Rust

Maybe we are too young and the world is trying to remind us of that.

“It’ll be okay,” I say.

When she lifted the sheet last night, it looked like spilled ink seeping beneath her. The words are on her lips even now, even if I’m only imagining them. She’s quiet and still and I’m filled with everything she’s not.

I start a haiku in my head. The words are written in blood. Too much blood. I don’t say them because I can’t. I hold Gray’s hand, and it leaves me itching to trace words in her palm. I write the haiku with my other hand on the underside of the kitchen table.

My flower baby,

free little gypsy dancer,

please don’t fly away.

“I can’t just sit here, Shaw,” Grayson says.

The way she bled our baby from her womb looked like a Rorschach test. When I think back to that moment, I try to remember the way she took my hand, running it down the small bump of her belly; a tiny half moon that will never be full.

The sun peeks through the living room window, exposing a sliver of light, trapping Gray in the shadows. She rearranges reminders for doctor’s appointments and our one ultrasound picture on the refrigerator door. She hides them beneath scraps of stories neither of us have used. Other paper bits bear pieces of poems waiting to be penned.

Grayson lets the faucet run over her hands until they are pink. The crusted blood beneath her nails turns the water pink, too. She washes my coffee mug from the night before. You could stop drinking it with me, she’d said at the beginning, but I never knew she was serious. Caffeine was the first to go when she found out she was pregnant. I never stopped drinking it. I should have given up coffee for her. I should be helping her.

When she starts scrubbing the sheets, it’s as if she is real and the sheets are real, but I am imaginary. And so I take them from her and try my best to scrape these moments back to before. I want the pen in my hand and the notebook in my lap and I want Grayson sleeping beside me.

I want us to be okay.

I’m already wishing for Gray’s lips to spread and reveal a sunrise kind of smile; teeth cresting over the horizon of her bottom lip. I know that look might be lost in blotches of blood now.

“Just leave them,” she says. The room feels different with her real voice here. Her small voice, her shy voice; the quiet way she always says she loves me.

I let her kiss me as she cries, her lips stiff and unsure. When she moves away, the space between us smells like traces of Thai takeout from the fridge. I want to pull her back, but she wraps her arms around her stomach, and I know it’s not me she wants.

We replace the bedding with two sleeping bags. Once inside, she curls away from me, but our feet still touch. I try to sleep, but her words and my words and all the words we heard between last night and this morning are in my head. I push an earbud into my right ear and the other into Gray’s and I press play.

I try to find words without paper and pen, but I can’t get them right. Before Gray, I was never a night writer. But now, the words find me while she dreams. Maybe that’s the only way stories can separate themselves between two writers.

I write a letter by the light of the alarm clock, not wanting to wake Gray. I start with To Nyxie, trying it on seven separate pages. I don’t know what to say now. I never told Gray about the name, but it’s what I’d started calling her bump while she slept. Sometimes I told it stories or wrote it words on her skin, hoping it would know.

“Already a day,” Gray says when she wakes. The early evening leaves traces of moon mist over her eyes. “I miss—”

“I know,” I say.

Because I do.

I don’t show her the pages pressed between the mattress and pillow. I set them on the bedside table instead, and wait for her to say something. She doesn’t.

Gray walks to the kitchen, and moments later I smell fresh coffee, hear a spoon clink against her mug. I know she must be stirring in honey and cinnamon the way she used to before. I wonder if the color will remind her, if she’ll write her way through the memory or if it will rust her insides until they crack.

Grayson sits at the kitchen table, steam surrounding her chin. Her eyes flash to the sheets in the sink. Spots still dot them like stars. All I see are bits of our baby. And I know she must see the same thing. I press the fabric to my chest until it doesn’t feel real and I don’t feel real and this all feels too fucking real with Grayson’s hands wrapped around my green coffee mug.

I leave the sheets on the balcony beside the bonfire pit we’ve yet to use this year. When I return to the kitchen, Gray’s coffee is gone, and part of me hopes she’s dumped it down the drain, that this is all unreal for her, too. Her hand finds mine across the table. I try to squeeze the life back into her, but it’s already gone.

Written by: Kayla King

Photograph by: Daniel Vidal

Hanged Man

Continued from Three of Swords

I try to hold the sun inside the same way your mother did, like a talisman. I see her squeezing that ball of light so tight that it oozed over every inch of your childhood home; an aura of habitual happiness.

I kept your old dresser from 2nd St. and now it’s painted like Lemon Meringue. I know you’d hate it. But Shaw doesn’t seem to mind. He leaves little things for me to find: yellow pieces of paper with other people’s song lyrics, daffodils in wine bottles emptied the night before. He wants them to speak sweet things to me when he can’t write the words himself.

This morning we find each other in silence, watching the sunrise.

“It’s lovely,” I say. But the way that gold glitters reminds me how you’d always quote that book to explain tragedy. The guilt tastes like dust now, so dry and decayed. It makes me think about the moment of evaporation and dehydration; the moment a person becomes a husk.

Shaw drinks his coffee from a tall green mug. I stare until it blurs and quakes and sprouts like grass. When I blink, it’s the color of your eyes. But Shaw doesn’t look into the dark surface of his coffee like you did. His eyes bring me back.

“Just a few hours there and home later tonight,” I say, taking a sip of his coffee.

“Stay,” Shaw says. I know he means it like a promise, not a command. I smile and kiss him on the cheek. I don’t ask him to come with me. A new cd starts playing when I start the car and I look up at Shaw on the balcony. When he waves and smiles, I know he knows I’ve found his new mix.

From the interstate, the green exit signs remind me how close I am to you. It has been two years since we were here together. I remember that last time, the dark sky tinged with lights from the city; acid washed. I wore your old Syracuse University sweatshirt with the hole in the left sleeve, wrapped up in your dreams.

When I pull into the parking lot, the sky is bright and the breeze is cool. I wish I still had your sweatshirt now. But standing in front of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, I fall in line with everyone else. The church is old, built from beautiful stones, and the burdens of sinners. I stay to the left to avoid the arms of those I know best.

“May we be blessed in remembering,” the priest says.

You grab my hand and lead me from the churchyard, distancing us from headstones and mourners. Smoke dances as you light a cigarette, trying to tweak the tines of my shipwrecked soul; a petite pallograph.

“Tell me a story?” I ask and you smile.

“Lost my first tooth in first grade and it was brilliant. Really, it was,” you say. “I was chewing a cherry gum ball and it happened just like that, just like us.” You kiss me and I bite your lip to stop you. But I taste metallic bits, drinking you in to bring myself back to life.

“Look at them all,” you say. I’m not sure if you mean the people surrounding that distant grave or the tiny blue flowers that grow in this part of the cemetery. They make me think of that summer we spent blanketed in blue, surrounded by sky and chicory blossoms; believing in perfection. Because you were perfect then, even if you didn’t know it. Moss eyes. Dusk hair. Skin like spiced vinegar. You reminded me of the earth and the beginning of time.

“There’s falling from stupid shit,” you say. “Like bike seats and bed frames and billiard tables. And then, there’s this.”

“I know, Jess.”

You don’t need to tell me about the way you love me. I see it in the way you pick up a penny and flip it luck-side up in my hand. I squeeze it tight, trying to absorb you.

“Just in case,” you say. I know what you mean, even if I don’t say it back. For the moment, you are made of stories and secrets and simple things. You are mine again. This time, when you kiss me, I let you. Our lips crush the distance of the last two years. We are closer than we ever were.

“Nothing gold,” I say when you pull away.

“It’s already happened.”

“But what about us? What about falling? What about—”

I imagine you explaining in a letter, maybe writing through the back of my black dress: Love. You. Can’t. Couldn’t. Me. Sorry. Love. Love. Love. But you leave because you were never one for words.

I walk back for the rest of the service. They lower your body into the earth and they pray: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I make the sign of the cross. The memories fade, and with them, so do you.

Your mother stands beside your casket, so soft, ready to melt. She bears the marks of loss in tired eyes and slumped shoulders. She talks about the way you used to swing from boyhood branches and I taste her guilt like mine; pure and pungent. I think about what I would say to her, praying that a tight-lipped I’m sorry might grow to encompass everything I felt for you. But I know I am not the person your mother wants to hear those words from.

I call Shaw from the car. I wait for him to pick up the phone. You whisper, I miss you, from the backseat.

“He’s gone, you know? And I wrote this fucking thing, this letter, for him, and didn’t even read it. So he won’t know, because I never sent it. I--”

“I’m sure he knew, Gray,” Shaw says.

But I don’t. The not knowing fills the space between the three of us equilaterally.

“I wrote you something,” he says.

Shaw recites his haiku over and over like the chorus of a song:

Light burns from gold to

silver. It can’t stay. But I’ll

seal you in stardust.

On my way back to your grave, I fold the letter until I can’t anymore. I send my thoughts somewhere gold so they won’t live inside me. I leave them here with you.

Written by: Kayla King

Photograph by: Erin Notarthomas

Southern Framed Joy

In the summer it gets hot. So hot that the temperature holds as the sun goes down, and even the moon makes us sweat.

This is where I live. It is not where I have always lived, though that place is not so far away either. That place, so full up of wheat fields and family; so full up of God. Filled to the brim and runneth over with churches that were once small and white and chapelesque, but are now behemoths, megachurches; congregations with mic’d up pastors and acoustic guitars, home to not only worship, but high school graduations, Starbucks, and daycares. You’ll find Catholics where I’m from, and Methodists, Lutherans, and dancing Baptists. You’ll also find angry billboards crowding interstates, their messages forged by hate groups masquerading as ones of hope.

Alas, I live there no longer. I left not because of God, not because of billboards or the Baptists. I left because that is what some people do. They leave where they are because they are curious and hopeful for the unknown future. They are not beat down by being human and raising family and following their dreams. They are not beat down by traffic and mass killings and car wrecks and breakups and heartaches, or whatever else. They are not tired. Not yet.

So they leave like I left and like thousands and probably millions of people leave the place of their birth, and maybe some of them go back to that birthplace, and perhaps it is something in the water that drags them there like the north star dragged gifters of frankincense. I learned to spell the name of the spice on a black chalkboard as a child. In the summer we decamped from our video game postures, from our aimless wanderings, from baseball fields and pool parties. We left those things behind for something called “Vacation Bible Study,” which was no sort of vacation I was interested in. They did, however, excel at spelling long-winded Bible names, and in retrospect perhaps there is some camaraderie to be gained from that time before I left; Wednesday night youth group, arms raised, free pizza. As if there really is a club. As if there really is support if you go to enough meetings.

I am not the only one who left, some of us choosing to make a home rather than being made by one. And of course, we never forget that we left. We might compare our places of past to that of our foreseeable future. In this practice we are looking backwards and forwards, always leaving out the present.

But enough about where I was and where I will be. I’ll have plenty of time to sit in the well of my past when I’m older, looking to the light above, smoking my pipe in a splintered rocking chair made of wisdom and wood, creaking along with the chorus of crickets in the evening.

Where I live it is so hot, but it is wonderful. And is that not a true southern sentence? To both criticise and cherish? Recognizing the imperfections of where you are from with a celebration and analysis that slip into romanticism. If you are from the south then you are born with this romanticism that runs like a red ribbon from your gut out of your mouth. I have dreams of someone pulling this red ribbon out of me, and pulling and pulling and finally when it is done, and I am on my knees panting like a thirsty dog, then it makes sense that I am southern. I am ecstatic and perturbed. Happy to be rid of it but always in longing for it. To be southern is to be addicted to this sentimentality.

Clarification may be necessary in even my term “southern.” I am not southern with accents, though ours is there as well. I am not southern with antebellum white pillars that are Greek in birth but sometimes still prejudice in practice. Blanche Dubois is as foreign to me as she is to Stanley Kowalski. I am not that kind of southern. I am not from there.

I am from cowboy boots and country music and mesquite trees and the fondling of B-B-Q, which can be spelled no other way but to look delinquent. I am from coyote howls at night and smoky casino floors in the morning, when the remnants of double-wide fortunes leave charred patches of red shame on the soul.

I am from a place of oil derricks that look beautiful and science fiction at the dawn or dusk of the day. A place that runs desert to the west and forest to the east, as you sink into the Gulf of Mexico, as you pay tribute to your southern neighbor, where Spanish is an absolutely breathtaking and beautiful language full up of breathtaking and beautiful people.

I am from line dancing where the term “honky-tonk” inspires nothing but agreeable nods. I am from campfires and peeing blindly into the woods and fucking blindly into the woods with girls named Mary Lou and sometimes girls named Kathy. I am from football and Friday night lights, where pickup trucks circle bonfires like summer Junebugs to a naked porch light, and country music mixes gleefully with booty dancing white girls and black girls and those aforementioned Spanish lovelies.

Where I’m from, people smile at one another and this is important for the sanctity of positive, glowing energy that moves with the wind through the trees and down past our tongues into the souls that the preacher has saved. Everything happens for a reason, they say, and that smile must surely be the reason.

And when you look back, when you ask why you left, it’s so that you can carry some of it along with you, in your briefcase, in your knapsack, in your fingertips and touch, and spread it around where all of us can have a drink, all of us can smile, and maybe when you’re done riding the trains, criss-crossing our home like the trappings and strings of a net, perhaps then we’ll have some purpose. Perhaps then we’ll catch a gleam of happiness, far out there, rising from the line of the horizon, silhouetted by the sun, riding a fucking horse.

Written by: Logan Theissen
Photograph by: Daniel Vidal

The Devil We Know

The thick curtains were drawn against the afternoon sun so that the room on the third floor of the Santa Dympna Hotel felt set in night. A thin thread of light beneath the front door was all that penetrated the darkness. The stagnant air hung heavy in the room making the distant murmur of the city viscous, as if it were passing through molasses before reaching Bernard’s ears.

And so he waited, seated on the edge of the threadbare skeleton of a bed, metal springs exposing themselves through the fabric. Bernard’s sweat-soaked cotton button-down clung stubbornly to his chest, and his hands shook as he tugged at the opening of his shirt. The radiator hissed and clicked and whined, scolding Bernard and punishing him with its overpowering heat.

The darkness will help, he thought, to calm his nerves. And for a moment, it had. The stillness of the black had washed over him like a cold tide on a hot summer’s day. But the events of the preceding weeks came rushing back, each time sending him into a state of renewed fear and anxiety.

Time to go.

Bernard had bought an antique European flop when he arrived in the city, a compact two-door hatchback in sky blue, like a rusted homage to the Argentinian flag. Cheap and inconspicuous. The car was parked in an alley behind the Santa Dympna and, with only a leather-bound suitcase that now held the entirety of his worldly possessions, Bernard took off, navigating through the narrow, cobblestoned roadways. Though the winter air outside was frigid, a healthy pulse ran through the twisting veins of Salta’s colonial-era streets. By the time he made it out of the city limits, the sky had darkened and Salta had devolved into a rocky desert wasteland. The mostly silent drive was broken up at random intervals by howling winds that rattled Bernard’s tin box of a car, both his hands clutched on the metal steering wheel at each gust.

And then for long awhile, it was still, and the dreamlike landscape, awash with the same crags and cacti and coarse sand, sent Bernard drifting into a timeless vortex. The exhaustion from his lack of sleep was finally catching up with him, and the dull hum of the wheels against the semi-paved desert roads left him in a trance. Several hours (two? five?) drifted by when a dust-like snow began to fall. Bernard squinted in disbelief, unsure if he had fallen asleep and was now dreaming. Though it was cold, and though it was winter, the snow appeared paradoxical against the arid backdrop. Soon, it was coming down in sheets. Visibility dropped to zero as Bernard turned on the windshield wipers, which groaned, useless as they swiped across the glass. But just as suddenly as the snowfall began, it stopped, like a curtain lifted. The gray of the sunless sky cast a ghoulish patina across the desert, now covered in a layer of what looked more like volcanic ash than snow.

Ahead, Bernard saw a burgundy SUV pulled over to the side of the road, the elderly driver waving his arms as he saw Bernard’s car approach. Bernard hesitated, but pulled over just ahead of the old man, who, with his wild tuft of white hair and grey cardigan, reminded him of his grandfather.

“Um...habla ingles?” The old man mumbled gesturing with his hands, as if it would help in the event of a potential language barrier.

“Yes, what’s seems to be the problem?” Bernard replied, approaching the man and his SUV cautiously.

The old man sighed with relief, “You’re American?”

Bernard smiled.

“Glen,” he said, offering his hand to Bernard.

“Cary,” Bernard replied, shaking Glen’s hands.

“Well Cary, I pulled over when that snowstorm passed through, couldn’t see squat. When I tried to start the car up again…” Glen shrugged.

“I would give you a jump, but I don’t think I have any cables in my car. Do you?”

Glen shook his head, “I have a cellphone. Batteries are dead though. Mind if I give it a quick charge in your car? I can give my hotel a call and have them send a tow truck or something.”

Bernard was reluctant to linger around longer than necessary. Two stalled cars on the side of the road might attract unwanted attention. But Glen’s presence and that peculiar moment of normalcy in what had been a whirlwind few weeks was grounding and comforting in a way he desperately needed. And besides, Glen’s had been the first car Bernard had seen in several hours. It was unlikely another would pass anytime soon.

“So, where you headed Cary?” Glen was seated in the passenger side of Bernard’s cramped car waiting for his cellphone to charge. He spoke genially, reminding Bernard more and more of his grandfather, affectionate even among strangers. He felt cautiously at ease with him.

Without thinking, Bernard replied, “Not sure yet,” instantly regretting his honesty.

“Ah,” Glen said knowingly, but without judgment. “I won’t ask you what you’re running away from, that’s none of my business. But let me tell you kid, and this comes from experience, 9 times out of 10, it isn’t worth it. These roads you’re going down now, they will just lead you right back where you started. If you run away from a thing, that’s all your life will ever be.”

There was a pause. “I made some decisions…poor ones in hindsight.” Why am I telling him this? “My life hasn’t exactly gone to plan since then.”

“Life never goes to plan.”

The tow truck came and went and Bernard moved on, less certain of his intentions then when he had set out on his journey.

The dense clouds set low were unfamiliar. His eyes burned from fatigue and he squeezed them shut, desperate for relief. When he opened them again, it was pitch black. He was back at the Santa Dympna, metal springs digging into his pants.

Written by: Sam Chow

Photograph by: Becky Lee
 

Return to Sender

The cold wind makes me rush into you, and I am well aware this heat between us is not passion. The force of your face toward mine causes my lips to retreat, and you to kiss meat-covered teeth. It’s awkward now. A fallen leaf scrapes a line between us on the concrete. All I can think is how glad I am that I drove. You say, "your lip is bleeding,” and I reply, "Oh," as I hurriedly lick the sweetness away. Our feet start moving because our tongues won't, and three years later we find my car. The night ends with a hug, I hold you too long, and rub your back as an apology for earlier. There are moments between seconds in which I do not want to let go. I do, though.

If only I’d met you before the ex...

But that doesn’t stop me from saying yes to a second date.

                                                                                                      ***

I write letters to my ex because I don’t know what to do with the leftovers. Just because he wrote an expiration date on the relationship doesn’t mean I have to throw us out.

I let my best friend read the letters.

You left because you think you don’t deserve me. You don’t. Now someone else is calling me beautiful, and it’s not the same, like when you speak a word over and over again until it no longer sounds like itself. Ex is a misnomer because it implies you aren’t a part of me anymore. There’s not a hole in me big enough to let you out.

She says to me, "I don't know how he can read those words and not respond."
I shrug, "You'd be surprised."

I know in the back of her head she wonders why I do it.
She hopes I receive a return letter, a late night phone call, an unfamiliar knock at my door.

She says, "I think you guys will end up back together."
I say, "No, we won't."

She envisions him reading my letters and six digit dialing me each time.
She doesn't imagine them left unopened, set ablaze on a pyre of cigarette butts and stale chewing gum.

And I can't lie; I can't say there isn't a part of me that indulges in the futile fantasies of failed romantic gestures suddenly being appreciated for their awkward beauty like all those John Hughes movies.

But that's not why I write him.

                                                                                                      ***

On the fourth date, you made love to me like broken light bulbs—properly screwed in socket, but never turning on. Walking home uterine contractions force out evidence of tonight’s event. I smiled because you didn't even notice I was bleeding, cried because despite my efforts even my biology will reject you. It reminded me of the time I was cooking eggs and as I broke one open, I noticed the yolk was red and thought oh, my! This egg has a heart. I whisked until it wasn't there anymore, but couldn't bring myself to pour it onto the hot, buttered skillet.

As I painted dotted lines on the sidewalk like a road marking machine, I wondered if it was a mercy not to be eaten, if I cut open my cramping belly would I find the yellow that was missing on that day?


                                                                                                      ***

Associations last longer than people.
Songs, smells, locations, a sock, your hair in my brush,
mother saying, "what happened to...?"

The awkwardness of my heart put back in my chest
where it was never meant to be again,
like when you accidentally use a toothbrush that's not yours,
and you know it because the bristles don't fit the grooves of your teeth the right way.

You don't exist anymore, but you live on in all these things,
like step children I want to give back
because they were never really mine.

                                                                                                      ***

By the tenth date you said “I love you.”

I convinced you that I was a contemporary woman and those words were meaningless predilections, overused and underrepresented in today's society. I suggested instead that we speak in code, and showed you affection in the only way I still could. In bed, as your body tensed, you said, “peanut butter,” and I said, “jelly.”

I wanted to say it back. In my dreams, I run wildly into the night and collide with you, full force destruction into five second flight, punching the ground, chortling bloody I love you’s. But he stole the phrase from me. Every story you've ever told that ended with the sudden stunning realization of absence, with I was going somewhere with that, is how I feel if I attempt to string those words together. I wish I could say this to you, but these words would give you hope that there could be something between us.

This morning, you woke up and found a note next to you that simply stated, I'm allergic to peanuts.

                                                                                                      ***

My mother has a friend who was electrocuted at the age of 9. The injuries she sustained led to her arms being amputated at the shoulder and hair only grew on one side of her head. She learned how to do everything with her feet; she flips burgers, writes down grocery lists, smokes cigarettes, and even drives a car. I wonder was it ever as hard for her not to be able to hold anyone as it was for me not to be held? Did she have a fear of zippers, of slow songs, of falling down? How could she be deformed and not broken?

The ticket ripper at the movie theater was so old that he had growths on his skin like grade school mold experiments and contorted knobby trees. He said, “theater 10 is to the right,” I wanted to respond with your death is showing, but instead said “thank you,” and went to learn what it’s like to watch a film alone. I write letters to myself now.

Written by: Monica Johnson
Photograph by: Whitney Ott