“Father said clocks slay time.  He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” – William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

 

It starts like this: first the darkness and then the quiet, like lights slipping on or off down a long hall, coming on in a hard way. I’m thinking about Usher, and the funeral home, the way we fight, even slowly, for things we love.  But the clock in the next room is loud and pushing each second out into still air and the sink in my bathroom drips. I tell myself it isn’t my watch because it is in the kitchen to keep me from hearing it.  Tick tick drip tick drip, over and over and over the television my mother sleeps in front of in the next room.  A man comes on selling knives that can cut through anything. 

6:06 a.m. Tuesday, stomach empty and astringent. Take watch out of the silverware drawer and slip it on. Coffee, 15 minutes.  I eat grapefruit while standing in the kitchen waiting for it to brew.  Stare at myself naked and sideways in front of the hall bathroom mirror, one week of grapefruit coffee diet does not seem to be making a difference.  Grab keys, work closely follows.

7:31 Usher carefully arranging flowers when I walk in, he fumbles a little with their skinny stems and they spill from the vase onto the floor.  Funeral service in 2 hours.  Clean up broken glass, cut finger, suck on it to stop the bleeding and shoo Usher to finish final preparation on the Passed, collect dumped flowers, dry floor, rearrange, lick finger to wipe off smudge of blood at lip of vase.  Back at my desk and I’m trying to remember when Usher started fumbling, moving slower, some days it feels like it happened only a few weeks ago, but I know it must have been progressing towards this since I met him. 

I answer phones and show caskets at Dimsdale Funeral Chapel, it’s been almost three years now, came here right after high school because my mother can’t work.  Usher does the rest.  

9:03. Vacuum the worn spot in the carpet by the flower altar and place for casket.  Remind myself to tell Usher we need to invest in a rug, again.  The family will arrive soon and I will hand out the funeral pamphlets before going back to my desk, smile at them reassuringly even though it probably won’t help, keep my voice extra quiet when answering the phones so I can still hear Usher giving the service.   

9:30 The service starts.  Music is mostly old gospel and Negro spirituals, but the family isn’t black and I’m almost sure Usher is in there thinking about his own loss, his Lillybelle he calls her, his Southern love.  She loved this music, he said, last night as we listened to the recording for mess-ups, her mammy used to sing it to her when she was just a young girl back in Louisiana.  I want to have met her, seen them together just once to understand that kind of eternal loving.  But she was gone long before I met Usher, and maybe his memories are just as good as the real thing.  Maybe if I had known Usher and his wife, they would’ve shown me the undying love you’re supposed to see in your grandparents. I don’t have any, they were all gone by the time I came too, and my mother doesn’t talk about them.  

11:01 Casket leaves the chapel heading toward the hearse.  Usher is the last out of the building like usual and gives me a little wave on his way out.  He always goes alone to the burial site with the family and that’s fine because I don’t think I could stand the site of them, giving their Passed away to the ground finally in a box of all things, we don’t do cremations, and crying, and the lowering so slow it gives them time to wish they could pull it back up, change the past, put themselves inside with or instead of their loved one.  Not for me, I’d rather answer questions about caskets or costs.  Just business, not any of the touchy stuff. 

12:45 Usher still isn’t back.  This morning it looked like rain and I hope it held out for them.  Although, I don’t know which is worse, clear blue sky and sun, or rain?  Either way, it can seem like God is just trying to rub it in, make some kind of statement.  Grapefruit for lunch, this time blended with ice and smoothed out into a drink so it fills me up a little more.  Phone rings finally.  Our first service scheduled next week.  Business is slower these days. 

1:14 He’s back and looking exhausted.  Usher moves drowsy lately.  This place is the only thing keeping him; he hopes his only son, Carl, will move here and take it over when he passes.  But he hasn’t heard from Carl in years, and even though I’ve sent letters, nothing ever returns.  Usher still thinks he’ll come, I can tell in the way he taps the picture above his desk, the one of them together holding up fish.  My boy, he says and taps, once, twice, he knows what’s right.  He’ll be honored to take over the family business just like I did and my father before me, you wait and see, Madeline, he says, you just wait till the time is right.  This chapel has been in his Usher’s family for generations, he grew up playing in the sanctuary, carrying flowers for his mother who worked the desk.

1:35 Two women come in wanting to look at caskets.  Probably a mother and daughter, the younger of the two looks around skeptically and sniffs.  I give them the rundown. 84, 28,23- the dimensions we all fall into when we die.  They always want to know the kinds. I make it sound like they’re buying a wedding cake or a new house, luxurious, comfortable, delicate even: Gauged steel in antique white, silver rose finish and light pink crepe interior, spruce blue with soft blue interior, or black with platinum finish and soft cream crepe interior.  I try to make them imagine something else.  I use the right words: a rose inlay, almond gold highlights, solid cherry or oak with soft eggshell white velvet interior in a French fold design.  We also offer a wood veneer in mahogany and poplar for the woman of discerning taste.  I want her to feel pampered, in control and able even though she is a widow and has children she will somehow have to take care of alone.  I left her feel the inside texture; I make my voice match it.  Usher says a woman is better for showing the caskets.  His mother and grandmother and then Lillybelle always did it before.  He wouldn’t even know where to begin he says, he is too simple, doesn’t know when to use cream instead of white or the difference between blue-shaded silver and blue-shaded gold.  A woman can just sense those things; he told me when I first took the job.  Usher calls them black, brown, white.

4:01 Mr. is on the phone from Eternal Enterprises, the biggest funeral home company in this region, wanting to talk to Usher.  Eternal Enterprises advertises biodegradable Go Green! Caskets, caskets for the everlasting sports fan available in any team’s colors and with logos.  They have caskets for pets and infants, clear glass caskets, French multi colored crystal rainbow caskets.  They use words like- Crushed rose quicksilver, Florence bronze, Monarch blue with pearl inlay. Sleek, fabulous, fashionable caskets.

Mr. says this property is valuable, that we don’t even know.  But I don’t think he understands.  We don’t care about money or advertisement or property value.  We care about loss. I give the message to Usher, but I know he won’t call back.

4:36 When we don’t have anything to do, Usher tells me stories about the war.  He flew planes, wrote letters home everyday to his Lillybelle promising himself.  He once had his face taken off by a grenade and it had to be completely reconstructed, but he still wrote from the hospital in France because writing was like making sure everything held together.  She still loved him.  He made her salt and pepper shakers from bullet casings. 

5:31 We do the final cleaning of the sanctuary; I poke a few tears in the pews inward with a toothpick while Usher dusts off the altar.  We clean at least twice a day, once in the morning, once at night before leaving, to keep the place looking nice, hide the worn edges.  I am getting ready to shut out the lights when Usher walks in with the record player from his office; he sets it up on the altar and fixes the needle.  It crackles to life, the music sounds old, hazy and he turns it up loud, takes my hand.  White Cliffs of Dover, his favorite song, he knows all the words and sings them softly like if he sings any other way he might ruin something or erase the times he’s remembering.  We are pressed, my hand in his and on his shoulder.  I close my eyes imagining Usher is my father and we are dancing at my wedding. 

6:00 Home. Mother is still on the couch, her joints are acting up today and I will have to make her dinner.  She asks how work was and I say fine, we don’t talk all that much because I hate that she just sits for the entire day and she knows it.  She calls it sickness and I call it laziness.  She is overweight and useless.  She can’t have to windows open, she can’t have light coming in, all of these make the pain worse.  Because of her the air in our house hangs like velvet curtains in a dusty house, pulling in all the light and keeping it there locked out of reach.  With my mother, I don’t care if I use the right words; she hasn’t done anything worthwhile like Usher, or the widows who come into the Chapel.  I don’t think she’s ever loved or lost, and to me that’s what makes you’re time here worth anything.

7:24 She gets her dinner, I get grapefruit.  I am tired and want to go to bed already, but the television is turned up too loud.  I put my watch in the silverware drawer and shut off the lights in the kitchen.   

9:23 I’ve been watching the numbers slide into one another, waiting for her to fall asleep.

9:40 Quiet again.  Her tucked into the couch like a child.  Then the tick.  Maybe that’s why she turns the television up; to stop hearing her seconds waste away.  No, she doesn’t even think that way.  It’s getting stronger, louder. My ears tune it in like hearing through a seashell or a paper towel tube. Might not sleep tonight.

9:41 There is only one clock in Dimsdale Funeral Chapel, on my desk.  Usher doesn’t wear a watch anymore, not since Lillybelle passed.  Don’t need to know when to come home for dinner anymore, he said, chuckling first and then letting his eyes get soft.  And after that I start wondering is that what death is?  Not having to come home for dinner, not caring what the clock says anymore.  If my mother passed would I stop caring about time too? I think I can hear the clock on my nightstand buzzing through minutes, a hum, not a tick, but it does the same thing.  If I didn’t sleep, how much could I get done?  Does Usher sleep?  I like to imagine him in his bed at night, the same bed he and Lillybelle shared, her side still made up and he won’t touch it.  I used to think that he visited her grave every day, but he told me no, she wouldn’t have wanted it that way.  She wasn’t a grave, Madeline, not even in her death, so I won’t remember her that way, he said to me.  Lillybelle was the one dress he still has hanging in her closest, her vanity left untouched, shoes still lined at the bottom of the closet.  Usher puts two envelopes in the offering every Sunday at church because that is what they used to do, and even though it’s just his money now, he divides it.  In death, are we a sum of the things that mattered?

 

 

5:43 a.m. Wednesday. Sleep on and off, made my dreams seem too real.  Can’t tell the difference between what happened and what I dreamt.  Television on, morning news.  Coffee, 15 minutes.  Grapefruit.  Watch from drawer.  Don’t look in mirror after shower.  Grab keys, lock the door.

7:30 a.m. Mr. from Eternal Enterprises has left a message.  It’s urgent, time to negotiate about buying this establishment, to re-sell of course, and build a preschool. And doesn’t Mr. Dimsdale want to help the brand new generations, give them a future and an education?  He promises a job with his company, adequate compensation.  He will come in later this morning to discuss the matter. He uses words Usher won’t like.

8:11 Haven’t seen Usher yet this morning.  Stomach makes empty sounds.  I decide to reorganize the catalog of service choices until he comes in. 

8:17 Storm later today, maybe.  The sunlight coming through the windows shifts between light and dark quickly so the clouds must be moving fast. 

9:35 Usher finally in and seems rushed.  He was at the rectory, Reverend Saylor’s wife passed suddenly early this morning and the body is coming to us directly.

10:40 Mr. is here from Eternal Enterprises, standing at my desk looking large like I thought he might, well fed to say the least and I can tell by the way he talks to me that he’s used to getting what he wants.  Mr. Dimsdale is unavailable right now, I tell him, and don’t bother to explain the situation or that Reverend Saylor is a close friend and Usher is doing his best to fix everything that’s happened so far this morning for him.  At Eternal Enterprises I think they call everyone friend without meaning it one bit.  But he insists that I get Usher.  It is urgent.  The future of our children cannot wait for Mr. Dimsdale, he says, as he leans over the desk.  And I want to say, Usher doesn’t care about the future or a new preschool.  Instead I tell him I’ll go check his schedule for an opening, I use his words to let him know we’re on the same level.  I want him to think we’re overbooked, too busy to consider his ideas.

10:51 I’ve only been in the embalming room once before this, when I first started.  Usher likes to be alone when he’s doing his work.  I open the door slowly, not wanting to scare him.  There isn’t music playing like usual and he’s just standing there holding a needle in the air above Mrs. Saylor’s chest, almost like he’s waiting for her to sit up and rub her eyes.  Usher, I say his name softly, but he doesn’t turn, so I walk behind him and put my hand on his shoulder.  Mr. is here from Eternal Enterprises, he wants to talk to you.  Silence, a few ticks of my watch make notches in it, and I can barely even hear Usher breathe.  The body doesn’t die all together, Madeline, he says, like I’ve asked, it’s a process.  Four hours after the passing, the eyes close on their own, finally let go of the soul and rest.  I’m not sure what to say so I just make a sound to show him that I’m interested even though I don’t really understand what he’s getting at and I know Mr. from Eternal Enterprises is probably upstairs pacing.  But we both just stand there, me shifting my eyes to catch a glimpse of his face, his needle still immobile.  I watched her close her eyes, he finally says, four hours after just like normal. I didn’t believe it happened until I watched it for myself, thought it might just be a story.  But I had to make sure she’d really gone, really left me behind, and when I saw her soul leave I took her hand and said, I’ll see you soon, darling to make sure she knew one last time that this could be just like when I was overseas, that she didn’t need to worry after me because we’d be together again. He stops and brushes his hand on Mrs. Saylor’s cheek and I know that he’s imagining she is his Lillybelle and he has probably never said these things out loud to anyone before.  Still, all I can do is let the silence take back over even though I want to say something that is right and soothing, something that touches where Usher is pulling himself out from, but I can’t.  So I turn and walk out of the room, take away the piercing tick of my watch so loud and heavy it is almost deafening.  I want to give him back his silence, for a brief moment, give him back everything he’s lost. 

 

 

 

 

to think about…

 

 May you turn stone, my daughter, into silk.  May you make men better than they are.

-Stephen Dunn  

Chasing the Dragon

When the fever hit, I was already inside myself.  Too busy pruning away the places he was still to notice anything.  The oil from his finger traces had seeped into my blood, after he pulled me into the house.  All I could remember was how he told me I wasn’t a good judge of space.  But I don’t believe in space.  When I look in the mirror I don’t see my hands and then the air around me.  I can’t tell anymore where it stops and I begin.

I think I could hear him in the next room, talking up my mother about Jesus.  Was it Sunday?  Since they decided together that I had to get clean, they’ve gotten so close.  With his each word, the walls pulsed inwards on me and I felt like I was ear deep in bath water listening to my own heart beat.  His thoughts, sliding in between the folds of my brain like shiny coy fish. And I think I heard him calling my name, like my mother had at dusk when I was small, but his voice sounded like it was coming from across fields, swaying through grass that cut him off from me. 

They told me this would happen, the fever, coming on when the shaking starts.  I could either do it at home or in a hospital.  I hate hospitals and my mother knows it.  He got clean before I did which was funny because he’s the one who started me using. When he found Jesus, I found a new supplier.  But he just wouldn’t stay away from me.  Always telling me I didn’t need it, he still loved me and all that just made it worse.  He didn’t understand anymore.  When you stop getting high, you stop seeing the world how it really is.  I didn’t want to give up understanding sound inside my ears, feeling my heart slam against my ribs so that I can see it moving below my skin.  He used to love this too, laying his hand so that his pointer finger sat between my collar bones and trying to make our heartbeats the same. 

I can’t remember when I was born.  But I know my mother had a headache from a thunderstorm that split down Chimney Rock as she molded me from wet earth and spit and grass seed.  I have no father.  She told me he died before I was born.  When I’m high I hear him singing from Gabriel’s Rock and the wind brings him in front of me.  My father has no face and his body moves like he is underwater but if I could make him out, I know we would have the same lips.  We don’t ever talk about him because he was a user too.  He lost his salvation, that’s what my mother says. 

 

My arms won’t move.  He sits on my stomach, pushing it down into my spine bones.  When I was a baby I would hold my breath until I passed out.  The needle is filled with mercury and I am turning glass and red, 103 degrees Fahrenheit.  Mouthing my neck, a goldfish at tank surface, while I kick my legs like swimming and try to yell but I am dream screaming again. His eyes look greedy as I bend forward to cough up pieces of mirror and snow in flakes.  There is no blood.  My mouth is cold and I see my air for a few breaths before it is warm again.  You are my brave one he whispers and then I am sleeping and waking up all at once. 

Then the sweat is everywhere.  I am naked and salty skin water is boiling out of me.  The room is dark and car lights break into strange shapes when they hit the window blinds.  Time seems inadequate and I don’t know how to name my age.  My mother must have fallen asleep on the couch again because I can hear the television, a man selling knives that can cut through anything. 

When I wake again there is light and at first I don’t know where I am.  Someone is mowing their lawn; my open window brings the smell of cut spring onions.  The house is unruffled and I am still, not wanting to set the air in motion just yet.  A soft scratching makes my eyes go wide and I crawl like a salamander to the window where a tiny bird sits.  It doesn’t seem to notice me, watching its ticking movements.  A cock of the head, a blink of the black bead eye, its twig legs seem stronger than mine.  This heart must be about the size of a pine nut and pumping feverishly, I want to hold it and feel this life rhythm.  If only it would let me squeeze its magnificent lungs, just for a moment.  Tree branches scrape the house side and startle it hopping off my windowsill and into invisible air current flight.  And somehow I begin to feel overwhelmed.  When it first wings the air, for a moment, I hear the sound of the wind through the feathers of a tiny bird. 

Train

When my head won’t let me fall asleep I sit outside by the lake and think about years.  The ghost of my grandmother whispers to me from inside my necklace and there are nights when I can’t hear her, my ears ringing with the train that took him.  Sometimes as it rushes by I stare at the people lit by waxy yellowed windows and put myself inside of them. 

                Every morning I wake up to pick my flowers and put them on the graves in the cemetery by my house.  Not on every grave, just the ones that don’t ever have anything on them.  Maybe when I’m gone, someone will do that for me.  I was pruning up my roses when I heard it.  Two towns over they took a little boy from the supermarket, from right out underneath his mother’s watch as though he had never been there at all.  They tied him up, not neat as Christmas paper but more like kitten string and left him pinned to the train track to wait on the 12:15.  Two thirteen year olds and the little one not even half their age.   They probably didn’t get enough attention at home, or they were just old enough to start really feeling things like hate.  Hate gives you lines and sagging skin, my grandmother always said. 

                The train comes through every fifteen minutes usually.  When I was a little girl, my grandmother would say, I bet you can’t hold your breath longer than the train.  So now when I hear the first sound of the horn I suck in real hard and don’t breathe again until it passes.  I’ve gotten good at holding in and I think my grandmother would be proud.    But the train those boys were waiting on never came.  Its legs were clogged with the sun warmed flesh of another.  That day, the 12:15 stopped with the weight of one body, the conductor saw but the horn couldn’t reach, and a train can’t stop quick as a stitch. It took just one man to stop that train. 

I was putting out beans for supper, two place settings like always because I’m waiting on someone important to walk in the door.  A man came on the radio talking about how the Lord worked in mysterious ways.  It seemed to me just a strange turn of the moon.  But I was never much for the universe.   I don’t like to know how small I really am.  I’m sure that man was just searching for his tiny place on those tracks, that he didn’t know he was going to save the little boy.

In Sunday school when I was a small, we always learned that taking your own life was a sin.  But maybe he knew something none of the rest of us do.    There was a time when I knew how to fly.  I saved feathers for months to make wings from cardboard, my grandmother helped me glue it all together and then watched me jump off the backyard chicken coop and break my arm.  That was the summer my parents moved me away from my grandmother and when I saw her again she was shriveled and I had to tell her goodbye for good. After that my parents took me to a doctor because they said my head was jumbled like my grandmother’s.  Unstable feelings, the doctor told them.  But when I heard about this man taking his own life my feelings were storm shelter solid.  I felt a hot love clotting.  He had done everything I had always wanted to.  From then on, each breath I took weighed 180 pounds and without the train the night was almost silent as beach crabs hurriedly pressing claws into soft sand.

 The talking radio man just kept repeating the train man’s initials over and over because the only thing to identify him was the bent belt buckle engraved with them.  I couldn’t stop myself thinking there had to be more to that man than those letters and sin from taking your own life.  And it started to seem to me that we might both be part of something much bigger.

Before they took her away, my grandmother taught me about loving.  She said if you love someone enough you would do anything to make sure you never forget them because sometimes you remembering is the only thing keeping their soul alive after they’re gone.  The night after my grandfather died, she took a needle and scraped his initials into her wrist.  She said that way she could never forget, she saw his name letters every day no matter what she was doing.  That way, his soul could stay around and she didn’t feel so alone.  I didn’t know what it meant then, to feel like that about another person or to be scared to forget. 

                Later that night, a fog set in from that train man’s pulling down on the clouds.  I could feel him everywhere.  The lake out back of my house was glassed over and soup bowl steamy.  My mouth stuffed with his still live cells, his last breath swelling my tongue.  The outside world swirled on; just gathering in this sort of miracle without slowing down.  The night was heavy even though it was summer and we were in a drought.  I wanted to mix what was left of him into me.  I thought about what my grandmother told me, what it felt like to scratch at skin, tearing down layers until it bled.  And I wondered if the train man’s soul was out wondering the streets, waiting for someone to make sure he could stick around.  His initials just kept coming into my head and I knew they wouldn’t leave because they were supposed to be there.  I didn’t have a needle so I used a pushpin and I boiled it in hot water to make sure it was clean.  I liked the way the blood spotted red after a couple scratches.  His air was coming in the window and already setting it to dry and scab up.  I had just finished when my mother rang to talk about her rose garden blooms.  While we talked, I flexed my wrist to feel the pull of the skin around the new cuts. 

A Hero! the paper headlines for nearly two weeks after it happened.  His life had saved the little one.  Every day there was something new to be said about God or about angels living among us.  I’m not saying he was an angel, but he made everyone into some kind of believer.  Ever since I let him in and made sure his soul could keep going I see in this frosted kind of way.  The scab on my arm peels away in pieces and it makes me think I’m a naked baby bird just growing in feathers. 

Each day I pass moon white bones of a cat that are slowly becoming ground again and they make me think about love.  Somehow I just know that man was someone I was supposed to meet, like he was who I’ve been setting my table for all these years.  We had so much to talk about that never got out because he had a life to save and I was just minding my own business. And mostly, I still long to have touched his body, to have felt the smooth and sticky pieces that hold us all together.   

 

The Lab

 

                At the Lab we are working on perfection.  At the Lab we are trying to destroy fear.  At the Lab we will soon have created the prototype for a superior race.  At the Lab we manufacture embryos, allow them to develop into fetuses inside bodies that we buy for the sake of science, deliver them, let them grow up on a playground of sterilized tile and tests and no mothers to check for monsters and put them to sleep like puppies at age eight when we can no longer use them.  At the Lab we hide in closets and pop out at pre-determined times to make them cry tears to be caught in small beakers and analyzed later in the day because at the Lab we are meticulous and always driven to further scientific knowledge.  At the Lab we do not use night lights or bedtime stories.  At the Lab we have a special experiment involving a puppy in a box that isn’t real and a monster in a box that is questionable.  At the Lab we like to make believe real.  At the Lab there are always lots of tears and blotchy porcelain faces, and taking down of numbers.  At the Lab we do not hold hands or give hugs or say it will be okay.  At the Lab we can’t be bothered with emotions.  At the Lab we are above ethics.  But some days I think about you and your forgiveness.  We at the Lab do not have use for weakness.  At the Lab we are not bound by laws of any nature except of nature.  At the Lab you are at the Lab and nowhere else.  At the Lab families and lovers and old flings are left behind.  At the Lab we love only Science.  At the Lab we live in a world of bodies anxious to birth this new and fearless race because they understand what is important.  At the Lab we do not have time for love or grief or silliness. At the Lab we only care about fear, and we are perfecting and destroying it.   

At the Lab, the process begins with females who do not mind giving themselves up to science and carrying a bastard fertilized egg to term.  At the Lab, we only accept virgins.  At the Lab we do not wonder how they will explain themselves to their parents or friends, or if they still consider themselves virgins or if they might do this just to feel some kind of holy.  At the Lab we feed the young women pills to make their fetuses smart and ironic.  At the Lab we cherish women and shower them with spa trips and vitamin packets and a hefty, tax-free check for their bodies to make sure they keep coming back.  At the Lab we know how to get just what we want.  At the Lab we use words like amniocentesis and blastulation and zygotically. At the Lab we never use the word children. 

 

         At the Lab we are building deity.    At the Lab we tear dripping newborn gods from wombs like boy-surgeon fingers pry squirming gypsy moth-babies from their gossamer nests.  At the Lab we feed them bottles of formula to make them like the rest of us, needing something to make them a bit more human.  When I nurse them with bottles, one by one, I watch their tiny feet and make myself forget that I once had a tiny body inside mine.  You used to tell me it’s okay to pray to Him like He’s just like the rest of us too.  At the Lab we make hyper intelligent subjects and never assume they could surpass us.  At the Lab we are the omnipotent.  At the Lab we are so sure of ourselves that we believe in second chances.  At the Lab we get another shot with each batch of new test subjects, and they are always better than the last.  That winter you made macadamia nut cookies every Saturday, to get it right you said.  You always needed it just right. 

At the Lab we think it is pointless to decorate for Christmas or any other holiday for that matter.  At the Lab w e do not pray for safe surgeries or accurate test results.  We see Jesus reborn every eight years.  And I try to imagine what you might say if you could witness this man made miracle.  But you always had too much faith, you didn’t ever need miracles.

At the Lab we are on the verge of something big.  At the Lab we are God.  . 

                At the Lab I feel unneeded.  At the Lab I do not have a full access security pass.  At the Lab I am disregarded except on birthing and killing days.  At the Lab I unlock the doors in the morning and close down things at night.  I wake the subjects and feed them, at the Lab I am always the first and the last thing they see.  When I go home from the Lab I try not to think about them.  I shut off my head with sleeping pills and red wine.  You would say this is unhealthy but if I don’t do it, I won’t sleep at all.  Some nights I fall asleep on the couch because I hate sleeping alone in our bed.  At the Lab I am the only one who looks after the children.  At the Lab I wonder why they chose a woman for this job.  But then I remember how you always said I was cold inside sometimes and maybe that’s why I’m perfect for this place.  And that’s why you chose church over me when I decided to come here.  At the Lab, I am a nurturing mother turned post-partum every eight years. Eight is the magical number at the Lab because after age eight, the human brain has set its fears.  And if we can destroy fear in the first eight years, it will no longer exist.  Without fear, we will be unstoppable.  At the Lab I wonder if there is a reason for fear.  At the Lab I am a blushing midwife.  I like to hold the newborn ones and search for us.  They never have the freckle you do at the arch of your right foot.  At the Lab I bring them into the world and send them back out to the unknown after with an injection that probably stings and makes my hands shake when I prepare it.  At the Lab I am more afraid than they are for this shot.  At the Lab I can taste my fear like morning coffee for a week before a killing day. And at the Lab it sometimes doesn’t make sense that it is my job to control life and death.  I always think something will go wrong, I have clumsy fingers.  But it never does.  At the Lab I think about how you always told me to put it in the hands of the Savior when I was afraid.  But there is no Savior, at the Lab I have traced His blue veins with my fingers, watched His eyes glaze like warm glass fogged by winter night.  He that giveth, shall taketh away, you always said.    

At the Lab the laughing makes me feel always stopped up inside like our first garbage disposal because I know that nobody else will ever see their happiness.  It will never be recorded and published the results of how funny, how clever, how kind they were.  At the Lab, I am the only one who sees that they are real.  At the Lab I use the word subjects except in my own mind and at night when I give them their nighttime sleeping dosage.  There are days when I wonder if you could ever do what I do everyday at the Lab, and I know you couldn’t because you are too sensitive and you are not a loner like you said I was always meant to be.   At the Lab I want to feel strong.  At the Lab I am in charge of something and it feels good to have control. 

 At the Lab I have begun to have dreams of dead praying mantises pouring from legs, their claws the tiny fingers of those who came into our effervescent nursery unmoving.  At the Lab I feel more alone than I do when I walk down the darkened hallway to my bedroom every night. At the Lab I wish I could cry sometimes because the perfect ones do and I wonder what it means that I can’t.  At the Lab I remember the time when I was more important than your God.  At the Lab I wish you still had faith in me.  At the Lab I try not to think about the way your car smells when it’s cold outside. 

At the Lab, lately things go wrong.  At the Lab there is no way to interpret methodically the reason why we are getting less than seven subjects per batch.  At the Lab we have corrupted the wrong gene.  At the Lab it is hard for me to explain to a woman why her first baby doesn’t cry, to explain that it isn’t her fault, that it wasn’t the right time or that it was God’s will.  Somehow I think God had nothing to do with it, even though He is hovering over her with a syringe of sedatives and a clipboard and a frown of disappointment and condescension that says it wasn’t his will at all.  And I am thinking it was her fault, because you stopped touching me like it was mine.  At the Lab, I find it hard to understand that even perfection can be born still.  At the Lab I am glad I will never be a real mother.  At the Lab, for once, I’m happy we lost our chance. 

 

 

Velvet

 

The house was full of old rain and sagged even on days when the sun was out.  Waiting for the bell above the door to ring, I sat and stared at the dusty light creeping across the shelves of books, her books, I made sure to buy all her favorites.  Everything reminded me of her. And on the days when I could feel the house get ready for a storm I would picture her face in the only way I could anymore and wish my life had been different.  I knew more than I used to from all the reading, but I still looked at my feet when I spoke and at times, I still felt useless.  I thought reading would make me different somehow.  Madame Scarlett always said I was too timid.  But I didn’t care what she called me because Velvet called it calm.  Madame though reading was a worthless idea. A good woman doesn’t bore a man by doing such things.  If she had been alive to see what was once the best gentleman’s refuge in all of Chicago in 1910 turned into a bookshop she would have smacked my face and told me I needed to wear more makeup. 

Velvet Jamestown who was Mary Elizabeth Margaret in another lifetime wore her grandfather’s rosary beads the night she walked into Madame Scarlett’s home for wayward girls.    I stopped dancing when I heard someone knock at the door.  Some nights the police came, but usually it was just new girls, looking for a job and a bed.  Madame had turned down the last few girls because we were running out of rooms; she said she would take only the best.  It was raining.  I opened the door to see Velvet, shivering; her hair wet against her cheek, leaving one eye the color of cucumber meat exposed.  She was shivering.  For some reason I thought her voice would sound like ice dropping into a glass.  But I let her in.  She told Madame Scarlett her name in a voice like smoke and it made me tilt my head in surprise.  From then on she would always surprise me.  At Madame Scarlett’s, I was her first and only friend; in the beginning I didn’t want it that way.  Since I had been there the longest, I was the only one who didn’t have to share a room.  Madame made sure of it, I was special.  But when Velvet showed up, the rooms were all full and I had to give up my space.  I hated her when she laughed because I told her my name was Tyger, I hated the way she brushed her hair two hundred times on each side before bed, and I hated that she would stare at me over the top of her book.  She asked too many questions.  All night she kept me up with her romantic ideas, her dreams about going places.  At first, she was a silly girl trapped in a fantasy world, making things up to pass time.  But I would learn to love the way she thought.  And the more I listened to her, the more I found myself caught up in her ideas, her dreams, even if they were unrealistic.  It didn’t matter.  Velvet made everything seem like it could happen.  The best part about Velvet was that she wanted to be me. She laughed at almost everything I said and that seemed to mean that what I said mattered to someone for once.  The night I told her that Madame Scarlett found me on the street when I was five and named me after the toy tiger I was clutching I began to look at Velvet in a new way.  That was the night I fell in love with her.  Velvet knew I was the only girl at Madame Scarlett’s who didn’t come by choice and she thought it was wonderful.  But I hated that I didn’t know the name my birth mother called me by or where I was from.  All I knew was Madame’s because that was the only place I could remember being.  Velvet thought my name was mysterious and magical, that it actually meant something, unlike hers.  Velvet was first named after her three dead grandmothers and she knew she had to change it before she got here.  Her old one was too stiff, she said, but her new name was perfect since she had picked it out herself, on the train ride from New York City.  The entire trip she had been wearing her favorite coat, it was made of green velvet and had fancy gold buttons, she said.  But when she got off the train she threw it away, leaving the past behind her where it belonged, in the train station.  Her new name was all that she kept.  She didn’t want anyone to know where she’d come from or the kind of life she had before Chicago.  I was jealous that forgetting her past was a choice.  Before I met Madame, I didn’t have one. Velvet wore jasmine perfume, the kind from a black bottle shaped like a flower.  It was expensive, a gift from the father she never talked about.  That was just her way.  She was running from something.   She was devoutly complicated, but she called me princess.  And in the sweating dark, I called her baby.

Every Sunday we went to mass and said our prayers.  Madame Scarlett insisted on it.  A good woman always puts the church first.  There were times when people gave us strange looks, keep your heads high, Madame told us.  We were ladies.  Some of the girls hated going to church but I didn’t mind it.  I had been going for as long as I could remember and watching the light shift across the stained glass windows made me feel calm and safe.  Even though Velvet wore her rosary she didn’t like mass, it reminded her of her old life.  She loved communion though, and closed her eyes when she took the bread to better feel God moving around inside.  The first Sunday she was at Madame’s she fell asleep during mass and I had to pinch her arm to wake her before Madame saw.  I knew what Madame Scarlett disapproved of and I didn’t want Velvet getting in her poor favor already.  But the more she went to church, the more she started to love the way our footsteps echoed into the ceiling when we walked out.  I knew she would.  When she was in a good mood, she would stomp out loudly to make people turn and stare.  See, now everyone’s looking at us, she would say. 

           The men who came in at night to forget their families liked to watch us dance with each other.  I always made sure to dance with Silvia and Mina so that nobody would suspect I was in love with Velvet.  She was bolder; she liked kissing me full on the mouth while I sat on a man’s lap.  And while Silvia brushed herself against me I thought about Velvet’s mouth.  The other girls were jealous of the looks we gave each other across the room when we danced and once I caught Mina trying to mimic this with Velvet.  We never kissed in front of anyone unless we were dancing.  I wanted Velvet to be my secret.  But she wanted everyone to know.  She said love was a beautiful thing and beautiful things are meant to be shown.  Velvet knew nothing about love, except what she read in her books.    When she had too much wine she would dance with Silvia the way she danced with me and I sometimes got in a sour mood, wondering if it was only a matter of time before I was replaced. Velvet loved me in this newborn sort of way. But I didn’t love Velvet the same way she loved me.  My love was rougher.  It wasn’t fleeting and lacy.  It was final and precise.  When I met Velvet I was nineteen and stupid.  She was twenty and could read and write.  She was always reading and at first I wanted to be a character in one of her books, just for her uninterrupted attention.  That didn’t change until she was gone and it had to. 

          If one of us had a gentleman offer money after watching us dance we were not allowed to take them to our rooms.  Instead, we used a row of rooms down the street that Madame Scarlett rented out for paying customers.  She didn’t want us sleeping and working in the same bed, which I was glad about because I only wanted to share that with Velvet.  The room Velvet and I shared down the street was small and the bed smelled like mold.  The first night I was with a man it was in that room and I watched the candlelight flick across the crack in the ceiling.  My man that night was a doctor and had specifically requested a virgin.  Most of the girls came to Madame’s already experienced, but I had only been dancing for a little over a year and the customers seemed to like the other girls better.  Madame let me help with keeping the books and dance instead of having to do anything more with them.  But this time, I chose to.  Velvet had been with men and I thought I should too.  It wasn’t how I wanted it to be.  I wanted to be in love with him and have him take me to the country.  His body was plump and sweat clung to the sides of his head when he was finished.  But the whole time I wanted to see Velvet’s thin body above mine, haloed by the candle.  When he left me I felt scratched inside and that night when I got into bed with Velvet I could smell his hands on mine.  I didn’t ever as her about her men.  I couldn’t stand to hear that someone else had seen her body. 

         Girls were in and out of Madame Scarlett’s often, so it was ordinary that Velvet wanted to get away too.  I had always wanted to travel, just never thought I could until she came.  Velvet wanted to settle down in New York City and open a bookshop.  We started saving our money to leave, staying up at night talking as if we were really going somewhere.  I saved the money I made, but I was scared that when we got to New York, Velvet would leave me.  She was all I had.    It was the summer that I turned twenty one when we were so close I could taste it in Velvet’s kiss.  One night, as we dumped out our savings to count again, she said she knew someone who would pay enough that we could go the next day.  The night the sky leaked over the lampposts, the air was still and stale and Velvet swore, just one more. Then we could leave and we wouldn’t have to dance anymore or touch men.  She told me to meet her at the room when she was done, around eleven.  I would bring the suitcases so we could leave on the six o’clock train the next morning.  I watched the clock nervously, checking the suitcases over and over, pacing in front of the mirror until I heard Madame’s heavy footsteps on the stairs and I was scared she would notice we were leaving.  She would call me ungrateful; leaving her after all she had given me.  But I didn’t care anymore.  Just thinking about being alone with Velvet made my head feel light.  When it was finally eleven, I grabbed the suitcases and left quickly, without saying goodbye.  It was a short walk to the rented room, the misty air made the streetlights soft.  The suitcases slapped across my legs as I walked and the streets were bare except for a gang of boys smoking cigarettes at the corner.  I kept my head low until I heard footsteps coming my, looking up I saw Father Celeste, our priest from church.  He nodded.  As I neared the room I saw the door was not shut; candlelight fluttered underneath and onto the step outside.  I called Velvet’s name in a whisper as the door sputtered open.  I didn’t hear the suitcases drop from my hands.  She was on the bed naked, arms wide as if she were asking me to come lay down with her.  But her breasts were not inviting.  Her stomach and chest were corseted in knife marks, the blood not yet dried, legs bound together.  I searched for some way to tell that this was not Velvet.  But her golden hair was spread, crowning a queen, or an angel.  The lips that had once whispered my name were gone.  The tiny gap between her front teeth perfectly in view and I couldn’t remember if I had loved it once.  And her eyes, the eyes that I saw every time I stood naked in front of a man, were gone.  Head, limp on her neck, the fatal wound taking the place of her rosary, its familiar beaded chain against the stain on the sheets.  It made me think of the martyrs from last week’s mass.  The insides of her thighs were the color of red wine, her grandfather’s rosary hidden inside of her. Pulling it out, I felt sick.  And then I ran back to Madame Scarlett because I didn’t know what else to do. 

The next morning was Sunday.  We all went to church as if nothing happened.  I wanted to find Velvet in the stained glass windows or floating in the holy water.  I had worn gloves because I couldn’t quite get her blood from my hands.  I stopped trying when I realized I didn’t want it gone.  Velvet and I had finally been joined in a way that we could never find, no matter how many times we made love or how many words we exchanged.  Her blood seeped through my skin, permeated and dripped into my veins.  I didn’t find her as we knelt and I said the only prayer I knew, the one Madame has made me say since I was small. When mass came to a close I decided church was never the place for Velvet.  Church was a place for her dead grandmothers.  I straightened my hat and swept out the heavy doors, spilling sunshine into the dark sanctuary. 

                Outside, the world went on without Velvet, though she still lived inside of me.  On the way back home I kept my head down, walking behind the other girls, listening to their talk and not wanting to say anything.  I walked in the door, past Madame’s nod of approval and up the sitars as soon as we got home.  I could feel Velvet still in the room.  And I hated her then because she left me and I had to sleep alone.  I kept dancing even after Velvet died because it was the only thing I knew and I didn’t care if someone killed me.  Velvet was my only reason for trying to get away, without her I couldn’t leave anymore.  Without her, leaving didn’t make sense and I was heavy and immovable. I felt like everyone knew about us, I heard them talking.  But I didn’t care because they didn’t know that Velvet danced with me every night.  I pictured her smiling across the room at me and I always danced my best on the nights I missed her most.  Nobody ever talked to me about it.  Not even Madame, she made me pack up all her things a week after it happened.  A real lady doesn’t ever show that she is upset. There wasn’t much to pack and when I finished her clothes looked cold and misplaced piled into a trunk instead of thrown on the floor.  Her favorite red dancing outfit was draped on the back of the chair and I couldn’t bring myself to move it.  I hid her pretty perfume bottle under my pillow and as many books as I could fit under the mattress.  Every night I would spray the jasmine on her side of the bed before I went to sleep.  On Tuesdays, I wore the red outfit. Velvet said that if she ever had a daughter, she would name her Tuesday.   

                I did not cry until Madame Scarlett died two years later.  And then, it was only because I was completely alone.  An orphan again, only this time I didn’t have someone to find me.  She left her money and the house to me, her considered daughter.  I wanted everyone out.  I buried her in a white dress and sent the other girls away to make wives or lovers.  With Madame gone I started reading Velvet’s books, slowly at first and finally I devoured them, each word like caramel.  I used the money Madame had left and bought hundreds more and made the house into the bookshop Velvet always wanted.  At first I hoped Madame couldn’t look down and see that I had turned the house into a bookshop.  Then I realized if Madame could look down so could Velvet.  And I cared more about Velvet being happy than Madame. 

Most days, in the house that creaked with old footsteps, I was suffocated by books.  Some days the bell above the door rang once or twice, but it didn’t matter.  I was scared to sell the books and give away pieces of Velvet to other people, but I knew it was what she would want from me.  When I got too wrapped up in missing her, I locked the door.  I read until my eyes were black.  I wished when I was tired of talking to people made from paper and ink that I had a baby, someone to listen without talking, someone I could hold.  But if I had gone to be a wife and had a baby, I would’ve lost Velvet.  I never wanted to lose Velvet.  I kept adding teaspoons of water to the perfume bottle just to make her last.  When it barely smelled of anything, I drank what was left of her.  And when the lights were shut out, I lay on the floor with my eyes closed until I could picture a little girl, my baby sitting beside me.  I called her Jasmine.  She was small and twinkled like in a dream.  I chased her through the bookshelves until we collapsed, out of breath.  I stroked her soft moonbeam hair and felt her sleep.  But then, in the morning, she was gone. 

 

of dreams or dreaming

Outside the rain sounds like car tires

 slowly over gravel, coming or going and it doesn’t matter

which.  Tonight the moon is eclipsed.  But it is cloudy

 She listens for something

new- a chirp, buzz, sigh.  The air conditioning still

chokes and clanks.  She is tired of observation.  She longs to see

just one star so she might remember there is more

than this room, this life.  When she closes her eyes she is

a stranger and the bedsheets become water, color

she knows only in contrast to darkness.  She longs to fly,

not like a bird but more like a bat, in a sort of fluttering

dive without sight.  If she could fall only to catch herself

she might understand her weight, the impact of her movements.

But she is afraid of heights and knows she will never

experience such flight.  She does not dream. 

but she often wonders

if her existence is in the sleeping brain of another.

When she is alone, she can hardly feel her body,

there is nothing to hold her in.  She is wrapped

in vapor.  Her imprint on the bed might be the same

as another’s and when she is gone no one will know

she was ever there.

for my mother

I know the smell of her bathwater, her skin as she steps steaming

from it, dressing herself to the sound of the drain.  And for the first time

I notice the way she is loosening in some places.  Why are we made

in such perishable bodies?

 

On the back porch: we drink wine and talk like friends, the noise

swelling as night comes on and summer is turning,

you can feel it left in the wake of a hand

 

quick through air at the height of a story.  She tells me

when she was seven she watched her mother run over her cat,

backing out of the garage.  There was a mark

 

left over, even after she saw her father use soap and hose, until

the next year when the driveway was repaved with asphalt.

It is possible to preserve something invisible

 

as the understanding of children about temporal things. 

At grandfather’s funeral she makes me rest my hand in his

to feel what has left him, she touches his eyelids

 

as though she is feeling for movement

beneath skin, like fish trapped under ice.  I want to pick up his

casket and hide it from her, pull away her hands from searching

 

for something already gone. What is the weight of human

without soul? In the winter we sit in the hot tub out back. 

When we run for the house, our pale feet make dark

 

wet spots on the deck steps. It is so cold

that two days later they are still there, our side by side footprints

frozen to the wood as though something has seeped from us and stuck.

Dream

I dream a world gray like highway and winter

always on the verge of spring.

I am in the backyard staring at the play set

made by my two fathers when my brother appears behind me. 

You have to help me bury the body, he says.  He is calm and has the look of practice.

 

Many years later, in the glow of a late night kitchen he sits facing me,

the confident look shaken off with dream.  His arms show the means of his damage,

he leaves them bare so I have to look.

Soil-colored lines parallel winding blue veins, his skin cleansed by overhead light. 

I want to tell him things can start over.  But I don’t know if I believe it. 

Ningyo

When I was made, my mother was a mermaid,

 my father, a fisherman.  They met

at the swimming pool.  My father couldn’t swim,

sinking like a bag of road salt,

 but he could hold his breath.  He was

when my mother wafted by, slow motion

hair fanned against pale arm, her eyes open

underwater.  Later that night their skin touched

for the first time.  And each day after my mother swam

through the pool and I swam inside her—

slowly forming legs from fetal tail.

Becoming human, kicking away from her.

 

When I got older, my father hooked my leg while fishing. 

The scar has whitened now but I remember more the way

 he took the fish caught with that same hook and taught me to gut

and clean it.  First the scales,

flaking from the knife, reflecting our afternoon sun. 

Tracing my finger along them, cold and still

 I pictured my mother, tail butterflied and peeled back,

 flapped open around her like wings or a magnificent dress. 

Was this the knife my father used to reveal her strong legs? 

How long did it take to gut her—

until she was clean , her bones pulled

to leave only her

pink and glistening insides.