Regardless, I seem to be back in a creative groove.
Here's a short story I wrote a while back and completely reworked this weekend, somehow, amidst a flurry of paid work and not a lot of sleep. It's still not where I want it to be, but that isn't the point. The point is, I'm writing again.
______________________________
Gymnastics
I
work a lot, but it really gets me nowhere, at least that’s what Harley says
every night when I burst through the door like a striped rocket and slam the
keys down on the table with so much gusto that my hand almost bleeds. He doesn’t
know why I work so hard; we’re both students with obsess grants and nothing to
do but sit and stare at the dark spaces in the dust-bunny-infested corners of
his filthy apartment. Those corners are all about procreation – mini sex
education lessons twenty-four hours a day with linty body parts flying every
which way, asexually pornographic.
I
come home from my job and take off my yellow sweater – his yellow sweater that
I stole, or borrowed. He has never admitted he gave it to me, but I realize it’s
not his favorite, so I think if I ever mentioned it, he’d just pass it off as “no
big deal” with a slight shrug of his shoulders and an aversive glance that
would make him look like a swimmer forcing out his ram-jet adrenaline behind
the blocks, seconds away from starting his race. But adrenaline is something
energizing, and what Harley has is heavy as a globe on his back, strapped with
burlap and thick-skinned leather, possibly shaped like a cross, if that is
obtrusive enough to magnetize an eye or two. As I throw the sweater on the used
red garage sale couch, I remember I once read a story in National Geographic about a group of people in Jerusalem (or maybe
it was right here) who carried seven-foot tall crosses crafted of oak and wore
thorned crowns for a thirty-mile hike to simulate Jesus’ final walk. I admire
their dedication, but still can’t help remembering how hard I laughed when I read
a quote from one of those robed Supermen Faithfuls: “By the time we got to the church, our
crosses weren’t touching the ground anymore because they’d been worn down from
all the cement we’d encountered.” (Modern living is a bitch, and so is
friction.) Now I think of Harley wearing a robe and a crown, carrying a cross,
and the image doesn’t really send more than numbness through me. And martyrdom
loses more ground.
I
throw myself onto the couch like a grammar school high jump junkie who has
perfected her Fosbury Flop and grab a literature ‘zine from the metal slab that
is a coffee table. I know over the ash tray and am reminded I want a cigarette.
But I don’t want to smoke all mine. (I buy the cheap ones that taste like the
floor of the subway station … not that I’ve ever touched my tongue to it.) I
want the expensive ones that come in either blue or red, both with gold coats
of arms and fancy calligraphy embossed on them, the ones that Harley smokes
beyond his means.
I
fly up onto my feet with so little effort that I almost believe myself to be the
first Guinness human being to able to stand straight up from a prone position
in one jumpy movement. I run around, a little twitchy white mouse who quests
for the nibble of stale cheese in a dark corner of the labyrinth and begin to
rifle through drawers that my fingers probably shouldn’t touch – drawers I
imagine might explode with weird, oblong devices of sexual torture, caverns
that are only stuck shut by accident; one little tweak could send them flying
open with a “Gasp!” and a long burst of tabooed fantasies.
My
grasping fingers choke on a folded-up piece of paper at the bottom of the
kitchen drawer – at least it feels like paper, but much thicker and with a
suggestion of glossiness. It is forced into a square, when it clearly wants to
be long and rectangular. I peek beside it, my thumb still fixed to keep it from
taking flight and notice my treasured cigarettes – the fancy red ones – right there.
I take my finger off the smooth square and mumble, “Stay …” with my palms to
the ground before I pull a stick from the package and flick it lit with the
lighter from my pocket. I stare at the shape in the drawer again and consider
while I draw in puffs of smoke through my teeth. I back away, step forward,
back away, step forward … until my face is directly over the drawer, and I have
to look down at this undefined, glossy “thing” over the tip of my nose. It
pushes back at me as it lies there on the brink of unfolding, of blossoming. “What
are you?” I say, although I feel it is something hidden, like a dark, deformed
child locked in the attic.
I
begin to reason with it.
“You
want to be set free, don’t you?”
No
response, save a slight and slow bend upward, which translated means “affirmative”
in square, robotic tones.
“If
I set you free, you can go back to hiding once Harley gets here, right?”
No
response, but another painful twist to the right. Maybe it is just thinking.
My
head cocks to one side, then the other, and I twist my hips back and forth to
pry myself free from the tension. I hear a loud “pop” and feel my fingers
explode onto the square, kidnap it from its comfortable prison.
“Aha!
Gotcha!” I let out a cackle and begin to unravel the square, layer by layer,
until something grander begins to appear. Amongst the creases I begin to
glimpse bits and pieces of a thigh, a nibble of a breast, an uncovered cheek I
unfortunately recognize as something gone wrong in the now whorish middle of
the kitchen drawer. I meet eyes with the woman in the picture and her familiar
cohort, and I can only think of one question I want to ask her; the pondering
beats at the back of my skull, flaps around like a clipped-wings pigeon in a
dusky attic. I struggle to formulate the appropriate words, and my hands shake
as I turn the picture around to examine its fleshy layers from multiple skewed
angles. My eyes squint to decipher the scene behind the matte finish, a
contortionist nightmare fit only for a “making of” documentary. The smiles on
the subjects’ faces are intimate, too close for me to answer my question, too
distant for me to ask it. But as I flip the photograph over, my index finger
and thumb poised on opposite sides of a crease, I gather up bracery like a
foreign skirt around my brain: “How did
you get this shot?”
I
begin to rustle in the nearly empty drawer again, my cigarette dangling from
the side of my mouth like the cigarette of a hustlin’ cowboy who wants to spit
defiant tobacco juice all over this floor through clenched teeth. I know there
must be a second photograph somewhere either with another woman … or another
man in it. The existence of a third party is the only way to explain the
artistry of the shot, the way all the right parts are bathed in shiny,
surprising, savory light … the general lack of arms or hands outstretched to
hold up the camera-invisible camera. I stretch my arm into the back of the
drawer until the crevice of my elbow jams up against the smooth flecked bottom
of the Formica countertop. All I feel is a vast and mysterious emptiness, the
place where the drawer is too short for its container, the spot where a gap
forms and anything can fall into the nether regions of the whole kitchen
structure. (I have been missing a lot of socks lately.)
I
hit my funny bone against the blunt counter edge on my hand’s way out of the
drawer. “Shit!” The cigarette dangles hazardously, and I stop my antics long
enough to sip more smoke, tap the long ashes into the sink. I thrust the
cigarette back between my lips and pull the drawer off its hinges with a Neanderthal
grunt, place it on the ugly pea green linoleum. I stare at the colorful flecks
on the floor, encrusted like millions of jewels on a makeshift palace gallery, the
same gallery in the picture. I look for the exact spot it was taken, count the
visible dots, but can’t make out any defining features. The floor reflects my
own envy, and I scowl at my past mattress positions during my long reign as the
Queen of Sheets and Dormy Lava Lamps. He must think I am a perpetual co-ed,
that my cheerleading uniform is just stuck at the cleaners right along with his
ripped letterman’s jacket.
I
try to stick my whole head into the void where the drawer is, but it won’t
quite fit, so I peek in through the darkness with my fingers curled over the
edge. The only thing not in any drawer in the apartment is a flashlight. I
begin to wish I had superheroine eyes – eyes that shot out light from the
sockets to provide an ample light source for friends, family and anyone else in
need of a little illumination. My insistence that the third-party photograph is
back there petrifies me. Still, I want to know the whole puzzled story, not
just the in-a-nutshell story told by this one-flash piece of formerly-folded-up
art.
“Damn
… no one could get this shot alone!”
I
spend a majority of my early evening in a thrashing, full-body seizure to get
everything back out of and into its place, except the picture, which I tuck
into my back jeans pocket. My black shirt is covered with yellow fuzz, downy
remains of him, so I put on the lemon sweater. The absence of that garment,
which I wear all the time, would divulge the secrets kept between the
photograph and me, the elusive, clandestine interpretation even the image
itself hasn’t quite discovered. The clock reads 8 p.m., and I know Harley will
be home soon from his job, which from what I can tell just involves a lot of
existential hanging out in a coffee house. I don’t even know whether or not he
receives a paycheck.
At 8:01
p.m., the landline phone rings. Is it the centerfold … or perhaps the
mysterious, omnipotent voyeur? My jumping jelly bean innards jolt.
I
gather up my courage to answer. “Hello?”
“Mitzi?”
“What?”
“Can
you meet me near campus, because I’m tired, but I want to see you?”
“Why
can’t you just come here, where you live … and where there is a mattress and everything?”
My voice drip-drops.
“Mitzi?”
“You’re
going to actually make me ride the subway alone at night?”
“Mitzi?”
I sigh
and hang up, because the conversation will never progress until my butt is
stuck to a plastic seat, hurling towards the now-forbidden future. I still have
the photograph, with all its creases and crawly crevices. I grab my discarded
pack of cigarettes from a table, shove them into the abyss of my left front
pocket and take one more of Harley’s for my trip.
***************************************
“May
the Lord bless you.” The man sitting next to me on the above-ground train
platform bench has eyes that poke through me, and from his hand dangles an
unsmoked cigarette on the brink of lighting. His irises are invisible next to
his dark, unbathed skin, covered with station soot and snowy dandruff from his
salty-peppery hair. His black coat is ripped under the arm, and I stare at it
to avoid those white-with-bits-of-yoke eyeballs. He picks his nose, gets up and
wanders around me like a participant in some mystical ceremony, a dance to
bring down the rains of an unknown power upon every person on the subway, but
especially negative-energied me.
“May
the Lord bless you.” His eyes get big, and he sits down next to me. I touch the
picture in my back pocket and think of Harley.
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