raw beginnings of life in the howling ages

A little slice of my thesis. And a morsel of my abstract. Enjoy together with a glass of lemonade:

"These short stories are concerned with how desire manifests itself through language, and the breakdown of language to communicate that desire. While this desire is not always sexual, the exploration of the language of the body is implicit, and I attempt to explore how this language often implies a disconnect between the mind and the body (or even between the body and the body). This exploration often centers on how imprecise language is, despite our attempts to use it precisely. The dominion that language can offer over others is juxtaposed with its abrupt and shattering limitations. These stories also explore the perils of using language in general, mainly through reading and writing. I focus on how books write us, rather than the other way around, and how our brains are infested with books, and the language of others is bound to crop up in our own work."

Raw Beginnings of Life in the Howling Ages

“And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.” — Jack London
“Animals are sexual talismans and aphrodisiacs. Animals appeal to our sensate selves with their tactile features and wild demeanors.” — Trinie Dalton

I used to read werewolf books to comprehend how a person can be so attracted to someone that they want to consume them. While puberty was striking the girls in my grade and parents were worrying about the anorexia they saw on TV, I was walloped with something akin to lycorexia: the canine desire manifested in humans as a need to stuff oneself with human flesh.
Although I never wanted to — and still don’t want to — literally devour Cecilia. Imagining her, a ripe and viscous plum surrendered to the pleasure of my teeth, could only have been carnal in my thirteen-year-old mind, never cannibalistic. And I really just stumbled across the werewolf section one late summer day after following her into the library. I was pulling books off a shelf so I could have a clearer view of her sitting alone at the beaten oak table when I noticed the cover of one of the discarded books. It looked like the stark woodcut illustrations in the Victorian novels my mother read, but the woman, instead of swooned over a chaise lounge, was slumped backwards into the arms of a grinning werewolf. The werewolf’s tail stood erect and spiked behind him, and even though the picture was black-and-white, I knew his eyes were the sallow saffron color of someone possessed. The woman’s long hair draped behind her and her mouth was open. Glancing up at the table where Cecilia was finishing her earth science homework with a purple pen, her pelvic bones curled into the orange plastic chair, I could understand why the wolf was so into that.

~

Cecilia and her family moved into my neighborhood—across the street, two houses down, green shutters—during the summer before our seventh-grade year. I’d often see her playing outside with her puppy (Tulip, as I later learned) running through the sprinkler or riding her bicycle up our narrow strip of road. But it wasn’t until the first day of school, two months later, when the girl with the light blue Keds and eyes the color of a root beer bottle began the slow process of taking me apart, piece by piece, with surgical precision. It was English class, I remember. Our teacher, Ms. Henry, was fond of rhymed poetry and saying things like, “the dénouement is never as sweet as the crescendo,” although she pronounced “dénouement” like “tenement” and it took me all year to finally figure out what she was saying. Ms. Henry had sent a letter to each student in early August, asking us to write a poem about summer and have it ready for the first day of school, but when she asked who wanted to read their poem to the class that day, it became clear the majority of us had ignored her request. I’d written a poem about the receding summer sunlight getting so thick that bugs got stuck in it like honey or wax, but I didn’t want to read aloud, so sat silently like everyone else.

“Anyone?” Ms. Henry asked again.

And then Ms. Henry was pointing at Cecilia, and Cecilia was standing up. I’m sure she said something before she read, but I don’t remember. Whatever she said, before I knew it, she was standing in front of the class, her tartan skirt slightly askew on her bird-small hips, and her mouth was opening. And as I sat there watching her push the fringe of bangs out of her face, she looked right at me, and said:
A soup of flowers marinates in the soil
And that’s all I remember. Something else about simmering through the winter, and boiling upwards in the spring. But that first line, that awkward plaid skirt and that thick curtain of bangs was all it took.
Vestiges of that moment are alive and well in my body to this day; I suspect they lie dormant somewhere in my thoracic cavity, nestled under plump, glossy organs until a subconscious firing of synapses in my brain sparks them back into motion and sends them into my blood stream, where they’re carted along to my heart. That moment floods back randomly and I’ll be shot through with incongruous feelings of lust and hunger while peeling the foil back from a container of yogurt or blowing my nose. Once, I thought I saw her in a public bathroom at the movie theatre, and even though there was no Tulip at her heels (how could there be, in a bathroom?), the physical ailments that only Cecilia could conjure in me flared up again, and I broke out in a sweat.
The effluvium of the long-evaporated Cecilia.

~

Two weeks later, the day I found the werewolf section in the library, I talked to Cecilia for the first time. I’d been watching her, trying to find something we had in common, but she didn’t seem to do anything but run around the neighborhood with her dog. I’d tried a few times to drag my old collie, Rufus, outside so we could skip around the front lawn together, and perhaps invite Cecilia and Tulip to join us, but Rufus was so old he wouldn’t budge from his sleeping place on the kitchen floor. Once when I’d attempted to push him from behind, he started howling and my mother scolded me, telling me to be gentle, to leave him alone, his hips hurt him.

So I was thrilled when I returned home from school that day, the first werewolf day, to see my mother’s car pulling into our driveway, Rufus’s snout smearing the window from the back seat. I dropped my backpack in our front lawn and ran forward to greet my mother and Rufus. I yipped and hollered as I bounded to the car, hoping Cecilia, who was in her own front yard (she always got home before me, because I always walked half a block behind her), would hear. As my mother held the door open for Rufus and guided his weedy limbs out of the car, he looked more like an aged and respected millionaire being helped out of a limousine than a shedding old collie in a station wagon. My mother told me to watch Rufus while she went inside. I patted him on the head and looked fleetingly to Cecilia’s yard. She was walking across the street, Tulip close behind. That image of Cecilia walking towards me in the late afternoon light is still tangled in the corner of my eye.
“Hello,” she said. It was the first time I’d heard her voice since the first day of school.
“Hello,” I answered.
Marinates, I murmured in my head.
“What’s your dog’s name?” she asked, sidling up next to me to pet Rufus. The fabric of her skirt brushed against my bare knee. Her forearm, freckled and dry, touched my side and her bangs fell into her face as she leaned over Rufus, and I thought of the werewolf books in my backpack, the woman in the long dress, her hair down her back.
“This is Rufus. He’s thirteen,” I said. “He’s very old and sick.”
As if on cue, Rufus let his fragile knees drop down onto the driveway and let out a long low sigh, like a river rolling boulders.
“Oh, no,” Cecilia said. She knelt down and offered Rufus a dog biscuit from one of her pockets; he sniffed it with his apostrophe nostrils, but did not eat it. Tulip, who’d been licking Rufus’s ears, stuck her snout forward and the biscuit disappeared from Cecilia’s upturned palm in the thick slurp of dog-tongue. Tulip sprawled on her back next to Rufus, exposing the shiny train track of stitches on her stomach from her recent spay surgery.
“He smells like mushrooms,” Cecilia said, standing up. She then leaned forward to pet Rufus once more. She looked at me, and I could see tears forming in the corners of her eyes. She offered no explanation; she simply said, “Come on, Tulip,” and walked back across the street with her dog. I watched her go, her long high legs dragging her Keds back home. And as I watched her, I tried to gather in my thirteen-year-old mind all I knew about girls. I knew that girls are hugely complex, smart, witty creatures, with labyrinthine brains, and I know boys throw themselves against girls just for the chance to be near that female wisdom, to get close to the heat of that superior mind. But sometimes girls really seem to be composed of just a ponytail brushing a collarbone, a muscle tensed in the neck, or a hint of lace stretched over the cusp of a breast.
Or, in the case of Cecilia, a slim calf dissolving into a light blue Ked, a notebook tucked under a dimpled elbow. And Tulip the dog close behind.
Rufus had urinated on himself. I ran inside to get a towel and my mother, but first I grabbed my backpack and brought it inside. Later that night, after my mother and Rufus were both asleep, I opened one of the books and read:
The lubins or lupins of France were usually female and shy in contrast to the aggressive loup-garous.
Cecilia, walking towards me, arms outstretched, smiling, dog biscuits held tightly in her palms.

~

By the time Rufus died one week later—cancer, his hind legs, my mother found him underneath the oak brush in the back yard—I realized Cecilia had already deemed him dead, mourned for him, and begun the long struggle to politely forget him.
I cried when my mother told me about Rufus. Being around Rufus had been like being in an old folk’s home: you love them, but you can’t wait for them to go. Of course, I didn’t tell Cecilia this. I tried to talk to her at school, but she refused to speak to me. Since the day she met Rufus, a pained expression would fill her face each time she saw me, and she would shuffle away as though she knew what was coming, her Keds squeaking on the linoleum, her corduroy-covered thighs making a slight scraping sound as she walked. Sometimes I thought she was crying, but she’d be gone so quickly I never knew if I imagined the blood draining from her face, the glimmer of tears. Once, when I caught her eye across the cafeteria, I thought I saw her blush, and I felt a hard kick to my digestive tract: could she be thinking of me, too? I carried that thought around with me for a long time. It was like when you see a spider hanging in the corner of your room: for the rest of the day, every piece of lint or dust that rolls by is that same spider. And when you’re lying in your bed at night, every small sweep of the sheet against your skin is the spider, waiting for you to fall asleep. That’s what crest of blood in Cecilia’s cheeks was to me. Every small flicker of her eyes, every time she walked past me in the halls, every time she dropped her pencil in class, every movement she made could be a movement towards me. Cecilia, walking towards me.

~

As the weeks went by, I read more about werewolves.
To drink water out of the footprint of the animal in question or to drink from certain enchanted streams were also considered effectual modes of accomplishing metamorphosis.
When Rufus was alive, and I was younger, I used to smell the pads of his feet. They smelled like the earth, and it comforted me. I wondered if Cecilia ever smelled Tulip’s feet. I wanted to ask her. I might have asked her. But she was absent from school the next day, and as I gazed at her empty seat in English class, I sickened for her like the sailors who go mad and throw themselves into the sea, imagining the knife-grey waves to be the rolling green hills of their homes. When lunchtime came, I could not eat the cheese sandwich my mother packed me. Without Cecilia nearby, I had no appetite, no desire to consume. During health class that day, my teacher taught us about bones and aging, but I only heard marinate, marinate, marinate. I sat at the desk where she usually sat and let my hand creep over it like something out of Poe—she had been there, there must be something of her left—but I found nothing.
Even her bones would lie, I thought, as I absently watched my teacher point at Mr. Bones, the classroom skeleton. Her bones would lie, I was sure of it. Even if she were to die right now, at the age of thirteen, and her body was stripped of all its thew and muscles, and the marrow slowly leached out over the years, and the calcified protrusion in her ankle where she’d once broken it came to the surface. If, years and years from now, her bare skeleton was found, the coroner would find a pubic symphisis so worn it would tell of an old life of hips ground to talc, not of the gracile thirteen-year-old hips I’d come to know so well, even if from afar.
I went to the nurse’s office after class and, complaining of a stomachache, called my mother to pick me up. Sitting in the backseat on the way home, I noticed Rufus’s dried snot still smeared on the window.

~

The next day Cecilia returned to class, and the school received an announcement from our principal. During homeroom, she told us that a disaster drill would occur sometime later in the day, but did not tell us when, which left us all sick and jittery with anticipation, pulling our hands up into our sleeves and crossing our fingers in the hopes the alarm would go off during math class. Much to our dismay, the alarm went off during study hall and did not interrupt any true work.
My class gathered in the library, and as we slowly crawled underneath the large wooden tables, I watched Cecilia compress her frame under the table like a melodeon. Seeing her packed in so closely to the others underneath the table, I tasted blood at the back of my throat as my heart welled over and spilled into my esophagus, and I thought only of how desperately I needed to be stuck next to her, entwined under the table with Cecilia in a state of emergency. I would trade my body for the wooden leg of the table, just to be so close to Cecilia’s spine; I would trade my teeth for the cold screws that held the table together, just so I could finally feel them press into the rind of her back. Perhaps as the table I could finally wrap my long legs around Cecilia’s huddled form.
When I was much younger—kindergarten, first grade, second—our P.E. class had a favorite activity called simply The Parachute. During The Parachute, our teacher unfurled a huge parachute on the lawn, and we all stood in a circle around it, grabbing the frayed and dirtied edges with our tiny hands. On the count of three, we raised the parachute over our heads then scurried under, maneuvering our bodies so we ended up sitting cross legged on the lawn, the parachute still clenched tightly in our hands under our buttocks.
I still don’t understand how the parachute stayed up; the language of physics always baffled me. But when that parachute was swelled overhead, it created a soft red dome, as though we were sitting against the fleshy shelled-out walls of a pomegranate or perhaps a grapefruit. And even at that young age, amid the humid limbs of our globed tent, I remember thinking what an intimate atmosphere it was, and I somehow had the urge to take my fellow classmates into my arms under that soft red sky we’d created. I remember the urge to lie next to them in that secret, enclosed space. Static electricity in the crackling globe pulled our hair to the walls.
In the library that day, waiting for the alarms to go off, I wished I could pull Cecilia’s crunched body from under the table, yank her into the pink cupola with me.
A year later in eighth grade science, we learned about the solar system, and biweekly we lay underneath a pitch-black dome, waiting for our teacher to flip the switch that turned on the map of sky and star lines overhead. Cecilia was gone by then, but in every constellation, I saw only her:
Cecilia tipping a water pitcher into her bath
Cecilia affixed to a starry throne
Cecilia tied to a post on the beach, awaiting the jaws of a sea monster

~

I thought maybe I’d write a poem for her, a poem about Tulip. I grabbed some paper, but quickly found I could not muster the words. I only thought: Tulip, flower, marinate. I picked up one of my werewolf books and read:
In Portugal, the seventh daughter is supposed to become a witch and the seventh son a werewolf; the seventh son often gets the Christian name “Bento” (Portuguese form of “Benedict,” meaning “blessed”) as this is believed to prevent him from becoming a werewolf (also known as turnskin) later in life. The belief in the curse of the seventh son was so extended in Northern Argentina (where the werewolf is called the “lobizón”) that seventh sons were abandoned, ceded in adoption or killed.
Looking back now, if I were to describe Tulip as passionately as I believe Cecilia might, I’d have to use Lolita-esque accuracy: the pale sand-colored markings bisecting her forehead, creating a pattern similar to a mosaic or stained-glass window; the unnecessary dew claws on her back feet that I’m sure Cecilia couldn’t stand to have removed, despite the risk of injury and infection; the tail, long and feathered like the plume in a three-cornered hat: every spot, every whisker down to the last detail.
But really, I never found anything remarkable about the dog. She was just another mutt, and she was scrawny. But I still would have swapped my skin to be that dog, to be so near Cecilia. There had to be something I didn’t see that made Cecilia love her so much, to throw herself into that dog so wholly. Because what is love if not a mutual obsession?
And with this in mind, I’ve swiftly learned there are some proposals that language simply denies—you and your Siamese twin can’t love yourselfs, and I could not love her—Cecilia, that is. Because by the time Cecilia left, there was nothing mutual about it.

~

About six weeks before Cecilia left, it was announced that all seventh graders would have the opportunity to participate in a writing contest. The guidelines were simple: write a children’s story for the first and second graders, and the winner would get his or her story bound and put in the elementary school library, plus a gift certificate for a free brunch at Luby’s. No one paid much attention to the contest, but I was plagued with anxiety for weeks, trying to come up with a story that would win the contest and win over Cecilia. I had given up writing about Tulip, as I found it impossible. Instead, I fabricated another dog. I named him Rufus, and wrote myself onto him. As Rufus, I stood as tall as any tree and combed my grey fur with the rib bones of animals I’d killed. I smashed houses in villages and used the broken planks to stun women and bring them back to my woods. But that was all I ever got; I quickly realized I had no plot, no ending. I also realized that other people would read the story. This terrified me. I could not imagine giving someone else my story, slicing out a neat cross-section of myself and handing it over to be judged.
So instead of entering the contest, I formulated plans to rig it so Cecilia would win. I read articles about voting fraud, but ended up simply stealing a piece of her story from the library wastebasket. It was just a few lines scrawled in her small, loopy handwriting, but to me it spoke volumes:
Mr. Wombat, vegetarian, lives in cave, eats spiders
Can’t kill spiders, gets pet Frog, Frog eats spiders
How can you eat spiders? Isn’t that wrong?
You are just as guilty as me.
I learned later that Ms. Henry (the enthusiastic judge of the contest) had deemed Cecilia’s story too somber for the elementary children. In the end, the winning story was by a boy whose name I’ve forgotten. I remember his story: something about a woman who wore her coat to the store, then put it on a hanger and tried to buy it from the store. When the storeowners finally make her leave, she gives her coat to a homeless man and walks away, and I’m sure the ending had something to do with footprints in the snow. I heard the original ending, in which the homeless man follows the woman’s footprints only to find her frozen to death, had been cut at Ms. Henry’s insistence. I never liked the story, and the illustrations were boring. Besides, we all knew Ms. Henry only gave him first place because everyone recognized his crazy Aunt Matilde, who was always caught trying to steal the gaudy buttons off waiter’s suspenders at one of the local restaurants, in his protagonist.

~

The last second and last time I talked to Cecilia—she moved away in November, her dad’s job, I still don’t know the details—was a Saturday morning in late October. It had rained the night before, and I was sitting on my front porch facing the street, a werewolf book in my lap. I’d found one of Rufus’s old tennis balls in an overturned flowerpot. I bounced it on the ground a few times then let it roll out of my hand. Following the ball with my eyes, I noticed a ripple on the wall of my house behind me; it looked like grains of wood, the growth rings of a tree boiling outwards. I watched the ripple for a few moments before I saw Cecilia walking across the street. Cecilia, walking towards me.
“Hello,” she said, climbing the porch steps to stand in front of me. Tulip bounded up behind her and immediately snapped up the loose tennis ball in her jaws.
“She can have that,” I said. “Rufus died.”
“I know,” Cecilia said. She touched her cheek, but no tears this time. At least I don’t remember any. Tulip slobbered briefly on the tennis ball and then walked over to Cecilia’s side, wagging her tail and sticking her nose into the pocket on Cecilia’s dress.
“I’m out of biscuits,” she said softly to Tulip. “I’m sorry.” She glanced up, and I saw her staring at the ripple on the wall. We both watched it for a while, the beams of light wobbling against the brick, until Cecilia said, “Look,” and pointed down.
A tiny insect was flailing in a puddle of rainwater on the floor; its movement reflected on the wall created the ripple.
“Weird,” I said.
“He’s dying, and its being reflected by the sun.” Cecilia said, gesturing to the ripple on the wall. Tulip stuck her head around Cecilia’s legs and bent to gingerly sniff the bug. “Now it’s really going to die, because she’s going to eat it. Leave the bug alone,” she said, gently pulling Tulip away by the collar.
Cecilia and I watched the bug writhe in the puddle for what could have been seconds, or minutes, or a few sun-lit hours, and the whole time Cecilia, standing in her green dress and light blue Keds, was so close to me, I could touch her, engulf her. I could hear her breathing. I could see wisps of her hair blown forward with her breath. I wasn’t sure if werewolves had heat-sensitive vision—I hadn’t gotten that far in my reading—but I was certain I could see her heart beat blue in her chest, see the orange heat rising from her body.
Tulip began nibbling at the back of Cecilia’s light blue Ked.
“Do you have any cheese?” Cecilia asked me, pulling her shoe from Tulip’s grip. “She really likes cheese.”
In the refrigerator, I only found a quarter of a wheel of soft white cheese, its pallid surface streaked with blue veins like the back of a hand. I carried it out to the porch, out to Cecilia.
“Roquefort,” Cecilia said, reading the label. She pulled the cellophane off the cheese and handed it down to Tulip. Tulip ate the cheese in one bite, licking Cecilia’s palm afterwards. Cecilia smiled and wiped her hand on her dress.
“Thanks,” she said. Her root beer bottle eyes were clear, and I looked for blood in her cheeks, but I couldn’t see any. Cecilia gave me a brief smile and hopped of the porch. Tulip was curving her back to chew on her own tail, like those old black and white pictures of snakes eating the ends of their bodies. Devouring themselves.
“Come on, Tulip.”
She jumped up quickly when she heard her name and followed Cecilia home.
Cecilia, in her light blue Keds, walking away from me. I’d thought it was the girls who were waiting, waiting for others, and who were eventually disappointed. I thought the girls were the ones to be left alone. But Cecilia, even at thirteen, turned out to be very different. And I was the one left with only my werewolf books and the bones of old memories to gnaw on.