apartment.”

So she takes you home and you sleep for a long, long time.

During the next few days, you feel angry. The tumor is gone, but you still feel the doctor’s hands inside you. It hurts to move and walk, and you’re afraid that if you lean too far forward, you’ll split open. Bee comes over and hugs you like your bones are eggshells. “I don’t want to hurt your little back,” she says. It’s late and she’s drunk from dinner beers with her friends.

You’re annoyed at everything she does (the stumbling, the rambling) and when you both crawl into bed that night you don’t move to kiss her. If she kisses me first then this is real and I’m not making it up.

But she doesn’t kiss you, and she’s afraid to touch you in case it will split your wound apart. You flop around the bed, searching for a comfortable position.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” it sounds like you’re shouting.

You drift in and out of sleep until three a.m. when you find yourself in the kitchen, peeling the skins from oranges and eating ice cream off a fork. Bee woke up to the noise and joins you in the yellow lozenge of refrigerator light.

“What are you doing up?”

“Do you love me?” you ask her, shutting the fridge.

“I love you so much,” Bee says. You want so badly to believe her. You want so badly for something to be concrete, to be definitive. No more of this floating in the light of rooms painted in red.

So you ask, “How much?” longing to quantify something there are no words for. You are going to wear her out, and you know this. She knows it too. She throws the orange peels in the trash, puts the fork in the sink and brings you back to bed. She kisses you, silently snapping the twigs of your heart, possibly trapping burrs and brambles in your sweater.