lcrw 27-final-interior-for-mobi-newfile

by 2011-08 (mobi)

  Pressure Points

  If I believe that we only experience a tiny bit of the possible world

  I will return to a story from my past,

  the one where I, in the middle of a dark wood, fall asleep under a tree,

  and wake to a small family—my watchers, my keepers—

  the ones who observe me.

  They shake their heads from their cottage

  and laugh when I say something funny, and watch me and judge not.

  Sometimes they send me small gifts and sometimes they can’t.

  Sometimes they send me enormous gifts that I can’t see or feel,

  I’m in an earthly stupor, I’m walking within an inch of myself,

  imagine me walking up my own body.

  See? There’s one lover that they know is wracked with uncertainty

  at my gratitude. Don’t be so thankful, they mutter to me,

  from their wooden beach house down by the sea.

  It’s the one with the outside shower, rosemary growing up the wall.

  They watch me on monitors.

  They wish they could invite me over but that’s not the way

  this world works.

  This morning while I write they smile—I’m so close—

  but I want to wake up under that tree

  with the son in the family, ageless and my age,

  breaking the rules.

  The weight of his heavenly body. He’s watched my whole life.

  He pushes into me.

  I’ll lose the body, the vehicle I love.

  Melt into the watcher, me, who loves my life.

  Elvis in Bloom

  Karen Hueler

  1. My Son Elvis

  Dear Lord, he’s discovered peanut butter. Can’t get enough of it. You’d think they don’t have it where he comes from.

  Well, I guess they don’t. They have mostly things I think they’re like protein powders. Can’t say I like them much myself.

  We found him in a field. Like he was superman, you see. A child stunned in a field, with a kind of hard film around him. Like that hard plastic packaging you can’t get open? Like that.

  It split when we got there and he sat in it, just looking around and waiting. As we watched it kind of peeled off and dropped away. He spoke good English right from the start, with a drawl that fit in like he was born here.

  That drawl kind of got on my nerves after a while. It would change a little if there was different people around. But I told myself he was just a child, after all.

  He was very friendly; he liked to meet people. At first he wouldn’t hold his hand out to shake, but then when we showed him, he took to it and was always the first. That was after, of course, we told him you only did it once, each time you met someone. None of this sticking it out every time you thought of it. He was like that, enthusiastic about things.

  I remember once I asked him: “Well, what do your people do when they meet each other?”

  “They wiggle,” he said. “Like this.” And he stood up and shook himself like he was shaking off water.

  “Must be tiring,” I said, and he looked a little surprised.

  Well, since I was his mother, I mean, since I took him home and acted like his mama, I may as well tell you that he had no genitals that I could see. Nowhere. I thought he might be sick from it, because he had such a lazy-eyed way of looking around him, not running like other little boys. You see, I assumed right off that he was a boy.

  He had a little hole just about below his belly button (which he didn’t have neither), and here he did his business in nice tidy ways, like a home-trained bird, water and solid together.

  But he did like to eat.

  “What’s this?”

  “Peanut butter?”

  “What’s this?”

  “Donuts.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Wonder bread.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Potato salad.”

  You see how it went. He liked soft things. No potato chips. Never liked them, though he ate the dip.

  “What’s this?”

  “Angel food cake.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Macaroni and cheese.”

  He was always heavy-lidded, kissy-lipped and soft-boned. Once I was washing him a little too hard—a long day, a hard day—and bent his fingers as I drew the washcloth through them. His pinky bent back. He looked at me curiously, about to say something. I bent it back.

  2. The Elvis Rehab Facility

  We’ve had Elvis for years, poor thing. He lost his voice ever so long ago, you see, and we’re a kind bunch. We used to be a church but a lot of us just lost the feeling although we continued to like each other and hung together. We’re a kind of commune now, only without the sleeping-around (we lost the feeling for that, too; we eat too much).

  We pick up strays. We presently have twenty cats, thirteen dogs, four parakeets, two iguanas, a pot-bellied pig, and Elvis.

  The people who had Elvis before broke up and neither wanted him. It was sad.

  You see, the problem with Elvis, here and everywhere else, is that he doesn’t do anything. All he is, is recognizable. He can’t sing any more and he’s vastly overweight; we have to put him on diets or he’d be furniture. We dye his hair and buy him glass jewelry, but he can’t sing.

  Of course his lips are still very beautiful, but that’s about it.

  There is one thing though. He’s very persuasive. People come here just to talk with him.

  “Is that you? Is that really you?” they’ll say, even though they just came 2000 miles for him. They still act surprised.

  “It’s me.”

  “I got a daughter who won’t talk to me. Can you speak to her and set her straight?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s right.

  And just like that the guy will set his lips tight, glare a little, then back off. He doesn’t stay there arguing with Elvis, he takes it and walks away with it.

  “My husband won’t touch me,” a woman says, a pretty decent looking woman.

  “Look under the sofa,” Elvis said. The woman nodded and took off. Under the sofa? What was she going to find there? Sometimes he can be just maddening. Under the sofa!

  3. The Elvis Retirement Home

  We keep him in the guest cottage, he’s been there decades now. He’d have to have a backhoe to move, at this point. I mean, it’s easy enough to say, Well, a man can maybe get himself to that size without help, but to stay there someone’s got to bring him food. He can’t get it on his own now. With that blame thing in their voice.

  Though it’s true, it’s a constant battle with the food, he’s always wanting more. Moans. Rolls his eyes. Looks pathetic. Well, that I could fight. But he says his sugar’s down, he’s in terrible pain, it’s hormones or something, out of his control, he’s like a machine stuck on a broken cycle.

  So I give him a white-bread sandwich or two; actually a loaf or two. Because he’s sweet thereafter and he starts talking about all his dreams. He thinks he remembers a place where everyone sings but no one can cook. There’s plenty of energy but no real interest. Folks just seem to be waiting, all their lives waiting.

  Well, not much of a dream.

  He’s getting bigger by the day. I keep all the windows open in the cottage, and the doors, because he smells kind of ripe. Not much you can do with all the bulk of him, trying to keep him clean. Shifting him around is hard, too, and I can’t help it, with that big a size, it seems even more indecent, though he’s not made the way everyone else is.

  4. Elvis in Bloom

  I thought he was getting bigger, too big, without much sense even, since we all agreed to cut back on the food.

  One day he swelled up to the breaking point, and burst.

  Split wide with a puff and a whoosh.

  And out spilled little Elvises, tiny, in clear casing, and they bent gently and rode out the air through the wi
ndows and the door.

  I wasn’t in the cottage, but nearby; I heard it and rushed back to see them, drifting all along the currents, as the attendants ran around trying to catch them. They told me, later, about the splitting and the whooshing. They sneezed a lot, and I thought they might have gotten bits of one of those little Elvises up their nose or something, and I think I’m right about that.

  In a month or so they began to wiggle, and they got a dreamy kind of accent. In two months they began to sing and let their hair grow long and asked for soft foods and were undeniably drawn to glitter.

  I’ve heard instances of this in the town across the river, and in a farmhouse outside town. There was a good wind blowing that day, so I think the Elvises made it to the city, because there’s been a revival lately of his music and his talents, and people are meeting now in town halls and in schoolyards, shaking their hips and pursing their lips, and singing like he sang, every last one of them. I heard they’re burgeoning in England, and blooming too in Italy, and that wind I think took them to China, and maybe Africa and Australia, and I can’t help thinking that we’ll enjoy the music, all of it and everywhere, for a few more years until the seeds begin to swell again and they all just sit back being pleasant and waiting to grow, just like he said: all of them waiting again for the moment when it all makes sense in an ontological way; and they burst, every last new Elvis, spreading his message all over the globe.

  A Sackful of Ramps

  M. K. Hobson

  Lita’s got it in her head that she’s got to have a sackful of ramps. And not just any old ramps, Toby can’t just rummage around back of the Kroger’s and pick some out that might fallen behind the empty woodcrates with the other spent vegetables. No, Lita’s got it in her head that she’s got to have ramps from Edna Gothel’s kitchen garden or she’s going to die.

  “She killed him because she wants to be white.” Lita’s voice is a disgruntled monotone as she brushes her hair, long and greasy and gleaming. “Hands red as a cat’s ear and it was cold and there wasn’t any moonlight, but there was the light from inside her refrigerator door. Do you understand? Now she wants to kill us. Kill us, plow us under like worms, plant white flowers on top of us. I see her. You think I don’t see her? She looks in the windows. Her fat face like a worm in a flower looking in. She’s imagining white flowers where our bed is now. Do you understand?”

  Toby, sunk into the couch in the narrow front room, stares at his beer. Sometimes he has a hard time telling his wife’s voice from the buzz of insects. Their one-bedroom house is set back from the road, on a swampy patch of ground, and the grass grows high around it, making it always humid and a little dim. He swats a mosquito and smears red between his fingers.

  “White hair, white fingers, white feet, white bed. She took all his blood. Sucked her husband’s blood so she could be white. Do you understand?”

  Toby sips his beer, flat and warm now. Edna Gothel never had a husband, and certainly never did murder, but no good to mention that. If Lita is talking about anyone, she’s talking about her own mother who stabbed Lita’s father in the throat with a steak knife and ran down Main Street leaving handprints on the limestone walls of old buildings. But in Lita’s mind, fantasy and reality reflect each other like slanting light in shards of mirror glass.

  “Hey, there’s lemonade in the fridge,” Toby says brightly, as if remembering it. “You want a glass lemonade, Lita?”

  Lita tilts her head and knits her brow, as if trying to fit the idea of lemonade into what came before. Finally she discards the effort and nods irritably, clearly lost. Toby springs from the couch. He feels bad for confusing her, but anything to stop her talking, even for a minute.

  “Lemonade is made with limes sometimes, Lita,” he calls from the kitchen. “You ever think of that? Maybe I should get you some limes. They’re green.”

  “It ain’t the green that I want!” she screeches from the front room, and there’s the sound of something thrown, something breaking. “I want the ramps. A sackful from the evil witch’s own garden!”

  Toby releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He cracks ice cubes from an aluminum tray, drops them into the only clean cup he can find. He swirls the pitcher of lemonade to mix in the sugar that has settled at the bottom. He carries the cup to Lita, but instead of handing it to her, he places the rim against her lips and lets her drink. He watches the long muscles of her throat work as she swallows. Then he places the cup beside her on the folding TV tray, making sure there’s a handkerchief handy. She won’t pick it up again unless she has the handkerchief to wrap around its sweat-dripping sides.

  It’s a bad time for Lita. In the last heavy round weeks of pregnancy, she is always hot and sweating and miserable. But she has a terror of water touching her hands or her face or her head, so her long hair is eelskin slick and her face is ground-in grimy. But even gravid and unwashed, she’s the most beautiful woman in Pitchfork County. Toby knows there’s no one else in the whole town, in the whole county, maybe in the whole state, as beautiful as she is. There’s no man, rich or poor, has a wife as beautiful.

  Sometimes Toby wonders if she wouldn’t be half as crazy if she was half as beautiful. Or maybe if he was twice as handsome. If she’s the prettiest thing in a hundred miles, he’s the homeliest; huge flap-out ears and crooked buckteeth, caved-in pigeon chest and pencil-stub legs. His hands are two decades of scars from slipped wrenches and busted fan blades, keloided with grease and rust.

  “What do you want a sackful of ramps for anyway?” he says softly, pushing a greasy lock of hair back over her ear and stroking it till it stays. “Dirty old things, they stink like hell. I’ll get you some limes, Lita. Nice, fresh limes, and white sugar, and shaved ice, mountains of it. Think how nice that would be.”

  Lita curls her lip in disgust.

  “Nicer not to die.” The words seethe.

  Toby lets his hand rest on her head for a moment, wondering why he doesn’t feel her brain jumping around under his palm. Then he goes back into the kitchen. He gets another beer—a cold one—and settles back into the couch. To listen.

  She’s always worse in summer. Something about the light hitting her eyes that dazzles her, scrambles her brain. Toby always tells her to stay out of the sun, but the light crawls in through cracks and finds her. It’s worst at night, when the insects outside invite her to join them in screaming. She comes alive then. She talks long into the night. She is desperate for Toby to listen. She’s like an urn, filled up with the harsh light of day, and it drips out of her as the insects scream outside. Drip, drip, drip. Toby’s so tired. He has to be up at first light and down at the garage by six. But night is when she comes alive, spinning theories, concepts that would be brilliant in another world, in another reality. Drip, drip, drip. But in the real reality, the reality of dirty floors and mosquitoes and work that has to be done, they are just hollow corridors that she follows to bricked walls behind broken doors. Toby nods off she is speaking, and it triggers a storm of tears and more smashed things. He wishes she would go to sleep. He tells her that sleep is a balm of nature. She tells him that sleep is when Miss Gothel watches her through the windows. Sleep is just what the witch wants her to do.

  “You can’t have a sackful of ramps for Edna Gothel’s kitchen garden,” Toby says finally, when Lita has wound down momentarily and is picking dry skin from the tips of her fingers. He tries to say it firmly, but she sees the weakness behind the words. She’s not stupid. She pierces him with a hard gleaming glare.

  “You want me plowed under,” she says. “You’re imagining daisies, lilies, apple blossoms, right where I’m sitting, right now.”

  “It’s stealing,” he says.

  “You’d rather have your wife die than steal something.” Lita’s eyes narrow with suspicion and understanding. “You’re just like her. You want to be white.”

  Edna Gothel is a spinster woman from Kansas City who worked all her life as a private secretary to a meat-packing executive. She liv
es on a big place inherited from one of her relatives; a white farmhouse surrounded by lush garden beds, snaked through with washed gravel paths. Her kitchen garden butts right up against a bramble-choked cyclone fence that screens the gravel road leading to Toby and Lita’s place.

  She’s a woman who maintains correspondences, has the county sheriff in for coffee once a week, would be active in the woman’s league if someplace as small as Pitchfork, Missouri had any such a thing.

  Their relations with Miss Gothel had been cordial once. The city woman had taken an interest in them, arranging for leftover food from church suppers to be delivered to their home at irregular intervals, inviting Lita over for tea and biscuits in the afternoon. The charity offended Toby, because he made his own money working and the garage and even if he didn’t, what business did the old woman have assuming? But Toby was glad that Lita had someone to talk to besides him. This was when Lita was better, when she didn’t mind so much about water. When she wore a clean dress every day and scrubbed her face and braided her long, shining hair every morning.

  Even in those days, when Lita was better, she would talk and talk and talk. Her imaginings were like confections made of suet and sugar; dense and nauseating, sweet but unappetising. They crunched slickly between your teeth, left your mouth feeling coated, made you feel like vomiting. Her ideas made Toby feel sick, not because they were ugly, but because they were too strangely beautiful. Impossible to reconcile with reality, they hinted at a greater reality, maybe even a better one. Or one vastly more horrible, you couldn’t tell, that was the problem. It was all uncertainty and shifting light in mirrors. But Miss Gothel silently poured tea, and passed small crisp cookies, and listened. Until one day there were silver spoons missing from Miss Gothel’s house, and Miss Gothel called the sheriff, and things became strained.

  Lita said that she had seen the reality of Miss Gothel, that she was a witch who meant them nothing but harm, and anyway, what would she want with some old witch’s spoons? But she never came out and said she didn’t take them, and later Toby found them, hidden in a coffee can in the backyard, along with dozens of other things from Miss Gothel’s house: a nest of white hair plucked from a comb, fingernail trimmings, a beauty magazine, and about fifty cents in small coins. He returned everything (excepting the hair and nail trimmings) and Miss Gothel had set him down for coffee.