I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like

by Noy Holland

  “Who are you and why are you here? Don’t you have school like we do?”

  He lived with Mr. U, he said, except that he said yived.

  “He yived in #3 with me. I yiked how he was soft to me. Mr. U was yike some sock to me. But I did never yove him.”

  “So you want to come be here?”

  “I guess.”

  “Geese! Geese!” Daisy cried out. Two flapped low overhead.

  “Yovye,” the boy said.

  “What is the name of that kitten?”

  “Goose.”

  “Goose?”

  “Goose,” the boy said. “You can have it.”

  “Does it fly in its sleep?”

  “Maybe,” the boy said.

  “Do you pee in your sleep like my brother? One night he peed on my head.”

  “Mr. U peed in a bucket. It was my job to carry the bucket through the hanging-down fence to the stream. One time I dropped it. It went out of my hands in the stream. I had my kitten. I had my yittle chick in my pocket that died so I walked over here to you.”

  “Can I see?”

  The boy held out the chick. It was muddied, a yellow wad of down.

  “You can have it.”

  One of his fingers was off.

  “Yook,” he said, “I yost a tooth.”

  This he gave her also, a little milk tooth, brown as a scab.

  He was happy to himself. His face was bursting. They heard the school bell sound.

  “Wait, he said. My name is Zach Syoat. I come from Zeyienople. My mother’s name is Yenore. I have two sisters, Yenore and Yenore. I yive with Mr. U.”

  “Olly olly umpf,” the teacher called.

  Daisy waited still. The boy got out of his coat. He wore pajamas, slick and humid, a superhero’s satin.

  “Sweet,” Daisy said, and pet him. The kitten smacked a fly from the air.

  “I better go,” Daisy said, and turned to go.

  “Geese! Geese!”

  The two came back.

  “See you yater.”

  The door to the school bucked shut.

  He had a tadpole, too, in his galoshes, he had caught, and a ball of goo, and a miniature shrimp, and to hold these, he made a bark-bucket for Daisy girl to find. The sap surged upward in the trees as he worked. His pajamas steamed from the heat he made. The jelly of his scalp melted open.

  “Daisy mine,” he breathed.

  Love’s thousand bees flocked to him, to draw the sugars from the heart, from the head.

  ONCE I WROTE A STORY

  Once I wrote a story about an opium addict with a self-driving car.

  ONCE I WROTE a story about an ostrich.

  ONCE I WROTE a story about a blind boy in superhero satin.

  ONCE I WROTE a story about a hummingbird drowning in a bowl of cream.

  NEXT I WROTE a story about an animal addict with a mule with two bitten-off ears. The mule was Notches. Ever gentle. Every night of her life, he told Notches good night until at last she drove him off and disappeared.

  ONCE I WROTE a story about death do us part. Extravagant, the wedding night, such as nobody can afford. The bride wore sequins. They found her in the motel bathroom. Her husband had stabbed her in the dry bathtub, the sequins from the bed to the bathtub strewn like coins, like scales, like sequins. Iridescent, incandescent. Like a mermaid, like a bird.

  ONCE I WROTE a story about a boy I loved who wrecked everything he had made for me and is wrecking it for me still.

  ONCE I WROTE a story about a Jennifer and a baby named Lloyd and a Jew.

  ONCE I WROTE a story about you.

  YOU SAID, What’s it about?

  I SAID, You.

  I WAS TRYING TO DESCRIBE WHAT IT FEELS LIKE

  It’s like being a beautiful city on the night of a biblical flood. A million bucks—all mine—already spent. Like a beach ball skipped out to sea. Baby, you show up on my avenue, baby, and buildings drop to their knees. I’m the flood I’m the flood that fells them. I am the zoo and animals in it and I feed you out of my hand. Eat from my hand. You have to let me. Every boy I ever loved peeled his face off and gave it to you. They’re all you. It’s your face instead of stars and stars on the move, arctic—and you’re the tether. Christ’s gaudy hissing crown. You make me loose in the middle and melted. I’m like fire but slow like rock. Like I’m the planet and you’re the axis. Be the axis. You be the thing I turn on. Up in the igneous. Up in the rot. Make me a moon, moon-maker. Woo. Like that like that like that.

  TIME FOR THE FLAT-HEADED MAN

  It has come to me to introduce tonight’s reader.

  My wife asked would I. She said it’s easy, easier for you. She makes it difficult—to stand here, to open her mouth. It’s a struggle, she says. I said, Yes, dear.

  Yes hello, dear. Our director. There she is, everybody. Give a wave.

  You mostly know me. What I mean to say—I know some of you from class, the ones I’ve been thrown. I see you out there.

  I’m not ungrateful. It can’t be easy. For my wife, I mean, not to seem, you know, it’s very delicate. Still she has managed to throw me work. It clears my head some—to stand up here and talk to you in a grownup sort of way.

  We have, as you know, the two children. The girl, a boy. They are thinking she is going to get better, our girl. Give her time, they say, some months to grow—

  Yes, come in, come in. I’m glad you made it, every one of you. Blinking into the snow.

  I was talking about our children. The girl, a boy.

  I taught our boy to ride his bike. That was nice. He skids out, lays a patch, wants to show me. Shows everybody his scabs. Lookit look: a scab on every joint he can get to. Point of pride.

  He says, “Our baby’s name is Noodle and I like to suck her hair.”

  He sets his lips around the hole in her head bone and slurps in a satiny frill. I think she likes it.

  How nice to see you. You few I know. You look lovely, really, you do. Hello, darling, up there. I like your muffler. I like your hat and shoes.

  She missed the winters, my wife, it’s why we came here. She missed all the different clothes—the heavy coats, the bundling up. You could pass your long life in a halter top in the town we came north to get out of.

  The air velvet. Squinch owls and duckweed, pickled eggs. A pontoon boat with the radio on making laps on the nearby lake. Our boy was small there, he was a baby. You could sit him in his bucket on the lakeside in the sun. We had egrets. Once a wood stork. Peahens on the roof of the cabin—tatting at the nail heads, the pipe coming up. Anything bright they could get to.

  She comes from Akron, tonight’s reader. Akron by way of Toledo. By way of Mayor’s Income. That’s in Tennessee.

  She writes poems. This is my introduction. Wrote a book of stories, skinny thing, lot of white on the page. She’s got two kids same as our two kids. A good gig in Tuscaloosa, a lanky buckaroo in the chute. It’s what I’ve heard.

  You ever hear of the ones they break the bones on young to get them back set right?

  And it works!

  While they’re small. Little miracles. Such a miraculous day and age with all they know and do.

  Hey and look. They are spot fucking on with this weather—it’s doing just what it’s supposed to do. Good old wintry mix. Three feet on the ground and now it’s—raining swords, our boy says. You’ve got to really run.

  I said Akron, right? She writes poems. Said that. I don’t get out much. I’ve half forgotten—what it feels like, what all I mean to say.

  Our boy said, “Papa.”

  We were lying in bed and he was messing with himself, his little package, trying to make the hole bigger, he said.

  “Papa, look.” He stretched it up to show me. “Doesn’t it look good?”

  His woowoo, he used to call it.

  “In a few days your woowoo will bloom into a thousand flowers.”

  He’s got the skin on still and he
forces it back and out comes this purple ball. It looks all wrong, it looks rotted.

  He says, “When you die I hope you’re a frog and I will catch you and I will keep you in my bucket.”

  I liked to think of him there in the heat where we lived rounding up snakes and frogs, growing up, fishing. Little barebacked nut-brown boy. Swinging through the trees on a strangler fig. I liked thinking of him being a man there sitting on an overturned bucket.

  He’d have a pontoon boat. He could think there. He’d have a radio, a little old crackly transistor of the sort that hangs in a shirtfront pocket. A gentle man. A party of one, making his pointy rounds.

  A simpler life.

  Of course we’re lucky. It’s easy to feel pretty lucky. I think she likes it, my wife, this job of hers—all the details, all the many tiny important things a woman of our day and age has to do.

  Plus a mother, don’t forget.

  Plus the baby.

  She’s not old enough, the baby, you can’t break them yet, little rubbery bones. So we keep her stuffed into her harness. Keep our chins up. As per. We think in pictures. It’s a help.

  She wags her arms a bit, but otherwise—

  I’ll just say it. I’m not cut out for it. We’re not. I mean men, I mean. We’re cut to gather. Gather and hunt and think—I used to think, have a thought through in my chair. My chair! Shoved into the corner of my room.

  I lay the girl down at the back of the house, pull the door to, steal away. Have a sit.

  She has to lie there. She’s just a nugget. I could drop her through the mouth of the woodstove, be done with her in a day.

  Who am I?

  Because who am I really do you think to her?

  She’s just little. She doesn’t know me. Give her time, some months to grow, she’ll point me out, say, “Bapa.”

  The ennobling moment.

  The blow to the head. Then the knees go.

  Like the heartbeat, first time, the first picture, her little face full on through the tissue, the fiber and brine, and she waved. Here I come, she seemed to say, don’t try to stop me.

  You do what you have to do. Burn through. Drop into my hands, big Papa’s hands, and he flinches. I gave her up to her mother: glistening, blue, the cord in my hand still humming.

  And her mother’s first word? Luscious. Think of that.

  They say it’s easy, it is all she knows: harness, plaster, spreading bar. Bapa. Hot. Brother. Dog. All the little slings and pulleys.

  Her brother drew on her face with a crayon, drew a face.

  I was elsewhere. I was taking my ten deep breaths. As per.

  You take a breath, keep moving. They can’t move, you think you’re safe, you think they lie there, okay, and what could come? Well, here we come. Bapa. Mama. Brother. Dog.

  My wife busts through the door, “Come to Mama, baby.”

  The old egg clutch. The gladdened hand. She is spitting milk, she is weeping. Bringing the bacon home.

  WHAT I LIKE?

  I liked lying on the bed on the phone with her, nothing left to say.

  I like a good outside shower, looking up through the moss and leaves. Our man in his boat, turning circles. Little lake.

  Our lake was shrinking. It was dirtier every year we lived there, the water siphoned off. Lake Rosa. After Rosa.

  It was storied. All the good stuff—rape and pillage, dirty Feds. Stills in the woods and sink holes you could drop your murdered through. Gothic excess. I always liked it. I liked the old gin joint sloughing on the banks, the desolated piers. Our boy was small there. Sit him on the slope in his bucket in the sun and the peahens would stroll down and gawk at him.

  Then the rumors flared up. Something had killed a peahen, a fellow was missing his dogs. Two, and then another, and then somebody else, and pretty soon they had gotten a posse up and were combing the lake for gators. They came upon an ancient bull in the muck, bellowing and sluggish, and everybody had a go at him, and beat him on the head with pipes. They opened him up and, lookyloo, found a dew claw, hair balls, gizzards. A broken chain of vertebrae, a clutch of radio collars.

  A boy bloodied to his elbows, sickened.

  The pontoon boat run aground.

  I’d say I liked that. The freakish tableau.

  The penny in your pocket mildewed.

  “PENNY?” SAYS MY wife.

  Nothing to report. A polar cold. The wind chirrups.

  Cheer up. Cheer up.

  Forgot your hat! Now go on, little Miss. Look both ways twice. Don’t let the door hitcha in—

  Somebody else scooting out?

  Nice to stand here. Talk to big folks.

  Poems and stories, she does both, she does the colonies, the clusterfucks, lunch at the door, a little basket. Qigong, fêng shui, reps at the gym. Have a look at her. Stringy thing, she used to dance, flattened abs, the haunch on her, quite the hottie. But you can smell it on her: she’s a mother. She’s submerged.

  Use your nose: she will have turned some. She’ll have soured, that’s a hint. Something’s ferny. They’re grown over, grown in. A flicker: then gone. You can’t reach them. You can’t console them. You touch them and they sink away.

  What’s to do?

  I sweep the floors clean. I make the meals.

  Our boy sprints at her; the baby wakes and cries.

  The ravaged female. Our Lady of the Mount. Miss DMV.

  Fresh from the stirrups. As if.

  Really, it’s nothing, she insists. It’s just she’s tired.

  I’ll give you tired, what the fuck. I’ll give you nothing.

  Sit down, sit down. You think I’m finished?

  “I amn’t finished,” says our boy.

  We’ll make a night of it—the wide belts, the tools. The wonder, the stunt.

  She’s got her papers out, the dog-eared book. She’ll get up here, find her page. Proclaim the miracle. Another living body in her living body yada yada yada yada nothing but give give give.

  YOU SIT.

  Let a man have a little fun, why not? Air his mind some. I amn’t finished.

  “I amn’t going to hit you,” our boy says. “I amn’t going to kiss you. I amn’t going to get a sword and chop you in two.”

  “Into what?” I ask.

  “A zillion pieces.”

  My mother’s dead now. Which makes life simpler. It’s not a joke, it’s true.

  When my old man was away, he was away quite a bit, I used to go to my mother in her bed. I never asked could I. We never spoke of it. She wore a nightgown the planets were pictured on and I knew in the morning when my father was away that she would lie in bed and let me pick at the sleeve, at the small gray beads of cloth I came to keep with the hair from her pillow. I lay in the dark in the bed heat, in the wet bready smell of her, not moving, pretending to sleep. I was a boy, and then not, too old for it, a mommy’s boy, and disgusted, and in my disgust it grew easier for me to picture my mother in stirrups, strapped in, laboring, gassed, while the waxy molten globe of my head burned through her.

  I never touched her: if I touched her she would burst into flames. I lay away from her and felt the seed move in me, heating up, pearly, the flashing tails, the race to the sea. The bliss of sleep enmired.

  I would sleep enmired in the puddle I had made, happy and ashamed.

  My brother served us waffles each morning and we lay propped up with the TV on and ate them with our hands. I wouldn’t speak to her. I wanted to throttle her. I couldn’t stand it: to have a mother: to have grown my arms and legs in her, my cock and balls, gill and lung, every plug and socket.

  I wanted to come from nothing, from air, a cloud, the heavens jeweled. The tinted distance.

  SHE SWEEPS IN, my wife. Hello, hello. She’s a special event, she’s a goer.

  I report on the daily doings, tell her what she has missed. The shitty baths. The scabs, some stunt. Some funny little peep her baby makes.

  I say, “She
spent the day on her backside, lying there hoping to grow.”

  My wife hovers, coos, soon to bed. She’s spent. Asleep by the time I get there—dreaming, I guess, of you. Some one of you tamping burning coals deep into her nostrils. You’ve pulled her teeth out.

  And her a mother!

  Full grown. Pushing forty, my wife.

  “Those are longing,” says my boy, and he swats at her breasts. It’s not a joke, it’s true.

  WHAT I’D LIKE?

  I’d like a day on that fellow’s pontoon boat, a radio, the white-hot marvelous sun. I’d lash the helm, keep her circling. Sun on my ass, blister my nose. Sit and drink some. Think a few gothic thoughts through.

  We got fathers out there? You a father?

  He’s going, Yeah. Fucking yeah. Sit and drink some.

  “I mean it,” says my boy, “I’m honest. I’m just standing here, I’m honest.”

  He’s at the bedside, the baby howling. His crayons poking out of his pants.

  Sweet doll. Sugar girl.

  He’ll make it up to her. He’ll saw at his trousers with a Lego. He said, “I’m gonna make these littler so when Noodle ever has a baby then her baby can grow into them. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

  He puts a dress on, very flowery, a lacy thing his sister will grow into, should she grow. “And what shall we call you?” I ask him.

  He’s sitting on the pot, thinking. “I’d like to be Glorious Angel.”

  And so he is, spinning through the kitchen with his dress lofting up.

  And I am Claybrain, Hiccalump, Clumpfoot, Tuk.

  A man in need. Could stand a drink. Stand to sit down.

  “We lived in Florida?” he asks. “I was a baby?”

  “Yes.”

  We lived in the land of the halter top. We snived in the snand of the lalter snop. Hip. Pop. Pifflewop.

  How nice to see you. You’re very tall.

  I brought pictures. The boy, a girl. You see, they’re lovely. We keep her dress pulled down to hide the harness. You can imagine—her little stirrups, our girl fresh from the womb. Her feet folded flat against her shinbones. She looks fileted even now, laid open, very clean. Little clean plump butterflied lamb.