I Have Forgotten Her Face

 

 

Sleep would be welcomed, should be, if I didn’t know what it brought. Stay awake, I tell myself, stretching wide my exhausted eyes in the dark. Just three more hours till I throw back blankets anyway, just stay awake, stay awake.

Even when I need to, I won't sleep. It’s too heavy, and my body too dense. Motionless. Nearly dead between my lace-trimmed sheets, trapped in a sleep-paralysis brought on by nightmares. Not the cat-and-mouse chasing dreams of childhood, no, these are a different sort of ‘mare where the faceless dead come and whisper on my neck. Where they lead me by hand through dense forests of brush, fog, and trees whose ancient bark is abrasive against my ankles, whose bark removes pieces of my skin as I struggle through their maze. In these dreams the dead come, one at a time, and turn their backs to the sun to reveal to me their shadowed faces.  They direct me toward motes to row across, and riverbeds lined with stiff black plants for me to walk through. These are my dreams. No dinosaur, no monster to tear me apart; just the stiff fingertips of a baby brushing mine in a creek bed.

And that rock, that fucking rock. That anchored, stubborn rock. Large enough to keep only one alive against the rising water; that kept me alive, held me just above the breaking, raging whitecaps on the gray sea.

They’re all gone.

Every last one. Swallowed whole by the slippery, storming water. And I, with squinted ocean-stained vision and a mouth stretched wide, black haired and naked, bearing only my chest above water, was good for nothing. Not one rescue. It’s coming for me, too.

I am soaked. Black strands catch in my open mouth, over the slope of my nose in a wicked, whipping way – the hand of the wind turning my own body against me.

It’s coming for me too.

But still I wait belly up on my rock, my lungs stretching, expanding, sucking in air and salty water together. Almost completely submerged now, the air that touches my chest is cold and I want to scream into the rain, but I only think instead, “he was just a boy. Just a boy. A tiny, tiny boy.” He smiled at me once, all teeth, large and white, gleaming. He was just a boy.

It will take me soon, too.

But, as ever, I wake in my final moment. And I remember the fingers. The baby's fingers, the boy’s fingers, the old woman's fingers. My chest is still raising in resistance to the storm, cold but no longer wet and bare. The angry surge in my belly that wanted to cry out the names of all the lost, of all the faceless and formless ghosts that linger in the crevices of my face, is still there but there are no names suitable so instead I cry, hiding under my white lace-trimmed sheets. Guttural sobs, exhausted sobs – those are their names.

This is why I don’t sleep.  This is why I can’t look at them directly, only a little to the side.

I cannot row this far.

It has come for me.

Overlook

There is nothing nice about death, nothing pretty or beautiful. There is no peace, just stillness. Stillness is loneliness. Stillness is loneliness.

Hills, mountains. They were small mountains.  Small mountains with paved roads leading halfway to the peak, small mountains with a footpath of dirt and pebble leading through forest.  Here the trees keep their green leaves year round to shade the mountain, and my shady blonde hair was caught in the corner of my mouth, tangled across my face, hooked around my nose. That mountain-climbing wind knows how to share its affections, welcomed or not.

Up here I am near them all. Up here I can think around them, not have to call them by name.

I think about director Tony Scott stepping of a bridge in LA two days ago. I think of Speedy Peterson’s unidentifiable face, frozen with frown, still missing his sister even in death.  In bending for a handful of pebbles, I lose my balance but recover just enough to throw them too hard over the edge of the mountain ledge, my fingertips stained with chalky brown dirt. Up here I can think of everyone else’s deaths. I can pluck the blooms from the trees, I can spit groans and screams and hear the sister mountain’s response.

There is nothing passive in me now. There is nothing passive in this voice. I know what that earthless breeze feels like.

These men have names.

Oslo is a Small Town

Found some old character sketches, and decided to re-work them. I'm anxious to see who these people really are.

Camille was the middle child of three and while most would say she was bored, the truth of it was that she didn’t really care too much about the way the rest of the world saw her. She loved the sun, and never wore sunglasses or shaded her eyes with her sweaty summer palm when she looked right into its mid afternoon gleam. Her baby brother claimed this made her brave, but really she just hated her face with large plastic rims around her eyes. And on really hot days she would cut the bottom of her pants and stretch her limbs across the pavement so each little pore in her skin making contact with the rough gravel would absorb its heat, would nearly burn. She said this was her favorite way to spend her evenings in the summer. I told her she was crazy, the biggest freak I ever met with Led Zeppelin playing too many decades too late on her stereo, perched right above her head. She had a way of pressing the back of her palm to her check to cover her blush when I said that to her, and as she turned to me I had to fight the burning of the asphalt on my back. “Thanks” she said with such a slow smile that my back would go cold. I wanted nothing more than to kiss the corner of her mouth when I caught a bit of happiness take form on her lips.

Almost as much as she loved the sun, she loved the thick black and grey clouds that rolled over one another from the western wastelands to her parent’s eastern home. And when I stood up to find cover from the rain, she stayed there, sprawled like a dead animal, belly up on her drive and let the rain come for her – let it take her. She stood then, too, and let her feet twist and step in a sing song dance-way to meet me head on. Her arms swaying, her lips heavenward, releasing a tiny hum that was nearly drowned out by the sound of her favorite Zeppelin, being drowned out by the downpour, and the occasional thunder roll. The lightening seemed to find a way to hold onto each of her white strands of hair, blonder than anything I had ever seen naturally. And with each of her glimmering dance steps, the electrical light trickled down her white jaw, hanging a moment before falling from her chin, her arms, in a white glistening sort of way. When she reached me, she bent over just close enough that I could have reached forward and found that tiny place in the corner of her mouth with my own. But she spread her lips and in the tiniest voice called me a coward.

I knew she was playing. She was always playing; so much so that I believed she didn’t always know the difference between Her World and The World. Or that, perhaps, to her they were one solid thing. Either way, I could do nothing but slide my fingers behind her ear and find the small curve of her neck and watch her breathing change. Her eyes closed a moment and she laughed her tiny slow laugh, the one where the left corner of her mouth twitched upward. She would pull away, almost abruptly as if to say she was almost mine. She would never let her face down, no, not her guard. That was her charm, her unattainable bliss.

Sawdust

Oh, joyful experiences, wonderful stories.

I hear he has a girlfriend now. One he likes so much he hasn’t even fucked yet. I hear he is happy. At least, that’s what his brother tells me.

I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to believe him, either of them.

I want to hear he is eternally damaged. I want to hear him whimper in his sleep; mouth closed, a small audible whine long and soft playing in his throat. I want to see his limbs twitch, a finger, a bicep, jerk violently when he dreams. I want to be part of his visions, I want him to see my face, all wet and white and haunting him. I want him to hear me begging for him to stop, I want him to feel my weak muscles fight his, I want him to see my mouth turned downward and bleeding in the corners. I want him to suffer, every night of his life. I want him to be sorry, so I can forgive.

I want him to be broken, just like me.

But he is different now. He likes her so much he hasn’t fucked her yet. That’s what his brother tells me.

It has just passed our two-year mark; two years since we screen printed t-shirts in the unfinished room. Sawdust coated the soles of my shoes, a pad, slippery on the cement floor. Escaping was impossible. Two years have passed, now, two years since he tripped my feet from beneath me. Two years since he moved on top of me like he owned me, like I was a small bunny he wanted to cradle silently in his arms, one palm over nose and mouth, perfectly still only for a moment before struggling for a way out. Two years since his palm had me by the throat, since he twisted my strands of hair around his fingers and pulled them out, one by one. Two years since he had me between his legs before I could even start crying. Sawdust chips, golden, blended with my hair. On my back, indecipherable patterns on my black sweater – a starburst of sawdust. He held me by the wrists.

The room smelled like sawdust. His skin smelled like sawdust, dampened. Bestial breathing.

I cried.
‘Look what you make me do,’ he said. My shoulders ached. My knuckles ached. My skull ached. My thighs ached. I realized I was paralyzed, and when I’d stand, my body would leave an impression in the sawdust blanket beneath me.
I cried.
He asked me for a ride home. It was supposed to rain. He didn’t want to walk in the rain. He hated the rain.
I cried. I wanted to kill him.
In my backyard, in the middle of the night, I took scissors to my hair and cut out the sawdust smell. I hate short hair. I only want to get rid of the sawdust.

But he’s different.
He has a girlfriend.
And he hasn’t fucked her yet.
At least, that’s what we’ve been told.

He is supposed to suffer too. He is supposed to want to slice open his gut, pull out a train of insides every time he passes that building.

I threw out my clothes with my hair and I shaved off thin layers of my skin.
Just to get the sawdust smell off of me.

We're All Rotting Anyway, In Our Skeleton Leafed Costumes

Wrote a freewrite the other day about my fear for my health. Working on polishing it into a poem, here is draft two. I drew off an old story I wrote a few years ago about a tree for help with the portion of the poem that regards the death of that particular tree. Enjoy, friends.


We're All Rotting Anyway, In Our Skeleton Leafed Costumes

My insides are twisting, my organs rotting.
“We don’t know the cause,” the doctor said, “how to cure you, either.
We have some primitive ways of treatment though.” That’s one.
How about two?
Three.
This body is deforming.
How many more organs can I lose before I am no longer human?
My body told me; I told them.
Who would listen to a 17 year old girl when there are
experts
in the room?
I can feel this body dying all around me.

My tree was rotting on the inside. True, I had known for years.
That just never changed the way I looked for her silhouetted shadow for every kind of comfort.
She had been planted all wrong; an up-close inspection of the state of her leaves,
her bark
reported her quality of life was not quality at all.
“Its roots were never able to spread out,” father said, “they just dug straight down, spiral-like,”
and I imagined her great tentacles
thick and hard,
drying up in the rich wetness of earth below me.
I watched her –
steady and unmoving, dry in the season’s breeze.
Her leaves, brilliant shades of red and orange in their diseased dying hour;
her leaking fluids thickening, grown sickly in their decent of her crumbling body;
her once strong figure lost of its harbored companions as easily as she lost her skin, lost her breath when her lungs fell one by one to the roadside curve below.
When they began to dismember her limbs, her branches, in a systematic fashion
she looked to me in my second story brick-set window and cried:
“please! We’re all rotting anyway, in our skeleton leafed costumes!”

Baby brother, my blonde haired Connor,
black lady bug on your right clavicle, a mole, a birthmark.
A boy with failed insides. A dead boy. A boy who loved loved loved,
Now, a fourteen year old ghost at my hospital bedside, finger-tipping my wires,
my life-line needles.
Kissing my crown,
I promised I’d never will for anything but life.

All seventy-seven years of her.
I never saw a body decay like that before.
Her face was still vibrant, her features the same,
shifted with age.
It’s easy to see how the man fell in love.
A rainbow of pills against her old pursed lips, “I just want to live,” she said in her sleep,
her legs twitching, her hands placing imaginary bottles on imaginary shelves.
Just like her
just like Connor
like my tree
with my roots twisted and hallow,
I was planted all wrong. I’m rotting,
rotting.

Scalpel, check. Sutures, check.
Remove the infectious, remove the inflamed membranes,
the diseased organs fighting themselves.
Tiny white lines, professionally marked incisions, shining white.
How much longer till there is nothing left to remove?
I can feel this body dying all around me.
Right now.
Lower torso.
Left side.
Throbbing,
numbing
me.
Remove this!
Remove these grayed, sick organs,
owning me.
Holding me
in one place,
sending me
to doctors
to exams
to surgeries
alone.
With this
I am always alone.
One of the unlucky ones.
The alone ones.
The one that dies, rots from the inside out.
Alone.

Bowling

After a conversation I had with a friend the other week about things we didn't like to talk about or think about, but did anyway, this story just began forming inside me. We talked for a while about feeling guilty, and how writing about it never really helped. But they are stories!, and we love stories (and does that make us even more guilty?) Its not much, maybe I'll develop it into something more. Something worse. Happy reading, friends. (Oh, and by the way, this one is called Bowling.)

............................

It was full-fledged summer again with sticky mornings and evenings, each afternoon interrupted by the kind of thunderstorm that dumped hail on rooftops and cars, cracking windshields; the kind of storm with scared children whose parents comforted them, “oh, that’s just the sound of God’s angels bowling in heaven.” For a few stupid years their children believe them, until they simultaneously figure out that heaven isn’t a place, that angels don’t bowl, and God doesn’t exist.

It was the kind storm that brought the horses in from their pastures - lightening could kill, you know.

It was thundering but most of the sky was still blue. The barn doors were open and in less than fifteen minutes her mom would be leading two horses at a time into their stalls. But right now, from where she stood she could look beyond his broad shoulder and see her mother trotting in circles around a practice ring through the window, its wooden cross creating four small glass panes like a square halo around his head.

“So, whad’ya say? It’d be between you and me, no one would have ta know. In fact, you won’t be able to tell no one where you get the money. You hear?” he tucked his chin when he spoke to her, like she was one of his own three daughters. She didn’t answer and he took a step closer, the heel of his boot scraping across the stone floor; she took a step back. He smiled, just enough to make her feel like a child, and his bribing teeth were in her face, cigarette-stained and angled all wrong. "Look, you do somethin for me, I do somethin for you. It’s business. You oughta know all bout that. Yer dad’s a business man, ain’t he?”

She could barely understand what he asked of her, hearing only the thunder outside. “Just a bunch of angels,” she told herself, “bowling, bowling, bowling.”
“I thought you were married,” she finally spoke to him.
“Well… sort of.”
“I can’t accept your money.”
“You’ll do it for free?” his smile widened wickedly and he walked around her as if she were already guilty.

He never would have put her older sister here. Broad faced, she would have killed him on the spot.

But Caitlin blushes, gets embarrassed, goes weak in the legs. She shivers in ninety degree heat. The edge of her brow glistens with sweat and traps blonde fly-aways. Inside she is raging, she is more a killer than he, and if she knew how to let the monster out, she would have him ravished and dead at her feet.

“Where do you get off thinking you have the right to talk to me this way!?” She wants to say. She wants to grab the iron shovel behind her, the one used to pick up horse shit and smash him in the face with the rage of a hundred raped women. She wants him face down, she wants him to smell the dust on the cobblestone floor and choke on it when he tries to breathe between blows. She wants to keep hitting his back with the shovel, over and over, until his lungs burst and he slowly suffocates. That’s how it feels, suffocating, and she wants him to feel it too.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said.
“What if I ‘ncrease your worth? Make it five.”
“I can’t…”
“Do you know you have beautiful skin?” he reached out to touch her, his wide index finger stained with dirt stroked her earlobe and she could feel the callused, chipping skin on his hand. Straight ahead, her mother is still riding her horse outside, and the thunder is increasing around them. “Bowling, bowling, bowling,” she tells herself.

He plucked the strap of her green tank top and snapped back to her sticky skin. He stepped back. He looked down at her, his face wrinkled and mean. His brow was drawn together tight, his eyes - a father’s pair, a husband’s pair, brown like the color of the manure she stood in. She tried to glare back but her muscles wouldn’t work. “I thought you were open-minded,” he said, “I thought you were an artist.”

She wanted to be. She wanted to be open. She wanted to create. She wanted to be. “I am.”
“No. You’re just as boring as ev’ry one else here.”
“I have made enough mistakes.”

He thrusts his palm against the wall beside her and yells in her ear, “You’re young! You’re suppos’ t’ be makin mistakes.” His breath, hot and sticking to her exits his mouth in puffs, with emphasized pronunciation. “If you don’t take this offer, one day you’re gonna look back and see I’m right. You will wish you accepted my offer.”

He stepped back and she exhaled. “Then I guess I’ll just have regrets.”

“Don’t regret me,” he said, embarrassing her again. She wanted to cover herself. She wanted to protect her skin from his touch. She wanted him to keep his hands to himself.

But she doesn’t, and he won’t.

Letting the Air In

Working with fiction lately. Lots of reading, lots of writing. Excited. Early drafts, but I plan to edit, edit, edit.. and make something worthwhile.

Letting the Air In

She said, “I have a date with a doctor tomorrow night.” Her mouth moved slowly, sure to pronounce each letter in each word. The air was hot, a typical northeast summery evening, all humid and moist. She laid on her back, all four of her limbs spread out as if she were paralyzed in the act of making a snow angel. But there was no snow and she was nothing holy. Silk, and printed with large pale flowers, her dress was pulled up halfway between her knees and her waist, a thick bunching a fabric collecting on the grass beside her; had I not been sitting next to her I would have been able to see the black strip between her legs that was her underwear.


"Look at you, getting all fancy,” I said.

She didn’t move, she didn’t even look at me when I spoke. Covered in sunlight, her face was turned heavenward like she was looking for something above her, but her eyes were closed.

“Andrew always said I did fancy things.”

“You’re not fancy,” I said.

“Maybe not, but I do fancy things sometimes. Like say big words or date doctors.” When she spoke, her words hung around me for a moment, just out of reach, as if to prove she had some kind of substance; it was almost as if a piece of her heart was coming out on one of those words, begging to be taken.

She lifted her head for a moment and slid one hand beneath it. The other she rose into the air and rotated at its wrist, its elbow, like she was trying to stretch out her tendons but after a moment I realized she was feeling the air move on her skin. She had found a way to cool her body temperature.

“You don’t say big words,” I said and watched her cheeks rise slowly the way they did when she smiled. “When was the last time you said a big word?”

Sarah sat up. Her hair was long and usually mid waist but she pinned it back in the hot weather. Darkened with sweat, escaped strands clung to the sides of her neck, little tree branches, all crooked and black, stretching around her throat.

“Don’t put me on the spot like that James, that’s not very nice. I like big words,” she said, lying back down. “They’re fun. They make me feel right.” Her voice trailed off, like I wasn’t supposed to hear why she liked big words. But she said it, her lips all red and swollen in the heat, and I heard her.

I lay down next to her, hoping the grass would cool my skin but it didn’t. Down there, there was no breeze and I spread my limbs like Sarah, to let the air in.

“He’s not a real doctor,” she said.
“What do you mean? I thought you were either a doctor or not.”
“He’s an eye doctor. He said I have large pupils. Can you believe that?"
“Well you do.”
“Do you think that’s fancy?”
“No.”
“Not as fancy as dating a doctor, right?”
“You dated me, and I’m not fancy.”

“No, you’re not. But you have your fancy shoes, and your fancy hair. I’m surprised you even sat
in the grass with me, James. You like fancy things. Should I say something fancy for you? Would you like that, James?”

I stood up and brushed at my back as if there was grass clinging to my sticky limbs, though there was none. “Come on. Let’s go for a drive. It’s too hot sitting still.”

Her eyes were closed again, her arms and legs spread out, and her dress was raised even higher than before. “But I don’t want to leave,” she said. “This place makes me feel right. It lets the air in.”