CrosshatchingBy M.K. Rainey
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It came one day as she sang in the choir. Or maybe it came after, when she was alone in the vestibule. Or the chapel. Or the corner store with the caramel chews she liked so much. It came in the meadow with the blue winds that tousled her hair. Or it came between the tussocks and cattails as she dipped her sooty fingers in the creek, fishing for mudbugs. It came with the chains that clanked and the horses that whinnied, the goats wanted nothing to do with it. It was plucked and pulverized and jammed with the jams that lined the cellar walls. It came stuffed in her father’s knapsack, but did not leave when he did. It came with the wood blocks and bits of string and stuffed toys and all the infinities of childhood. It came in a cloudy reality. It came and it came and it came and it-
The Singer
Earthen rank. Twin boys crowded her by cellar door. “Chicken,” one clucks, a finger in her shoulder blade. Just one bottle. She gathered the pleats of her choir dress and descended to basement. Pushed through black. A trapezoid of yellow light fell on the dusty floor behind her and she moved through dark, searching the air for a chain. She curled her fist around the rusted links and pulled. The bulb glowed fiercely for a moment, illuminating the pink underbellies of bottled holy wine, but then the door slammed and the globe crackled and burst and rained electric embers. Non-light. She blinked, eyes adjusting to shadow. A tenuous, starry light filtered through the frosted glass of a ground-level window and she looked around and saw her own colorless reflection in the moonlit plane above. Silence. She felt something else there, alone with her. A thread of light bled through the space at the bottom of the door and she ran to it and pounded and pounded against the hollow frame. No one answered. She beat and yelled and she knelt on the seam of light and pleaded for her release.
Tails
A playful dirge. Struck chords wafting out from the rectory and into the forest space where boys plotted their next moves. Stella paid no mind. A lizard stole across the hot rocks, its blue spine thick with dust. She cupped her hand down over the writhing body, but only its tail was too slow. The creature escaped into the lily-choked pond, leaving its tail to the god-like hands of a twelve-year old. She flung the curled muscle into the pond where it landed on a lily pad drying in the sun. The boys had a bottle, smearing it with their grubby fingers as they passed it back and forth and soon it landed in the dirt at her feet. They teased and bullied her and then the glass was to her lips. It burned like creosote in her throat and nose, but she swigged again and again until the liquid numbed her tongue and the ground dipped and rolled beneath her feet. These shadow-faced boys shoved one another, laughing, their tail-shaped skins sagging between their legs. And soon her thin limbs were heavy and heat crept up her neck and bile lined her mouth. She leaned over the pond, pushing vines and kelp aside. Her face, washed of color, billowed in the glassine surface.
Sunday
The organ swelled with air overhead, gold pipes running to the wooden rafters. The iron railing hemmed her in and only her mellifluous voice escaped through the balcony bars. She closed her eyes and saw her voice floating in the air as the congregation below held their breath. There was nothing but her music echoing, reaching out to the apse and Stella offered it up to the seraphic figurines before her. She finished with numb lips and a hollow chest and looked down at the flock below. No one seemed to have heard her. A black haze curled in her periphery, but she could see it straight ahead too, seeping out from the alter, the pews, the deacon’s cassock. No one saw the soprano fall to her knees in the stained glass light, broken and colored by the blood-orange halo of John the Baptist.
Blackbird
Black trees with branches outstretched like tentacles against the ringed glow of the harvest moon. Land and sky blurred a gradient of blue-gray on the horizon so that no man could distinguish where earth ended and the heavens began. Inside the bar, dust motes and smoke married in the air around her. Warped piano against the wall, a boy tickling its keys with a cheap cigarette hanging from his lip. Stella shook the last trickles of drink into her mouth and left the glass on the lid of the Steinway. She danced with a Harper kid, a Skellern twin and dipped into a Fillimore brother’s arms and flirted with all the boys whose meat-colored eyes had become as familiar as her own achromic face in the mirror. The heat crept up her neck, but she only thirsted for more. No one here can love and understand me. The lyrics crooned out of her and the boys laughed and she twirled in the dim light. She watched their phantom faces in the mirror. She swallowed, down raw throat. She felt the world shift beneath her. I’ll arrive late tonight. Blackbird, bye, bye.
Alternate Endings
Once a man with a wide-brimmed hat and pinstriped suit approached her in the vestibule after mass. Hoarfrost collected at the window corners and incense smoke curled in colored sun shafts beneath stained glass. He smelt of leather. He complemented her voice. Mentioned a program. Gave her his card. Later, in her wild abandon, she slipped the card under a tumbler and the paper became wet with glass rings. Sometime during the night, it fell into a puddle beneath the bar and the ink bled and the wet fibers became knotted and torn. The barman swept it into a bin long after the drunks had gone home and its dilacerated structure fell apart. Eventually, the papery fragments made it to the dump where, after weeks of shifting weather, the only etchings of its former life were a sliver of corner mottled in the garbage. That too would disappear.
A Wedding
Wildflowers bundled with twine filled a church doorway. Familiar human faces occupied pews as Stella kissed a Skellern twin, an embryo doubling and stewing already inside her unbeknownst to them both. She glanced up to the balcony, to John the Baptist and his blood-orange halo. They were married. Petite cakes with creamy icing and flaky apple tartlets and ladyfingers and bitter jams and cool lemonade filled the oilcloth picnic tables outside and a crude tent played host to the reception. Hours crept by and the tangibility of the world became strained and pulled like wet tissue paper and Stella grew limp in her alcoholic haze. She lost husband and shoe at the height of the festivities and struggled to search for either in her reverie. She rested against a haystack not far from the crowd. Turreted clouds moved quickly overhead and the landscape darkened and blurred. A figure beside her. Raw mouth on hers. Her husband, she hoped, but then thought how maybe that fact mattered little at all now.
An Old Friend
A sky poised for impending storm. Reefed skin sagged beneath her eyes, shadowed and fragile as her nights stretched long into dawn, the metronomic clock her only witness. Somewhere in the shadows she heard her children’s soft breaths, the dead sounds of unplucked piano strings, a rustling that belonged to another reality entirely. Somehow she knew they would never again hear the approaching dissonance of her husband’s car. The dark knew it too. “Is it time then?” Stella asked, withered fingers silently tracing the flowered upholstery on her armchair. Fear had long melted away with other sentient parts. No answer. “Please?” she asked. But there would be no answer for a long time.
The Dancer
Hollow winds shook town, street sign, broke windows as the denizens scrambled for their cellar doors, storm shelters. Stella hunkered beneath the church, watching the others click rosary beads in time with the clacking shutters. The meadow grew dark and across town the little house wobbled and creaked and Posey watched the sky glow with those supernatural southern lights. The green winds winnowed the grass, sprayed long arcs in the brook, bled through the cracks in the weather-stripping until outside and inside married in the space around her. Posey wrung a threadbare pair of ballet slippers in her hands, the rank, homey smell of feet rising to meet her. Both mother and daughter looked to the sky and Posey came to know her new friend in the dark.
Dinner
Posey chewed a bit of celery, green plant matter crunched to pulp, threads of stalk stuck between her teeth. Across the table a body that contained her mother. A smear of peanut butter dirtied the plate and she went to dip the celery, but then stopped and took another unadulterated bite. A clock chipped away at time. The birds ceased to warble. They listened to the unceremonious creak of the front door and its subsequent closing and heard her brother’s cumbrous footfall across the parquet floor. Posey held an unchewed clump in her cheek. Her mother’s eyes fell. Eventually, Stella stood, went into her room and closed the door. Posey listened to the weight of his movements as they violated the silence. She looked out the window and searched the sky for something she might know in the night.
The Gilded Bat
Gripped wood, leg extended. The other girls talked in a cluster on the floor, their lavender leotards sparkling with iridescent wings that jutted out from their shoulder blades. Her own gossamer forelimbs felt heavy and limp on her back, but she did not look in the mirror. A rumbling murmur broke out amongst the girls and Posey looked to see the principal dancer cross the other side of the studio in a black-winged tutu, paint cut across her face in startling chiaroscuro fashion. Posey turned into the bar and looked out the window, catching a glimpse of her own washed face in the glass. She pointed her foot harder, felt the strain in her arch like a hot knot. She pointed and pointed and pointed as the burn tore up her muscles and an army of bats ripped through the sky.
Meanings
“Faith,” the teacher spoke, but the rest dissipated into the penumbral corners of Posey’s mind. She sat, fingers clamped to the splintered edges of her chair, fixated on a sliver of paint hanging loose from the baseboard. She focused on making it the most defined object in the room, turning her mind from outer shapes. Faith, she thought. Yes, Posey knew all about faith. Not the belief in the things that we cannot see. She already knew there existed for her things that did not exist for others. No, rather, faith was the belief that things could be different. That night, as her brother’s dark shape crossed under a disconsolate sky just outside her window, she wondered if she had any.
Growth
She cupped her breasts. Flattened them. Sucked swallows of air. Hair and skin and limbs became one colorless extension in the fluorescent lights. A figure appeared in the reflection and Posey ducked, covering herself with a towel. “Relax,” said the figure, smoke curling out her nostrils. The principal dancer crossed the dressing room in three long strides, smoke trailing her like a cape. “Here,” she said, taking a long elastic bandage from the counter. “Come.” Posey stood and dropped the towel and felt sick to find her nipples like marbles in the light. The principal dancer handed her the cigarette and proceeded to cover Posey’s chest with the band. Posey took a drag and coughed. The dancer smiled and drew the bandage tight. Later, after her brother returned to his room, Posey took out a pack of cigarettes she’d stolen from him and lit one, letting the smoke roll out her windowsill. She lit cigarette after cigarette until eventually the smoke felt easy and her breasts withered back into fishbone.
La Folie de Giselle
Pink blisters bubbled the skin between toes. Yellow-red blood stained broken wood inside her point shoes and she dabbed bits of tissue between the hot skins. The stage was dark and silent save the few bright spotlights illuminating the place and she could hear her tumescent heart beating in her ears. She wrapped her toes. Counted turns of the medical tape so that each end seam was aligned to the left. She tied ribbons and adjusted her leotard and started again. Ballonné. Ballonné. Pas de basques. Glissade. Jette. She faltered. Again. Ballonné. Ballonné. Pas de basques. Glissade. Jette. Something rustled the dark. Quiet. Glissade. Jette. Pas de basques. A scratching like a rake over the wooden floor. She saw nothing under stage lights and felt her heart in her mouth. She crept towards the noise, careful not to clack the wood of her shoes. She peered into the wings. The stage turned to fog and all she could see was a shadow blooming out from the dim work lights. She backed away. She must have screamed. At what? Later, when the company members found her, she would say the heat from the lights had caused her to fall. And she would eventually convince herself that it had happened this way.
Feet
Distended feet, bunions callused and cracked. She waddled over lime green tile onto shag carpet. She sunk into the armchair, her hands clasped around her bloated beach ball belly. She heard a cry from the other room, but then silence. A foot poked up through skin and Posey pressed down on it. A silent house darkening rapidly, her husband would not be home for some time yet. She dozed. Somewhere in the depths of her dreams, a footfall echoed out, and then she was awake and could still here the squeaking of rubber on a parquet floor. Her veins constricted and her fingers went numb. Posey peeked around the corner, down the hallway, but there was nothing in the dark. The phone rang. Stella’s voice seemed to hit her through layers and layers of atmospheric pressure like wavelengths through water and she couldn’t be sure of what she’d heard. A crash. Twisting husks of steel and glass and ice compacted in unholy matrimony. Posey lit a cigarette. She was not surprised to find that she did not cry. She was surprised by her mother’s hiccupped description of her brother’s severed foot on the side of the road. She was surprised by what she did two months later.
The Painter
Yellow winds rumbled through the grasslands. Desiccant stalks bowed in waves of gold around Stella and she blinked away an errant hair. Wheat beards scratched her forearms and legs as she watched the littlest girl, removed with her crooked easel, ostracized from the game. The other children popped in and out of sight amongst the tall grasses, bedashing one another with shouts and demands and laughter that echoed across the meadow. The little one paid them no mind and was still for some time, staring at the limned figure on her paper. Stella scratched her arm. Posey shifted next to her, smoke dissipating from her cigarette like a papery sixth finger. The other children ran off, disappearing into bulrush. The girl looked up from her easel to the air between Stella and Posey. Both women looked behind them and the sky turned to liquid and the shadow unfolded itself and filled the space between the three figures.
Turns
Corrine chewed on the plastic handle of a watercolor brush as she watched Lora and a friend take turns. “Now you,” her sister said. The friend leaned over and pulled back Lora’s dead hair, a wet smack noise stuck between them. Lora let out a gasp. “It kind of hurts.” “It’s supposed to be good,” the friend said. “Now you, Cory,” Lora said. Corrine shook her head. “Come here, you’re the boy,” Lora protested. Corrine knelt down beside her sister and stuck the tip of her tongue out between her teeth. “No you have to use your lips.” Corrine tasted salt and sweat and soon she was crying. “I don’t want to play.” “You’re such a baby.”
Ray Banks
Feathered bangs and sprayed curls and a peach smell behind ears. Corrine sat before her mirror, fumbling with the clasp of a silver locket around her neck. Her contacts dried her eyes and she blinked and blinked, but the redness remained. Posey stood in the doorway, cigarette smoke coiling through the air around her. “That boy is here,” Posey said. Corrine nodded, dabbing a small amount of cream on her knuckles and elbows. “It’s going to rain,” Posey said, leaning against the frame, right foot crossed over the left, a crisp pleat down the thighs of her silk slacks. Corrine did not reply. “It may even sleet.” Corrine opened her mouth as she coated her lashes with mascara. “How long has he had his license?” Corrine lifted her eyebrow. “Don’t look at me like that, what if you run into black ice? What then? Does he even know which way to turn in a skid?” “Stop,” Corrine said. Posey tapped the long ash from her cigarette into her hand. “He’s gay, you know,” Posey said. She took a long drag and the black hung between them like velvet. “He’s the captain of the football team,” Corrine replied. Posey shrugged and walked down the dark hallway.
Outsides
Hissing and humming (if it can be called hissing and humming) and sparks and heat and Heat and HEAT. Lava-like whips recoil and lash in blood orange arcs, hot descends, cold ascends, the colorless gas contracts and the hissing grows like helicopter propellers and flares burst at the surface, the wind crackling black and red clouds into the darkness and the heat stretches out astrally through the blackness, and it burns and burns and burns and burns and burns uninhibited and unwavering until it hits- “Good shit, huh?” he took the damp joint from her and brown flecks stuck to her lips, but she did not care. She did not hear him through all that black. “The stars,” she said. “Look at all the stars.” “Hey,” he said. “The stars,” she said.
Soup
Grease drippings. Marrow-sucked bones. She wiped the counter, removed his plate. He nodded for more as he sucked the orange from his fingertips. Chicken Flats always wanted more. In a booth in the far corner, Half n’ Half raised his glass and she brought the pitcher to him. Just Coffee wanted just her check. The place emptied around three and Corrine hunched over the bar, fingers splayed over creamy stock and colored pencils. A timer chirped in the kitchen. The sounds of things boiling. Burnt coffee smells. Corrine was lost, shading the ribcage of her paper figure, and did not hear the front door open and the man cross the room and sit two stools down from her. “You’re a good artist.” She jumped. The man smiled. He took the sheet from her hands and studied it. Suddenly she saw her drawing for what it was, disproportionate head, ogre-like neck and legs, the flatness of the eyes, and she wanted to tear it to pieces. “This is wonderful,” the man said. “You have a gift.” Corrine smiled. She took the paper back and served him water and a menu. “What can I get you?” “Soup.” He smiled. “And your name.”
Happiness
She rolled the syllables over her tongue, the hiss on the back of her teeth. The urine-colored gladioli displeased her, she added white to the canvas for highlights, but they remained blurry and uninspired. Just one synapse, one nerve getting a little more stimulation over another. If it’s that easy, couldn’t it be regulated?
Ray Banks, Reprise
Another merlot. Another check of reflection in the mirror. Corrine avoided wine lips by drinking out of a straw, but tongue remained swollen and purple. She watched the crowd, ghosts in the glass who weaved and pulled through the smoke filled room. “Cory!” a voice called over bobbing heads. Ray Banks appeared before her and squeezed her thin shoulders. “I didn’t think I’d see you here,” Ray said, but before she could respond he caught the sleeve of a smallish man and reeled him in. “This is Clark,” Ray said and Corrine shook his hand. Ray put his arm around Clark and held him in a way that Corrine longed to be held. They talked. Ray and Clark “married” and Corrine “married” too. Their lives hung between them in useless lines of data. Clark handed her his card. He was an interior designer and Corrine thought about all the interiors she has to decorate.
Shapes and Colors
Head rocked. Shoulders slumped. She stretched on the couch and all her pretty objects swirled and blurred before her, framed in a blackish haze. Carefully selected crown molding, mantel linings, dried branches and berry table pieces, hollowed out ostrich eggs, feathered pillows, cashmere throws, ornamental runners, wall hangings, oiled prints, leather bound books. Corrine walked to the large oblong bowl of ostrich eggs, one cracked, a long curvy tendril in its shell. She reached under the egg and found the wooden box still in place. She knelt before the coffee table. Inside, a plastic zip lock crinkled and she held it to the light, looking at all the shapes and colors inside. Pink. White. Oval. Rectangle. Yellow. Circle. Green. Blue. Bar. Valium. White. Darvocet. Codeine. Ultram. Demerol. OxyContin.
Numbers
One two three. One two three. Corrine was keeping count. One two three. She fingered the cigarette in her pocket that she managed to coax out of a credulous nurse on the fourth floor. One. She pictured the unfinished canvases strewn about the garage. Seven. She stood over the sea of white linoleum, one hand clutching the IV mast as she sifted through a stack of mail. Adverts for hand creams and five-dollar pizzas. Six. Charity newsletters. Four. Pastel cards with balloons and bears and flowering fields. Nine. Letters of acceptance. Zero. She touched the staples in her belly. Twelve. She watched as they wheeled the limpid body in, its mouth puckering ceaselessly as an errant string of spittle stretched and broke between its fists. Three. One two three.
One of These Things is Not Like the Others
Big Bird cooed over the electronic beat. She put her hands to her temples. The baby was not watching the television. It stared at her through the chipped wooden bars, her soft hands clutching the railing. One of these things just doesn’t belong. There was something uneasy in the little black eyes, but Corrine could not look away. She fingered the lighter in her pocket that she still carried around even though she quit smoking. The baby blinked. Can you tell which one is not like the others? Corrine broke the stare and walked down the hallway. She heard a crash and raced back to find the little girl outside the crib, the wooden railing collapsed, the baby standing for the first time. By the time I finish my song?
Lines
Corrine smoked on the patio watching the squirrels dip down the trees in straight lines, frozen trunks cracked like open wounds. Corrine liked lines. Paint lines. Makeup lines. Book lines. Signature lines. Coke lines. She liked things symmetrical. She thought about other lines.
Stella and Adolf beget Corin and Posey. Posey and Rick beget Lora and Corrine. Corrine and David beget Eliza, David Jr., and Lydia.
The Doubtful Guest or The Writer
Posey inhaled, a burn like a slow fuse coiling the length of her esophagus, and watched the girl’s spine curve further over scraps of paper, her tongue hanging limp over her fat bottom lip. The girl coughed. She coughed again. Posey wet her fingers and pinched the cherry embers of her cigarette out. The girl scribbled below her. “Read my story,” Lydia said, holding her paper up. Three rectangular figures with faces shaded in pencil stood in a field bursting with colors. Blue grass and orange flowers, a pink-green sun with red winds curling in the air. “And they lived happily ever after,” Posey said. Corrine, legs draped over the arm of her chair, swirled the gin in her glass with her finger. Lydia took the sheet back and drew a black oval to the left of the gray faces, as if it were hovering above the scene, and left the drawing on the floor. Posey folded it in half and tucked it between the pages of a slender yellow book where it remained for seventeen years.
Tableaus
Corrine insisted on a family portrait. Soup emerged from his makeshift office with a crumpled jacket, licked his fingertips and ran them through his dusky hair, a small coffee stain on the triangle of his tie. The children yawned. The photographer set the tripod up in dewy grass, waiting for sunrise. Where was Lydia? When she did not come at her call, Corrine stormed through the house, throwing open laundry hampers, emptying cabinets, lifting rugs. Soup slipped away to the garage and tapped twice on the hollow door of an old metal storage box. A tiny rap echoed in response. “Come on,” Soup said. Her hair tousled and skirt wrinkled, Soup smoothed the lumpy curls as best he could and made a ponytail. He spotted a scrap of paper on the ground. He looked in her pockets and pulled fistfuls of shredded paper like confetti from the depths. Lydia grinned. Years later, she would stare at the divorced family as if they belonged to another reality entirely. Only after gazing for a long time, would she spot a small sliver of paper in her own fist and wonder what words she had desperately clung to, even then.
Goosebumps
Stacks of glassine paperbacks- purple, orange, slime green, blue- leaned in precarious towers over the worn carpet. Lydia held a book close to her face, dusting the yellowed edges with her sticky fingers. Several times she held her breath and released only with the page breaks. A shadowy monster ascended the pages, clawing over words like rocks, her chest constricting with each grammatical corner took. The story narrowed, as if she too was thrust in its tunnel, and reality and fiction blurred in the most terrifyingly beautiful marriage around her. The creature made its way up the paragraphs and commas and italics and exclamations until she could smell its rotten breath hanging between them. “Lydia!” Lydia jumped, the book leapt from her hands. “Lydia.” Her mother stood, fingers clamped around a bundle of papers, waving them in the doorway. “Just tell me exactly what these are?” Corrine yelled. She threw the papers on the floor. Missing assignment slips and red-lettered “F’s” stared back at her. “Homework, now,” Corrine hissed. Her mother picked up the book and gathered it with the others. “Homework!” Corrine took the books and stormed down the hallway. Lydia went to her desk and took out a sheet of paper and wrote, “fuck,” then “shit,” and, when she could think of no new curses, repeated both words the length of the paper, folded the sheet into a tiny flap and stuffed the square between her mattress and the wall.
Insides
She began to design herself inside.
She wrote: There are no black squirrels in the forest. Only the colorless ones survived.
Mirrors
Two women bickered in the crepuscular haze of Christmas Eve. Lydia looked up at the hairline furrows around her mother’s eyes, not as shadowed as her mother’s mother, but defined all the same. She watched them as if watching her own colorless self between two mirrors, her clones mimicking her movements in the infinite, silver planes. No matter which way she moved, which way she flicked her limbs at the last second, the clones copied her, or she copied them, it was all the same in the timelessness of glass. She was hopelessly linked to them no matter how tenuously bound. But hope was what she did have. She would keep glancing away, keep jerking her arms at the last second, hoping that she was different.
Alternate Endings, Reprise
Black paint chipped beneath, flakes sticking to legs. She sniffed away dust shook loose from the red curtain behind her. Lydia watched student-actors improvise lines and she jotted notes down for the masterpiece she would later create. And then she was writing. Seconds and minutes and hours slipped away as her notes became lengthy sentences and dialogue and whole pages that swirled and blurred the air on her periphery until the tangible world became as loose as the shattered lines of her imagination. A hand reached through her clouded glass and touched her shoulder. He was tawny and ponytailed and his square face more defined than any she would ever know again. He took the notebook from her hands. “Take a break,” he said, handing her a soda. He began to read. Three little syllables that would echo on through the years, long after he had ripped apart the ligaments of her soul, long after he had married and she had torn his letters into fine wisps and scattered them in the far reaches of her existence. “You’re a good writer,” he said, wetting his index finger to turn the page. “Yes,” she said, her mouth curling into a half smile. “I am.”
The Singer, Reprise
Violent morning sun. Struck through sky and lush landscape, bleeding bright arms of light that shattered through the translucent wings of moths, refracting against the spider web that stretched across the patinaed spire of St. Madeline’s. They stood, side-by-side, gazing down at the woman spread and boxed before them, her Old Testament eyes firmly shut, an artificial rouge smeared on her waxen cheeks. Stella. Could any of them remember when they were last together? Black-clad human shapes surrounded them, crying and laughing accordingly, reverently, offering the perfunctory words of comfort. Somewhere behind them, Lora chased and chastised a loose child. The hallowed ground was still wet with dew as the parade carefully trampled the fresh mown grass. Wind burst upon this scene as if spectral revenants dared them to listen and the three colorless faces stood looking to the sky, the hairs on their arms brushing against one another, backs to the sun.
Work
She felt all the sinewy layers in her mouth and nose and eyelids prickle. Lydia stared at the blank screen for a long time, afraid to blink. She felt the brightness in the roots of her eyes and pain pulsing down her face and she looked away, wetting her lids with fat tears. She drew long curlicues and little flowers and a misshapen horse on a notepad. She tore it to bits and rearranged the pieces on her desk. Then she did nothing, could do nothing for a long time.
Memory
Memory, she thought, is just strange kin to imagination. Human minds are malleable, riddled with holes, and the delicate scenes that make up our lives, while pretty and horrifying, amount to what? Who is to say that the past that was differs from the past that was not?
Crosshatching
His mouth pucker ceaselessly as he wrote, cross-legged with the pad on his thigh. “And what about your family? Any history there?” he asked, still writing. Did he know that his face resembled a leathered kiwi? Lydia glanced out at the rain clattering against the window, knocking the mesh screen back and forth into the glass as the sky faded from cerulean to shadow. That night, she stared at the slip he had given her. She stared at it for a long time. She tore the paper into pieces and stuffed the bits in crevices all throughout her apartment. She took out a sheet of paper and wrote.
An Ending
The piece consumed her far more than she had expected. Lydia stared out the window, hands poised above the keys in anticipation as she watched the nandina berries dip in the wind, their bright red clusters hanging nearly to ground. She wondered how many one could eat without falling ill or dying. Endings were always tricky, but this one was especially problematic. What did it matter, these words? To place in proper context this great and infinite void that rattled within, that could not, no matter what combination of limited alphabetical signs she used, ever really be written as she felt it. What did it all matter? Except that it did. Somehow it did, the little solace these words provided her in all this cosmic dark.
The Singer
Earthen rank. Twin boys crowded her by cellar door. “Chicken,” one clucks, a finger in her shoulder blade. Just one bottle. She gathered the pleats of her choir dress and descended to basement. Pushed through black. A trapezoid of yellow light fell on the dusty floor behind her and she moved through dark, searching the air for a chain. She curled her fist around the rusted links and pulled. The bulb glowed fiercely for a moment, illuminating the pink underbellies of bottled holy wine, but then the door slammed and the globe crackled and burst and rained electric embers. Non-light. She blinked, eyes adjusting to shadow. A tenuous, starry light filtered through the frosted glass of a ground-level window and she looked around and saw her own colorless reflection in the moonlit plane above. Silence. She felt something else there, alone with her. A thread of light bled through the space at the bottom of the door and she ran to it and pounded and pounded against the hollow frame. No one answered. She beat and yelled and she knelt on the seam of light and pleaded for her release.
Tails
A playful dirge. Struck chords wafting out from the rectory and into the forest space where boys plotted their next moves. Stella paid no mind. A lizard stole across the hot rocks, its blue spine thick with dust. She cupped her hand down over the writhing body, but only its tail was too slow. The creature escaped into the lily-choked pond, leaving its tail to the god-like hands of a twelve-year old. She flung the curled muscle into the pond where it landed on a lily pad drying in the sun. The boys had a bottle, smearing it with their grubby fingers as they passed it back and forth and soon it landed in the dirt at her feet. They teased and bullied her and then the glass was to her lips. It burned like creosote in her throat and nose, but she swigged again and again until the liquid numbed her tongue and the ground dipped and rolled beneath her feet. These shadow-faced boys shoved one another, laughing, their tail-shaped skins sagging between their legs. And soon her thin limbs were heavy and heat crept up her neck and bile lined her mouth. She leaned over the pond, pushing vines and kelp aside. Her face, washed of color, billowed in the glassine surface.
Sunday
The organ swelled with air overhead, gold pipes running to the wooden rafters. The iron railing hemmed her in and only her mellifluous voice escaped through the balcony bars. She closed her eyes and saw her voice floating in the air as the congregation below held their breath. There was nothing but her music echoing, reaching out to the apse and Stella offered it up to the seraphic figurines before her. She finished with numb lips and a hollow chest and looked down at the flock below. No one seemed to have heard her. A black haze curled in her periphery, but she could see it straight ahead too, seeping out from the alter, the pews, the deacon’s cassock. No one saw the soprano fall to her knees in the stained glass light, broken and colored by the blood-orange halo of John the Baptist.
Blackbird
Black trees with branches outstretched like tentacles against the ringed glow of the harvest moon. Land and sky blurred a gradient of blue-gray on the horizon so that no man could distinguish where earth ended and the heavens began. Inside the bar, dust motes and smoke married in the air around her. Warped piano against the wall, a boy tickling its keys with a cheap cigarette hanging from his lip. Stella shook the last trickles of drink into her mouth and left the glass on the lid of the Steinway. She danced with a Harper kid, a Skellern twin and dipped into a Fillimore brother’s arms and flirted with all the boys whose meat-colored eyes had become as familiar as her own achromic face in the mirror. The heat crept up her neck, but she only thirsted for more. No one here can love and understand me. The lyrics crooned out of her and the boys laughed and she twirled in the dim light. She watched their phantom faces in the mirror. She swallowed, down raw throat. She felt the world shift beneath her. I’ll arrive late tonight. Blackbird, bye, bye.
Alternate Endings
Once a man with a wide-brimmed hat and pinstriped suit approached her in the vestibule after mass. Hoarfrost collected at the window corners and incense smoke curled in colored sun shafts beneath stained glass. He smelt of leather. He complemented her voice. Mentioned a program. Gave her his card. Later, in her wild abandon, she slipped the card under a tumbler and the paper became wet with glass rings. Sometime during the night, it fell into a puddle beneath the bar and the ink bled and the wet fibers became knotted and torn. The barman swept it into a bin long after the drunks had gone home and its dilacerated structure fell apart. Eventually, the papery fragments made it to the dump where, after weeks of shifting weather, the only etchings of its former life were a sliver of corner mottled in the garbage. That too would disappear.
A Wedding
Wildflowers bundled with twine filled a church doorway. Familiar human faces occupied pews as Stella kissed a Skellern twin, an embryo doubling and stewing already inside her unbeknownst to them both. She glanced up to the balcony, to John the Baptist and his blood-orange halo. They were married. Petite cakes with creamy icing and flaky apple tartlets and ladyfingers and bitter jams and cool lemonade filled the oilcloth picnic tables outside and a crude tent played host to the reception. Hours crept by and the tangibility of the world became strained and pulled like wet tissue paper and Stella grew limp in her alcoholic haze. She lost husband and shoe at the height of the festivities and struggled to search for either in her reverie. She rested against a haystack not far from the crowd. Turreted clouds moved quickly overhead and the landscape darkened and blurred. A figure beside her. Raw mouth on hers. Her husband, she hoped, but then thought how maybe that fact mattered little at all now.
An Old Friend
A sky poised for impending storm. Reefed skin sagged beneath her eyes, shadowed and fragile as her nights stretched long into dawn, the metronomic clock her only witness. Somewhere in the shadows she heard her children’s soft breaths, the dead sounds of unplucked piano strings, a rustling that belonged to another reality entirely. Somehow she knew they would never again hear the approaching dissonance of her husband’s car. The dark knew it too. “Is it time then?” Stella asked, withered fingers silently tracing the flowered upholstery on her armchair. Fear had long melted away with other sentient parts. No answer. “Please?” she asked. But there would be no answer for a long time.
The Dancer
Hollow winds shook town, street sign, broke windows as the denizens scrambled for their cellar doors, storm shelters. Stella hunkered beneath the church, watching the others click rosary beads in time with the clacking shutters. The meadow grew dark and across town the little house wobbled and creaked and Posey watched the sky glow with those supernatural southern lights. The green winds winnowed the grass, sprayed long arcs in the brook, bled through the cracks in the weather-stripping until outside and inside married in the space around her. Posey wrung a threadbare pair of ballet slippers in her hands, the rank, homey smell of feet rising to meet her. Both mother and daughter looked to the sky and Posey came to know her new friend in the dark.
Dinner
Posey chewed a bit of celery, green plant matter crunched to pulp, threads of stalk stuck between her teeth. Across the table a body that contained her mother. A smear of peanut butter dirtied the plate and she went to dip the celery, but then stopped and took another unadulterated bite. A clock chipped away at time. The birds ceased to warble. They listened to the unceremonious creak of the front door and its subsequent closing and heard her brother’s cumbrous footfall across the parquet floor. Posey held an unchewed clump in her cheek. Her mother’s eyes fell. Eventually, Stella stood, went into her room and closed the door. Posey listened to the weight of his movements as they violated the silence. She looked out the window and searched the sky for something she might know in the night.
The Gilded Bat
Gripped wood, leg extended. The other girls talked in a cluster on the floor, their lavender leotards sparkling with iridescent wings that jutted out from their shoulder blades. Her own gossamer forelimbs felt heavy and limp on her back, but she did not look in the mirror. A rumbling murmur broke out amongst the girls and Posey looked to see the principal dancer cross the other side of the studio in a black-winged tutu, paint cut across her face in startling chiaroscuro fashion. Posey turned into the bar and looked out the window, catching a glimpse of her own washed face in the glass. She pointed her foot harder, felt the strain in her arch like a hot knot. She pointed and pointed and pointed as the burn tore up her muscles and an army of bats ripped through the sky.
Meanings
“Faith,” the teacher spoke, but the rest dissipated into the penumbral corners of Posey’s mind. She sat, fingers clamped to the splintered edges of her chair, fixated on a sliver of paint hanging loose from the baseboard. She focused on making it the most defined object in the room, turning her mind from outer shapes. Faith, she thought. Yes, Posey knew all about faith. Not the belief in the things that we cannot see. She already knew there existed for her things that did not exist for others. No, rather, faith was the belief that things could be different. That night, as her brother’s dark shape crossed under a disconsolate sky just outside her window, she wondered if she had any.
Growth
She cupped her breasts. Flattened them. Sucked swallows of air. Hair and skin and limbs became one colorless extension in the fluorescent lights. A figure appeared in the reflection and Posey ducked, covering herself with a towel. “Relax,” said the figure, smoke curling out her nostrils. The principal dancer crossed the dressing room in three long strides, smoke trailing her like a cape. “Here,” she said, taking a long elastic bandage from the counter. “Come.” Posey stood and dropped the towel and felt sick to find her nipples like marbles in the light. The principal dancer handed her the cigarette and proceeded to cover Posey’s chest with the band. Posey took a drag and coughed. The dancer smiled and drew the bandage tight. Later, after her brother returned to his room, Posey took out a pack of cigarettes she’d stolen from him and lit one, letting the smoke roll out her windowsill. She lit cigarette after cigarette until eventually the smoke felt easy and her breasts withered back into fishbone.
La Folie de Giselle
Pink blisters bubbled the skin between toes. Yellow-red blood stained broken wood inside her point shoes and she dabbed bits of tissue between the hot skins. The stage was dark and silent save the few bright spotlights illuminating the place and she could hear her tumescent heart beating in her ears. She wrapped her toes. Counted turns of the medical tape so that each end seam was aligned to the left. She tied ribbons and adjusted her leotard and started again. Ballonné. Ballonné. Pas de basques. Glissade. Jette. She faltered. Again. Ballonné. Ballonné. Pas de basques. Glissade. Jette. Something rustled the dark. Quiet. Glissade. Jette. Pas de basques. A scratching like a rake over the wooden floor. She saw nothing under stage lights and felt her heart in her mouth. She crept towards the noise, careful not to clack the wood of her shoes. She peered into the wings. The stage turned to fog and all she could see was a shadow blooming out from the dim work lights. She backed away. She must have screamed. At what? Later, when the company members found her, she would say the heat from the lights had caused her to fall. And she would eventually convince herself that it had happened this way.
Feet
Distended feet, bunions callused and cracked. She waddled over lime green tile onto shag carpet. She sunk into the armchair, her hands clasped around her bloated beach ball belly. She heard a cry from the other room, but then silence. A foot poked up through skin and Posey pressed down on it. A silent house darkening rapidly, her husband would not be home for some time yet. She dozed. Somewhere in the depths of her dreams, a footfall echoed out, and then she was awake and could still here the squeaking of rubber on a parquet floor. Her veins constricted and her fingers went numb. Posey peeked around the corner, down the hallway, but there was nothing in the dark. The phone rang. Stella’s voice seemed to hit her through layers and layers of atmospheric pressure like wavelengths through water and she couldn’t be sure of what she’d heard. A crash. Twisting husks of steel and glass and ice compacted in unholy matrimony. Posey lit a cigarette. She was not surprised to find that she did not cry. She was surprised by her mother’s hiccupped description of her brother’s severed foot on the side of the road. She was surprised by what she did two months later.
The Painter
Yellow winds rumbled through the grasslands. Desiccant stalks bowed in waves of gold around Stella and she blinked away an errant hair. Wheat beards scratched her forearms and legs as she watched the littlest girl, removed with her crooked easel, ostracized from the game. The other children popped in and out of sight amongst the tall grasses, bedashing one another with shouts and demands and laughter that echoed across the meadow. The little one paid them no mind and was still for some time, staring at the limned figure on her paper. Stella scratched her arm. Posey shifted next to her, smoke dissipating from her cigarette like a papery sixth finger. The other children ran off, disappearing into bulrush. The girl looked up from her easel to the air between Stella and Posey. Both women looked behind them and the sky turned to liquid and the shadow unfolded itself and filled the space between the three figures.
Turns
Corrine chewed on the plastic handle of a watercolor brush as she watched Lora and a friend take turns. “Now you,” her sister said. The friend leaned over and pulled back Lora’s dead hair, a wet smack noise stuck between them. Lora let out a gasp. “It kind of hurts.” “It’s supposed to be good,” the friend said. “Now you, Cory,” Lora said. Corrine shook her head. “Come here, you’re the boy,” Lora protested. Corrine knelt down beside her sister and stuck the tip of her tongue out between her teeth. “No you have to use your lips.” Corrine tasted salt and sweat and soon she was crying. “I don’t want to play.” “You’re such a baby.”
Ray Banks
Feathered bangs and sprayed curls and a peach smell behind ears. Corrine sat before her mirror, fumbling with the clasp of a silver locket around her neck. Her contacts dried her eyes and she blinked and blinked, but the redness remained. Posey stood in the doorway, cigarette smoke coiling through the air around her. “That boy is here,” Posey said. Corrine nodded, dabbing a small amount of cream on her knuckles and elbows. “It’s going to rain,” Posey said, leaning against the frame, right foot crossed over the left, a crisp pleat down the thighs of her silk slacks. Corrine did not reply. “It may even sleet.” Corrine opened her mouth as she coated her lashes with mascara. “How long has he had his license?” Corrine lifted her eyebrow. “Don’t look at me like that, what if you run into black ice? What then? Does he even know which way to turn in a skid?” “Stop,” Corrine said. Posey tapped the long ash from her cigarette into her hand. “He’s gay, you know,” Posey said. She took a long drag and the black hung between them like velvet. “He’s the captain of the football team,” Corrine replied. Posey shrugged and walked down the dark hallway.
Outsides
Hissing and humming (if it can be called hissing and humming) and sparks and heat and Heat and HEAT. Lava-like whips recoil and lash in blood orange arcs, hot descends, cold ascends, the colorless gas contracts and the hissing grows like helicopter propellers and flares burst at the surface, the wind crackling black and red clouds into the darkness and the heat stretches out astrally through the blackness, and it burns and burns and burns and burns and burns uninhibited and unwavering until it hits- “Good shit, huh?” he took the damp joint from her and brown flecks stuck to her lips, but she did not care. She did not hear him through all that black. “The stars,” she said. “Look at all the stars.” “Hey,” he said. “The stars,” she said.
Soup
Grease drippings. Marrow-sucked bones. She wiped the counter, removed his plate. He nodded for more as he sucked the orange from his fingertips. Chicken Flats always wanted more. In a booth in the far corner, Half n’ Half raised his glass and she brought the pitcher to him. Just Coffee wanted just her check. The place emptied around three and Corrine hunched over the bar, fingers splayed over creamy stock and colored pencils. A timer chirped in the kitchen. The sounds of things boiling. Burnt coffee smells. Corrine was lost, shading the ribcage of her paper figure, and did not hear the front door open and the man cross the room and sit two stools down from her. “You’re a good artist.” She jumped. The man smiled. He took the sheet from her hands and studied it. Suddenly she saw her drawing for what it was, disproportionate head, ogre-like neck and legs, the flatness of the eyes, and she wanted to tear it to pieces. “This is wonderful,” the man said. “You have a gift.” Corrine smiled. She took the paper back and served him water and a menu. “What can I get you?” “Soup.” He smiled. “And your name.”
Happiness
She rolled the syllables over her tongue, the hiss on the back of her teeth. The urine-colored gladioli displeased her, she added white to the canvas for highlights, but they remained blurry and uninspired. Just one synapse, one nerve getting a little more stimulation over another. If it’s that easy, couldn’t it be regulated?
Ray Banks, Reprise
Another merlot. Another check of reflection in the mirror. Corrine avoided wine lips by drinking out of a straw, but tongue remained swollen and purple. She watched the crowd, ghosts in the glass who weaved and pulled through the smoke filled room. “Cory!” a voice called over bobbing heads. Ray Banks appeared before her and squeezed her thin shoulders. “I didn’t think I’d see you here,” Ray said, but before she could respond he caught the sleeve of a smallish man and reeled him in. “This is Clark,” Ray said and Corrine shook his hand. Ray put his arm around Clark and held him in a way that Corrine longed to be held. They talked. Ray and Clark “married” and Corrine “married” too. Their lives hung between them in useless lines of data. Clark handed her his card. He was an interior designer and Corrine thought about all the interiors she has to decorate.
Shapes and Colors
Head rocked. Shoulders slumped. She stretched on the couch and all her pretty objects swirled and blurred before her, framed in a blackish haze. Carefully selected crown molding, mantel linings, dried branches and berry table pieces, hollowed out ostrich eggs, feathered pillows, cashmere throws, ornamental runners, wall hangings, oiled prints, leather bound books. Corrine walked to the large oblong bowl of ostrich eggs, one cracked, a long curvy tendril in its shell. She reached under the egg and found the wooden box still in place. She knelt before the coffee table. Inside, a plastic zip lock crinkled and she held it to the light, looking at all the shapes and colors inside. Pink. White. Oval. Rectangle. Yellow. Circle. Green. Blue. Bar. Valium. White. Darvocet. Codeine. Ultram. Demerol. OxyContin.
Numbers
One two three. One two three. Corrine was keeping count. One two three. She fingered the cigarette in her pocket that she managed to coax out of a credulous nurse on the fourth floor. One. She pictured the unfinished canvases strewn about the garage. Seven. She stood over the sea of white linoleum, one hand clutching the IV mast as she sifted through a stack of mail. Adverts for hand creams and five-dollar pizzas. Six. Charity newsletters. Four. Pastel cards with balloons and bears and flowering fields. Nine. Letters of acceptance. Zero. She touched the staples in her belly. Twelve. She watched as they wheeled the limpid body in, its mouth puckering ceaselessly as an errant string of spittle stretched and broke between its fists. Three. One two three.
One of These Things is Not Like the Others
Big Bird cooed over the electronic beat. She put her hands to her temples. The baby was not watching the television. It stared at her through the chipped wooden bars, her soft hands clutching the railing. One of these things just doesn’t belong. There was something uneasy in the little black eyes, but Corrine could not look away. She fingered the lighter in her pocket that she still carried around even though she quit smoking. The baby blinked. Can you tell which one is not like the others? Corrine broke the stare and walked down the hallway. She heard a crash and raced back to find the little girl outside the crib, the wooden railing collapsed, the baby standing for the first time. By the time I finish my song?
Lines
Corrine smoked on the patio watching the squirrels dip down the trees in straight lines, frozen trunks cracked like open wounds. Corrine liked lines. Paint lines. Makeup lines. Book lines. Signature lines. Coke lines. She liked things symmetrical. She thought about other lines.
Stella and Adolf beget Corin and Posey. Posey and Rick beget Lora and Corrine. Corrine and David beget Eliza, David Jr., and Lydia.
The Doubtful Guest or The Writer
Posey inhaled, a burn like a slow fuse coiling the length of her esophagus, and watched the girl’s spine curve further over scraps of paper, her tongue hanging limp over her fat bottom lip. The girl coughed. She coughed again. Posey wet her fingers and pinched the cherry embers of her cigarette out. The girl scribbled below her. “Read my story,” Lydia said, holding her paper up. Three rectangular figures with faces shaded in pencil stood in a field bursting with colors. Blue grass and orange flowers, a pink-green sun with red winds curling in the air. “And they lived happily ever after,” Posey said. Corrine, legs draped over the arm of her chair, swirled the gin in her glass with her finger. Lydia took the sheet back and drew a black oval to the left of the gray faces, as if it were hovering above the scene, and left the drawing on the floor. Posey folded it in half and tucked it between the pages of a slender yellow book where it remained for seventeen years.
Tableaus
Corrine insisted on a family portrait. Soup emerged from his makeshift office with a crumpled jacket, licked his fingertips and ran them through his dusky hair, a small coffee stain on the triangle of his tie. The children yawned. The photographer set the tripod up in dewy grass, waiting for sunrise. Where was Lydia? When she did not come at her call, Corrine stormed through the house, throwing open laundry hampers, emptying cabinets, lifting rugs. Soup slipped away to the garage and tapped twice on the hollow door of an old metal storage box. A tiny rap echoed in response. “Come on,” Soup said. Her hair tousled and skirt wrinkled, Soup smoothed the lumpy curls as best he could and made a ponytail. He spotted a scrap of paper on the ground. He looked in her pockets and pulled fistfuls of shredded paper like confetti from the depths. Lydia grinned. Years later, she would stare at the divorced family as if they belonged to another reality entirely. Only after gazing for a long time, would she spot a small sliver of paper in her own fist and wonder what words she had desperately clung to, even then.
Goosebumps
Stacks of glassine paperbacks- purple, orange, slime green, blue- leaned in precarious towers over the worn carpet. Lydia held a book close to her face, dusting the yellowed edges with her sticky fingers. Several times she held her breath and released only with the page breaks. A shadowy monster ascended the pages, clawing over words like rocks, her chest constricting with each grammatical corner took. The story narrowed, as if she too was thrust in its tunnel, and reality and fiction blurred in the most terrifyingly beautiful marriage around her. The creature made its way up the paragraphs and commas and italics and exclamations until she could smell its rotten breath hanging between them. “Lydia!” Lydia jumped, the book leapt from her hands. “Lydia.” Her mother stood, fingers clamped around a bundle of papers, waving them in the doorway. “Just tell me exactly what these are?” Corrine yelled. She threw the papers on the floor. Missing assignment slips and red-lettered “F’s” stared back at her. “Homework, now,” Corrine hissed. Her mother picked up the book and gathered it with the others. “Homework!” Corrine took the books and stormed down the hallway. Lydia went to her desk and took out a sheet of paper and wrote, “fuck,” then “shit,” and, when she could think of no new curses, repeated both words the length of the paper, folded the sheet into a tiny flap and stuffed the square between her mattress and the wall.
Insides
She began to design herself inside.
She wrote: There are no black squirrels in the forest. Only the colorless ones survived.
Mirrors
Two women bickered in the crepuscular haze of Christmas Eve. Lydia looked up at the hairline furrows around her mother’s eyes, not as shadowed as her mother’s mother, but defined all the same. She watched them as if watching her own colorless self between two mirrors, her clones mimicking her movements in the infinite, silver planes. No matter which way she moved, which way she flicked her limbs at the last second, the clones copied her, or she copied them, it was all the same in the timelessness of glass. She was hopelessly linked to them no matter how tenuously bound. But hope was what she did have. She would keep glancing away, keep jerking her arms at the last second, hoping that she was different.
Alternate Endings, Reprise
Black paint chipped beneath, flakes sticking to legs. She sniffed away dust shook loose from the red curtain behind her. Lydia watched student-actors improvise lines and she jotted notes down for the masterpiece she would later create. And then she was writing. Seconds and minutes and hours slipped away as her notes became lengthy sentences and dialogue and whole pages that swirled and blurred the air on her periphery until the tangible world became as loose as the shattered lines of her imagination. A hand reached through her clouded glass and touched her shoulder. He was tawny and ponytailed and his square face more defined than any she would ever know again. He took the notebook from her hands. “Take a break,” he said, handing her a soda. He began to read. Three little syllables that would echo on through the years, long after he had ripped apart the ligaments of her soul, long after he had married and she had torn his letters into fine wisps and scattered them in the far reaches of her existence. “You’re a good writer,” he said, wetting his index finger to turn the page. “Yes,” she said, her mouth curling into a half smile. “I am.”
The Singer, Reprise
Violent morning sun. Struck through sky and lush landscape, bleeding bright arms of light that shattered through the translucent wings of moths, refracting against the spider web that stretched across the patinaed spire of St. Madeline’s. They stood, side-by-side, gazing down at the woman spread and boxed before them, her Old Testament eyes firmly shut, an artificial rouge smeared on her waxen cheeks. Stella. Could any of them remember when they were last together? Black-clad human shapes surrounded them, crying and laughing accordingly, reverently, offering the perfunctory words of comfort. Somewhere behind them, Lora chased and chastised a loose child. The hallowed ground was still wet with dew as the parade carefully trampled the fresh mown grass. Wind burst upon this scene as if spectral revenants dared them to listen and the three colorless faces stood looking to the sky, the hairs on their arms brushing against one another, backs to the sun.
Work
She felt all the sinewy layers in her mouth and nose and eyelids prickle. Lydia stared at the blank screen for a long time, afraid to blink. She felt the brightness in the roots of her eyes and pain pulsing down her face and she looked away, wetting her lids with fat tears. She drew long curlicues and little flowers and a misshapen horse on a notepad. She tore it to bits and rearranged the pieces on her desk. Then she did nothing, could do nothing for a long time.
Memory
Memory, she thought, is just strange kin to imagination. Human minds are malleable, riddled with holes, and the delicate scenes that make up our lives, while pretty and horrifying, amount to what? Who is to say that the past that was differs from the past that was not?
Crosshatching
His mouth pucker ceaselessly as he wrote, cross-legged with the pad on his thigh. “And what about your family? Any history there?” he asked, still writing. Did he know that his face resembled a leathered kiwi? Lydia glanced out at the rain clattering against the window, knocking the mesh screen back and forth into the glass as the sky faded from cerulean to shadow. That night, she stared at the slip he had given her. She stared at it for a long time. She tore the paper into pieces and stuffed the bits in crevices all throughout her apartment. She took out a sheet of paper and wrote.
An Ending
The piece consumed her far more than she had expected. Lydia stared out the window, hands poised above the keys in anticipation as she watched the nandina berries dip in the wind, their bright red clusters hanging nearly to ground. She wondered how many one could eat without falling ill or dying. Endings were always tricky, but this one was especially problematic. What did it matter, these words? To place in proper context this great and infinite void that rattled within, that could not, no matter what combination of limited alphabetical signs she used, ever really be written as she felt it. What did it all matter? Except that it did. Somehow it did, the little solace these words provided her in all this cosmic dark.
M.K. Rainey is a writer, teacher, and editor from Little Rock, Arkansas. She is the 2017 Winner of the Bechtel Prize at Teachers & Writers Magazine and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, 3AM Magazine, The Collagist, Fiction Southeast, and more. She co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series and lives in Harlem with her dog. Sometimes she writes things the dog likes.