I don’t understand why this is still a problem,” the ACS Director says, point-blank from behind the line of tiny crystal goblets filled with discreet, elegant sips of sherry. The Director’s flight, and that of every sherry-flight at the table, glistens in the muted light of the cabin. He stares on through the front windows of the yacht’s dining room into the night. The city is partially hidden on the horizon, and, up above it all, almost insignificant pin pricks of light lie scattered like fallen sequins.
I am locked up in a cell. The captors are conducting medical experiments on us. They give us metal wires to stick in our necks, which I know instinctively will erase our memories.
They crawled from shallow darkness out of a crack in the sidewalk. They each stood as tall as a man and a half. Their bodies were covered in hazelnut fur and their nose tendrils writhed like skinned octopi. There were three of them, and one of me.
I fell backward onto my ass in the street, whimpering and whining, completely expecting to have my brain eaten out backward from my skull like a stew by these terrible, loathsome, horror-inspiring… Psychic Moles from Outer Space!
When I was in the seventh grade I found a scalpel after school. I think it belonged to my mom. There was nowhere else it could have come from. And this scalpel almost glowed. The black, black, veiny marble counter it was sitting on reflected a kind of halo around the silver knife, anything but subtle.
Paper shapes
Real people
Paper shapes
Real people
Most certainly
I’d ride
You can't self regulate
My need
My want
To drive
They come
They go
They said something about me once
I said
Smash
Your ears
In a plate
Of alfredo
Pasta shapes
Real people
Pasta shapes …
Real pasta.
I come home and open all of my shades. My bedroom becomes a pool of warm, buttered light. I strip naked, leaving my pants slung over my chair, and my shirt on the bed--it comes undone in quick succession, four flicks of my wrist to undo the hooks. On the desk, my favorite white lace bra I carelessly stained with red paint from fucking a boy during my first week of university. My Calvin Kleins along with it. I will make love to myself before, during, and after the sun sets on a green blanket I crocheted two winters ago. I will come so hard, I cry.
It wasn’t until I turned 18 that I began to notice my body. How the freckles on my shoulders are my favorite part of myself. How the light brown splotch an inch and a half below my right breast is actually a birthmark, not a freckle. How the black dot on the innermost part of my left thigh might actually be a mole, just like the one on my face, but not raised. And it will fascinate me that my past lovers have never noticed these features, kissed my shoulders, never recognized these little treasures, these little marvels of my body. That, at 19, it is me who says look at how beautiful I am here, look at how lovely. And, it’s not that it’s all being realized for the first time. It’s that I’m making it mine now.
And, despite all this intimacy with myself, the way I go over all these details of myself, the way I kiss my shoulders and draw patterns on my thighs with my unevenly chewed nails, it does not mean my body forgives me. It does not mean my body no longer keeps the score. It does not mean I forgive myself. There is a vital difference between saying yes because you just wanted to be loved and not getting the chance to be asked at all. There’s a gaping difference between swallowing your disgust at 14 and having to yank a stranger’s fingers off your vocal box at 19. They both kiss like they are trying to swallow you whole. And there is no metaphor to make this pain easier to digest, to sugarcoat this, or make all this ache into a cavity. It does not need to be made into a metaphor to explain all the times I have pushed my tongue against this rot and blamed myself. But this does not mean I have to accept the lie that this is the way things are. Because there have been times when the words yes and please have not been enough (and this will be true again).
Tonight, I will eat a cupcake in the dining hall and wind up not brushing my teeth before bed. An acquaintance will read a poem he wrote for his creative writing class, and while I listen my finger will press between my collarbones--the way it does whenever I’m engrossed, when I’m becoming part of a story. And the pressure will not hurt. My skin will not crawl. Not even a little bit, not even at all.
february 2023
how easy it is to pack our lives into boxes
a few hours at most. sprawling trinkets
amassed over years, witness to innumerable tears,
crammed onto orderly confinement. shut away.
i peel free polychromatic posters; walls bare
but for thumbtack holes. how many wounds
lie under the thin coat of landlord-white,
mnemonic shadows abandoned —
my own. those of fictive predecessors.
can it ever return to primordial barrenness,
once infested with love?
when hinges creak and plumbing shudders
will it be my poltergeistic haunting
or just overactive imagination?
i would like to think that would be enough.
On an island only in my mind
Nothing more on than what I need
Wind touches my soaking-wet hair
Chills crawl down my spine,
and take hold of my heart
I can see it in the corner of my eye
There’s fire on the horizon
I yell out Cassandra into the night
Praying to these pages, I call to her
If you saw the end coming, would you try to
stop it?
By then, she was already gone
Maybe I’ve got this twisted obsession with
fucking things up
The feeling of falling in love while the world’s burning down
is all I’ve ever needed to feel
When all that's left are the cinders of your life,
who still stands beside you?
where do you stand, Cassandra?
I listen to the birds like the Bible
I ask the robots how to feel okay
I cry myself to sleep, I’m too cool to care
spell out the signs of being too far gone
Cassandra, please, don’t leave me in the dark
I saw the end coming and I didn’t stop it
what if I knew you wanted me to?
A good/better person would have tried
The world ends in fire, mine ends in ice
Because when Troy’s burning down is the only time I feel alive
I take a quick cut to my right, and plunge into the sanctuary that is the Forest, relishing in the knowledge that now, all eyes are off me. I breathe in, and out, let my body reconnect with the world around me. Now that there is no longer thick concrete and brick blocking me from Nature, I can feel it all again. The earth pulses beneath me, the heartbeats of the worms, the roots– the sheer volume of life around me is overwhelming. I want to close my eyes, but I cannot, yet, for the image around me is sublime; sloping paths giving way to towering trees, plants of all sizes vie for dominance across my view, my eyes snagging on the few trees whose fall colors are beginning to be revealed. The itching of my wings begs to be set free from the confines I must keep them in. Every day I worry, I wonder– do they suspect? Do they know? It’s not on anyone’s mind, I’m sure, no one here thinks the Fae are real, we’re all just an ancient story to them.
It is worth it, the discomfort, the pretending that must be done so often. It is worth it, to be here. This land is special, its importance reverberates down my spine, spills raindrops in my hair. I was upset before, but now I’ve forgotten why, nourished by the landscape before me. I take my time walking, alternating keeping my eyes open and closed– I’ve done this walk a thousand times, I know where each small bridge and protruding tree root sits in the path, know every bend and fork, so it doesn’t matter, just different ways to take it in. Eventually I get to a spot deep in the Forest, where off the path’s side there lies an old, decrepit manhole cover ensconced in concrete. It is covered in moss, and mud, and dirt, with a heavy rusted padlock sealing it forever shut. Or so it seems. After a quick glance around, I approach with my key, and easily slide off the lock before gently pushing the door up, revealing the fresh hydraulics inside and a well-lit ladder, the outside all the illusion of paint. Entering, I am sad to feel the dirt on my shoes turn to metal rungs, but happy to know that I am home.
Insulated by the ground and the pipes, I remove my coat and shoes at the entrance, now in my warm cocoon. It wraps around me, yet I am a butterfly, and with my coat off now I ease my wings open, stretching them and rolling my shoulders. Tunnels aren’t where I ever planned to live, where any Fae was ever meant to live, but nevertheless it is home. The walls are still grimy, discolored, the pipes clamor and shake, and there's an aggressive damp smell we know we’ll never get out, but it’s home. Odd rugs line the floor, an overlapping patchwork telling the stories of all the house-tunnel’s inhabitants; all the places we’ve lived, people we’ve loved.
I wish we could raise these tunnels up, network them through the trees above. It’s the first place that’s ever been ours, and that sense of ownership is electrifying, the allure of control glimmering around me, hiding the mold and rust and rot, banishing the sounds and smells to the back of my mind. We came here out of necessity, but it's become so much more, our safe haven against the world. Our dining table is a log, pulled from just outside. We’ve begun to carve it, in spare moments; flattened the top, began making legs appear from the dense wood. Our chairs all mismatched in a perfect way, like most of our things, an amalgamation of ten lives; things given, purchased, stolen, donated- all collected here, safely stored away in the Tunnels. We are proper Fae, collectors, living communally– but not quite in Nature.
We should be resting high above, wings wide to catch the sun as we bask on the open arms of trees, but those days are gone now. The Forest is protected, its wildlife safe from harm. But we are not included in this vow. Instead, while the plants and the small animals get to go about just as they always have, we must relocate, and learn to live with the humans. I say this as if it’s recent. It’s not. We’ve been at odds with the humans for centuries, starting for my family line in the Middle Ages, where Monks and Friars began prowling the land, evicting all of Faekind to the margins.
The trees told us of the Tunnels, and we moved in as soon as we could. To say it is a perfect arrangement is to undermine the difficulties we face, but it is indeed the best we could hope for. The stress of it all, though, haunts me. Someday, they will find out. It’s happened before, in other areas, and my friends, my roommates, aren’t known for their subtlety. I had a long day, and so did everyone else in the Tunnel household, so after dinner we go for a frolic. Donning our most inconspicuous clothes, we all ascend to the surface, delighting in the dark shroud around us. This is the only time we trust, our night vision and knowledge of the Forest is far higher than any human, so we feel it is a time we can finally be truly ourselves. Wings out, we take to the sky. We can’t go far, but rejoice in a game of tag, or a race between the branches of the trees, always avoiding spots of light from nearby buildings. Someone hits a branch, we laugh, then all remember we must be quiet, must make only the sounds of the animals– what laugh comes from fifty feet up?
After some time, the Moon now high in the sky, we retire, one by one folding our wings to descend into our subterranean dwelling, so strange and yet so fitting for us. I am the last one, intending to do up the lock behind me, a simple trick of air magic I happen to have a better handle on than the rest. They disappear beneath the surface, and I am left alone, pausing for a moment to take it in. I connect to the person I was coming home today, feel the same thing she felt, entering the Forest, and then see the differences, how the soundscape has changed in the switch to nocturnals. Trees rustle, far off a small waterfall crashes, and nearby– a twig snaps. A large one. I open my eyes wide towards the sound, and realize my wings have flared in alarm as I move swiftly to hide them, seeing a humanoid shape begin to materialize on the path. I turn, but it is too late– they would see me close the hatch, they know, it’s over.
The shadow solidifies, and I realize that while its silhouette is mostly a stark contrast to the surrounding landscape, off of the shoulders, there is something murky that moves with it. Closer it comes, they come, and I can make out the shapes, on either side, transparent membranes that flutter in the cool midnight breeze as the unidentified Fae comes up to me, close enough now the little light that spills from the open manhole reveals them to be– a normal person. Someone I’d seen nearly every day, for months.
“So, I’m not the only one.”
The Tower
A sentinel stood at his post on a lone tower, stained green by lifetimes’ worth of creeping moss, on a slope beneath the mountains, tall and gray. The tower, reinforced by rotting lengths of flaking timber and a roof of pale straw, had guarded the gates across the mountains for generations, and would, the guard himself hoped, for generations more.
Dawn broke on the other side of the valley, where the mountains loomed taller and whiter, with the snow of the winter drooping from them, and the dawn cast orange and yellow beams of fearful light across to the tower. The valley woke from its slumber then and there, and all was illuminated in glorious gold, awash in a sea of daybreak which now crawled across the peaks on the sentinel’s side of the valley. Sunrise had come, ripe and predictable, but ever surprising.
The sentinel leaned on one of the spindly poles holding up the roof, his coat made of pieced together skins and furs, and his fraying pants hid his skinny legs, and his arms were exposed except from a series of belts keeping them warmer than they would be, like two needles hanging out from his torso. He thought of how astounded he was that the sun rose, but then again, why should it not? The gods themselves had placed it around the disc of the earth, with its sole purpose being to endlessly spin. Truly a magical thing, that the world kept working and life went on.
He remembered a story his grandmother had told him once, about the times when the sun always stood above the earth, and there never was night. He remembered how he had remarked how that didn’t sound so bad, how dark the night was, after all, and how scared he was of it. But she beat him back, and told him of how people had to hide in caves for fear of being burnt to cinders, and how nothing could grow, and all animals except for those used to the tunnels of the earth could prosper. The god of life saw this evil and sent down upon the earth a child, who glowed with the light of a tenth of the sun, and once he had reached maturity he went outside into the light and climbed the mountains. He went to the sun and threw it beneath the disc of the earth, and he and his daughters spread throughout the night darkness, becoming the stars which shine at night, him the star father. The goddess of light was much displeased, and came to the god of life in fury, and to the heavenly courts she took him, dragging him by the beard and hitting his head on every step of the way up. All of his grandmother’s grandchildren had laughed at that part. So against the judges of heaven, the god of life said the sun could return, but instead it had to equally share its time with the night and the daughters of the star father. Then, one of the daughters of the light goddess invented the blue lid of the sky to keep the light from scorching the disc of the earth. And so, everything was set as it should be, though the sentinel had forgotten exactly how the moon was created.
Anyways, it still surprised him that time kept moving, that things kept themselves in order, that things didn’t collapse at the snap of a finger, that even when he felt like things would fall apart, they didn’t.
The sentinel righted himself and found the stairwell of rickety wood which led him down from the tower. His watch had ended, and it was someone else’s turn.
The Market
The merchant watched the great white temple, lined with mosaics of the gods and scenes from the histories of the valley, and its doors, swinging open, their richly carved wood telling the story of the journeys of the first princess and her foundation of the regal line which ruled the town. In a grand procession first flowed the incumbent princess, the fourteenth of her family to bear the name of the first, her cloak dyed royal blue, followed by her retainers and three husbands, all in drab gray and wearing ceremonial chains indicating their fealty to their wife. The richest people in the village followed: gaudy merchants, learned scholars, flattering nobility and envious members of collateral lines of the princely dynasty. Then the common people walked out, and before them all was the market.
The merchant, busying herself with arraying her goods, closely watched the potential and pious customers flock to the neighboring stalls. She herself had not joined in the temple gathering, having already participated in her weekly duties of piety the day before. Much groveling to wooden statues, she thought, as the dust of the street picked up in the commotion, the princess long having departed to her palace on the other side of the town.
It was early morning by then, all the worshippers having filed into the temple just before dawn and now enjoying the sunlit world. Surrounding her booth were the many tokens she sold, figures of the great princesses and princes who had ruled the town, and the deities which ruled over the heavens. She sold a great many of the birch crafted statuettes of the first princess, who, it was said, many many generations ago, emerged from the local river, her body made of mud and her hair of watergrass, and deposed the petulant child prince of the previous ruling family. She had then walked back to the river after having ruled the town for a thousand years, and innumerable princes had ruled after her.
Each one was given the arm belt of the princes in the shallows of the river, a thing of wood masterfully carved to resemble the flowing river, and then walked out of the waters. And when they died, each one, excepting perhaps some whose lives had been cut short in some violence and were never given a proper farewell, had been put in a raft of seagrass held together by mud and given to the river, which flowed down into the falls at the western side of the valley, dropping into a deep lagoon. One of those rulers whose body had never fallen down into the deep lagoon was the merchant’s own father, who had rebelled against the high king who dwelt deeper in the valley and was stripped of his post. He died in shame, and left her nothing but the claim of bastardy she would surely be killed for if she claimed it. There were no figures of him.
One of the pious customers approached the stall, and inquired about the deeds of one of the figures, a princess of the town, holding a great ax. The merchant explained, as she often did, with great theatrics, how this princess had felled seven giants and fourteen lesser trolls, and conquered the many towns of this stretch of the river. The customer asked, in jest, what had happened to this wide domain. The merchant smiled, and explained that the gods cursed the grandson of this princess and sent his lands to a watery grave (this part requiring the merchant to sweep her hands across the table like waves), for this prince had cursed the gods and had wedded himself to forty women and forty men, which broke the amount of marriages allowed to one mortal. The customer looked curious and gave the merchant two coins of crumbling copper with the high king’s visage stamped on them, and the merchant gave her the statue. She looked down at the coins, at the king who had deposed her father, and put them in her purse.
The Library
The aged scholar leaned over his desk as the lesser librarians sputtered throughout the room, a small enclosed and cavernous private office within the bowels of the growing library. They were leaving, yes, their brown robes wrapped around their hunched bodies, but they were taking far too much time to do so, hauling between them the ancient, wide tome he had been arduously poring over for the past week. He felt the crude paper with his thin skin, the heavy binding of this even more ancient tome. By then, all the assistants had left, and the high king’s brother was left alone to ponder the histories, and to compare.
As the last son of the previous high queen, he had never been in line to inherit anything, so instead devoted his life to the texts of history. He was writing a chronicle, completing one, really, which he had started years ago, and whose chapters were not chronological but based on which region it covered. His book, an annals plundered from the greatest temple of the northern slopes of the valley, would help him begin his section on the history of that area.
The previous tome was a more general history which mentioned, in passing, a genealogy of the princes of a town on the edge of the region. The scholar looked over these crumbled annals and searched for the names of those princes which he had noted on another paper. He spotted the name of one, the seventeenth prince and legitimate son of the previous princess, on the genealogy, but here reckoned as a usurper who slew the daughter of the previous princess and took the throne of the town. The year was said to be the fourth year of the reign of a king of the great temple city from which the annals were taken. As this higher king held suzerainty over the town, he sent his armies there and, in the fifth year of the king’s reign, the supposed usurper prince was thrown from a cliff.
The scholar paused here, and read the next line of the annals, where it was declared that the usurper was replaced by a cousin of the previous princess, who became the next princess. What caused the scholar pause was the lack of any mention of her in the genealogy, instead a daughter of the usurper was listed as the next ruler of the town. The scholar scanned the next few entries in the annals. The reign of the conquering king came and passed, to be replaced by a niece, who was replaced by a son, who, on his death, had a list of achievements embedded in the text. The conquest of the town was listed, and the deposition of someone called a bastard princess, who appeared on the genealogy as the granddaughter of the usurper, succeeded by her sister.
The scholar began scribbling notes on this, which, by his calculations, happened a thousand years prior to the current date, which he deduced from the lengthy annals. He skipped forward to the end of the annals, where during the fourteenth year of another queen it recorded the disturbance of peace by the high king from the center of the valley. That was the last entry, the only mention of the scholar’s royal line in the whole book, previous entries only listing periods of peace and prosperity ushered in by the young queen, despite the scholar knowing well that her reign was reviled by her subjects and that her mother’s reign had seen the territories of the temple city shrink to just the center and its hinterlands.
The yellowing annals could not be trusted, evidently, but neither could the genealogies. He sighed, and looked at his hastily scrawled notes once more. There was one more document that could solve the confused chronology of the princes, a contemporary document penned by one short-lived princess who recounted her prestigious ancestry. The scholar turned to that tightly rolled scroll, and began unfurling it.
Epilogue
The great library in the heart of the valley in the city of the high kings was burnt with the rest of the valley by mountain peoples who overran the land and slew the last high queen.
The body of the scholar, the brother of the third of the twenty-two high kings and queens, many of whose names were lost, who would rule over the valley before their domain’s ungraceful end, had been interred in the royal tomb, but by the time of the fall of the city his inscription had faded and only the faint outlines of half the letters could be read. No matter, as the entirety of the royal tombs were felled by the raiders and the tombs looted, the skeletons themselves ground down into magical powder and sold, or their teeth pawned off as divine relics of the long gone god kings. All that remains of both the library, burnt during a second series of raids, and the tomb, are a series of foundation stones on which now rests a dump for trash and refuse.
The history which the scholar was compiling, which was never completed, had been lost to a lack of copyists even before the fall of the city. The texts he had been consulting were stripped of their valuable illuminations, if they had any; their bindings removed for more utilitarian purposes; and the papers mostly tossed into the river, which ran black with ink, so it is said.
The temple and market of the town of the merchant also suffered less severe raiding, but were mostly affected by a great flood which drowned the temple, the doors flowing down the falls of the river into the great lagoon. Many of the common peoples of the town, who owned the precious wooden figures sold by the merchant, who it must be noted was found out as a bastard daughter of the previous prince,was exiled across the mountains, buried their most precious goods below their houses. These troves of coins and statuettes survived the subsequent war and chaos, though the sands of time rendered them largely unrecognizable, and the poor coins eroded into the muds. Still, pride was felt by the villager who, when digging an irrigation trench, found an ax-wielding wooden figure and recounted from it a story of a great princess who had killed many tall men, unearthed from his memory of an old story of the previous heroes of his town.
The tower, sitting on the edge of the valley, sustained raid after raid, and was reinforced by the successive generations into a larger wall for a small village. The sentinel, who lived a long life and told his grandchildren stories of gods and suns, was buried on a nearby hill and later inhabitants assumed it was the grave of some demigod king. They still told the story of the star father, his daughters, and the trials of the gods, and especially the story of the steps up to heaven.
So the sun set on the valley, and all were surprised when it rose again.
ACHE RAGE AND CRUMBLE
SMELLS OF DEATH AND SAFETY,
SKELETONS WITH FUNNY FACES
COMBUSTION STOPS AND STARTS
NEW THINGS FROM OLD THINGS –
AUTHENTICITY IS ONLY SURVIVAL
UGLIFY YOUR LIFE AND RESTART
FIND BEAUTY IN THE LESS BEAUTIFUL
AND PERHAPS THE LESSER KNOWN
TO FEEL BELONGING IN A PLACE NO ONE BELONGS
MIGHT BE HOME.
A catalog of haunted places on campus: between the rotating shelves in the lowest floor of the library. The study room on the 4th floor of the old Academic Center with the leaky vent. The closet in the bio building, filled with jars of hearts. Someone stole one of the hearts in sophomore year and they never got caught, so now the heart - it was an elk heart - could be anywhere on campus, so really anywhere could be haunted.
Someone saw a ghost in your dorm, four years before you lived there, but they’re still handing down the stories of it. It was dressed in white and bleeding from its fingertips. You passed a dead opossum on your way to French the other day. It didn’t look dead. It looked fine. Just curled up. Just a little grim.
Now, every time you turn your computer off, it feels like a tiny death. Now the clouds feel like ghosts in your throat. Now you keep checking if the pots in the kitchen have rotated overnight. Now you keep wondering if every time you fall asleep it's a death in miniature and you’re haunted by all the yous you’ve been before.
There is a restless feeling in Autumn when everything seems in motion. Even the sky and the trees feel it: one last dance before winter.
When Vanya was 9, a man came to stay with her mother. He had a soft voice and sounded like a gentleman from the old movies, but his eyes were hard. He let her ride on his shoulders and gave her a silvery necklace. He told her her father would gather her up to heaven when she died.
Heaven is dark. She can feel rot pressing against her eyelids, like a brittle honeycomb. She still wears the necklace: a cold cross on her collarbone. She feels languid, skin prickling with cold sweat as she lies in the darkness.
When Vanya was 15, she spent most afternoons out on the practice field. Clouds over the turf dappled the sunlight, and there was sweat, blood, and spirit in the air — in every breath. That’s why she might never have met Claire. But that one day it was rainy, with big wet drops; playful like water balloons. They darkened the sky, and the clouds promised lightning, and the coach was on the phone: maybe with an administrator, or maybe the rain was an excuse to continue some important conversation. By then they were drenched and cold and they heard shivering thunder from beyond the treeline. Regardless of the reason, they wandered inside, phones ringing, calling parents, arranging carpools. The school band was muffledly playing from somewhere farther in. With nothing better to do, Vanya wandered the school, thinking how eerie the halls felt without anyone in them. Rounding a corner, Claire was just, there. Silly bow tie, curly hair, holding oversized trombone. Then again, maybe Claire wasn’t just “there,” after all she had to go up to talk to her so she could scribble her number on a sticky note. Funny, how fuzzy that flashback was: a feeling more than anything.
Vanya doesn’t know if she should pray — do you have to pray in heaven? She feels like her breath is coming through a sieve. Or maybe a funnel? She always got those mixed up. She must have got everything mixed up, to not know what to do in heaven. When you’re mixed up, you can’t even remember if your shoes are tied, or whether you’re supposed to pedal forward or backward and shift up or down gears, or how to breathe. Vanya feels like she needs to pray. She must, the world is squeezing in around her, she can’t breathe, it is cold in the worst, sweatiest way and her skin is clammy with fear and panic. She has to get out.
When Vanya was 16, she had asked Claire out to homecoming. They were at a park, and the summer air felt like honey, sweet and warm. The last lightning bugs were out, and it was hard to tell where the sky started and ended: which stars were dancing out a cosmic rhythm in time to the fear and joy in her heart, and which were dancing on shimmering wings, a dance of love and loneliness, glowing their soul into the darkness.
Heaven is choking: Vanya finally has a handhold on something in the cramped darkness. It is wet and crumbles beneath her grip like bread pudding. It felt like that game everyone plays at birthdays, the one where they spun you round and round and round and round and round, with a paper donkey tail in your hand trying to find a wall to pin it on, trying to find which way is up and which way is down.
When Vanya was 16, her mother stroked her face, adjusted the lace on a long white dress that a quiet man had put her in, and placed a flower in her hand. The man who lived with her mother had draped the necklace with the cross around her neck. Claire was there too, long straight hair tossed in the wind. She played her violin like an angel, like it was the rapture, like heaven. Vanya wanted to cry, but she couldn’t move her face, she tried to applaud, to even look at the beautiful girl. But the sky got farther and farther away as they lowered her into the ground.
Heaven is harder than Vanya expected, she thinks as she tries to crawl her way upwards. She feels like a child again on the playground climbing up some tube. Only thick with dirt and heavy like a blanket. Clumps of soil get in her ears, in her nose, in her mouth, in her eyes. It tastes like the baking soda her mother would shovel into her mouth when she said a Bad Word, dry and powdery like sand. Except darker, meatier, wetter.
Piece by piece the dirt crumbles down. Inch by inch she works her way upward. Finally, she feels her fingers light upon something new; grasping onto it trying to wrap her arms around it. It’s just like a pull-up bar. Coach always said I was good at pull-ups. Hope makes her heart race, a tension worse than the tight pressure of the soil or the box she was in before. Above the thing in the dirt; it must be a root, there is only more dirt. Piece by piece it crumbles down. Inches turn into hours.
First, her ring finger gives way, the nail ripping off down to the cuticle. The pain is sharp and surgical, but there’s no way to comfort the wound, no way to move her arm close to her chest and hold the sting. No one there to kiss it better. When you’re on the field with friends, or enemies, or acquaintances, or anyone; or when you’re asking a cute girl to dance with you, it feels like you can take all the pain the world can give. Vanya felt like a child, buried in darkness bleeding from a dozen tiny blisters and crying quietly.
Inch by inch. I might never make it out, she thinks, and realizes that she no longer cares either way.
When Vanya was 10, her mother got her a wooden stool so she could reach the countertop. She showed her how to make bread, jam, and cake. Sunlight streamed through the window above the oven, a gentle breeze making the flour floating through the air dance in the light. The man laughed when he saw them and told Vanya she was a good little baker, and that one day she would make her husband happy. Vanya put baking soda in the cake instead of baking powder, it tasted flat and soggy. Her mother told her that it didn’t rise. But it didn’t matter, because they laughed and it was sunny and the whole house smelled like sugar. She doesn’t smell anything now.
By the time Vanya breaks the surface, the pain doesn’t matter anymore. Yes, it runs thick like honey over her body, but it is drowned out by a dull hopelessness, a swelling numbness. Walking on hard ground feels like swimming —- feels like flying after hours underground. The night could be beautiful and austere and cold, but she honestly can’t tell. Years ago, when the lights turned off and her mother was asleep, she would like to drift through the halls and make friends with the darkness. Wandering without anywhere to go, maybe for water then back to bed, maybe to stare down a hallway. Once she saw the man who lived in her house kneeling by the foot of his bed, sweating and shaking as he offered a shuddering prayer.
She wanders now, down empty streets. The checkered-tile patchwork of houses quiet in the night. Somewhere ahead she hears noise, people laughing and dancing, music playing and flashing lights. Vanya wants to be furious with envy. Why do they get to dance? She feels a kind of panicked desperation to be with any other people, in the warm light. She tries to gulp back the fear, but only swallows a piece of dirt unlodged from her teeth.
Vanya reaches a stately window, set into red brick gazing into a small gymnasium with pinprick lights dancing on the walls like stars reflected in a cold lake, misty-blue music drifts across the floor, littered with balloons and napkins. And there, in the center of the room is Claire, white sneakers tripping over someone else’s feet, as together dance badly and beautifully. She’s never looked more enamored, childish delight makes her smile look magical. Vanya can’t look anymore, she squeezes her eyes tight as the darkness closes in around her and she presses up against the glass, wishing she could just sink through into the light.
But Vanya is in heaven. And heaven is lonely tonight.
