paper bee

the brother returns home

Dennis is coming home Friday for a few weeks before he heads off to Sedona to get hitched! I've been trying to clean his room for him, but unfortunately, all the detritus of my life has overflowed into his room, so I'm afraid he's gonna have to be living amongst all of my excess clothes/paintings/books/broken lamps, etc.

"You know, time and space are essentially the same thing. So with Daylight Savings Time, do we save space as well? Because my closet is really crowded." — Dennis, circa 2006

I can't wait.

scrabble, anyone?

Lately I've been having a lot of fun with Scrabble. As in, I pick some of my favorite lines from poems, songs, whatever, and try to Scrabble-ify them. Some are impossible to do, but I totally nailed one earlier tonight:

It's hard to see, but it says "writhe and bear the fruit of screaming," and it's from Frank O'Hara's "For Grace, After a Party," which is one of my favorites:

You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little

different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

I'm easily entertained (obviously). I suppose I should be focusing on writing my own poetry instead of Scrabbling other people's poetry. Eh, blargh. Oh, and I found the bridge from my very very first fiddle, which was no longer than a longish knitting needle, and which I grew out of when I was 8 years old. It was in the Scrabble box. Weird. The GDAE I penciled on it to help me remember is still visible. I'm going to make a necklace out of it. Like I said before, easily entertained.

mutatis mutandis

I find way too much weird stuff on the internet. I wrote this for my thesis, in response to Shelley Jackson’s Half Life:

Mutatis Mutandis

In my memories, the glass separating me from the Two-Headed Boy was not actually glass, but rather a sort of lucent film. The hairs on the two heads waved slowly in the murky liquid as the boy floated, his motionless form occasionally knocking against the glass as though he was attempting to nose his way out of his amniotic pouch. In my memories, it is when the glass begins to stretch and bend under his force that I remember this scene probably is not from my memory at all. It probably never happened, was just seeped into my head by the floating Braille foam of imagination.
I used to ask my mother if we’d ever visited a museum that held a two-headed boy, but she always balked at the idea of such an oddity. I don’t know where the memory comes from, but those two heads with their black hair and closed eyes are as clear in my mind as my own reflection.

~

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING ARE TRUE OF YOU? (CIRCLE ALL THAT APPLY):

•I sometimes have the feeling that someone is looking over my shoulder.
•I sometimes have the feeling that someone is looking through my eyes.
•I sometimes have the feeling that I am looking through my own eyes, i.e. that my self and my eyes are not identical but keep a certain distance.
•I'm butting my head against a wall, and the wall is myself.

“Remind me, why do I have to fill this thing out?” I asked Petra.
Petra set her notepad on the side table and leaned forward in her chair, giving me a hard look over her thick, plastic-framed glasses.
“I told you, Blanche. It’s just a little experiment. Something new I’m trying with all my patients who exhibit your symptoms.”
“What symptoms?”
“Well, your paranoia, for example. Your sense of a haunted past. We weren’t able to dredge up anything with hypnosis, so I’m trying something new.”
I sighed and read on.

•It sometimes strikes me as preposterous that so many different people feel entitled to call themselves “I”.
•When I say “I,” I have the feeling there are several people involved: the one talking, the one talked about, the one listening, the one observing all the others.
•When I catch sight of myself in a shop window, or hear a recording of my voice, it takes a moment to recognize myself.
I circled all three.
•Parts of my body are mysterious to me.
“My eyelid sometimes twitches involuntarily. Doesn’t that happen to everyone?” I said, smirking. Petra simply raised her eyebrows.
•When my reflexes are tested with a rubber hammer, I often wonder whether I am pretending to kick or just kicking.
•I sometimes feel that part of me is devoted to some activity in which I have little say.

Circle.

•I have eyes on the back of my head.
•I am invisible.
•Nobody knows me.
•I sometimes have a feeling of déjà vu.
•I sometimes feel like I see the world backwards and upside down.
•I sometimes feel like I'm the wrong size and shape, that my real self is much bigger, smaller, or simply different.

Circle.

A small drawing on the next page depicted a boy putting his pants on backwards, each foot inserted into the bottom cuff.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
•The pants are on backwards.
•The boy is on backwards.
•Where is the floor?
•There is nothing wrong with this picture.

I passed a glass paperweight from Petra’s desk between my hands as she wrote down the name and address of the new doctor she wanted me to see, Dr. Shelley. The sphere was heavy in my palms, and cold. Ghosts of my chilled fingerprints lingered on the glass.

~

Sometimes in my memories, I have a sister. I know she looked like me, but her features are blurred and infantile. When I used to sit on the floor of my mother’s closet, my nostrils full of the leather smell of her shoes, my twin was there. Her small hand rested in mine as we whispered to each other. She used to point out the patterns in the woodgrain on my old oak dresser—the arches and curves of the lines looked like a cave to her—and create stories for me, stories of blind cave creatures. Her hand looked like a white star as she placed her palm on the wooden drawers. This memory is unlike my memory of the Two-Headed Boy, because from the beginning of this memory, there is not doubt in my mind that it is not true. I don’t have a sister. But then where do these memories come from?

~

I assumed the baby was a boy, but there was no way to tell from the black and white drawing. The furrow between its legs sprouted not sex, but another torso, two more arms and another head. The head was smiling, raised slightly to glance upwards over the bridge of skin and organs that separated it from its counterpart. One leg projected from the wrinkle of the baby’s hip, ending in a fan of mismatched, spatulate toes. A long crease replaced a belly button, leading into buttocks and two more bowed, fat baby legs. The baby’s skeleton must look like a chalky, spindly starfish, I thought as I traced each limb with my finger, wondering why Dr. Shelley would hang this in her waiting room.
“Blanche Adams?” A squat nurse poked her head from behind the oak door. “We’re ready for you now.”
I followed the nurse—Peggy, her nametag said—down a long corridor. No doors had been left open, but I could hear murmurs behind them. I thought Peggy would lead me into a room to wait for Dr. Shelley, but we instead walked through the doors at the end of the corridor, where several large white machines waited, hollowed out like insect husks. The drone and whir of the nearest machine filled my ears.
“If you could remove your clothes and put this on, we’ll get the tests started as soon as possible,” Peggy said, handing me a hospital gown.
“What tests?” I asked.
Peggy consulted her clipboard. “Looks like we’ve got you down for a CAT scan, MRI, and thoracic X ray,” she said.
“Why?” I asked, bewildered.
“Your doctor faxed over the results of your questionnaire. This is just standard procedure for someone with your results.”
“My results?” I asked. “It was just some mind-trick test.”
“Dr. Shelley thought it’d be best to take a look at your brain and other organs, just to make sure,” said Peggy, smoothing down the tissue paper on the vinyl-covered pillow of the nearest machine.
My ears rang with the word tumor, and every medical textbook picture I’d ever seen ran through my head—the glossy blue clusters corded with thick veins, clumps of tissue tucked between folds of the cerebral cortex like the miniature hearts that belong to mice and other small mammals.
“Do I have a tumor?” I asked. I was outside myself.
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Peggy said before she left the room to allow me to change.
Malignant cells hanging from ribs like moss, crawling up my spine like ivy.

~

Dr. Shelley examined the CAT scan of my braincase on the computer screen. I searched through the rings of red and purple glowing lines that denoted my brain tissue, but I found nothing. When I tried to envision it, my skull always held cavernous, unchartable depths; however, on the cathode rays of the screen, it looked small and insignificant.
“Well, I don’t think it’s a craniopagus parasite,” said Dr. Shelley, circling the crown of my head with her pen. “We’d see a lot less epiphyseal closure in this area.”
“Wait, I’m sorry. So it’s not a tumor?” I asked. My head felt light and hot, as though it was filled with cotton. “I thought the MRI showed a tumor.”
“There’s a tumor in your chest. I’m saying you don’t have a craniopagus parasite in your head. A type of duplicata incompleta. It’s what would have been your twin, attached to you,” said Dr. Shelley.
“I’m sorry, what would have been?” I asked.
“Yes. It would have been your twin, if its development hadn’t been stunted in the womb.” She handed me a packet of papers. “Didn’t Petra tell you anything about this?” Dr. Shelley asked.
“No.” I looked at the papers Dr. Shelley had given me.
The explanation is relatively simple. Conjoined twins are divided into groups from the area of conjunction, one of the groups being craniopagus twins, i.e. joined at the skull. In rare instances, the body of one craniopagus twin atrophies in utero due to deficient placental blood supply, and the result is craniopagus parasiticus conjoined twins, where the ‘normal’ twin has a parasitic head and rudimentary body attached to the crown of the head. The second head normally grows quicker than the lower one, probably due to hydrocephalus caused by defective venous drainage.
A picture showed a two bawling infant heads fused together. The upper head did not reach further than a neck-like stump, vegetal and shrunken, a small peach. Its skin was veiny and lucent like the ears of a rabbit.
“Oh my god,” I said.
“I have video,” said Dr. Shelley. “If you’re interested, I can show it to you. There’s a really great part when its mother gives it her breast and the lips attempt to suck.”
Individuals with buried craniopagus parasites often have the feeling that they are not alone. Moreover, they feel they possess a sort of guardian or alter ego, someone who watches over them, but who sees things they do not see, or sees the same things, but from an inverse perspective. They are occasionally stirred by sensations that have no identifiable source within conscious experience, and occasionally perform unintended actions, e.g. putting away the milk in the freezer, that seem to reflect some sort of logic, but a logic that is back to front. Usually, though, this is a source of secret satisfaction, as it may be the case that what seems to them their worse mistake may be in fact their salvation.
I ignored Dr. Shelley’s offer to watch the video. The peach pit neck and O-shaped lips disappeared and I saw only the Two-Headed Boy. “I used to have one of these?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think so. But I do think,” she said, sliding the X-ray of my chest under a metal clip, fastening it to a glowing screen, “that you have a duplicata incompleta. You contain your incomplete, undeveloped twin in the form of a tumor right here.” She circled a smudge of white below my left ribs.
It sometimes strikes me as preposterous that so many different people feel entitled to call themselves “I.”
“I’m surprised you’ve never heard of this before,” said Dr. Shelley. “The twofers are getting pretty popular nowadays.”
“Twofer?”
“Dicephalus dipus dibrachius. Conjoined twins who share a body. Two-headed people,” she said.
“I’ve heard of it,” I said. “The Two-Headed Boy of Bengal. I’ve heard of him. And I think,” I paused. “I think I’ve seen it before.”
“On TV?” asked Dr. Shelley.
“No, I don’t watch the news,” I said.
“Oh, these guys aren’t on the news. They’re usually on the talk shows.”
“I thought those were fake,” I said.
“Most people do.” Dr. Shelley sighed. “I’ve been on Oprah twice. I think the Farber twins were on last month, actually.”
I didn’t know who the Farber twins were, but I had seen the Two-Headed Boy, floating behind his glass. I didn’t mention this to Dr. Shelley. I simply continued shaking my head, no, no.
“How can you be certain?” I asked.
“I’ve spoken with your psychiatrist, and Petra felt your paranoia, the haunting impression that your life could have been entirely different and something has gone wrong, made you a prime candidate for duplicata incompleta.”
“It could just be a tumor. Lots of people are paranoid.”
“Yes, but if you look here,” said Dr. Shelley, pointing to small white speckles on the X ray, “you can see that your tumor is growing teeth.
I looked at the string of white dots hanging from my ribs, illuminated on the screen like Christmas lights, and promptly vomited at my feet.

~

Twofers, I learned from the material Dr. Shelley sent me home with, have two hearts. I remembered from my books that vampires also have two hearts. One heart beats with goodness, the other with evil. While the good heart beats, the vampire is harmless, but there is always the risk of the second heart taking over, wetting its chin with blood. I wondered which heart I’d inherited.
Dr. Shelley said the twin buried in my chest likely did not have a heart, and if it did, it wasn’t functioning. But despite Dr. Shelley’s reassurances, I still felt it thrumming—a low, quiet vibration, like a leaky valve. Motionless, the sullen blimp of my twin hung in the empty space. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there, fattening.
When I thought about myself—myself, was I still myself? Or was I now myselves? When I thought about myself, I sounded like a bad riddle, (What has teeth but is not human? A comb!). What if my twin wasn’t even a girl—what was I then? I often turned to the pamphlets Dr. Shelley had given me. I realized I had the telltale sense that there was another life buried within my own, but that I have choked or stifled it. Or maybe it has, of its own accord, turned on itself? I could not tell.
I could feel the pulpy mass growing heavier and knottier in my chest. I imagined it was growing fibrous veins of its own, tendrils snaked through the valves of my heart, leeching away my blood. This could not be the same twin from my childhood, that benevolent sister of my youth. The picture of the undeveloped twin in the pamphlets resembled a stuffed turkey, limbs folded back in on themselves, spine curved over tucked knees. All that remained of the head was a shriveled, radish-shaped peninsula jutting from the neck.
You tend to be suspicious, to suspect others of carrying a secret, when you are the one with the secret—a secret that you do not know and will never know. Unable to determine what is wrong, you scrutinize yourself for signs of a contrary will, but in every respect you resemble yourself: you are normal. This strikes you as an almost unbearable deceit; if only you could let yourself express... express... what?

~

Dr. Shelley said I needed to decide whether or not I wanted to keep my twin. “The labs show it’s not malignant,” she told me over the phone, “but there’s not telling how much longer it will continue to grow.”
“Grow?”
“Yes,” she said, static singing across the phone lines with her voice. “As long as it—the entity—is connected to your blood supply, it won’t diminish. Some twins grow until they’re almost as big as newborn babies. I once extracted a skeleton the size of a pigeon from a woman’s abdomen.”

~

Dr. Shelley arranged for me to meet with a surrogate twofer I could relate with, someone who could help me make a decision. There were no twofers living in my town, so my assigned mentor had to travel an hour to get to me. I met her—them—I met Willow and Diane in a coffee shop down the street from my apartment. I didn’t actually meet Willow, as she slept the entire time.
“Narcoleptic,” Diane said before even shaking my hand, crooking her head to point across the cradle of neck to her sister’s slumped head. “She once fell asleep for an entire year. But she’s only been sleeping for eight days this time.” Diane shrugged their shoulders—I imagined she must have nearly full reign of the body while Willow slept. “She’s had chronic narcolepsy since we were twelve,” Diane said.
“My doctor says I have chronic suicide,” I said before I could stop myself. Something compelled me to divulge this personal information to Diane and Willow: perhaps it was the way everyone in the coffee shop was staring at them—I wanted to make the scene more intimate. Or perhaps it wasn’t me at all, I thought, considering the clump of cells in my chest.
“What’s that?” Diane asked politely. She rested her chin in her right hand, brushing her dark hair out of Willow’s face. Willow’s hair was cropped much shorter than her sister’s.
“It just means I subconsciously make my life bad, but never actually end it all.”
Diane nodded. “So, you have a foetus-in-foetu?” she asked.
“Is that the same thing as a duplicata incompleta?”
“Yes.”
“Then yes, I have one of those,” I said.
“How do you feel about that?” she asked.
“How do you feel about having two heads?” I asked, then immediately clapped my hand over my mouth. “Oh, that was rude,” I said.
Diane threw her head back and laughed, as Willow’s head jolted slightly from the vibrations of laughter in their chest. A small drop of saliva fell from Willow’s lips, hitting the collar of their shirt. Diane didn’t seem to notice. “We’re used to it,” she said.
“What I meant to ask was, how do you feel about sharing your identity with someone else? I said. “Don’t you feel that there should be something that is intrinsically yours?”
“No,” said Diane. “I think people like us—myselves, yourselves—I think we who share our identities are a better example of true humans. We all share pieces of ourselves with other people. And sometimes other people get under our skin so thoroughly they never leave us.”
“Hm.” I mumbled. Are my innards riddled with other people? Is nothing purely mine?
“When you think about yourself, there are already two of you—you and the you who is thinking.” Diane said, pulling a napkin from the dispenser. She drew something with black pen, then pushed the napkin at me. I saw a bracketed I:
[I]
“When you think about that, there are three of you—you, the you who is thinking, and the you who is thinking about the two of them.” Diane drew:
I[I[I]]
“Look at that,” she said. “Now there are four of you:
I[I[I[I]]]
I put my hand over the hollow below my ribs where my twin rested. Was it listening?
“Isn’t that neat?” Diane asked. “You’re an example that infinity is not far away, not in the voids of outer space or the grains of sand on a beach or all the raindrops collected in the ocean.” Willow gave a satisfied, sleepy grunt, and her eyelids quivered.
Any human being is big enough to get lost in, no matter how small we look pressed against the glowing hospital screens.
“I think I saw a twofer when I was little,” I addressed Diane, although I was still watching Willow’s eyelids. “He was in a glass case, floating.”
“We’ve seen him too,” Diane said. “The Two-Headed Boy.”
“Where did you see him?” I asked.
Diane shrugged their shoulders again. “No place real.”
She must have noticed my face fall, because she reached their left hand across the table, placed it on mine and said, “It could be worse. We could be microcephiles.”

~
In my memories, the glass begins to stretch and bend under the Two-Headed Boy’s force. Glass bulges forward until it deflates like a plastic bag and rips. Green water issues slowly from the case, like water from a faucet. I take a step backward as the loamy-smelling water gathers around my ankles. The Two-Headed Boy unfurls himself slowly like a scroll and wraps his two arms around us, careful to cradle our head in the gulf of neck between his two heads.

area: no measure of depth

When I was 15, I was obsessed with — surprise! — Emily Dickinson. If you're a teenaged girl, I think it's required that you go through a phase of either Emily or Sylvia Plath. My Plath phase didn't come till I was 18 (man, and I was a total downer then). Anyway, I read all her anthologies, all the biographies. As she described herself: "I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves." How could I not love that? I used to grow heliotropes in my garden, because I once read that she requested she be buried with a handful of heliotropes "to bring to my (...)." George? Shit, I forget his name. Some guy she supposedly loved who died before her. In fact, this summer I had some heliotropes in a pot on the porch until my mom let them die when I was out of town a few weekends ago (for a woman who saves people's lives, she's a horribly unskilled gardener).

Anyway, I thought of Emily Dickinson the other day. The first time I've really thought of her in nine years. I thought of her because I've been mulling over the idea of location. I've been here since February, and soon I'll be back in Boulder. And I want to go to school in Seattle. San Francisco. New York. Austin. Chicago. Portland. Prague. Santa Fe. Oxford. Middlebury. I don't know. Sometimes I miss living in Paris so badly that it feels like I have a big, baguette-shaped piece missing from my life. I want to move to Brazil. Actually, I want to move to New Zealand. Or both. Maybe Russia.

I was at my desk looking up how to obtain a work visa to live in Reykjavik, and I found a quote: "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." How appropriate, I thought to myself. How fitting. (I later looked up this quote on Wikiquote and learned that "this quote has gained popularity among Facebook users as of April 2008." Blurg). 

And then suddenly, I thought of Emily Dickinson, who never travelled more than 60 miles from her hometown. Okay, I don't remember how many miles exactly. But not very far. And I suddenly felt so suffocated at my desk, and so, so sorry for Emily Dickinson. And, you know, I did the normal freak out: I calculated how much money it would cost me to live in Paris again, looked up plane tickets, searched hostels, browsed ebay for kickin' old luggage. 

But then I remembered another quote I once read. After Emily died, her sister, Lavinia, found the 1,800 poems that Emily never had published. And on a scrap piece of paper, she found something that Emily had scrawled out hastily:

"Area: no measure of depth."

And I felt like an asshole for feeling sorry for her, and for feeling sorry for myself.

"There's an awful lot we miss"

Usually my job is pretty entertaining. Karl, my editor, and I like to make fun of the pictures of babies, weddings, and other randoms people send in to be published in the paper ("I wonder if she realizes she birthed a potato?" "Oh, I see Ichabod Crane there secured himself a lovely bride."). However, reporting in this town has been getting me down lately. I get pretty sick of trying to organize the messy sphere of human affairs in print. Sure, I meet a lot of interesting people and nutters (like the woman who believes she is periodically impregnated by the Council of Twelve, a group of otherworldly beings who use her body to produce the Children of the Violet Ray of Wisdom. No joke). But lately I've been trudging through the banal: school board meetings, kiddie fishing tournaments, town council votes. This weekend I had to go to the local production of "Oliver!" the musical. As much as I love watching kids dressed as scrappy Dickensian orphans sing and dance and celebrate child abuse and poverty in Victorian London, I really wasn't feeling it. Plus an old man yelled at me for taking pictures: "You knock it off and get out right now!" I was so furious and humiliated it made me cry.


That being said, I wasn't thrilled that I was slated to write a quick piece about the local worm farm this week. Oh my god. Worm farm. I was positive I was going to be murdered and turned into mulch. I imagined some horrible, eyeless, hook-mouthed monster rearing out of the soil and crashing down on me while the fanged farmer cackled in the background. Luckily, our local worm farmer — Jody, I believe, is her name — called and cancelled our appointment Monday morning. She told me the influx of tourists fishing over the Fourth of July weekend had completely wiped out her stock. I was off the hook (oooh, bad pun!). So instead, Karl sent me to interview an old man who had called the office and told us he had just met up with a childhood friend he had not seen or talked to since 1943. "Go write something to tug on the withered old heartstrings of this community," Karl told me.

So, I met the old friends, Jim and Glenn, at Jim's home, where they were sitting on the couch talking when I knocked on the door. Jim wore the hugest plastic-framed glasses I've ever seen — you know, the type that would look totally hip on someone in The Downer, but on an old guy, just look necessary and utilitarian. They introduced me to their wives, Elizabeth and Fern, respectively, and offered me a seat. Before I could even start asking them questions, they wanted to know everything about me. Jim and Glenn grew up together in small town Illinois, so they were absolutely fascinated by my Irish and Russian origins in Chicago (I left out the part about my grandmother losing her thumb in a factory when she was eight years old; I guess "Oliver!" was still too fresh in my mind.) They acted like the fact that I was born in Arizona and grew up in The Valley was a great achievement on my part (old people love Phoenix). When I told them I'd studied creative writing and French in school, Elizabeth wistfully murmured, "Oooh my, French," to herself.

I finally got them to start talking about themselves, and ended up listening for two hours. Glenn and Jim used to double-date with a pair of twins (haaaawt, right?), before Jim graduated and moved to Springfield and Glenn dropped out to work on his mother's farm. That was the last time they saw each other before their reunion Sunday. Glenn and Fern just happen to go to church in Illinois with Magel, "the gal Jim used to go with," and out of the blue, she asked Glenn if he'd talked to Jim. This prompted Glenn to look Jim up and contact him. They told me all sorts of sad stories and funny stories, a few of which I put in my article. When I asked Glenn how he and Fern met, he couldn't remember, until Fern said, "Well, you used to come watch me roller skate, then one day you asked me for a date." This, of course, melted my cold and surly heart, as I imagined a young Fern with curled hair and lipstick, red polka-dot dress swishing in time with the movement of her skates, and Glenn nervously folding and refolding his handkerchief as he gathered his courage to ask Fern for a date.

I really like talking to old people (when they're not yelling at me in musical productions, that is). But the entire time Glenn and Jim were talking, the only thing I could think about was how easily the people we love and care about slip away from us. Even today, with cell phones, email, facebook — blogs — it's so easy for people to disappear. When someone's been out of your life for long enough, it can feel like they're dead. Sometimes, if you really never speak to them again, they might as well be. And people we've only just met can leave as quickly as they came into our lives. It made me think about the friends, and others, I once loved who I haven't spoken to in years. I don't even know where some of them are. Reilly? Casey? Scarlett? Ron? They could be anywhere. Or the people I barely get to see or speak to because they're across the state, or the country, or the world. Or the people whose location I know, whose phone number I know, but I still can't talk to them, or see them. How do we make it so easy to lose track of each other? There are so many people on the peripheral I've lost, and quite a few on the center stage I've lost and miss, too, and I don't want 65 years to pass before I find them again. Because I might look cute and ironic in giant glasses now, but when I'm 88 years old, I'm sure I'll just look utilitarian, too.

When I asked Jim and Glenn what one talks about after 65 years of no contact, Glenn said, "Oh lord, everything." And Jim said, "You wouldn't believe it, we haven't stopped talking...except to go bed. There's an awful lot we miss."

I'm not just some chick

I didn't tell anyone about this blog when I started over two years ago, then I deleted most of it. Secret blog? Dumb idea, Sarah. I get paid to sit at my desk and fiddle around on the interwebs anyway. A blog seems perfectly in order. How else am I gonna keep up with the cool kids? My Wayfarers are knock-offs, and I fell on my polaroid camera and smashed it, so I'm way behind the times. So let the blogging (re)commence.

To the Spiders

No one would miss you. No one
would notice the absence
of your sniping gloom in my
bedroom — except me. And so I let you

live on and sink deeper
into your knitted homes. Because I know
as soon as you’re gone, every piece of dust
that rolls across the hardwood will be you.

Every small sweep of the sheet against
my skin at night will be you. And though
I will not see you, like the white bones
hidden in my dark body, I will know you are there.

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.