by Неизвестный
In the first days of the king, there was a girl who wandered far into the forest. At dusk she would come home, with scratched face and torn skirts and brambles stuck like pins in her hair, to find her husband sitting before a hearth gone cold, a dirty pot caked with gruel. But how his eyes would shine when she appeared! He draws out her seat, he brings in water, he makes her a thin soup, which she plays with, with her spoon. She smiles at him shyly, saying, I think I lost my sense of time.
One evening, the dusk turns into darkness and still the girl has not returned. Her husband runs to the edge of the forest, a torch in his hand. All night he searches for her, the legions of trees looming around him, and by morning he stumbles out from the woods, bewildered and afraid, having found no sign of her. The other wives are washing clothes in the stream. They bend down farther over their work, as if by doing so they might make themselves invisible. The young husband approaches them, his face a wound, his voice hoarse when he asks them, Have you seen her? The women, up to their elbows in cold water, shake their heads. They are silent.
Eva imagined the silence into which her husband would awake. She imagined his voice in the empty room, saying her name. She heard, clearly, the variations he would use—Evita? Evuncular?—time’s elaborations, the joyful, thoughtless ornamenting of the word he most liked to say. The names would chime and shiver in the air. Evel Knievel? he would ask, and there would be no answer. She had been taken too far away.
In a strange bed, in a strange room, she felt the anguish of her husband as her own. It felt like knives, like rats gnawing, like broken glass, like poison bubbling—no, it felt like something else. Exactly. All it took were two slippery pills, swallowed at the clinic, and then a bus ride home and straight into bed. The pain began as a little pang in her gut, and then—whoosh!—she was possessed by it. Her husband (not yet her husband) knelt beside the bed with a cool washcloth in his hand as she writhed around like a snake, sweating through the sheets. And just as swiftly it was over. The pain disappeared and the bleeding began. The whole thing lasted only an afternoon. In the evening the two of them walked around the neighborhood, eating ice cream. To say they had made a decision would suggest that they had needed to have a conversation. Neither one had said, Given the smallness of our apartment, and the narrowness of the stairs. Considering where we are in our lives . . . She didn’t even have to mention her wedding dress, which was already paid for, already fitted, sitting hugely and steadfastly on her credit card. It was made of silk organza and floated up behind her when she moved. It was the color of champagne.
In this strange bed, in this close room, beneath the tiny jewel of a window, she thought of her husband and felt again the ache of that dreamlike afternoon. Or at least she did for a little while. A shockingly, shamefully little while. For how could she stay sad when the king himself was watching her, sitting alert by the fire? As she saw his dark eyes gleaming in the light, her sorrow for her husband dwindled into a low, melancholy note above which her false heart trilled. The king! The brave and ravaged and beautiful king. What might he say to her? What might he see? There was always the possibility he could love her, wasn’t there? There was always the possibility. If her young marriage had taught her anything, it was that. The surprise, the stark miracle of love, bent in her direction. So why not the king, watching silently from his chair?
She felt his eyes move over her, touching each part of her deliberately, like a hand.
The next time Eva awoke, in the darkness of the bedroom, her heart was brimming, beating lightly as a bird’s. The heaviness that had pulled on her was lifted. She yawned enormously, stretching her limbs to the far corners of the bed. At the end of the room a ruddy light glowed, but rising up onto her elbows, she saw that it belonged to the unsteady street lamp outside her apartment window. And above her was her ceiling, still haunted by the water stain. The crooked blinds. The seething radiator. Did the sound of its spitting mean she was back? The dream over? More likely, more tormenting, the dream continued, and she had simply been ejected from it. For there sat her umbrella, her shoes. There lay the novel she was reading, prostrate on the floor. Her crumpled socks. His swaybacked boots. His corduroy pants, upright and perfectly accordioned. They spoke of the lovely, unflustered motion with which he had loosened them, allowed them to drop down the length of his legs, neatly stepped clear of them, and then plunged into the bed. Her husband. His watch resting on the bureau. His stack of hermetically sealed comic books. The photograph of his mother and father and sisters on the wall. His harmonica glinting. His collection of fortune cookie fortunes in a jar. All the things about him she adored, infinite and ordinary as the stars.
She reached for his hand. She slid her foot across the sheets, seeking his leg. She rolled over voluptuously, in anticipation of the warm obstacle that would stop her. But she rolled, unhindered, all the way to the edge. Nothing prevented her, nothing held. She had the cool expanse entirely to herself. Her husband was no longer there.
He’s coming right back, she thought. He’ll be here in a heartbeat.
Because maybe he wanted a glass of water, or else drank too many before he went to bed. Maybe he heard footsteps on the stairs, and was waiting, dictionary raised, behind the door. Maybe he was saving them. Maybe he was thirsty. Or maybe, like her, he had fallen in love—with the gypsy queen and her raven hair. The tiny girl tucked inside a tulip. The mermaid, the shield maiden, the daughter crying from the tower. Maybe it was the siren who had called to him. And maybe he had answered, and was gone.
LUCY CORIN
The Entire Predicament
M y head hovers over the floor, and my hair dangles, and my foot teeters near my ear, and my backside is exposed. I’m separated. I’m gagged and behind my gag I can’t feel my voice. Homebound, on my very own threshold, I am of two minds or more about most things. I am of no mind about the rest, suspended, here in the doorway, within a network of ropes. I’m dangling upside down, one foot bound to the door frame, an arm bending somewhere behind my back, another hip rotated, thigh stretching toward my ear, knee bent, a foot hovering somewhere above it. I have never felt so asymmetrical.
A bird yaks from a tree in the yard behind me. Bright air moves like a thousand singing bees as I breathe. I can release my head and look at the floor or I can raise it and gaze across my house. I can see beyond the living room, past the breakfast bar, into the shining kitchen, and beyond that, through the glass doors to my pool fuming with chemicals. Expensive house, cheaply made. Inside, the doors are hollow, the knobs brass plated. Nick a wall and it crumbles.
I’ve lost the education I worked so hard for, or at least, it turns out I know nothing. My money is down the drain; I can see my last dollar from here, where I swing in the doorway, shifting my weight enough to revolve; I can see it blooming in the kitchen sink. My dog caught two rabbits in the backyard, finally, after years of failure. He slung them in a bundle over his shoulder and went packing.
My country’s at war, and I don’t mean venereal disease.
I swing here, hung, dumb, limb after limb, by hook and crook, bound, naked, open. I’m also turning. I moon every direction I don’t face as I turn. I moon the blank world out my front door, and then I moon the desirable open floor plan inside. I moon my living room and its seven broad windows, and I moon the kitchen beyond it, mirrored deep in the appliances. I moon the patio set beyond the sliding glass doors. Sunshine hums in the windows and gushes along the walls, bounces and lolls on the flanks of my overturned furniture, the coffee table warming its belly, the sofa slashed, stuffing bulging, books like fallen moths, bits of china and glass from the buffet doors fairy-dusting my Pergo floors and tasseled throw pillows. How many hours has it been since my sunny eggs winked from their squares of toast? Since the tongue of my dog splashed in his water dish, since I sprinkled confetti for the fish, since my daughter donned her red boots and tromped to the school bus with bows in her hair and my husband, the dumb lug, backed over the roses on his way into town for the bacon? Eno
ugh hours for my hands to grow rubbery in their rope cuffs, for blood to fill my ears to bursting, my eyes rolling in their humble sockets, my brain rocking in its everlasting bath. How many hours since my dear withdrew himself from my cozy body and flopped onto his back in the moonlight, his grin sliding about his face, the silhouetted dots on the dotted bedroom curtains swaying in the breeze as I am swaying now, the motion moving them like a galaxy in a planetarium, night insects cruising and making their soft landings on the sill and on the branches of the tree that drags its nails across our shingles—
And before that the sleeping in feathers—
And before that the dog curled with the daughter in the wooden bed—
And before that the peace of nothing happening that I even thought to know of—
And before that the lives I could have led, and the cells that made me.
Anyone could see I can do nothing, nothing, but there’s nobody that I can see to see me. As I turn I can look across the planks of my porch and if I tuck my chin I can see my lawn above me and the broad black band of the street with no cars parked along it because everyone’s taken all their cars to work, and on errands and vacation. Or else the neighbors are cowering in their houses, cars tucked into garages with the doors squeezed shut, or else they’re peeking through their windows and they can see me and I make them afraid to come out. All I can see through my windows as I pass one and then the next are boiled reflections of the ideas of the colors of things like flowers, like hedges, like lampposts, like a cloud here and then there, and that’s all.
My vertebrae push at the skin of my back. My whole skeleton is apparent to me as it has never been before. It’s as if I don’t have the fat I have. It’s as if I’m stripped of more than clothes. What’s left of my breasts slides near my armpit on one side and under my chin on the other. When I turn, backside out, craned neck bulging, I feel my home and my body as intricate and intricately connected contraptions, a Rube Goldberg that produces the drip of my mere and continuing life. The ropes that stretch and support me are like the wires and pipes in the walls. My cavities are rooms, my organs are furniture, my blood, transporting air, is air. Now, truly for the first time since my babyhood, there is nothing I can do. I can cry or I can not cry. As a baby I cried, but now if I know anything I know better. I can hold my breath. I can open or I can close my eyes.
I close my eyes. Here, upside down and overbalanced, the thing that happens is not what I make happen, it’s what I am within the definition of suspense. First, my shoulders ache, and next they ache more. They ache in relation to how much my neck aches which aches in relation to my ankles which ache unlike each other because of how simultaneously bent and splayed I’m hung. The only other thing that happens in the time I can witness by the wall clock in the kitchen with the rooster on its face as I pass is the ticking of my mind as it tracks the shifting pulse of my body and maneuvers around the ideas lodged in its coils. My mind is a lost snake stuffed in a bowl and pressed. My mind is a snake too crushed to strike.
I open my eyes. I am turning, upside down and tangled, as if on a vertical spit, such that window after window passes in a rhythm, and then, as I let my eyes blur, I can begin to see the walls of my square house ease into curves and soon my windows make one watery strip of blue-green world. All this motion, and I am almost used to it, time passing and nothing happening outside my body’s placement within everything, in fact I am almost used to this level of pain, almost content to spin within it, when peeping into the windows I see bobbing mounds of heads of hair, and one has doffed a cap, and one has pigtails like ears on her head, and another has a blow pop in her mouth, and another has a backpack that bounces up behind him as he bounces, and another must be holding an enormous toy giraffe because the giraffe’s head bobs above his head and hops with him, and nods as the boy hits the ground below the sill, and bends as the boy is rising or falling each time I pass. Children are bouncing in no particular rhythm; they’re like whack-a-moles at a county fair.
I unblur my eyes a little and I can see mountains creeping up behind them, green and brown, and then the children rise in slow motion and stop, framed in groups of twos and threes in the windows, as if secreted in my shrubbery, looking into my house and at my family’s things, looking at me in my doorway, backdropped by the empty street. They wiggle but are almost still, as if making every effort at a dinner table.
Are these children I know? Are they from my daughter’s school? Is it a field trip? Is my daughter one of them? I just can’t tell—their faces and affectations, their clothing and hairdos—all aspects I recognize but aspects arbitrarily distributed to one being and then another. As individuals, not one child rings one hollow bell.
Then I remember to unblur my eyes entirely and the mountains in the background materialize into soldiers with camouflage outfits, their faces as stiff and suspicious as pioneers’ in photographs, lifting the children so that they can see. The children’s faces go slack, taking me in as I sparkle in my house. Some of the windows are open, with screens, and I can hear a child suck and swallow. I can hear the blow pop shift across her teeth. Then the children start squirming, because their armpits are uncomfortable and they’re bored. So here and then there the soldiers put them down and I can hear shoes and voices in the shrubbery. For a few moments the soldiers talk to one another on their walkie-talkies, looking across my living room at one another, window to window, nodding and shrugging, hatching ideas, making plans. They seem to come to a decision. The giraffe’s head is still in its window but I have no idea if there’s anyone down there supporting it. The soldier standing framed with it does not seem to know it’s there. The giraffe looks directly at me, and the soldier is in profile, with his walkie-talkie, and every burst of static has the rhythm of affirmation—roger that, ten-four—
But I’m still turning. Some of the children appear in the background, in the hilly yard of my neighbor next door. They are tossing a ball. They are jumping a jump rope. They are writing with chalk on the walkway. A soldier shifts from his window and shouts an order at them. Bark, spit, he says. One of the children comes to him, but the others ignore him. What can I do? Atrocities are imminent.
Outside another window a soldier is examining my barbecue.
Outside another a soldier is tying his boot.
Outside another a soldier continues to look at me each time I pass, because I am still turning, and turning as if the opening and closing of my eyes propels the turn, as if time itself is what turns me, as if my turning makes time move. He continues to look at me and I know everything he might do; I can see everything he might do move across his eyes in scenarios I remember from news and movies. Then he walks around the house. I can see him pass by window after window. I am following him as I turn, or my turning is pushing him along in a dance of magnets. He collects the giraffe as he passes. He hands the giraffe to the soldier who is standing with my barbecue. He’s rounding the porch and I’m turning to meet him as he approaches the threshold, removing his flak helmet. His face is at my crotch. He is wiping his boots on my welcome mat.
Then I do, I cry. I try to control my breath enough so that I can do it with the duct-tape gag. It’s all I can do.
My house is like the world. The furniture is islands and continents now, in sun and shadow, its inhabitants the bugs, the mice, the dust, and the knickknacks we collected on our travels. Air is water, and sky hangs, as always, above the roof, though here the roof is ozone, leaks intact. How did I get here? Sleepwalking? Sleephanging? Sleepbinding and sleepgagging? Sleepransacking of my home? Or did soldiers do this in the night?
He stops my spinning. He turns me and turns with me as if I’m a bookcase to a secret room and I can feel a shaft of sunlight settle onto my ass. He takes a poker from my fireplace and pokes me carefully so that I swing a little. Who do you think you are? Poke. What do you think you’re doing? Poke. He tucks it under his arm like an umbrella and goes into the kitchen and starts opening and closing drawers. Why don’t you have any
pancake mix in this kitchen? (I do, but it’s in the cabinet and he’s still looking in drawers.) Don’t you have any decent snacks?
Outside, the soldiers are directing the children to do something, to ready something, and they’re scurrying about with their accessories. I am suddenly unsure if the soldiers are directing the children, or if the children are directing the soldiers, as if it’s simply their toys that have grown life-size. I spot the giraffe standing near the barbecue. It’s large for a toy, but it is not nearly life-size. And the soldier in my kitchen has opened his fly and let his penis flop out. This, I recognize, is nothing a grown doll could do.
Then my husband comes home. There’s no sign of the car, but he comes in the back gate, stands at the patio doors, kicks his boots off, and then, as if remembering my instructions, he retrieves and sets them tidily next to the geranium pot. I have no idea why he’s home so early, but the soldier has scooted back around me, taking the porch steps in one stride, setting me spinning again. He’s somewhere in the yard with the rest of them, and he must have zipped up because now I cannot tell him apart from the rest of the soldiers, some of whom have found fold-out lawn chairs and are setting them up around the grill. Others are primping the coals.
My husband comes inside and makes a peanut butter sandwich. Behind my gag I am trying to regulate my breath enough to make a noise, but then he pulls a stool from the breakfast bar over to where I’m hanging and stops my spinning so we can both look the same way, out the window to the grassy side yard where they have dragged the barbecue. It’s good to be still. It is so good to be still that I hardly wonder why my husband remains unalarmed. We watch as first they barbecue the giraffe and then they barbecue each other. A soldier, sitting lotus on the grill, salutes, and next it’s the boy with the backpack, grinning like wax, and like wax, his face moves from comedy to tragedy mask. One and then another disappears into smoke and flames, another soldier and then the child with lollies, everyone nodding appreciatively at everyone’s sacrifice.
