by Lily Hoang
We remember the very first time we met her. She came to see the open apartment, and when we saw her that very first time and she saw us, she said, “Yes, this is it. This must be it.” And we had no idea what she meant, but it only took us that one meeting, those first few words, and we fell in love with her. We wanted to know more. We wanted her to stay here with us forever so when she told us about her death, we shut off our ears and refused to listen, but the truth remains that by tomorrow morning, she will be dead, and no matter what we do to try to prevent it, we won’t be able to.
We think it would be horrible to know the things she knows, but the woman down the hall is grateful. That’s the kind of woman she is. She’s the kind of woman it would be impossible not to love, and we hate her for all her kindness and understanding. We hate her for her wisdom. We hate her for her mortality.
Women & the Sky 4
The woman down the hall does not really exist. She is foam, moving between walls and into our noses and throats. Quite often, we can feel her in our bodies, moving things around. It isn’t an unpleasant feeling and we generally do not even mind. We know that the woman down the hall is trying to help us because that’s what she does. In exchange for a room for her to expand in, she offers us immunity from disease. She enters our mouths and ears and boosts our bodies with her magic.
We often wonder about this woman down the hall, why it is that she is the way she is, and she tells us that we wouldn’t understand, but that if we knew our folktales, she’s in there. She is the shadow that was left behind for our benefit, and whereas we are flattered — no honored — we can’t help but be sad for her, that she must live here, with us, when she belonged to a time so very long ago, a time of folk tales and magic and sublime fairy tales, a time without maps, a time of legends, and that she must endure this, just for us.
Continuous Women 3
The woman down the hall has hair longer than is even possible. Sometimes, we think she is Rapunzel, but we don’t believe in fairy tales so we ignore this possibility. We should note, however, that she lives at the apex of this building, that even though we say she lives down the hall, she really lives up the hall, high up, higher up that we can even see.
We’ve never seen her room, this woman down the hall. We’ve never even seen its door, although we’ve tried. Lord knows we’ve tried. Just the other day, in fact, we took the stairs up to her room — the elevator doesn’t go up that high — but we kept stepping and stepping until we’d stepped for days, and even then, there was no door. Our building isn’t so tall and yet we couldn’t reach it’s top. So we stepped for more days and days until one of us, we’re not sure who, passed out of exhaustion, but still, we forged upward. We hiked our way up until we literally couldn’t go one step further. Then, we rolled bodies into tight balls and bounced our way down. We simply could not have endured all those steps again.
And yet, when we see this woman down the hall who we like to call Rapunzel we do not ask her how she gets into her tower. Instead, we prefer to watch her knit her hair in the lounge. We try to not to disturb her, lest she lose count of her stitches and must begin anew.
Hidden Women 2
The woman down the hall is anonymous. She could be any woman. She looks like every other woman. There is nothing particularly noticeable or unique about her. The woman down the hall is a faceless woman among so many others, another person wandering in a crowd.
We have never seen a woman so plain, so utterly unremarkable. Perhaps this is why we are so interested in her. We try to speak with this woman, but she is so plain that she slips away without us even noticing, and another woman, equally uninteresting, has taken her place. This is not something we notice at first, but there is some small glimmer of difference between the two or three or however many of them there are. We notice only because we watch. We observe her and her other anonymous friends. We are certain we can unlock the truths behind every woman if only we can know one of them.
But they are not really every woman, and they are not truly anonymous. We have learned that they too have names and homes and some of them live right down the hall. Imagine that! These women that we’re only now learning to recognize have lived right down the hall all these years if only we’d bothered to notice.
Women & the Sky 5
The woman down the hall, she’s a crazy old loon. She’s not to be trusted. The old crone is the devil, we swear. We’ve never seen anyone so wretched, just for the sake of being wretched. She twists our ears to watch our eyes swell with salty tears, to watch our eyes clench shut for the stinging, to see our noses begin to drip, and she doesn’t stop until our mouths are filled to the brim with snot, and even then, she makes us swallow it in one gulp before she releases us, and we hate her. We’ve never hated anyone so much in our lives.
And yesterday, you won’t even believe this, yesterday, that old bitch down the hall pinched a cloud from the sky and crumpled it into the smallest ball, and that old witch down the hall punched us square in the jaw so hard that our faces broke, and that old woman laughed and laughed.
It was then that we decided that she had to die, that we can’t stand even one more moment of her alive.
So we killed her.
Continuous Women 4
The woman down the hall simply doesn’t know how to shut up. We swear she talks and talks like she doesn’t even need to stop for air, and when we see her, we run. We call her Dragon Woman — infernaled — and it wouldn’t be so bad if she only talked about more interesting things, but she doesn’t. Dragon Woman gabs about the most banal things. She goes on and on about her pewter plates and how she chose pewter, and sometimes, the mere imitation of the sound makes us sick. Sometimes, we hear the word computer and by default, we want to spit up. She’s insufferable, this Dragon Woman with her continuous words. Seeing her, we want to plug up our ears, but even then, her voice has this way of sneaking in, the nasal squeak makes us want to shove a whole box of tissues down her throat.
Hidden Women 3
The woman down the hall is a hoarder, and her tiny apartment is a labyrinth of boxes and trash. She never emerges from her layer of debris, and yet somehow it grows to consume the edges of the walls and all the empty spaces in between.
The woman down the hall slinks her body over and between, collapsing into the tiniest spaces because that is where she feels safest.
She is a rat, this woman. We imagine her apartment is a three-dimensional maze, and she maniacally rushes through it, chasing the scent of something absolutely delectable.
We have never seen this woman, but we know she is real. At nights when it is quietest, we can hear the shuffle of something moving somewhere, the scrape of her skin against all that trash.
Her apartment stinks of rot. It is a landfill, a dumping ground. It smells of teenaged boys after gym class, that irremovable odor of adrenaline and adolescence. It hovers for yards around her door. For a while, this smell drove our guards away, but we are a diligent kind. We do not waver. Sooner or later, someone will come or go. She is human, and she must eat to survive.
She has been here longer than any of us, longer than the groundskeeper and the landlady, and we hope that somehow she will survive until after we are gone. We would hate to have her myth destroyed for a heart attack or high cholesterol, something mundane. We have invested too much imagination and effort into creating her, this hidden woman, this woman who has forgotten the rest of the world.
Continuous Women 5
The woman down the hall is fat. She’s nothing but a bucket of lard, only larger. Much larger, and she’s got skin that folds over itself, forever hidden. There must be mold and mildew in those pockets of skin and flesh that never see light, and in those pockets, there must live these little creatures who recycle all that perpetual sweat and stink. She is a virtual ecosystem, this gross woman down the hall with all her lard and all her skin and all her stink, and strangely, we want to explore it. We want to claim it as our own, if only we could find an adequate place t
o stake our flagpole.
Hidden Women 4
The woman down the hall no longer lives here. One — for everything of any note occurs at night — she packed her entire apartment into one small handbag and walked away, leaving a large hole where her home once sat. It was as if she opened her satchel and invited the wallpaper and the siding, the lamps, light fixtures and their ceilings in to leave with her.
The hole gapes at the world outside. The hole where the woman down the hall used to live reveals our most hidden secrets.
Hidden Women 5
Beneath the woman down the hall, there is another woman. She is tucked beneath ruffles of skirt and ebony corset. She is a small woman, this woman beneath another woman, but she is happy.
She tells us, “It is warm where I live but never too hot. I believe it is something akin to your California.”
We tell her that we rarely take note of the weather.
She says, “But one must always be prepared for variant temperatures.”
She tells us this like she knows what it’s like to go outside. This woman who barely has skin covering her because she doesn’t need it, this woman who lives in suffocation tells us how to dress! We scoff.
We say, “Woman, if you care so much about the weather, why do you live inside another woman, hidden away from the world?” We say, “Woman, it’s apparent that it’s been so long since you’ve seen sunlight that your skin has restricted into your muscles, and even your muscles are pale.”
She looks at us.
There is an old photograph hanging above the smaller woman. It is the height of our chests. The sepia bleeds into its boarders.
She continues looking at us. Her transparent face is sad, frustrated.
Her fading face is bored.
Then, she lifts the lady’s skirt and crawls back in.
~
The Great Freud’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised women visited in thought but not yet discovered or found.
Sigmund asks Lou: “You, who go about exploring and seeing things, can you tell me toward which of these futures — these women — the favoring winds are driving us?”
“For these women I could not draw a route on a map or set a date for the arrival. At times all I need is a brief glimpse of possibility, an opening in the midst of an incongruous word, a glimmer of light in a pupil, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect woman, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of strengths unavailable to men and weaknesses that are more subtle reasons to improve than flaws. If I tell you that the woman toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for her can stop. Perhaps while we speak, she is rising, brushing her hair and donning a loose summer dress, within the confines of your empire, you can hunt for her, but she will never appear as you imagine her to be.”
Already the Great Freud was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the women who menace in nightmares and maledictions.
He said: “It is all useless, if the last woman can only be in the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”
And Andreas said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
Freud replied: “The woman that exists in this inferno can hardly be expected to see through it; and men are too caught to even look up.”
And Andreas said, calmly: “And that is why we look, door to door, searching for the woman to help guide us through this inferno toward freedom. She is one person, but she is also every woman in your atlas. Every woman.”
The End
About the Author
Lily Hoang is the author of several books, including Changing (the recipient of a PEN Beyond Margins Award). Hoang serves as co-director of Puerto del Sol, Editor at Tarpaulin Sky, and Associate Editor at Starcherone Books. She received her M.F.A. in Prose from the University of Notre Dame in 2006.
Table of Contents
Lily Hoang Invisible Women
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Women & Memory 1
Women & Memory 2
Women & Desire 2
Women & Memory 3
Women & Desire 2
Women & Signs 1
Women & Memory 4
Women & Desire 3
Women & Signs 2
Thin Women 1
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Women & Memory 5
Women & Desire 4
Women & Signs 3
Thin Women 2
Trading Women 1
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Women & Desire 5
The Cold Outside
The Little Bird That Could
The Soundless, Bloody Whistle
The Unanimous Decision
Weeping Beauty
The Little Bird that Couldn’t
Promise
The Returned Gift
Ever After, Part I
Ever After, Part II
Ever After, Part III
An Ending
Women & Signs 4
Thin Women 3
Trading Women 2
Women & Eyes 1
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4
Women & Signs 5
Thin Women 4
Trading Women 3
Women & Eyes 2
Women & Names 1
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Thin Women 5
Trading Women 4
Women & Eyes 3
Women & Names 2
Women & the Dead 1
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Trading Women 5
Women & Eyes 4
Women & Names 3
Women & the Dead 2
Women & the Sky 1
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Women & Eyes 5
Women & Names 4
Women & the Dead 3
Women & the Sky 2
Continuous Women 1
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Women & Names 5
Women & the Dead 4
Women & the Sky 3
Continuous Women 2
Hidden Women 1
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9
Women & the Dead 5
Women & the Sky 4
Continuous Women 3
Hidden Women 2
Women & the Sky 5
Continuous Women 4
Hidden Women 3
Continuous Women 5
Hidden Women 4
Hidden Women 5
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About the Author
