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.”