black shatter

My first reaction to a father who parted my head with an ax was anger. You can imagine it, can’t you. Well, first I felt an enormous pain and saw nothing, almost nothing, and you probably won’t believe it when I say those stars like the ones in the cartoons after someone gets their head bashed in was the first thing I saw and at first I thought the stars were just behind my eyelids, but then I realized they were the stars of the night sky and I was flying, shrieking, toward them, my skirt flapping in the wind, my sweater hanging from me like wings, and yet I was cushioned too by veils – dark, light, and soft – and I passed through them the heat of my anger was quelled and I felt around me the multitude of a curious collective presence like my mother’s soft-worn dresses hanging in the wardrobe and I slowed myself or was slowed by them and I realized I was floating in a dark night sky and was no longer in the barn with our cow turning her terrified eye to me.

Had this peace been what I had never known and only what I imagined until now? I didn’t know at first though I began to suspect it, yes. I experienced the dark immense space as a feathery presence, lifting me, carrying me through mists and vapors, caressing my eyes and cheeks with what felt like soft sweet smelling tongues until the dried blood on my flesh softened and melted away. I felt a little softer on the inside too and I was no longer shrieking or crying or worried about Elizabeth, our cow, who was likely by now focused on her oats again. I only worried for my mother, alone in the house with Father except for my brother and sister Newland and Fannie, and in my worrying, I moaned a bit and a face emerged from the darkness, a young face of a girl about my age, a girl whose eyes were filled with tributaries of blood so that her milky blue eyes looked like veined marbles of the most precious kind, the one we would have wanted to win. “My name is Rachel,”she said, taking both of my hands, “We will see to your family.” I loved her immediately.

So my hair doesn’t look as pretty nor does my face, but there are others of us here who are in the same boat and just can’t be bothered anymore with how ugly we are. That’s because the baby howling wakes us up and doesn’t let us sleep like some who might be in our state, deep in graves, in coffins sunk in metal boxes. We were never put to rest that way and so the baby howling, a thing which happens when a baby dies and remains unfound, keeps us awake. It is a screeching of bats clambering up in caves under mountains and it tears the ears of the undead abused teens. That’s who we are, by the way, although there are some of us as young as four, so old at heart when young. We are in flight among the grave mists at the call of the baby howl because that’s what we do.

I think we’re beautiful, personally, our tattered clothing like soft worn shredded silk, our white faces illuminated by the moon, our bedraggled nails having grown out since death, clearing wild strands of hair aside so our view may be unobstructed though the tracking of the baby has less to do with “seeing” as we knew it when we were alive and more to do with a nocturnal sensation and this is why we are enfleshed: We are equipped, more than any other, to detect sources of pain that have been the result of unimaginable darkness, pain issuing from the breasts of babies murdered by the mothers and fathers who didn’t love them.

We call ourselves The Baby Justice League of the Undead or just The League for short and let me tell you that though we have always existed the baby howl has reached unprecedented levels. I mean, you find the babies crying in a swamp sometimes or sitting alone out in the woods or stuffed in some small place like a concrete pipe and what you do is set them on your knee and pat their cold little forehead and rock them or if they are little enough you give them your finger to suck and that’s how it is for these kids and you have to find all of them before daybreak in their part of the world and you have to put them all back to sleep because that’s just what you do because there’s no one else to do it for them. And even if they are found by the police or whoever you might still have to love them into quiet sleep because chances are if their moms or dads wanted them gone, they aren’t going to want to see them again and there is just no satisfying that kind of pain, especially in the very young who do not understand, who do not find more comfort in people their own age.

It’s a lot of hard work but it doesn’t come without its rewards besides the obvious one of making someone feel good.

Like, there were times I partied at the cemetery with my friends when I was alive, but imagine an undead party where people fly, predict the future, read each other’s minds, mess with the night guard and make out in the graves without getting busted.

I met my other best friend Sissy in the League. She was the girl who happened upon the baby who had been chloroformed and stuffed into a cooler and set out on the sea to die. She detected the baby howl even in fifteen foot swells and roaring winds, could hear it before any of us spotted the tiny white container rolling up and down on the backs of waves the size of colossal black giants tumbling over in their sleep. I said to myself, Damn, now that’s a girl of some refined sensibility. We all took turns holding the baby until she settled and then we nestled her back down into the cooler and set her adrift.

(And before you go accusing us of neglecting to save this baby, I have to reveal that it is against our code to interfere with the course of justice. We are concerned mainly that babies should not suffer unnecessarily when under our watch. Therefore, for example, this baby must be found, floating in the cooler the same way it was placed there. All we can usually hope for this side of the grave is that those who have neglected and murdered their babies will get their due.)

I had been comforting dead babies with the League for several months when a most disturbing cry rocked us. It was that of a child murdered by her mother, dismembered by said mother, and laid to rest on a parcel of land between neighborhoods. That night the cry rose up from the ground was the night the child’s mother was to be released from prison at midnight and the child, confused, was both scared and anxious as young children will be, when in a mixed state, in which, incredibly, they love their own killer. Always, it is the blood shared with their killer from birth that is more powerful than the blood that is let in their death, for the former is the first memory and the bond. That night, the moon set high in the ink that is a tropical night and over the place where the baby lay, under trees dripping with moss that feeds on air.

I would not want to be the newly slain baby of a mother like this, who could party and wear makeup twenty four hours after hacking bones from sinew, the kind of mother is so hot for eyes on her, her lust becoming bloodlust. We had heard of it but had not believed the murderess would be among the trees, the highways, the homes – mute witnesses to the crime. Even given the fact that the free woman accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior, she was not going to be free of a baby who is jealous of her life.

We found the child sitting under a stand of trees on the spot where she had been murdered. We had to put he body back together so we could speak to her, for the wailing came from the clattering of loosely scattered bones. Sure, the living could put her in a casket, even make her look like a doll, but in our world, there are no untruths. Even though she was only three and couldn’t explain if she tried, the case was known more generally, worldwide among the living, and the night the child’s bones were strewn about by her mother, we made a little basket nest with our arms and comforted her from the treetops. When her mother was released from jail and we again gathered up her bones, we decided to do something almost unprecedented: Return her to her previous state as much as we were able to manage.

We determined to do our best in this so she would not have to drag her bones around, so she could be of some use to herself in achieving her aim, which was to be united with her mother. (All she said the whole time we held her that night her mother got free was “Mama,” “Mama,” “Mama.” She knew and we felt there should be no stopping her and sometimes in these cases, a child will take it upon themselves to love their killer back into reciprocated love. It is strange, I know, but it is in our unwritten text of the abused.)

We cried and hugged her and kissed her and gave her a bottle even though she was a little old for that, but we all go back a little in the wake of pain and relief. She chewed on the nipple and smiled, actually smiled her gap toothed grin and we saw shades of that beauty that was hers in life, a beauty a mother like hers would not want to ripen for it would compete with her own. Our tears for her were profuse and the dawn came and we scattered in the cool morning mist which blankets spirits and hides the living from themselves.

The reputation of this child’s mother had tarnished the murderess just as an ornate unpolished piece of silver will become a grotesque thing when left to the air and by the time she left prison, the tarnish of her lies had covered her spell-binding beauty.

Furthermore, it is estimated that the average human being who kills someone will spend approximately 18.5 hours of their waking hours engaging in behaviors of avoidance and purgation.

At first, it seemed our cobbled together baby could not get her mother to see her. The methods of avoidance were strong, warranting a flight from the tropics of the South up to the midwest, several thousand miles away, with plans to travel overseas, but no matter where that mother went, our baby clung to the back of her neck so that every time she looked into a polished mirror in an attempt to improve her visage, her baby looked back at her, over her shoulder, the bloody seams between her arms and shoulders, her head and neck, her fingers and palms screamed out at her. To enflesh her, we had used some of the limited resources at our disposal, even lending her things that would grow back on our own dead bodies, like nails and hair. One old undead guy who hung out with us sometimes said we could have his eyes, ears, tongue, and lips – he’d used them enough for a lifetime and more.

And that slipshod baby, yeah, she stuck with that hateful mama, clung to her neck, loved the life out of her through several of her mama’s disguise and avoidance techniques – her hair changes, the change in lovers, locales, names, weight gain and loss – every possible disguise to mask her identity and guilt from herself, to try to ” start over,” to hide from people who, initially spellbound by her beauty and youth, were furious with themselves for the blood she put on their hands with her lies.

It was a mess when she got out of jail a year after her trial. And in our world, the baby howl took the top of the world off and the heavens were rift in two and we half expected God to come down and pound the ground with his fist, but He remained silent and watched for when humans sew stupidity what they reap is a diseased crop and they do just about enough damage to themselves anyway. All about us were messages carried by radio waves and satellite transmissions concerning the injustice that had been meted out and there was confusion and mourning and anger but we knew the baby would always love her mother, would always see the violence wrought against her own body as some sort of separate thing from her actual mother, as if her mother’s body had been inhabited by a monster.

She would love that mother with a love so fierce as to render an exquisite kind of lonely torture on her, becoming a baby, suckling at her teats, caressing her mother’s skin with her broken fingers, clinging to her legs with her deformed limbs. Her mother will try to dance as before, but will find it impossible. She will try to make love to her boyfriends, but will be hindered by a dead baby on her back. Her mother will find it unsexy to have her laugh accompanied by a cackle issuing from her baby’s lips borrowed from an old dead man. The baby will not let her sleep, will hound her for things she would like to have, now: caresses, cuddles, songs, patty cakes, listening ears, attentive eyes, kisses, hugs. She will hound her all day and all night long for the baby that has been loved will go away but the baby who has been killed by her parent’s hand will never be satisfied.

A message from the League to all men and women who have taken it upon themselves to mother and father children: Need we say it? Yes I guess we must! Take it upon yourselves to do justice to your children, for they are your flesh. We should not have to say this but the morals of our society have turned upside down so that murdering parents are attempting and getting away with murder. If you think you will escape because the courts of the living declare you free, let us warn you that you will have wished you would have shared your child’s fate. Your life will become an unnatural thing, your existence experienced as one might say – as if you were one foot in the grave, for you will literally be with us in your minds and there is no washing that will cleanse the tortured conscience. We exist for the purpose of comforting the slain but in the case of the mother or father who has no conscience, it is our duty, as a justice league, to provide one and provoke it until your death.

When we were close to shore, we cast flowers into the sea, flowers that had bloomed from cracks and crevices of the ship as if the sweetness of Love manifested itself in unusual and unexpected miracles. The One Who Had Been Love had cared for us the whole of our journey although he was dead, wrapped in a shroud, his body kept below deck. Still, impossible things continued to happen just as they had when he was alive and present to perform them. After we lost our mast on the open water during a storm, we cried out in our beds, certain we were done for. The next morning, a new mast had been erected, a mast as straight and turgid as the leaves from a bulb in April. We cried and danced and drank the wine. We spoke of times to come when we would commune with him in full, when he would receive the burial that was his due. We sang songs to him as if he were still alive with us and we knew the songs that gave him pleasure.

At the island, we threw in the rope made from a chain of the flowers he had seen fit to give us. We had weighted it with a chest of our writings, a record of our hopes. It was a message meant only for the sand. When the box hit bottom, the rope snapped and the flowers scattered and the silver fish of the blue green darted and turned and shot off through the rain of pink. The Dear One had loved us into ourselves and at the least sight of beauty, we were tearful and grateful although before our awakening, scales had crusted over our eyes so that we had no joy. After the moment of His hands upon our eyes, there was no division among us, no evidence of shame or envy or grief or anger. When we threw the chest into the sea, we did not know how long or if our joy would last but when one is in love, there is no asking for how long, no greedy hoarding. The sea spread the flowers and before us an unknown source of breath moved the fronds of the trees and a white beach blinded our eyes and gave us delight.

It was no great effort to come to shore. We had prepared the boats long ago and lashed them to the ship, along with the pyre with which we intended to transport the body. We had managed to preserve the means for making fire and lashed a torch to each corner of the strange dark boat. We had no care for ourselves, only for the safe conveyance of our Dear One and for our efforts we were richly rewarded with a feast from the ocean which we cooked over an open flame. We made little houses from reams of sailcloth and we took turns keeping the fire lest wild animals should want to desecrate the body. Though he had taught us not to be scared of all that had been made, we began our protectiveness without a recognition of what we were abandoning, that is, the teachings he had uttered in his living beauty.

Secretly, each flame keeper wanted a chance to whisper to the shroud that contained The One Who Had Been Love. The miracles we had seen convinced us it was a living body though he had taught us were not to put faith in such things but to instead live according to what can’t be seen. We were confused. We spoke to the body and didn’t know we could go anywhere on the island and still be heard. And so we whispered our most fervent hopes to this shroud along with our rather specious prayers that he be conveyed to God though surely the Man was already seated at His right. We said prayers for those whom we had abandoned and for those dead as well, as if they weren’t well cared for, as if the sparrow would not be fed in our absence.

Should the others miss us, we did not know. We only knew one Man had made us live. Perhaps our actions to flee had been rash but we knew the living existence of our Love had staved off what had become for us a grievous state of existence. We knew what men would say, they would say what they’ve always said, that love can be found in present circumstances and yet, we reasoned, how could anything stay the same when trees clearly now have leaves? And so we began our quest, which was not unlike any imperfect quest on earth, though at the time there was no reason to doubt it would turn out to be anything other than what we dared hope.

For the first Christmas after the separation, my son gave me a candle simulating the flickering sounds of a fireplace. For all of my married life I had wanted a real hearth, chimney, fires burning year round, even in summer.

The candle smelled of fake vanilla bean and when lit, emanated a sweet, cloying fragrance throughout my living room. The candle broke my heart.

I have since bought a “Mandarin Tea” fake fireplace candle for my bedroom. It sits on my black bedside table, part of a bedset that is as uncharacteristic of my taste as my “urban chic” apartment.

The sounds of my Mandarin Tea candle accompanies my worries about bills I can barely pay, a health insurance policy with an expiration date.

When the toilet flooded downstairs, the floor painted to resemble a Mexican cantina turned a greyish white, like regular concrete. I’m going to have to find someone to help me make it look fake again. I don’t want to get kicked out after my first inspection. I don’t want them to raise my rental fees.

One day on my way to get my meds I saw in the parking lot a woman, about my age, hobbling into the pharmacy. I projected some calamitous outcome for myself on her. She became a vehicle for my self-concern. I thought, worst case scenario, this is me without insurance, having been hit by a car, developing M.S., enduring the side effects of chemo – all things that have happened to my girlfriends. Was she covered? I wondered. Would I be?

The months are counting down while the candle flickers and the minutes go by while I write this. The fireplace wick in the vanilla bean candle disappeared into the wax weeks ago. Yet I burn “Mandarin Tea” with abandon.

I go out on a date with a divorced man who has lost almost all access to his daughter. Prisoners get more time with their children he says. We sit across from each other at a table in a chain restuarant. After dinner, he suggests we go to his apartment and I buy a case of Yuengling. He says he has no money and I believe him. He cannot pay his student loans this month. He could be sponging off me but I don’t think so. Besides, it is only a case. But I don’t know if it can last like this. He says he doesn’t know how many more dinners he can buy me even though he still wants to go out. I tell him we don’t have to eat.

At his apartment, I sit on the bed while he stands at the threshold to his backdoor and smokes. He knows I am a Christian and he says he knows more about Christianity than a lot of Christians. He says he’s actually read the Bible and a lot of Christians have not. You know what hell really is, he says. He’s forgetting I went to seminary and know something about these things. Almost all men try to tell me things I already know.

I cut him off and tell him yes, that it was called gehenna and was an area located outside the walls of Jerusalem where the city dumped their trash and burned the bodies of criminals and animals. I want to transliterate gehenna from the Greek on a piece of paper, but I hope my ready response with a derivative of the original term is enough to catch him off guard.

He persists. He says yes but now that place in Jerusalem has been made beautiful. I say I’ve been to the city of Jerusalem.

I am glad I chose the Yuengling. He let me choose since I was buying. His tailless cat bounces on the bed and off like a monkey. I ask him for his expensive pill with the Benadryl. The cat makes me sneeze.

We didn’t last long after that. His room was trashed the second time I stayed there. Not that I’m neat. I knew he was. I miss him. But he knew how to hurt me with what he said or didn’t say, with what he did or didn’t do. I even wonder if I should cry over it. But since I’m wondering if I should cry I guess I can’t. I only worry about my abilities as a human when I hear my mother’s voice in my head: You’ll be alone some day. I can’t worry about the future any more I tell myself. Fuck it.

Another man texts me to the effect of the following: Why are you letting your son control your life? How am I going to see you only when you’re not caring for him? Why don’t you get a babysitter for your son? When he is around, it seems like you are very concerned about him. Maybe you are one of those helicopter moms.

When my son brought the candle over he was with his father. It was only a short visit. He was so proud of the purchase and the reason for his pride was based on his keen memory of what I liked and had no more: a fireplace, a hearth, a roaring fire for Christmas. His father had those things now but he wanted me to still enjoy something of it in my drafty urban chic loft-style 2 bedroom which I won’t be able to afford much longer.

As the man is pressuring me, I am literally counting down the weeks my son will be with me and has been with me since he turned thirteen, close to the time I left his father. The weeks that count are the ones he won’t have a car and a means to leave at will and how much will he want to be with me in an apartment without a yard in a neighborhood where his friends don’t live. As it is, he plays video games on-line with his friends most of the time, talking to them through a tiny microphone. But I love the sound of his voice and his laughter, and if that’s all I have left of him, I will not give it to a babysitter for some man I do not know and who is already proving worthless as a potential stepfather, if that’s really this man’s goal which, given the odds, is highly unlikely. He can prove me wrong. I would welcome the surprise. But he will not take me from listening to my son while I write this. He will not take me from the privilege of picking my son up every afternoon or hosting a friend over to spend the night or sitting in the gymnasium stands, watching him play basketball.

I could worry over this man, that he doesn’t like me, but I don’t. I turn the ringer off for my texts.

Here’s the gist of my combat:

(man) 2:13 p.m. “I think u should work on ur flexibility. I know u want to have a more personal life.”

(me) 2:16 p.m. “Yes.”

(man) 2:17 p.m. “I know u don’t like saying that u have a kid and can’t go out. I know other women with 11 year olds who can go out w.o. a babysitter.”

(me) 2:18 p.m. “I’ve been pretty active. During the week I have my son I schedule stuff during the week he’ll be at his dad’s.”

(man) 2:19 p.m. “I like spontaneity.”

(me) 2:21 p.m. “What can I say.  During the week I have him I can see you only once. It’s ok if I’m not what you need. I can handle it.”

(man) 2:23 p.m. “Quitter.”

(man) 2:23 p.m. “Quitters don’t win and winners…”

(me) 2:24 p.m. “I win all the time.”

(man) 2:26 p.m. “Ah but bailing on me the minute I challenge u.”

(me) 2:27 p.m. “I love my son and show it. I don’t bail.”

In my ringerless text world when the man is no doubt on the hunt for something that can satisfy his desire for spontaneity, I write this and ignore for a moment that I am unemployed and will soon have no insurance.

Fuck the future I say. And fuck whoever tries to rob me of my present. And fuck this country for not taking care of its own. And fuck broken vows, including the ones I broke, fuck me, and fuck a lack of forgiveness and hard hearts and the wall that separates.

But God bless the children bringing  their small gifts to heal the world. The flame they carry inside is so tiny Lord, and their hope is as small. Carry them through a dark night. Amen.

On a Saturday in April, you and your dog arrive at the field with the others. Everyone drifts to the bleachers. On the diamond, players are beginning to form, break, and reform in their practice maneuvers as if engaged in a formal dance.  It is game day on this spring day in Florida.

Your dog greets “Cody,” another dog, the unofficial team mascot. Your dog also has a human name and with the people who are the parents of the players, you begin to speak in dog owner code. The people often become vicious when they stop paying attention to the dogs. You’ve been there before, in moments like that, but today, there is dog talk, and the sky is blue, and there are events on other fields, and there is cheering and clapping and buses rolling up for the pole vault, the dashes, the hurtles at the high school. There is a lot to attend and just about everyone seems happy. Besides that, there is clover.

Inevitably, though, a relative of yours criticizes your dog owner choices, a special characteristic of hers that is well known among family members. She questions you over and over and over in a variety of ways, comparing your dog owner approaches to her superior ones. It is time for you to break from this particular quadrille. There is another dance you do, a maneuver necessitated by the sometimes too-closeness of others. There is a narrow strip of trees between fields and while it is not deep enough to escape screams and cheers, it is cool and dappled enough to invite a stroll.

You leave your husband keeping score. You pass your son pitching to his best friend. They are throwing in the clover. He says “Hi Mom” and you say “Hi sweetie,” and you think, Should I stay? Should I watch him throw to his friend? And as you walk on and say no more, you realize that today, someone said “Hi Mom” to you and today you had the privilege of saying “Hi sweetie” and you think you have taught him everything you know and he will continue to learn, on his own, how to throw the ball until it stings someone’s hand, until it eludes someone swinging a stick.

Your dog seems happy in the dappled woods, or is it your mood that makes you see her that way? These aren’t perfect woods. There is a pond blooming with algae. There is a plastic sign on a tree along a sidewalk offering Tai Chi instructions. You stay off all sidewalks.

When you return back to the sunshine, you see a man playing basketball on a court you hadn’t noticed before. He is a man about fifteen years your senior and he has lost the ball and it’s rolling toward your feet. “A ball,” you think. How long has it been since you’ve thrown a ball? And you laugh with him that it’s been a long time and you throw.

At the field, someone is nice to you, someone who hadn’t been as friendly toward you when she first arrived. You are relieved. You think you know the reason for this person’s attitude and possible feelings, but you are glad you don’t really know.

The umpire is performing magnificently behind the plate. The players and parents have never seen anything like it. His voice is the tearing of lightning. His movements are those of an archangel. During the last game, the game that you missed because of your depression, tremendous fights had broken out. You think, “Thank God he is here.” And you sit in a chair, apart from everyone, and feel the thrum of the calls deep in your chest, this relief, this gap in the oppressive heat that is a Florida spring.

She really ought to do something about that hair he thought as she pedaled by his first floor apartment on her powder pink cruiser, her fleshy legs pumping, that mangy white dog scampering beside, pulling at the leash so he could stop and take a shit. Tippi now sixty wearing short shorts. No wonder her husband tossed her. That had been ten years ago, still. What had she been wearing then no telling. But likely good riddance. She had told him once her mother named her for Tippi Hedren, Hollywood starlet, blond bombshell, Hitchcock’s kept woman. On the days Tippi dressed for church and errands, he could see, if he took his glasses off and blurred his eyes as if trying to discern if a site was a mirage or something fairly representing itself, shades of the starlet, the teased, smoothed hair, the mint green dress cinched in at the waist, the kitten heeled pumps. She was a whore. She had boinked every man from here to to the market. Hardly Hedren.

He wondered what it would be like to choke her as in Hitchcock’s Frenzy, though he would prefer it with his bare hands. Who needed the medium of fabric when one could sense flesh on flesh, flesh conquering flesh, flesh unifying flesh, his thick fingers around her tiny pipe. It was time for her to die or get a good fright.  Sixty was too old. Cougars be damned.

Naw, he wouldn’t do it. She wasn’t worth it. The rest of his life in lock up thinking about the time she laughed at him when he slipped his hand under the table, slipped his hand beneath her skirt, feeling for the silk. She clamped her legs hard and turned, forcing him out, grabbing for her screwdriver with a twist. The drink he had bought at least entitled him to what, well, a hand on her back, feeling her warmth, her bra clasp. Women were all alike. He followed her to the bar and sat down beside. Nervous twitch of the lipsticked mouth observed. Perfect. Trembling manicured hands with the cigarette pack. And he, smooth with the lighter, not a reason to be unruffled. To see those lips in a square of panic, the sharp nails clawing at the flesh of his paws, grasping for his face, his eyes. Better than a movie. People everywhere said they never would, given the chance, but in private, living vicariously through flickering screens and turning pages of books and newspaper pages, chickenshits egging on the wrong guy.

She didn’t remember him, never paid attention. For a while he quietly cleaned up the mess her dog left behind him on the sidewalk and in the common areas. That was when she first moved into the neighborhood. She didn’t know who he was at the time but he remembered her from high school, the fantasies of Tippi, and now she was close again, he could watch her and if he was lucky, could finally… People do things when they were older they wouldn’t have done when younger. People come to see things differently. He secretly pumped her bicyle tires at night while she slept, the bicycle chained to the rack under her apartment stairwell. He liked the idea of her surprise when she found them this way in the morning, at the time she exercised her dog. He did’t mind she rode on the sidewalk, against the rules in the neighborhood, something he might have reported of some punk kid. This was Tippi. He had made love to her more times than she could imagine, made love to her in a younger mind, in a younger body.

She had laughed at him at the bar, the nervous quiver in her lip, showing the slight hysteria in it. He disgusted her. Leave me alone, she said as if she had suggested some gruesome thing not merely a stroll along the lake where it was dark and nothing but owls and nighthawks would see them. Leave me be! she said and slapped him when he said he didn’t want to fuck her, only hold her hand. He had thought the language appropriate, considering. She was still something virtuous in her mind then and he liked it, in a way, that show of deception. The former is exactly what he had in mind, right there on the pine needles and crushed scrub palm, in the dark, in the briny mud where a gator might hunt flesh for his nest on a warmer night.

And now, dog shit on the pavement every morning. He would like to lay her out and with his own bare hands or ok, with that godamned scarf that flew out behind her as she rolde, blow out that bitch candle. Fucking cunt.

In all the nights before I became a woman, a beast lay at my feet, pursuing some aspect of my flesh, his furred back reeking of fires and stagnant pools. There had never been a time when he had not whispered into my ear or lapped at my neck or felt the contours of the rises and dips of my body under his hands. My mother had always left my door cracked as if in wait, as if in welcome. When I was a very young girl, pre-pubescent, he hadn’t much to touch other than a flat plain, only a little rise in the mattress, my bones under the sheets and grandmother’s wedding ring quilt.

I remember a woman saying to my mother “Drusilla is well-groomed.” There were people on the television who talked of men and children and grooming. I am a child who is ready for men, I thought, I am well groomed, or maybe it’s that I am well and I am groomed, or, I am only well when I am groomed. Maybe I am a well that has to be groomed.

As I grew, the beast’s pressing between my legs became more frantic as if he were a dog pawing a hole for a bone. His back was hunched, his eyes wild, his mouth dripping and slack. He tore a hole through the quilt and my pajama bottoms became thin. I could feel him more and more when he brushed, when he stroked me. His nails were piercing and light, lightly piercing and tickling. I was both sick and excited and used to lie in wait.

In the day, I made a cage of chicken wire lined with cotton batting to protect my skin. I put it all in my hope chest with my Grandmother’s wedding dress and the veil that covered her eyes. There I also kept my dress of red. One day, my Grandmother’s wedding gown would be a pillow. One day her veil a canopy.

Though my hope grew ever fainter, every night I bundled up in the cotton and wire, locking myself in with keys I hid in a rusted hole in the bed frame. My brother brought me Southern Comfort. He got me drunk before he went back to his apartment to study for med school. “You are one messed-up fuck,” he said. He was on a psychiatry rotation. One day when he was over Mother talked to him about having me evaluated.

Father hunched over his roasted chicken, fat dripping from his lips and fingers. “She’s fine.”

Mother went outside with my brother to talk about me.

Father wiped his hands on a napkin pressed between his legs. He inserted each finger until they didn’t shine and then he licked his napkin. He ran his damp napkin under my shirt until my nipples rose.

My father groomed himself after eating and then he groomed me with his napkin. My mother and brother groomed us by leaving us alone.

My father had a hairy back. When we were little, four and six, he held us, one on each hip, bouncing on the waves at the beach, bouncing up and down at the pool, up and down. When he went under with us, the soggy hair felt like moss. In bed, the hair on his back became coarse, like an animal’s.

When I started wearing the cage, he couldn’t talk me into taking it off. He stroked my legs. He stroked my arms and face. One night he entered my bedroom with a gleaming pair of shears. He cut the wire. He threw the broken cage across the room. He pulled at the batting and unwound me. He spread my naked legs across the cotton.

He began to shake and cry. He beat his fists against his knees. He lay down beside me softly.  He touched me in the tender place. This was the next step, the one that lead to the last. His touch was deep, long, knowing. I was ashamed of my own pounding, my own orgasm, my child death. He whispered into my hair, “I’m going to eat you alive.”

Indeed I died.

But I awoke, after a time. I got up out of my bed and was alive. I married, and to my wedding I wore red. And what’s more, I gave birth to a daughter. Still, my readers, my dear ones, I hold close to my breast a key to my child’s room. Though the darkness is no match for a woman’s fierce love, let’s not be naïve.

It was diffiult for her to decide if the cologne he spritzed himself with in the morning was different from the cologne he had used weeks before. When he changed scents, he also changed dress and grooming habits. He became sharper, neater, more focused-looking. When she asked about the seeming alteration of fragrance, he always had an answer: It was a new deodorant.  Then she would remeber that a direct question was always the wrong tactic.  It shut off channels for future honesty, though these channels had been running dry for quite some time if they ever existed at all. Now, he seemed to tell her only what she wanted to hear – that she was the only one, that his love for her was undying, unquenchable, eternal. It was possible, she knew, that for all their married life, some twenty years, he had always had other women. He was not patient in waiting for the fulfillment of any need. Her mother had warned her. “There’s something not right,” she said, “It’s something in the eyes.” But the bride-to-be was as impatient as the groom.

When she had endured one change too many in him, she decided to look through his cupboards. She took his keyring in the middle of the night and had copies made for the locks.  When her husband left for the job site at dawn, she pulled the bottles out one by one and sprayed them into the fading scent he left behind, trying to find a possible match. She tried to recall where he was working, who would be there, what women he had mentioned lately, for sometimes he would mention one in particular, and then weeks later, another, usually a female assistant who worked on the site, someone keeping the coffee warm in the trailer while steel beams moved overhead and pile drivers shook the foundations.

He had recently taken to wearing suits instead of jeans and workshirts. He had also grown a beard groomed in the form of a coiffed neat triangle that followed the contours of his chin. He was incredibly attractive, even as he neared middle age. The blackness of his hair only deepened, was almost blue in some light, and was sprinkled through with barely discernible strands of gray.

Although he had been promoted to project manager, she dared not pursue the details for he hated to talk about his work. In fact, he had told her it was not her place to know anything. Before this prohibition, when their love was seemingly open and free, she brought him a sandwich, a chicken salad of which she was especially fond, her mother’s recipe. She had planned on a picnic, to take place on one of the unfinished concrete floors. She had envisioned herself wearing a hardhat and shuddering at the danger of their position so high up on one of the upper stories. It would be an aphrodisiac observing him there, feeling his strong arms about her, touching her.

Instead, he took her aside. “Don’t ever come back here again,” he growled, his canines gnashing.

When he came home, he beat her for venturing out where she should never have been. He punched her in the jaw. He threw her over the couch and entered her violently. She had bruises and bled but she kept quiet. She was fearful and ashamed.

A few days after the encounter on the work site, she met her friend Sarah for tea at a time he would not be able to detect her absence. She had made herself up well but her friend had not been blind to the marks on her face and legs and her friend’s trembling fingers on the cup, the pained nibbles on her pastry. That night when she opened her email, an account she shared with her husband by his insistence, she noted the subject heading of a message from her friend:  ATTNY. ATTNY? Attorney, she realized. Quickly, she deleted the message without reading it. What if he had seen it? She didn’t want to think of it, not for a minute. She stopped seeing Sarah altogether. They had been close growing up, were almost like sisters. Sarah would continue to push for the divorce until she was rid of him. But a divorce was not in the offing. Something about it paralyzed her. She vowed to remain fluid, to bend. Besides there were times he loved her.

And now she had come to find there was yet another woman, and perhaps a cologne to go with her. She took one from a box that looked especially new. The seal had been broken. She read the description on the paper inside:

Our “Light Blue” perfume is elegant and sensual.

Decidedly modern, but also unique, a timeless classic that perfectly reflects the man who wears it:

Charismatic and seductive, worldly and sophisticated, a modern hedonist who never passes unnoticed.

Something made her turn over the box to look at the bottom. “Amy” it said in a script she recognized. She opened another cabinet, one she hadn’t explored before. More boxes. “Steph.” “Kaye.” “Shyla.” “Brooke.” “Ashley,” “Jenna,” “Susan,” “Roxanne.” The boxes came spilling out. He hadn’t even bothered to contain them, these little coffins.  He would kill her when he came home and discovered she had spied on him. He would know. He would take her fragile neck in his thick fingers and press the breath out of her. There was a bottle for every year of her naivete, for every year she was his wife.

She closed the bathroom door and picked up the phone. “Sarah?” she whispered.

Not long after his parents’ divorce, he couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the noise of the traffic, the sirens, the alarms, the train – noises he had slept to all of his life, it was a sense he has of drifting, of having lost his tether in zero gravity.

Plus that, there was something outside his window, something huge spying on him with its large not unkind eye, an eye he recognized as his mother’s though it gave him a bit of a shock, the size of it, the way the light shone through. He opened the window and reached out to touch a lash and she gave him her finger and he recognized its firm roundness, its reassuring solidity.

She waved to him and moved sideways across the apartment building, holding onto the crevices with her fingers like a rock climber. At the corner, she stretched her enormous frame to the opposite building. She wore a large backpack and he watched her climb and lift herself up over the building and descend and climb again until he could no longer see her climbing and descending and his eyes began to droop from the watching and the radiator ticked and he no longer felt himself loose and suspended but moored and tucked in as if his mother herself was there, helping him into bed.

When the boy was with his father in the house outside of the city, he was drilled about visitors to the apartment. His father took careful notes. Were there men? he said. And all the boy could think of were the men who brought their dinners, who fixed their sink and toilet. What about late nights? Does she go out at night? Does she leave you alone? The light on those mornings streaming through the windows made him yearn for the the diffuse gray light of the city, its cool tones, like the side of a ship gliding into a harbor. Later, after breakfast, they would exercise “hard.” It was good for him, said his father, it would build muscle. Drink your milk, he said. Here, he said, take these vitamins. I’ll bet she doesn’t even keep them in the house.

In their apartment in the city, there had been a man before the divorce. The boy would see him when he came home from school. He wore a white shirt and small tie and thick glasses. He made their carpet dirty and then he made it clean again with a large blue vacuum. He came over a lot and did the same thing over and over. By dinnertime, he had packed all his bags with special gadgets and was gone.

Then soon after, there was the divorce. Then his mother started climbing buildings at night. She was a night courier, she told him.

- When you become a single parent, she said, you become two people and you get to see how much you can handle on your own.

- I want to be two people he said.

- Guard the house while I’m gone. Be a man, have a third eye. She pressed a now normal sized finger to his forehead. You will sleep, same as always, but when something isn’t right, the third eye will wake you up and let you know. It’s always there for you.

- There was a man, said his father, one of those blistering mornings in the breakfast nook. All the boy could think of was how he would have to lift weights and how it would hurt.  That man ruined my life, said his father. I could kill that bastard. Have you seen him? Has he come to the apartment? Selling his cheap sucking machines. I’d be with your mother now, and you’d be down the hall, just like always. Now I’ve got to live out here so I don’t kill the son of a bitch with my own bare hands.

Later that night at the apartment, the boy said to his mother - Maybe we should help the eye along. Maybe you could draw a lens for it, something for it to see out of.

So she drew a lens right over his brows and he felt the cool of the marker and her warm soft hands.

- All better? she said.

Now he knew there was nothing that could keep his third eye from working the way it should and he loaded his airgun and stashed it under his bed and his mother gave him a kiss.

In the night, there was a man inside, silhouetted against the gray light of the window. The boy’s third eye flew open and told him – Get the gun. Aim at the soft spots.

The boy shot at the man’s eyes and neck. His mother came home and they filed a police report but the man had fled.

The boy and his mother got a call from California. It was the boys’ father, saying he was out there for business. He wasn’t sure when the company would have him back east. The boy started staying with his mother all the time. His third eye developed to the point it didn’t need a lens and he became big and strong, as big and strong as two of him, man and boy.

Give me a prompt and I’ll produce your smile. Give me one reason on God’s green earth why I should smile for you, behave like a puppet, answer your leers and criticism and unasked-for guidance. Here’s my face, unprompted, at 44 on the eve of my 44th birthday, unbeautiful now and unyoung, even more unyoung since 6 months ago as someone observed, but I believe it wise as the lines signify experience, and the eyes, deeper now, bring knowledge that comes through pain. I would bring a world to you but you want a doll. Someone else told me they wanted an amaneunsis for the dictation of their spectacular achievements and sexual exploits, their swinging years, the world of middle aged men and their ravenous desires that is to somehow make up for what they’ve “missed” when they “settled” with their burn outs, their used husks of women. The men tear at each other, at any female. My eyes, these eyes have seen too much now, too much. Just six months ago, I worried over my mother’s biscuit recipe and the new marble in our bathroom. And now there is a crevasse over which I hover. There is nothing like this in-between, this no-man’s land of certaintly and doubt, of going with one’s instinct and second guessing the next day, of beautiful resolve and extreme regret. It tears the face in half. Observe the slightly drawn brow, the weaker mouth and chin. I wanted to put this picture on the dating site, but they rejected it. Too much reality for what a woman on this site might actually look like when their guard is down. Men who once took care of women, men who were previously married, no longer give a shit, it is clear, and you are a dollar figure and income when before you were a mother and of irreplaceable worth, and all this in an economy which rejects even its finest, most faithful worker bees. This online dating profile photo was rejected without apology or explanation, but one knows why. It is no longer the lie that feeds the idea of the unattainable beauty and what’s more, I don’t even give a damn anymore. Somewhere this has currency, value, worth. When you find out the subculture that values pain, reality, loss – pictures of -  will you please call me.

There was never a time I knew Anoushka when she was not in some sleepy-eyed phase of a delayed bloom. Yes, she was  much younger than I was and much more beautiful and far more talented.  I felt some inexplicable responsibility to protect her thought at the same time, I wanted her to wake up and not rely on me. It was becoming so that I was constantly reminding her of her talents just to keep her going. Yet she remained untried in the real world and I grew weary. I wanted her to ply our trade, to finish her stories, to submit them for publication, to suffer.

And while I haven’t wanted this mother’s role of reassuring her and encouraging her in her writing, I have found myself taking up this mantel. Maybe there has been something to gain by my being her friend, OK, call me creepy if you want, call me a sycophant, call me a desperate, middle aged lady who’s flattered that this twenty-something would want to be friends with me, someone who is – what – not hip to the scene or whatever it is they’re saying these days.

And no, I’m not a lesbian. I’m happily married to a man, thank you very much. I’m happy most of the time, that is.  OK, let’s just say I’m happy enough to get by, alright. But one can still have beautiful, young friends, can they not? Yet I grew weary of the dewy youth on this one as I waited for her to break out of her writing virginity, to publish the product of her labors. She secretly gloated that she was much better than I, better than most. So out with it, I said.  If she demanded so much from me by way of reassurances to her ego, do I not have a right to insist she pop the publication cherry?

It was her lethargy I craved to kill, but as my weariness grew, other aspects to her personhood and our relationship became vulnerable to my vicious fantasies. I wanted to be rid of the very idea of her and of our friendship. I could not afford the ambition she siphoned off with her need, her expectations that I love her for her looks and her humor and her youth and as if that weren’t enough, her cracker-jack ability with the words which came rolling off of her, spinning out as a beautiful vine of roses from fertile soil, as if there were never a phenomenon more natural.

The market supports and encourages those of her ilk, who take beautiful cover photos, who will not make waves, whose writing, above all free of what may disturb or unsettle, or at least not to an inordinate degree. You can see how, my readers, this may be a problem for me, admitting already as I have that I am: a) jealous, b) covetous, c) ambitious, and d) of the murdering persuasion as it applies to the murdering of one’s literary “child.”

You can only imagine my narratives. You can only imagine my look behind the podium given what you can guess of my age, given what I covet enough to abolish. Other writers would not be as forthright as I. I have seen many a female writer who will swear they have never felt competition with any other female writer and yet they cut and undercut other women like a scythe mowing a hayfield. It happens. Men don’t know it. They are the compassionate hunters who can’t believe some woman has sent them out to cut out a heart.

So here was how I murdered her, my darling:

1)  The corset binding. I forced her to gaze upon what was inconsequential to the writing itself: Her looks. I emphasized over and over how beautiful she was while she drew herself to the mirror and away from her desk. I cinched in her waist and she was mesmerized by her own proportions. By my manipulation of her waist size, she almost ran out of breath as she was overcome by a sense of the futility of self-expression in light of her growing dedication to her physical form.

2)  The poisoned comb. I infected her thinking with faint praise, going in deep to kill the root that would poison the bloom, once and for all. If this had been successful, she would be like the women who yearn to write but who finally give up because of self-doubt.

3)  The poisoned apple. At this point, she had found others who were wise to me, clever girl, so this step was the trickiest of all. I was determined that she must see me eating from the same fruit, as it were, and so I told her:  “You can be a writer and have it all. Don’t listen to what people say about giving up the life of wife and mother to dedicate oneself to one’s art. Chose as I have chosen. See, I have done so, and it hasn’t killed me!”

These are only half-truths because my children are estranged, my husband sleeps on the other end of the house, my career consists of shredding up budding artists at the women’s college to whom I feed poisoned apples. My creative output consists in enumerating these tales of my passions, my crimes, but I’ve found the market responds, for grist and the gristle can be literature as long as it’s beautifully spun. The market eats almost anything in a pretty package, and Anoushka does too, chomping down on the succulent flesh of my tempting suggestions, taking the bait, wedding a man who loves only her beauty. After a while, he can’t even stand the sound of her voice.

He fashions boats from waxed paper, affixes huge tissue heats to the corners, sets candles inside and lights them so that the miniature craft are drawn along on the dark water. Lovers pay fifty cents to see their hearts set on fire and set adrift only to witness their incineration somewhere near the opposite bank, the cinder and ash ascending into the grey twilight, the smell of burnt paper, like kindling that flames and is quickly gone, filling the air, an acrid, comforting smell of home fires and warmth.

No one asks him any questions about the meaning of all of this or how or why he started, nor does he think of it too much. He thinks only of the delicate feel of the tissue, the lightness of the string, the slippery paper smoothed and sealed by wax, the fire on the water, the lovers’ faces as they stare at what they have paid for, prompted by who knows what, fascinated to see what becomes of their boat though they all must know what will be so why do they stay to watch? It is a mystery. Are they sad or satisfied somehow in the justification about their beliefs about tissue and hearts and fire, or had they hoped to see their boat, of all others, land on the other side?

Every night a woman who brings him a snack of rice and vegetables wrapped in a tortilla pays him fifty cents to place something small in her boat -  tiny babies for Mardi Gras cakes, bodkins she wore in her hair when she was a girl, pieces of wool from her sewing basket in which she kept materials to make socks for soldiers, crosses she buys in packets of ten, pieces of kibble. She always has a prayer and dedication which she asks the man to recite though every night he protests he does not have his glasses and every night she gives him her late husband’s readers from the nightstand, and as the boat floats out, he says her prayers for the soldiers, the young life, the married couple, the single women, the woman herself and her cat and her grandchildren.

He found himself saying a prayer for himself one night as he set a boat in the water containing a gold heart. He snatched the boat back, soaking his trousers. He retrieved the heart. This is my gig, he said gruffly, as if she had affronted him with something. She asked for his blessing upon the heart. She asked him to kiss it. Instead, he chucked it out into the lake with all of his force where it plunked into the dark center and disappeared. They stood for a moment, the frogs screeching in judgment. It’s time to get a move on, he said. People are waiting. Indeed, a line had formed and that was the last night he saw her and every night he was hungry for the food she gave him and every night he had nothing to wonder about, what she would put into her boat, how she would ask him to pray, the feel of her late husband’s glasses upon his nose. How missed that feel, strangely enough, and the strange prayers she had written, not like the coherent prayers he knew, but her erratic thoughts upon a subject, not a petition, but a statement as if she were telling someone how things were. He missed it.

And so he collected things for her, things he thought she would like, things he liked too, things forgotten and dusty in closets, things from childhood and a career and family from another life, and he put them in boats and watched the hearts burn and the boats sink with prayers on his lips uttered in a strange tongue, her way of speaking and thinking that had infused him and he believed himself capable of finding that gold heart had only there been money for proper equipment and younger lungs. But in its depths the dark lake held his gift and he did not mourn but for the first time understood why couples waited until they saw what they knew would come to pass, and that in the waiting they anticipated what was most beautiful, a beginning and an end, all at once.

For a new friend in the in-between: Blessings

There was no blood in the barn where the girl said Tyler raped her. There was nothing. I checked several times. The hay smelled fresh and sweet and I rubbed my face in it to assure myself this barn couldn’t have contained such a soiled one. She had been there with someone else when he found her, said Tyler, leaving his mark on me to remind me not to talk about it, saying people wouldn’t understand. I was comforted that he was a husband in our bed that night although he made noises I had never heard him make before, like that of an animal.

The next day, the mark was a thumbprint size of a bruise on my arm and blood caked on my buttocks and thighs. Was it the other woman’s blood? No, it must have been my own, for the thing Tyler did to me he hadn’t done before, making it ache there. Had she caused it, caused him to act in this way? I asked this of the pieces of straw on the barn floor. I ran my fingers through the stalks as if shuffling through tarrot cards. He had called her a cunt. Was she? She had looked so small and worn and thin. I had seen her lying on the barn floor even as he was pushing me out, squeezing the bone of my arm. The next day, the sheriff questioned us. She had been found on the side of the road, in a ditch, barely conscious. I said nothing and by the time she had accused Tyler, there was no evidence. Hay doesn’t lie, a barn floor would have revealed something, surely.

He never makes love to me anymore. He doesn’t seem satisfied until he has made some kind of mark. He is coming up with contraptions patched up from farm equipment. He tells me I am to blame for the stream of girls filing in, each of their shadows the same, long and thin, the shoulders sloped, unsuspecting. I watch from our bedroom, the closing of the barn door. There is nothing, no sound. How could anything bad happen in silence, among gentle, dumb beasts and how could it be that he is guilty when he is still acts as husband every night, without fail, with a rigor some would call grossly violent, perhaps, but which he tells me demonstrates his absolute passion and dedication to beautifying me? My silence has been a key he says. He has never been so consumed with a desire that I should be whole, that we should be together, as one, that there should be no division as there has been previously in my days of doubt, of questioning.

Nightly I am chained to the radiator. He feeds me meals on the floor. He tells me how dear I am to him now and how it had never occured to him that he should be more my master, that this would have made it the very thing between the two of us and I the more lovely. He kisses my bones more visible beneath the flesh. He carries me to the bed when he is ready for what he must do for what he must unleash. When it is accomplished, he speaks as he is securing me. My silence had enabled his vision, that vision of who he is to me, my own dear husband. He cries when he talks about it. He strokes my hair. He forces me between his legs, forces himself into my mouth. My arms strain against the chains. The purification is in the sickness he says. It was ok to take him in so far that I  gag, he says, to choke over and over and over. It is the love in him that makes it possible. He says I am more radiant than a flower.

In my dreams I have been encountering men I have lost yet their visitations have not been unqualified fantasies of reconciliation and reunion. Instead moments outside of the dream state have been ones permeated with unease as if the dreams contain enough of both reality and unreality so as to straddle a border between what is and what is not, between who I am to these men and who I am no longer. It has gotten to the point where I have questioned who I am, my own reality, my own substance, for when you suddenly find yourself living alone, who are you to anyone but the dream people that haunt you?

In the dream of my former lover who is in recovery, I receive a call that wakes me. “I am trying something new,” he says, “I am experimenting and I wanted to call you.” I am so happy to hear from him I am not absorbing what he is saying. I had always been certain he would make contact again, and for a long time would wake up having forgotten that we’d broken up. Now my predictions had been confirmed. Upon awaking from the dream, I realize that the call, after months of silence, is also a break in his recovery.

In another dream, my divorcing husband ushers me into a room of our old house, a room I’d never seen before. It is a bedroom where I am to stay. It is night and the room, well lit and appointed, opens out onto the lush Florida yard. It is clear there is some sort of intended grace in this act, that I have received more than I deserve, that I am to acknowledge the magnanimity of it. It is also clear there is significance in being led directly from the yard into the room. I do not walk through what was my own house. “The forgiveness room” I think as I am doing chores around my apartment the next day. “Some sort of purgatory,” I think to myself in this way one tries to analyze these things. There had been no other doors in the room other than the one leading out.

One afternoon I had a dream while napping, while workmen were repairing the apartment balcony. In the dream, my son was with me and that was all. It lasted but a moment. I was filled with warmth. We were laughing or smiling, and there was light and a sense of fullness, completion. He called out to me and I woke. There was only my dog beside me, no child. I hauled myself up out of the bed as if punched in the gut. The boy would be with his father for a week, starting today, that’s what I realized. My child’s call had been the workmen, announcing they were finished. They didn’t make eye contact with me as they filed through my galley kitchen. They were not as friendly as before, as when they were arrived. Maybe their attitude was due to their long, hard day. Or maybe they sensed something had happened, what may be typical, perhaps, to women of my sort, middle aged and lonely, vampirized and loved by their ghosts.

There is a man in town who has a reputation for creating wildlife statuary for the lawn and garden. On a recent trip to take my son to camp in North Carolina, my dog went apoplectic over a stone deer at a Super 8 motel. When I got home I commissioned this man to make me a deer though deer were not known to venture into the Orlando suburbs. The man had the deer delivered to my yard and set up there. It was painted a soft brown and its eyes were shiny and dark.   As the months passed, dogs peed on it. Birds shat upon it. When people walked by, they commented sarcastically, “Look at that authentic wildlife.” Still, my dog, a believer and faithful, curled up under its slender torso and slept.

Even when some neighborhood toughs took a sledgehammer to it and busted up its midsection leaving the wire exposed, my dog licked the carnage of concrete lying on the grass, as if she could heal its wounds. When my boyfriend Jonah found out about this, he sat up in vigil for a few nights until the beer did him in. Then one night after he’d passed out, they knocked its tail off.   Jonah commissioned the fashioning of another deer. “Make this one male,” he said, “ten points and all, the whole kittenkabootle.” When he wasn’t looking, the suburban gang had the buck humping the doe, or what was left of her. The HOA wrote me something nasty the next day. We had the deer disengaged, but the buck’s privates had been damaged.

When Jonah left me he shot a deer out of guilt. I know this because he spent a whole lot of money getting the animal taxidermied and he said he was giving it to us to keep our dog company. How many women had it taken to squeeze this lifelike deer out of him? And what’s more, my dog made short work of it. That stony deer who stands in the yard, a tattered blanket now tied around her waist, shit everywhere, wire exposed, reminds her more of an alpha.

First published in The New Absurdist

After a day of packing and unpacking, driving, moving furniture and rugs, sweating, heart pounding, I was on the beach in a new long cotton dress, my bra straps showing because of the newfangled style but I did not care. I was cool, finally, sitting in a low chair, the water tickling my ankles. And I was no longer what I used to be, on this beach where I used to bring my younger body. But can you believe I had the nerve to yearn for a man to emerge from the ocean and come up to me there while my eyes were closed, my hair blowing across my face – and kiss me on my lips with his wet salty mouth? There was no one on the beach at that moment but had there been thousands all at that spot, would one man have done this? I supposed so if this were the kind of beach where that sort of thing happened or men were expected to behave thus and how I wished for it and to feel that mouth, to taste it.

As it happened, only two women passed, both overweight and in capris and tshirts. They laughed and as I opened my eyes to observe them, one of them said “Becky?” as if they had mistaken me for someone they knew. I know people from further inland who come to this beach and I run into all kinds of people I know here even though all the time all I want to do is just get away.

To save this woman from some kind of embarrassment I simply waved and say “hi,” but it would not have been like me to show much animation. She knew immediately I was not “Becky.” I was thinking it highly likely that Becky was a person who liked yellow, who spared others sadness, who remained loyal and didn’t cheat, who wouldn’t kiss a man rising up from the sea especially if she were dating someone steadily or married, who wouldn’t think such things to herself: If a man rises up out of the sea and wants to take me, I’ll have him, and lose my life to the abyss as atonement.

My husband arrived after work wondering about his dinner. My son likewise. And the dog. They left to get fish dinners at a market. While they were gone, a man walked up and placed his bait bucket not far from my chair. He rigged up his pole and strutted to the sea. I wanted to see this, I said to myself. I wanted to see something. Make something happen, I said to him silently. I propped myself up in my chair. I put my book in my lap. There was no question I was watching him and he knew it. He went out to the shelf where we have caught hammerheads. He began casting and making his way back to shore. Nothing ate him and he kept working it, striding down the beach with the tide.

I did not respond to my husband’s call from the balcony that they were back with the take out fish dinners. Eventually my husband came down to the shore. He and I watched as the man cast into the ocean. I told him I had actually watched this selfsame man catch a fish earlier that afternoon. I had watched him from our bedroom window. His catch was large I said. What I did not say is that I knew I liked the man when someone walked by while he was holding up the large fish and they chatted for a minute about it.

The fish the man caught while my husband was watching was small. Just a pinfish, said my husband, might as well put that on the hook and catch a real fish. As the sun set, we ate our fish dinners on our balcony and watched the man cast into the sea and fight the waves. That was all we did before my husband had to leave.

first appeared in The New Absurdist

He stood at the foot of her son’s bunkbed. She had slept there the night before, her son being grown and in college.  He had been dating her for about six months, but had not succeeded in getting her to sleep the entire night with him. She slept alone.

She reached out and touched the name stitched on his shirt. He kissed her lips. She wore only gloss. He liked that.

“I want to make you some coffee,” she said.

Her hair was mussed up. He wanted to forget his scruples, drop his pants, and climb right into her child’s bed, but he was running late.

“I don’t have time.” It was cold outside. He had to get the truck started. “OK, make me coffee, would ya? And chop, chop.” He patted her bottom.

She would pour him a steaming pint in his big thermos with cream and sugar and he would drink from it slowly to make it last. He would make sure everyone noticed its presence too, clinking it down here or there.

When he came back into the house, she was on the kitchen counter, kneeling, stretching for a bag of sugar.

“Watch it now, baby,” he said, trying to scold her, though he had caught a glimpse of her dimpled thigh under her nightshirt. He knew he would remember it all day.  He pulled her down and retrieved the sugar.  She took it from him with her icy, thin fingers.

“Let’s get married,” he said.

She didn’t look up to meet his gaze. She held the bag over the mouth of the thermos. As he watched a seemingly endless white stream fall into his coffee, he felt a pressure on his chest.

“Yes,” she said. When he looked up, he saw that she was watching his face, was not watching the sugar, was smiling in that way she saved for things that secretly pleased her.

Take a shower. Fix your hair. Put on make-up, no short cuts. Put on a skirt and wear a silk blouse. Wear pearls or a charm bracelet. Wear earrings, always, like your mother taught you, and lipstick. If you are not listening, you are not a woman and this advice does not concern you, or you have certain beliefs which restrain you from these practices, or you are not ready for this exercise. Wear low-heeled shoes or flats. It doesn’t matter as long as your gait is relaxed and your feet look attractive. Blanket yourself in perfume.

Bring the dog. The dog should have experienced sufficient discipline not to pull on its leash. If the dog has not been trained to follow the master’s lead, a silver pronged choke collar will do. It is not cruel. It saves the dog too. It maintains the health of their windpipe.

Say hello to the man and his business partner. They greet you in the breezeway of the apartment building as you pass. The man is Argentinian. He has lived in the building as long as you have. It would likely not work between you long-term. He would be too traditional. But it is still evident he appreciates the pearls and Pave diamonds, the chiffon blouse with the ruffles, and the silk camisole. It is clear you have pleased him. Greet him. Greet his partner. Feel their eyes on you as you walk away. For now, you are only taking the dog to the grass downstairs, but this entire sequence, from the beginning, is not unimportant. Do not  waver from any part of this instruction.

You have a final purchase to make at the furniture store by the tracks. Watch the salesman you have come to know there as he writes your order. Enjoy the beads of sweat on his brow and on his lip. Watch his hands tremble slightly. He is not the man for you. What he has told you about himself without any encouragement  informs your opinion. When he spoke on and on the first time you were there, you were silent and only listened. Enjoy it when he says he has told his mother about you. He tells you your furniture will arrive even quicker than it arrived the first time around. Instead of having to wait a week, you will get it the next day. He tells you to be sure of it. He also tells you, as you leave, to please come visit him again, just come talk to him while he works. You will do no such thing. You are not a creature who allows salesmen to substitute furniture store visits for dates. Besides, you’re out of cash. What business do you have in a furniture store with a randy, cheap sales clerk?

This period, they call it the in-between, can be difficult. It is a holding pattern requiring strength. You may want to go back to an old way. You may be in a bookstore and hear a blues album and remember your old bluesman love and what you intended to sing with his band. You may find yourself wanting to cry. Don’t. Stand and listen. Buy the album. Buy some coffee. Drink it black. Vow to learn the music yourself and sing it with another band. No, likely this won’t happen, but you don’t know that. Vow it, now.

Meet someone new, a woman browsing French tutorials. Pick one book. Agree to meet and practice. She knows Spanish too, so do you. Actually, you may never see her again. It doesn’t matter. Hug her. Feel her warmth against you. She is not unkind. She knows about the divorce.

All of this happens so that the album of Hawaiian songs does not overwhelm you with its blue sadness and the memory of the bluesman touching you in the theater. It happens so you do not follow through with your desire to purchase the album and put it in his mailbox. Pieces of that bridge are on fire and floating down the river.

It happens also so you have a friend who is female. Listen to what I say, it is what your mother said, girlfriends are important.

Leave the bookstore now. Besides, it’s four o’clock in the afternoon. It’s more important you walk your dog than scheme up half-crazed ways of making yourself vulnerable to unavailable men.

Remember this above all else: Never, ever appear like you once were, not to anyone.

You have entered a new phase, but you must forgive yourself to enter. And you have to remember new lessons of restraint, for they will always apply.

You are now always your own private garden.

You are now always the only one responsible for nourishing the soil and replenishing the seed.

You alone tend you, you alone water. This is what I say for the tending of the sweet, resplendent places.

It is pleasant to walk your dog beside a lake in winter in a tropical place because all of the black ducks waddle up the ryegrass bank and pluck the seed with their small gray beaks. There is nothing required of you but to watch them and wonder what kind of ducks these are. In fact, to do more, to wonder more, to think more, would be of something in the not-waiting, and the waiting is what I am trying to teach, the in-between, the still small tending that takes place when one sits silent and closes the eyes and lets the breeze ruffle one’s hair and the edges of one’s skirt and takes in the warmth of the sun on one’s face as it sinks into a blue lake and trees grown dark in their shade.

It is not necessary to fret over the things you don’t have or what you try to imagine you should be making happen when there are black ducks in the ryegrass and a tree full of birds in the dying oak under which you sit. Men walk by and affect various postures, women frown at your Pave diamonds or your occasional cigarette. It doesn’t matter. Let them.

A man, trying to impress his wife, both of them baby-talking to their children as they pass, complains of your cigarette smoke. What kind of man are you, you want to say. You had seen the way he looked at you when he was in the park earlier and his wife was further away. And now he was saying something which implied something, something that said to her “I will always, always, always be on your side in everything and will always, always, always speak in this ridiculous manner to our children because it is what is necessary for now, to make you happy.”  You have known that kind of man. He is nice, so very nice, so very ultra nice.

One man strolls by and claps at the birds in the tree. thinking to stun them into silence for a moment. You forgive him when you see what big strides he must make, to assert himself against all of that.

+  When I come out of a movie tonight, a young man asks, where you going can I come with? I am wearing my heels with the bows, the skirt with the slit, the silk camisole, the wool leopard sweater. I wore this for a reason, more as a way of saying fuck off to a certain someone. The young man has long blond hair. He is not unattractive. He must be a mere ten years older than my son, but I know what he’s asking. No, I say, no thank you.

+  Last week, when our party is through with the wine, one of the men walks me to the parking lot and touches my hair. He asks me to take down the side of my jacket which reveals the shoulder the blouse leaves bare. He tells me he can help me relax. He touches my shoulder. He rubs it. He calls me the next day. I tell him I am seeing someone.

+  A man tells me I look good in his car. He lets me light his cigarette and put it in his mouth. We drive around the city. He gets lost. A few days later he asks me to never call him again though he’s written a series of stories based on my body.

+  A man tells me I am radiant, I am powerful. He is a music man and is regaining his confidence with the instruments. He promises to help me fix things in my apartment. A week later, I cannot reach him. Nothing is fixed. He tells me I scare him though he’s been out of jail several times and I’ve never even been to a mental hospital. I take my pills.

+   A man says to me everyone needs a secret friend. He says to me no one respects someone who can come over and over and over again. I tell him I have no idea what he’s talking about. His wife smiles at me from the photo on the mantel. I tell him she is beautiful.

+  A man says I should confide in him everything, any time I need to talk about what’s going on, I should let it all out. He is referred to in the legal documents I signed last Monday, explaining the dissolution. He asks me to come into chat rooms where people are doing everything I could possibly imagine. I have not bothered to make contact. Even I know what an edge looks like.

+  My father left a bag of oranges on my apartment steps this afternoon while I was talking to someone on the phone. He just left a bag of oranges and knocked. By the time I opened the door, he had mostly disappeared down the stairs of the building. I could only see his face and hand as he waved.

December 2, 2002 a.m.

Had a dream last night about a dead woman, a corpse, at the edge of our yard. Kept forgetting to call the police and then imagined corpse was in different location every time I looked out the window. Her hands were tied behind her back, her legs were tied together, she was face down. She had black long hair and was wearing black jeans and a sweater. I imagined she must have been beautiful.

December 2, 2002 p.m.

This morning in church, songs in unison, a Christmas chorus, the wavery voice of a soloist. The soloist, gray hair, tied back in a ponytail, off-key on the higher notes, delivery heartfelt. I was calmed by pastor, gentle manner, listened while standing in the narthex, didn’t even hear the words because too noisy, but felt soothing tones of his voice. Saw friends outside church, the E—‘s. The youngest was wearing a sweater I’d dressed P — in many times (The E –‘s are borrowing some of P –‘s baby clothes.) Just seeing that took me back to all the times I would pull it over a knit shirt to dress him up, when we lived in Washington, D.C, when he was little.

Vain hope of getting a solo at the Christmas concert. Not even in the choir anymore and want a solo. Think I can sing so good who wouldn’t want me. Am vain as in Bette Davis’ Baby Jane – past my prime – am becoming like this and the woman who sang at church. The woman, not noticing the fidgeting, the people avoiding her eyes even when her voice is cracking or singing slightly off key or clamping down too much on certain vowels. Feel the need to perform now, get it out of my system, before it’s too late.

Nov. 30, 2011 p.m.

He will sleep with someone else. He will fuck her on our bed. The scent of him is heavy in our house. I should force a sale. As it is, I will sign the papers on Monday and touch myself on the bed I bought by the tracks, the one fashioned from vinyl. The little noises I will make will be hushed by the fan.

A woman loves a man in a Nor’easter. She has lost her silver earrings. She has a white dog she walks in balmy fields. She has a son who lives with his father. She owns a house she no longer inhabits. She leads a life she no longer owns. In a green field, she finds her oblong earrings lying one on top of the other, wet with dew and rain. She picks them up and puts them in her pocket.

Last night I had a dream about a bear. I was running with a man and my child and we were running with the bear, or from it, at times it was impossible to tell, the bear would catch up and we would be next to it. We ran into a glass building. We ran down a hall with the bear, who was enormous and black. I did not know the man but he had that look about him of a good man. In the fleeing, he became trapped against a glass door. I could not reach the man to pull him away. The bear began swiping, using its advantage to flay the man before the threshold. I will not describe the noises. I will not describe the cries of the man whom I did not know but whom I felt must be good, whom I would have loved had I known him. I do not want to remember the particular tenor of that agony and rage. I do not want to remember the feeling of what I could not do. I found an open room with glass windows and covered my child with my body.