Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 (11 page)

Eventually, locusts were all over the room and Clem's legs were getting smaller and smaller. His jeans were getting flat and he was crumpling towards the floor. It was only five o'clock. Guy wouldn't be home for another three hours.

"Don't look at the clock,” Clem said, not in a nice way. “I know you can't tell time no how."

No how?
I remember thinking. By this time Clem was just a torso. He crawled away from his jeans by using his hands and elbows. There were locusts everywhere: in the curtains, on the couch. I could see their dark silhouettes crawling on the TV screen. Clem's torso started laughing at me in a really mean way. “You don't know about a locust?” Clem's hands wrapped around my ankle. “This is how babies is made!” Then he started bucking up and down on the carpet and cackling and his cackling sounded like the chirping of the locusts. Clem bucked higher and higher until he grabbed the straps of my overalls and pulled me down on the carpet with the creeping, chirping locusts.

I was so afraid of the locusts that all I could do was look at the TV. I looked at the TV and the whole world turned into a tunnel that went around the TV and the light from the TV was the light at the end of that tunnel. Two girls my age came out of the light to comb the hair of the ponies on the TV. What a long commercial.

Hey look,
I remember thinking,
it's me and Rhina.
The girls were very calm and polite as they took turns combing the hair of the ponies. One girl would hold a pony and her eyes would grow big while the other girl combed the pony's tail. They smiled at each other so I could tell they were best friends, the kind of friends who could tell anything to each other. But could they really tell anything to each other? What if one of the girls found out something that the other one could not understand. What if she knew the other girl would never understand it but would be bothered by it and mad at the one girl for telling her something so difficult to understand. Would there be any point in telling? And on the TV they were petting the ponies and giggling at the pink ponies with the purple hair. Only now it looked different to me and I remember looking very hard into the eyes of each girl to see if one of them knew something the other could not know. I looked very hard but there was no telling. And do you know what? One of those ponies winked at me.

Again I know what you are probably thinking
Aha! So
this
is the kind of story this is.
And you're putting me in the uncomfortable position of letting you know you're warm. You're over half right. Or, if you want to use the phrase “for all intents and purposes,” go ahead.

The next day Mary and Guy and Mrs. Daws stood around me and said “We have something to tell you,” and they told me Clem had fallen down a well. They were stockstill and looked at me to see if what they said was sinking in.

"Don't let us ever, ever catch you going near wells,” they told me. This was not a problem as there were no wells anywhere near our trailer or the Daws’ trailer. I had never seen a well except in stories where curious children fell down them. Probably there were no wells for miles and miles. I wanted to see Rhina so badly but Mrs. Daws said Rhina needed to sleep. Rhina slept and slept, and later, when I did see Rhina, I felt very cold. We both did. After that we moved into a ranch home and I saw her sometimes. I saw little things about her like the stars she painted in silver marker on the cuffs of her jeans and the dramatic method she developed of hopping up into minivans. Then I saw nothing for a long time. And now I am under contract to the University and have papers to grade. Papers about Latin American identity in the rodeo community that are not stapled the way I specified. Can you give me one example of queering from the text? That sort of thing. So please excuse me.

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David Lunde

I had never seen a man wearing a wolf before. He'd made a vest of it. It smelled. I was sitting on the splintery wooden lid of the old adobe cistern in the farmyard. This was in Ibiza. It was July, hot and Mediterranean, 1969, and I was looking at the moon, golden and enormous there in the early evening. I was attempting to see the image of a hare that the Chinese see, but it still looked like a human face, less harrowed tonight than usual.

"Hallo, what are you doing?” the man asked.

"Looking at the moon."

"Ha! you are the one they call
poeta, ja
?"

"
Ja
, I mean, yes."

"Then you must do this,
ja
? For you, the moon is television!"

"I guess you could put it that way; maybe I'm just a lunatic.” This guy lived up to the stories I'd heard.

"Is it true that you are the grandson of Heinrich Schliemann?” I asked. I had always admired Schliemann for his imagination and perseverance.

"
Ja
, he vas a great man, my grandfather. Eferyone vas saying he vas crazy,
ja
, but he is making them be stupid!"

"He certainly did; three cities of Troy, not just one, pretty amazing."

"Not amazing. He vas
knowing
it."

"From Homer, you mean. Everyone thought it was a myth but it wasn't."

"
Ja
, and you, you are writing true things in your poems?

"Well,” I said, thinking about it, “I guess so, true for me anyway."

"
Ja
, just so. If they are being true for you, they vill be true for eferybody."

I pondered Kurt's logic; it would be nice to be able to believe that.

"Why are you carrying that axe?” I asked, finally getting up the nerve.

"For the bears."

"Ah, bears...” I was sure there hadn't been bears here since the last Ice Age. “I'll bet they don't give you much trouble then."

"
Nein
, they are knowing I have the axe. They smell it,
ja
?"

Or the dead wolf, I thought.

Later I went to Bar Anita for a
cerveza
. The whole village was gathered there, gaping. The moon was on television; television was on the moon. Neil Armstrong was taking a giant step for mankind. I wondered if
he'd
seen the hare.

Walking home in the dark, I was nervous.

I didn't have an axe.

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Punk-rock mimes crashed the Spoken Word festival I'd organized.

They detailed, through gesture alone, their mutual entrapment in a box called

Society.

I guess I prefer irony in less obvious forms:

remember the time we rented that cannibal documentary and my VCR ate the tape?

We were so happy then—two outcasts, two oranges ostracized from the rhyming dictionary of the world...

Now I simply drink my orange juice alone as childish ideas and childish words struggle with Life's childproof cap.

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Christina Manucy

On Monday, Jack showed up at lunch and tossed a clear plastic sandwich bag in front of me. “Here.” He hung over us, in wrinkled T-shirt and jeans, his shoulders curved in a perpetual slouch.

Stacey kicked me under the table.

I must've been staring. “Um, thanks."

"For your birthday,” he said.

The bag looked empty. No, there were a dozen or more flaxen strands, the size of ... “What...?"

He said, “Cat whiskers. I thought you'd like them.” Then Jack walked away. Fast. People swept from his path

"That's creepy,” said Stacey.

"Yes,” I agreed.

"
He's
creepy,” said Stacey.

Later, I took the whiskers out of the plastic bag, and taped them (in a tiny bundle) to the inside corner of my notebook.

Jack watched me and I couldn't ignore him. So I ignored myself instead. The pang pulling at my diaphragm I tamped down, vacuum-sealed, expelling air until I sounded like Stacey, talking about whatever. Blah, blah, blah.

I soliloquized and Stacey rhapsodized, non-sequitur theater. “Did you see her hair...? I have the dumbest math teacher in the world ... You were crazy last weekend ... Like the time I saw John Waters ... I had carrots and a Snickers bar for lunch..."

In the drama of the moment, Jack proffered a tightly-folded sonnet. I read his confession after class and taped it face down in the back of my notebook, next to the whiskers. Stacey fumed: I wouldn't show her what he'd written.

The following day I asked Jack to quit smoking. Jack watched me, but I was watching his cigarette drop to the ground. He crushed it under the heel of his boot.

In the parking lot, his friends prowled around me. I would've felt no stranger, no more displaced, had Jack joined me at lunch to chat about clothes and hair. They must've smelled my fear.

His friend approached, bristling. He blew smoke out of the side of his mouth, away from my face. I suppressed a cough.

"Why'd you bring her?” His gaze ricocheted off Jack, landed back on me; his eyes narrowed. “You're feeble. But that's cool. I can see. We're all insane. You, me, him,” he jerked his head in Jack's direction.

And he sliced me neatly down the center, split me in two.

At his home, Jack told me in awkward sounds that he saw only me. His hand touched my waist and I looked up. For a moment I was dizzy, as if I'd been standing still before a mirror and seen my own reflection move. I forgot not to breathe. When we kissed, he smelled like the woods at night. I wanted that wildness for myself. My arms wrapped around him. The cut his friend had made began to tear.

Stacey said, “Is it true that you're dating?"

"I guess,” I said. I had known I was weak, bifurcated.

"It's almost the end of the year,” she said.

I shrugged. “I know. It won't last."

"Perhaps it will."

I smelled the trees, the damp earth. Afterward, in the darkness, we kissed. My insides ached. I held him with one arm; I needed the other to keep from splitting apart. I gripped hard, a stranglehold. “Stay."

His head jerked up. In the gloom I saw the whites of his eyes, light escaping. For a long time, there was no sound but his panting. Then, heavy as a stone, “I will stay."

At his words, I felt power enough to ignore my fear, and that slice, until I told myself I must have imagined my weakness.

The summer waned. The gap widened. My two half-selves stopped speaking to each other.

Once upon a time he had come to me. I don't remember when I first noticed the rope between us.

He smelled like the city; he smelled like his friend. A light flared and he lit a cigarette. I saw him out of one eye. My other eye was facing the wrong direction.

"Why?” I asked. He'd said the ashtrays in his room were his friend's, before.

He shook his head. “I can't. My friends..."

The half of me that might have understood wasn't listening. I babbled out of one side of my mouth. My words were incomprehensible; he only heard every other one. “You me. you I us be together. I that happen. a and live your ."

Smoke rose, rope burned. I was unstrung.

He leaned back, twirling the singed end of the tether. “Come with me."

Torn, afraid, I plucked out the eye that saw him and ran away.

The empty socket was on the wrong side. Stacey didn't notice.

I said, “It's over."

"He was creepy,” she said.

When I cried, my halves slackened together. One side of my face was wet. Tears from the missing eye fell back inside my head, filled up my lungs. My heart capsized, and bobbed on the surface. Water leaked from my mouth, my empty eye, seeped through the unhealed slice down my center.

I breathed in. Something floated in the marsh my room had become. I picked up my notebook and waded to the window, climbed onto the roof to sit in the sun. My feet left damp prints behind.

Taped inside the cover of my notebook were cat whiskers and a sonnet. I gently pulled back layers of tape. The sonnet, bleeding blue ink, was placed carefully to the side. I saw the seam where I had severed. I pierced my skin with a whisker and knotted the ends together. Down, and down, I buttoned up living flesh. The sonnet was dry. I crumpled it into a ball and stuffed it into my empty socket.

A breeze went in and out of my lungs, nesting like birds. I lay on the roof. I smelled salt water, felt warmth and open sky. One eye crinkled when I blinked. The sky was clear, cloudless.

Your feet pound across the roof. I feel your weight vibrate through me. I smell the exhaled smoke; feel your gaze in the pause where your steps end.

"He's not here,” I say.

No answer. I turn my head. If I stretched out my arm, my fingertips could touch your bare feet.

You flick the spent cigarette in an arc over the edge of the roof. One leg crosses the other and you sit in a single, smooth movement. “Did I do that?” you ask with a nod toward my stitched wound.

I lift my head to look down my reclining body. The edges of the wound are pink and raw. My head thumps back against the shingles. “You worried a thread that was ready to unravel,” I say.

I know you're staring at my nakedness. After a while, I look over. You lean forward. One hand reaches out to hover above my navel, above a cat whisker. “When you're ready to take those out...” Your hand moves away, rests on my forearm with a touch so light I barely feel it.

I meet your eyes. My new eye sees more clearly than the old.

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Jenny Ashley

Lucy saw them through the window, strappy aquamarine heels with flecks of gold. They reminded her of fishing lures. She strutted inside, gestured to the shoes and the storeowner nodded, sending an employee to the back to retrieve the perfect size.

As Lucy slipped her right foot in the sling back heel, she felt a delicious thrill. The two hundred dollar price tag seemed like a sale. Everyone watching—the storeowner, the employee—remained hushed, in awe of Lucy's religious attention to the shoes. They knew this ritual well. She stopped in several times a week and never failed to leave the store with at least one new pair: platforms, Mary Janes, T-strap pumps, vivaldi slides, bellini thongs.