by Gray, Amelia
Ray realized that he was at the state of intoxication where anything Betsy could possibly say was going to piss him off. Keep your cool, buddy, he said to himself. She’s just trying to make conversation.
“Usually that’s a job for the lady penguins,” Ray said. “I am a male penguin and therefore, no, I have never protected an egg.”
“Right,” Betsy said. “Well, I saw a documentary once, and a male penguin was protecting an egg. I figured maybe you’d have some experience.”
“Sorry, I don’t have any experience. I guess that makes me less of a penguin.”
“I wasn’t saying that.”
“I suppose you think I’m some kind of lesser penguin, just because I fought the fucking darkness and tasted my own blood, because I haven’t protected a stupid fucking egg.”
Betsy felt tears welling up. Don’t cry, she said to herself. It would be really stupid to cry at this moment.
“I honor your fight,” she said. “I did not mean to disrespect you.” Ray sank back. “It’s no disrespect,” he said. “I’m just a penguin in a bar, drinking my gin out of a fucking highball glass for some reason.”
“I was wondering why they did that,” the armadillo said. “Doesn’t make any goddamn sense,” said the penguin.
THE COTTAGE CHEESE DIET
There’s no reason. There’s no reason why you couldn’t. There’s no reason it’s not possible you couldn’t possibly finish your mild cottage cheese breakfast, buy a ticket, take that train to the edge of the world, squeeze your eyes shut, dig the wheels into moist world-edge earth and make a dramatic plunge off the side, your friends and family waving good-bye as at the end of a parade when all that’s left is sandwich wrappers and the rest of a long day, sun streaming through all the windows and still a cold room no matter how much light hits every corner, even if you take the curtains and flip them over the curtain rods so there’s nothing impeding the procession of light—that kind of lazy afternoon where someone in the house mutters a promise to make banana bread but you know the bananas will spoil and cultivate bacteria, becoming dangerous like the kitchen counter you washed in your younger years first with warm water and later on with the stronger stuff, ammonia making you dizzy behind your allergen free mask, a boiling water rinse and a layer of bleach, just a bit of the stuff mixing together into what you hear is dangerous but secretly know is a chemical so powerful that certain entities don’t want you to hear about it, and by “certain entities” you mean the government, these powers in power have other plans for you but you’re one step ahead, you and your sleeves with the tricks in them and your special diet, the cottage cheese diet, the diet with cottage cheese, and as you eat the cottage cheese you hold very gently on your tongue the cottages and the people inside the cottages and the people are screaming.
DEATH OF A BEAST
June was sitting at her desk and looking out the window, as she often did when she was thinking about her problems. It was a cold day, and cloudy, threatening rain. As she thought, June twisted a length of hair around and around her index finger.
She observed a squirrel on the tree outside her window. It was perched on a small mid-tree stump which had been cut earlier that year by overzealous pruners. The squirrel was clutching his heart.
Before she stopped to look out the window, June had been reading about a massive trichobezoar. Gastroenterologists removed the giant hairball from a girl on Thanksgiving morning. The hairball weighed ten pounds and was shaped like the stomach in which it had been lodged. The girl had a mental disorder that involved eating her own hair during times of duress. Romantic gastroenterologists called it Rapunzel Syndrome. When asked if the removal of a ten-pound hairball would affect their Thanksgiving meal, the gastroenterologists were quoted as saying, “We don’t get fazed by much.”
It seemed as if the squirrel was having a seizure. He was shaking, and gripping the tree with three paws. The fourth was still on his chest, as if he was about to break into song. June thought it would be wonderful if the squirrel broke into song. She couldn’t take her eyes away, though she was tired, and needed to work and sleep. Helping the squirrel was out of the question, because the tree branch was eight feet from the window. June wasn’t sure what she would do to help, anyway. She could do the tiny chest compressions if necessary, but she wouldn’t be able to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She had tried a similar procedure once on a kitten, many years before, and it had not worked.
The hairball girl went to the hospital to have it removed after she lost nearly forty pounds. It turned out that the mass growing in her stomach was filling her up, and though her body begged for protein and energy, everything she ate or drank fell against the knotted hair and clogged in her system. The little food she did eat would eventually break down into enough nutrients to keep her alive long enough to eat more hair.
The squirrel was no longer shaking, June noticed. Its tiny paw still hovered over its breast but the beast simply stared in through the window. June understood dramatics, having recently worked at a dinner theatre, but the performance was a little too compelling. The spirit and knowledge in the eyes was gone, and the squirrel was dead.
Somehow, its tiny claws had dug deep enough into the wet wood—it was raining now, June saw—to keep it righted on the mid-tree stump. The squirrel had honey-brown fur that was the same color as June’s hair, still twisting around her finger. June and the squirrel were only two stories up, which still seemed a long way to jump or fall.
That morning, June and her friends had a laugh over breakfast about how they would each die. June had claimed skin cancer, pointing to some questionable moles on her forearms. Another friend swore that after a lifetime of watching his partner smoke, he would be the one with an ironic cancer of the lung. Cancer is funniest when discussed over breakfast.
June tried to see the humor in things. It was a character trait of which she was proud, her ability to laugh at any situation. She joked about love and death. She thought the ball of hair stuck in the girl was hilarious. She often made a joke about the last gift her grandmother sent, a single pair of red socks with a row of embroidered polar bears. She wore the socks, and when anyone remarked on them, she would say, those were the last present my grandmother gave before her passing.
She never would seriously say “passing.” Her grandmother hadn’t driven in years and likely wouldn’t utilize the HOV lane, but June imagined the woman in a dirty red sedan, flipping the bird as she tore around a school bus and howling at the idea that a pair of socks could make so many people feel like shit.
The girl with Rapunzel Syndrome claimed she ate her hair out of heartbreak. June understood heartbreak, having recently worked at a dinner theatre.
The squirrel was dead for sure. It was staring through June with eyes that had seemed glassy before but were practically mirrors at that point. The squirrel swayed along with the tree. Raindrops dripped from its sagging tail.
June smiled at the poor squirrel, wondering about where the rest of it was at that moment. That was funny because she usually saved ridiculous thoughts about the afterlife for animals or people close to her. When the kitten died, for example, June invented the idea that the pitiful creature would return to the world as a ballerina.
She twisted her hair around her finger and watched the squirrel, which had passed. Her knuckle, wound tight with hair, was nearly at her scalp, and her hand was held against her head by her own hair. June wondered if it would be a comfort. She could barely see her own reflection in the windowpane, and when she squinted, it appeared that the squirrel was sitting on her shoulder. June closed her eyes and pulled her hand away in a ripping clump, making a sound like an animal might make. A brown leaf blew against the squirrel, against its face, and then whipped past. June twisted the hair into a knot and swallowed it without chewing.
She was distinctly aware of her body and skin. The squirrel pitched forward with the swaying tree branch. The times, they were changing.
THOUGHTS WHILE STROL
LING
Harry Austin Clapp, creator of “Thoughts,” a column that ran in this newspaper every week for a score or more years, died at the age of 79, at his home in Collegeport, Saturday, December 25th at 10 o’clock following an illness of several months. Traveller, explorer, engineer, writer, philosopher, real estate man, Harry Austin Clapp rounded out a full and complete life before he passed quietly away.
The Daily Tribune (Bay City, Matagorda County, Texas)
December 27, 1937
Recent rain great for crops and makes the figs glisten and show green.
The people of the town have never seen such a warm rain. Fat raindrops make the figs glow, showing the people of the town a new color of green that they’ve never known before, a green which they call Fig. The townspeople say that this rain is the beginning of things. That year, five families name their first-born sons Fig.
Oscar Chapin growing a ninety-pound watermelon.
Or is the watermelon growing Oscar Chapin? The neighbors begin to wonder. He sits all day by the watermelon, on the ground next to the watermelon in its wooden crate lined with old rags. He takes an eyedropper of water every ten minutes to strategic areas of the ground, under which he says he can feel the root growing. Oscar Chapin claims this watermelon has given him new eyes.
Train crew go to Kingsville with the engine.
Everyone makes a big fuss about it and rightly so, as it takes twenty strong men to lift the train diesel engine into the auto that will transport it to Kingsville. They also travel by train, which makes some of the townspeople think philosophical thoughts about building a train so strong that no train can transport its engine. Likely a train of this nature would need to be constructed in Galveston.
Jim Hale better train his dog.
That dog runs the perimeter of Hale’s yard, treading the ground until he makes a ditch. Dog says, “Hey, come over here.” When you do, that damn dog gives you a recipe for lemon bars which omits egg yolks and disappoints you sincerely.
Found a dirty face powder puff in my mailbox.
If I were a younger man, I would suspect intrigue from the daughters of the farmer next door. Surely they would have left it as a token from their girl-friend, who felt tender emotions for me. As a younger man, I would contemplate this while holding the dirty face powder puff under my nose and breathing in a heaven’s scent of woman’s skin. As an old man, I suspect a group of rowdy boys.
Seth Corse suffering from “tizit” in the back.
What happens is this: we tell the young boy, Seth Corse, he has a beetle on his back. The boy turns round and round and says “tizit, tizit?” All in attendance laugh mightily. This is a game we play on Thursdays.
The Come-Inn afloat with water Saturday.
Nothing but trouble for landlord Gus Franzen. Buckets and extra towels were loaned across the land to ease cleanup for the waterlocked sops at the Come-Inn. The building lifted clean off the foundation as if someone cut the concrete with a blade. When Franzen flung open the door in the morning he was greeted by a boy named Fig who was floating on a dinner table.
Freshly graded roads impassable.
Even when you don’t walk the full length of a freshly graded road, you must stand at the edge of the work and smell the tar and earth. Half of the crew sickened themselves with drink in Kingsville and did not arrive home in time to operate the static roller, which means the road itself is rough enough to cut the soles of your feet through your shoes if you’re foolish enough to walk over it. Passing traffic will compact the road into grooves like a pack of running dogs. I must take a shortcut through the neighbor’s pasture.
School board holding a meeting and electing teachers for the next year.
Women are intoxicating and cruel.
Emmitt Chiles is now a member of the ancient order of grandfathers. Came Saturday, and a nine pound boy.
Brought the new family a pan of lemon bars. They observed the strange color and texture of the custard filling and told me Thank you Harry, would you like to see the baby? Humiliation radiated from all in the room. Even the baby felt its first wave of humiliation, spreading across his face like the fever that would eventually claim him. That damn dog.
Worms feedin’ on the cotton crop. Time to use a wormacide.
On the back of the wormacide bottle there is one warning: Do not plunge your hands into the dark earth and hold them still until nature renews its movement and you feel the delicate pulse of thousands of worms through your fingertips and across your palms. Such a feeling will make it very difficult to use this wormacide.
By parcel post—twenty-five Jersey Black Giant chicks from Ohio. Arrived one hundred percent.
Open the manila envelope and the chicks come tumbling out, covered in their own excrement and feeling betrayed but alive, cry to the heavens, alive after a long and difficult journey, the world around them tinged with gold. They are granted five hours of freedom before they are locked in the coop out back.
The sun is trying in vain to peep between the heavy clouds.
One understands the feeling, thinking back with some shame to a dress heavy like soaking wet lead, like a velvet bag full of bullets. Everything you touch turns to fire.
Frogs croaking.
Turn them over and tickle them, the young boys say to the girls. After much conversing and screeching, one brave girl picks up a slick frog, green as a fig. She flips it over so delicately in her small palm that the boys stop their shoving and feel strange for watching. The girl extends one slender finger and runs it slowly up and down the frog’s exposed belly. When the frog urinates on her, she looks at the boys with loathing. She will later go on to swallow two goldfish alive.
A goose on the slough ranch sounds its rasping call.
The ugliest image in the area. People come from far afield to observe it and feel better about their own lives. On this morning I see a man leaning on his auto, smoking a cigarette and observing the slough ranch goose. The man flicks his cigarette into the wet ditch and drives on.
The something that makes an onion grow; an auto run; a man move and act; a bird sing—where is it generated? Anyone answer?
In the smallest chamber of the heart: Desire.
The mourning dove made her nest in the low tide ground. Foolish bird. Your eggs are now covered with water. The oriole’s nest swinging high in a tree is safe and dry.
The foolish oriole, lemon-colored, swings at the wind’s mercy and prays for her eggs. It is a wise mourning dove who drowns her eggs before they hatch, for the nature of the mourning dove is to perch on a branch above the low tide ground and grieve the swamp.
The latest fad from Paree is to tie a black silk ribbon around your ankle. For girls only, of course.
A language is born: the manner in which the black silk ribbon is tied determines the personality of the girl who ties it. A half hitch means she is searching for a kind gentleman to walk her to the market. A sheep-shank means she is a scurrilous woman who wishes to entrap a gentleman with kind words. A figure-of-eight means the time has come for sober discussions regarding the future. The children steal a black silk ribbon and tie it round a frog.
Two and half miles of cement laid on the Collegeport road in less than three weeks is some progress. Thus does our “nine-foot sidewalk” grow.
The sidewalk grows unobserved, save for the men building it. Once it is there, everyone walks on it, assuming it has always been. It has not always been.
Rosalie and her sister buying candy.
Rosalie and her sister enchant all who fall under their gaze. Their pockets are stuffed with peppermint sticks. A flock of orioles groom their brunette hair. Black ribbons tied in timber hitch knots flutter from their ankles. The bloom of youth!
The extra engine crew eating breakfast at the Come-Inn.
The boys are back from Kingsville and tired from the journey but Gus Franzen puts them directly to work, shoring up the building’s foundation and repairing the wooden slats around the door. The men blot their faces w
ith rags under the shade tree out back and lay the load of sopping rags in rows to dry. Gus Franzen serves them lemonade and promises to have their rags cleaned before the next dinner service.
Old Sport coming home for an extra meal.
Proprietors of local restaurants wave to him as he walks, saying Hello, Emmitt, care for a drink? A moment off your feet? They know that if they get Old Sport in, they won’t have to sell another plate for the rest of the night. He’ll eat a porterhouse steak before he sits down. The proprietors claim he eats more than the President, though this claim is unsubstantiated. Today, Old Sport waves them all off. He goes home and sits across the table from his new grandson. Together, they eat creamed peas. These happy days will not last.
