The astronomer fell in love with a lonely poetess. They lay on the roof of the astronomer’s old car and tried to trace their names in the sky. “I love you more than the Moon,” said the poetess.
The astronomer thought for a moment. Then she said, “The moon is beautiful but it is harsh, and it has a dark side. I would not like to love the moon.”
“I love you more than the brightest ring of Saturn.”
The astronomer shook her head. “Saturn’s rings are thin and cold, made of dirty snowballs. Close up, they are ugly. There is very little to love there.”
The poetess rested her fingers between the astronomer’s. “Well I love you more than all of the stars.”
“There are billions of stars,” the astronomer sighed, “and not one of them has a word for love.”
Defeated, the poetess lay silent. The astronomer curled herself into the poetess’ side, turning away from the stars. “I love you without compare,” she whispered into the poetess’ ear, “your arching spine adds art to the beauty of the backbone of night, your eyes pull my gaze away from the sky. When I fell in love with you, I fell from orbit.”
The poetess laughed. “You never stopped having your head above the clouds. I have always seen you as a celestial body, and you lifted me up.”
“You are the one thing that makes me happy to be on the ground.” And the astronomer kissed her.
Chào mừng bạn!
Rất vui được gặp bạn.
I'm Amy Sarah.
I am a survivor.
I work at NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center.
I like Sailor Moon.
I like whales.
I like space.
I like Viet Nam
And I like writing
I also have a Sailor Moon blog
and a ballet blog
• life is worth living
• Submarine Dreams Whale Club
• tutoring and donations.
• about the author
• reach out.
• Write something for my blog. The Last Nereid
Githyak and I are sitting in a seedy bar on the northern continent of Dawson, a lifeless rock on the edge of the Perseus reach, when he turns to me with a spark in his eyes that I’ve never seen before. “Let’s blow up the fuel depot,” he says.
I almost spit out my beer. “Where the fuck did that come from?”
“You saw the memo the company brass sent around today.”
“Another pay cut. So what? We don’t have anything to spend it on out here besides the joy of drinking ourselves to death on Charon’s bar. If I really needed more money I’d pick up a job at Alexi’s.”
“You’re pretty enough.” He laughs and glances down at my chest. I know he hasn’t gotten laid in months. He calls Dawson the Dwarf Kingdom because half the women have bristly beards. And the ones who didn’t have beards all worked down at Alexi’s. “But that’s not the point,” Githyak says. “They cut our pay again. Again! If this keeps up, we’ll be slaves by the end of the year. And out here in the reach that wouldn’t even be illegal.”
“Okay, so we blow up the fuel depot. I can think of a few problems with this plan. First of all, the depot is ninety million miles away.” This is true. The depot is a vast space station that receives tankers from planets all around the system. It is in orbit around Yukon, a planet that probably would be a nicer place to live than this rock, if not for the fact that it’s a gas giant. “Second, once we blow it up, where the hell are we going to go? They’re going to catch us and feed us to the tau dogs, taking bets on who will survive longest.”
“Those would all be problems, but I have an in on the security force.”
“No. No way are we commandeering a cruiser.” I put my face in my palm.
Kyle the bartender is standing across the bar from us now. “Any refills for you two?”
I look at the water beaded up on the outside of my empty beer glass. “I’m gonna need something stronger. Dammit I wish I could get a jack and coke out here.”
“Can’t help you there, but I did just get a shipment of Arcturan scotch whiskey.”
“Damn. Then Arcturan scotch whiskey it is. On the rocks.”
“Comin’ right up.”
When Kyle returns with the whiskey, Githyak drops a few crumpled credits on the counter and says to me, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“Damn it, Yak. I haven’t even started my drink.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Speak for yourself. You’re the lunatic going on about the plans that end in certain death.”
But sure enough the next morning I’m sitting in the copilot seat of a security escort cruiser speeding across the system towards Yukon. I always find traveling through space to be tense. You can be going thirty million miles an hour and feel like you’re standing still. Spaceships can just turn off their engines when they reach cruising speed, so the ride is preternaturally quiet and smooth. The anticipation of imminent chaos makes my stomach churn.
“Does this thing have any weapons?” I ask.
“It has a tractor beam.”
“Great, we’ll tow the depot to death.”
“Don’t you remember when I explained this plan to you last night?” Githyak says, shaking his head.
“No. Last I remember I was downing a glass of Arcturan scotch whiskey while you tugged my arm towards the door.”
“I told you you were drunk.”
“No big deal. So what are we gonna do with our tractor beam?”
“Nothing.”
“Great plan, Yak. I’m with you one hundred percent.”
“Would you just listen for once?”
“Would you just think for once?”
“Fine,” I say. “Go on.”
“My contact left us some black-c charges in the back.”
“But those need to be planted. We can’t just throw them.”
“That’s why you’re here. You have EVA training.”
“No fucking way, Yak.”
“Okay, I know you don’t like this, but just hear me out. Nobody is going to know we were the ones who did this. How could they? What would you rather be doing right now anyways: catalyzing social change or pole-dancing at Alexi’s?”
“I still don’t like it.”
“We’re almost there, suit up.”
Yukon is getting bigger in the window, and the light glints off a speck moving around its orbit into sunlight. I float into the back of the cruiser and start getting into my spacesuit. The charges are in a small metal case. I run through the quickest way to do this. I’ll plant the charges on the dark side of the station and when they go off the whole thing will go up in a thermonuclear fireball. I admit, I smile a little at the thought.
Githyak pulls us into the dark side of the station and holds position a few hundred feet from the wall of one of the depot’s impressive cryo fuel tanks. I open the airlock.
The glide to the surface of the station feels like an eternity, even though it only takes thirty seconds, tops. When I land on the surface I power up my magnetic boots and stand up. I have to get my bearings, the tank is so large that I feel like I am on a small moon. I hear Githyak come in over the comm link in my helmet. “Come on, set the charges and let’s get out of here.”
“Give me time. I’d rather not blow myself up today. Don’t worry, we’ll be able to see this explosion all the way from Dawson.”
There are five charges, and I plant them in a wide pentagon around the outside of the tank. When they blow, they will crush the tank and start an out-of-control fusion reaction in the station’s helium-3 supply. I look up to where Githyak is waiting in the cruiser, but I can’t find the ship. “Hey Githyak, not funny. Come pick me up.”
“Sorry babe, I had to bug out. The whole thing was a trap, my contact betrayed us.”
“I don’t see any security ships. You could drop in, pick me up, and we’ll be out of here in time to watch the fireworks.”
“I’m too far for that. Sorry.”
I look down at the timer on the closest bomb. Less than a minute. I take one look up at the crescent of Yukon drifting across empty space. I sure wish I had a jack and coke.
In hindsight we all know it was inevitable. Gracie was only ever halfway there, the other half of her was trapped on the edge of the razor between life and death. We were simply waiting for the day when we would call and she wouldn’t answer, and we wouldn’t hear back. We were waiting for the day when our respective parents sat us down in our respective living rooms and explained that the funeral would be on Thursday. I hope the others had been more optimistic than I was, because when my parents told me, I realized I already had my outfit picked out in my mind. I took the black trousers, black turtleneck, and charcoal grey jacket out from the back of my closet and I hung them on the inside of my bedroom door, over the mirror.
The casket is closed. I am in the second pew with Hallie and Emily. I have a golf pencil and I’m drawing squares on the inside of the program. The squares have our names: Hallie, Emily, Annie, Gracie. I try to arrange the squares so that our squares evenly surround Gracie’s, but I can’t. There is always one exposed side. But I keep drawing squares with names in them. I feel Emily watching.
Gracie was different every time she returned from the hospital. She always had stories. One time she told us about a girl who was so drugged up that she didn’t realize she was on her period and she was just standing in the hallway bleeding all over the floor in front of the nurses’ station. Gracie cackled as she told the story. I just felt sick to my stomach. “It sounds horrible,” I said.
Gracie shrugged. “Not good, not bad. Normal.” Normal was her word. Her way of keeping herself ambiguous, undefined. When you asked her “How are you?” she would usually say “normal.” It took some getting used to.
The pastor begins with the usual. “I did not have the privilege of knowing Grace, but in the time I have spent here with her family and friends, I feel I have come to know at least a part of the extraodinary person she was.”
I laugh. A loud, piercing laugh. Hallie punches me in the knee and I look around and see people with their heads down, or looking up at the pastor. Gracie’s uncle Jim is seated at the back of the church and he glares at me. The preacher stutters. “She isn’t extraordinary,” I mutter, “she’s normal.”
We knew all about her razors, we knew where she kept them, and we knew that if we took them she would just get more. So we let her do it. It was one of the things that made her feel like she was a part of the world. One night she slept over at my house and we went for a midnight dip in the hot tub. As she stripped with her back to me, I realized I had never seen her bare legs before. When she turned around I saw her narrow thighs criss-crossed with dark red scabs, raised silvery scars, and dark burn marks. I hugged her. “I know,” she said, “I look like I got run over by a lawnmower. Now let’s get in the hot tub.”
The next week she was in the hospital again. She had tried to drown herself in the bathtub. I called to invite her over and her mom answered and told me what had happened. Hallie and Emily and I went down to the breakwater and threw rocks into the ocean.
Gracie’s mother tries to speak at her daughter’s funeral. She stands at the pulpit above the polished wooden box. I wonder what Gracie is wearing, in that box. Is her corpse naked? Somehow I can’t imagine her wearing combat boots and black tights with a pink dress to match her bright pink hair. That’s not the kind of person you picture in a casket. They burn up like a blue star, gone in a flash, giving their ashes to the world. Nobody can bury their flames.
Gracie’s mother is crying now. My stomach is twisted, upside down. Emily knows it. She places a hand on my thigh, a hand that takes me by surprise and floods me with warmth. The pastor helps Gracie’s mother to her seat, and leads us in another prayer. By the time he says “Amen” I am positive that the entire funeral can hear my heart pounding. “Now,” says the pastor, “Gracie’s best friend would like to say a few words.”
My legs stand and begin carrying me to the pulpit, to be sacrificed to the god that is Gracie. And as I pass the coffin my heart shudders and I think: what if the box is empty?
“Have you ever heard of this guy named Schrödinger?” she asked.
“Well, yeah.”
“Well I hadn’t but this guy in the ward was a physicist. His room was right across the hall from mine and even though we weren’t supposed to go into other patients’ rooms I would go into his sometimes. He told me about Schrödinger’s cat. The cat can be alive or dead but since the box is closed the cat is both alive AND dead.”
“Which is all well and good but if you keep the box closed too long the cat will starve or suffocate or something,” I said.
“That’s not the point.”
“Well what is?”
“The point is that if you put me in a sealed box I will be both alive and dead. Which makes me some kind of god but I’m not a god I’m just me but I’m both alive and dead because of physics.”
I stare at the casket for a few seconds and stare down at the framed picture surrounded by flowers sitting on the polished surface. In the picture Gracie is laughing, she has the widest smile. And her shock of pink hair is swooping over her left eye as she tilts her head back. Beside the picture I can see my own reflection in the varnish on the casket. I look ashen, like a ghost. And that face is the one the congregation sees as I stand at the podium.
“Gracie wanted to be a god,” I begin, “but she was stuck in this cycle of being normal.” A smile creeps across my lips but I feel my throat closing. I squeak the next word out. “She would always respond to ‘how are you?’s with ‘I’m normal,’ like she was disappointed that she hadn’t metamorphized into an angel since her last visit to the hospital. But perhaps her belief in the normalcy of her life was what kept her go—“ I stop. It didn’t keep her going. She’s dead. She’s in that box and she’s going to go into the ground and she never did become a god.
After her final stint in the psych ward, Hallie, Emily, and I would call Gracie every night before bed and we would talk for about an hour because we were the most important people in her life, and we were the ones who could make her believe in herself. We knew we could. But the thing we couldn’t admit at the time was that we knew a night would come when Gracie wouldn’t answer the phone, and neither would her mother. A night would come when she toed the line between life and death one final time.
And now, stopped midsentence, shaking with sobs, I know that she couldn’t have become anything else. If I were to open the box, I would not find her alive and dead. I would find her sliced open by Occam’s razor, bearing the last scars she would ever wear.
“That town became synonymous with Genevieve, and every June when I packed my steamer trunk and my parents loaded it into the back of the minivan I could already smell her—she smelled like sweat and shampoo and sunscreen. She was something savage and feminine. And the way she seemed to rewrite her biology every year gave her the quality of a goddess. My last thought as I buckled my seatbelt was always ‘I wonder what Genevieve will look like this year.’”
— Henri Gifford-Erdmann, Eleven Julys
Do you remember when the storm washed the pier away and we still wondered whether they would ever rebuild it? That was how we grew up, “they” was our favorite word. They did everything. They solved world hunger, they sent rockets to space, they wrote books and magazines, they said the world would be fine. But they never repaired the pier, and the gaping hole in the boardwalk grew damp and rotten. We became a town that used to be a beach town, and was now just a town with a beach. In school our U.S. History teacher said they approved a new federal budget, that’s why they couldn’t repair our town.
There was this one kid named Arthur and he would go down to the beach after school every day. He wandered the shore looking for flat rocks and driftwood, and he piled them by the crumbling supports of the ruined pier. The other girls and I would ride past on our bikes and laugh at him. We called him King Arthur, and his pile of flotsam was “Camelot.” We hopped off our bikes and curled our toes over the edge of the boardwalk. “Hey Arthur, nice sand castle,” I cackled.
“Go away, Bea, it’s not a castle.”
“Aw but it’s so beautiful,” I mocked.
“You’re just as bad as the rest of them. When I rebuild the pier I’ll show you.”
“Sure you will. You know they’re never going to rebuild that thing.”
“I know they won’t, that’s why I’m doing it.” He looked me right in the eyes. “Did you ever think maybe we should do something instead of always waiting for someone else to do it?”
“It’s their job, Arthur.” I threw a pebble at him, and then my group got on our bikes and sped down the boardwalk to get some ice cream.
Do you remember what happened to Arthur? I heard he grew up to be a serial killer. They called him the Camelot killer because he killed his victims with a broadsword. Nobody ever did repair the pier. Do you remember when we still lived in that town? Just another name they drew on a map, slowly being washed away.
The sun is high overhead as I haul in the last net for today. Bracing my right foot against the transom I take the net in both fists and pull, remembering to duck to avoid cracking my head on the boom as I back up. I drop the net onto the deck, where the fishes, abducted out of their aquatic world, thrash and jump, spraying silver and purple and green light into the bright blue day. In the barrel they go.
I’d love to stay here longer, but today is the day of the Dragonbirth Festival, and it’s my birthday. I stow the nets and head to the bow of the boat to enjoy the sea for just a moment before I begin the sail back to shore. The ocean to the northwest is—as far as anyone knows—endless. The dragons may know what lies beyond this vast outer sea, but we, not knowing, and fearing that unknown, say that beyond the ocean lies the Black Mountains, the unforgiving peaks through which we must journey after we die. Regardless of what the truth is, however, sitting here and gazing out to the north, one really could believe that the ocean goes on forever, that the whole world is ocean, that even our island, with its forests and mountains and rolling fields, is merely a speck atop this vast, enveloping blanket of water.
I close my eyes for a moment, breathe in the salt air, listen to the seagulls back on shore and to those that follow my boat, hoping to catch a snack. Usually I do have a sardine or two for the friendliest birds. I can feel the boat rocking gently, and the soft fingers of a warm breeze affectionately roll along the exposed skin on my stomach and my shoulders. I take a deep breath and begin to sing:
Arwa sa’i wyrim a sako
Alla yah’a siwa a tai’oh
Sekkarith osen therabanth yue’i
Nim sora de nan yuda’i
The long, high notes soar out on the breeze, and I open my eyes. Far off on the horizon I see a pair of dragons dancing on the waves. They fly high above and then plunge in head first, only to emerge seconds later from a new spot on the surface of the ocean, spiral around each other rapidly as they soar into the air, and then dive once more. Must be fun, I think. And before I know it I’ve been sitting here watching these two dragons play for the better part of an hour. I slip back to the stern and turn the boat back towards shore.
At the end of the summer before I was a high school senior, all of the neighborhood kids decided we were going to have a bonfire. Mom and Dad dug us a big fire pit in the back pasture and we carried rocks out of the dilapidated rock wall in the woods beyond the farm. The rocks formed their own little wall around the fire pit, so the flames would not spread onto the field. Everyone found sticks, logs, branches, newspaper, broken furniture, rotten pieces of plywood—really whatever flammable things we could get our hands on—and we piled them in the back of my pickup and drove them out to the pasture.
Through the hot afternoon we built all of the wood we had found into an enormous teepee, with a “log cabin” as tall as I was inside of it. We admired what we had created, its branches stretching towards heaven, a monument constructed at the pinnacle of a culture all our own and greater than we had ever known or could possibly foresee. We admired our creation knowing it would be destroyed in a matter of hours.
But living in North Haverhill, we were accustomed to impermanence. Throughout the spring and summer we grew up our fields full of green and red and yellow, caring for the crops every day; and by the time September arrived, my family’s farm was full of light and color. Two months later the color would be gone, and there would be in its place bare fields, bare trees, and cold wind carrying the first white flakes of winter. In the winter, my brother Alex and I would build elaborate snow forts, with deep caves, watchtowers with staircases, sitting rooms, and pictures carved on perfectly smoothed walls. We reveled in the beauty of our winter castles, castles that would sink into the field with the coming of spring.
Thus our bonfire could have been seen as simply another exercise in impermanence. But it was much more than that. It was something that us kids had decided on and planned independently from our parents—imagined by Alex and Freddie Munroe as they were looking down on our lazy bend of the Connecticut from the top of Moosilauke. We were, of course, all in love with the idea. The adults took care of getting the permit and digging the pit, but everything else was ours.
As the sun dipped below Wrights Mountain we doused the log cabin inside our bonfire with diesel fuel and ceremoniously set fire to it. We watched, awestruck, as flames licked through gaps in the teepee before catching, reaching far into the sky. The nine of us sat on seats made from sections a log and felt the heat from the flames dance across our skin. I was sitting next to Freddie’s sister, a girl about my age named Julie. After a few minutes of letting the heat sink into our bones, she leaned over to me. “Andy, we need some music.”
I smiled and picked up the small instrument that had been sitting on the ground behind me, my mandolin. After warming up on my favorite song—a little Appalachian song called Whiskey for Breakfast—Ben Wilson joined me with his guitar and we launched into the Sally Gardens Reel. The Boland sisters, Eleanor and Sheila, had been taking Irish dance classes down in Hanover, and they jumped up and jigged and reeled around the towering fire. Before long we had a full-blown céilidh going in the back pasture. Notes sailed over the flames, licking skyward as we bobbed and twirled and stomped.
Later on, people collapsed on the grass around the collapsing bonfire, and I wandered off along the path that ran up from the pasture behind the orchard. “Andy?” I heard Julie Munroe’s voice drift through the gnarled apple trees toward me. The first chill of autumn breeze followed her voice down over me. I squinted into the darkness between the trees and saw her dark figure lying in the tall grass. The grass crunched and snapped under my shoes as I walked to where she was.
“I didn’t know you were up here,” I said, lowering myself into the grass beside Julie. “Why aren’t you down enjoying the bonfire with everyone else?”
![A Submarine Dream
“What are your dreams?” she asked, and I ran my fingernails along my collarbone. I did not know this girl who took my hand as she stepped out of the surf, but I felt her pinging inside my skull as her cold skin brought me to my knees. I cast down my gaze because I knew my dreams were cold. I used to call myself yumekui and I stole dreams and I hid them away in dark corners in the vain hope that they would save me. They glowed in the scary places in the empty closet and under the bed. But they grew there, and I believed that was in the nature of dreams to become nightmares. I couldn’t swallow any more dreams, I sent them out to dwell among the cold outer planets, and I tried to forget them. She crawled up from the abyssal plain with translucent skin and bioluminescent hair, a girl out of my dreams. “I dream of you,” I said. She laughed then, and her voice was pebbles rolling into tide pools. “Do you know who I am?” she whispered into my ear. And the gossamer hairs behind my ears stood up in the space between elation and terror. “I can make your dreams come true.” I saw a vision of distant space, where I left the nightmare creatures to asphyxiate while their blood boiled away. I saw that dream fading and I felt my heart warm and my skin cool. I longed for the embrace of the sea. “All I want is you.” She kissed my ear and she sounded like a conch, and she let her body dissolve into mine. Bioluminescent stars draped themselves along my hair, and my skin grew pale and translucent and coated with a soft jelly. Razor-narrow fins grew from my ankles and gills opened in my neck as I desperately gasped for breath to fill lungs that were no longer there. And I dove into the sea. I blinked and my eyes grew large and luminous, so that my last look at the land was distorted into a bubble vignette. And I dove away into the sea, to dream new dreams in the living darkness.
[Image Credit: .:.Seafloor.:. by ~Aerys54][Prose Credit: submarinedreams]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8f1faf837b52958715c43beacbd46334/tumblr_mh5t9itutW1qj6j3po1_500.jpg)
A Submarine Dream
“What are your dreams?” she asked, and I ran my fingernails along my collarbone. I did not know this girl who took my hand as she stepped out of the surf, but I felt her pinging inside my skull as her cold skin brought me to my knees. I cast down my gaze because I knew my dreams were cold.
I used to call myself yumekui and I stole dreams and I hid them away in dark corners in the vain hope that they would save me. They glowed in the scary places in the empty closet and under the bed. But they grew there, and I believed that was in the nature of dreams to become nightmares. I couldn’t swallow any more dreams, I sent them out to dwell among the cold outer planets, and I tried to forget them.
She crawled up from the abyssal plain with translucent skin and bioluminescent hair, a girl out of my dreams. “I dream of you,” I said. She laughed then, and her voice was pebbles rolling into tide pools.
“Do you know who I am?” she whispered into my ear. And the gossamer hairs behind my ears stood up in the space between elation and terror. “I can make your dreams come true.”
I saw a vision of distant space, where I left the nightmare creatures to asphyxiate while their blood boiled away. I saw that dream fading and I felt my heart warm and my skin cool. I longed for the embrace of the sea. “All I want is you.”
She kissed my ear and she sounded like a conch, and she let her body dissolve into mine. Bioluminescent stars draped themselves along my hair, and my skin grew pale and translucent and coated with a soft jelly. Razor-narrow fins grew from my ankles and gills opened in my neck as I desperately gasped for breath to fill lungs that were no longer there. And I dove into the sea.
I blinked and my eyes grew large and luminous, so that my last look at the land was distorted into a bubble vignette. And I dove away into the sea, to dream new dreams in the living darkness.
[Image Credit: .:.Seafloor.:. by ~Aerys54]
[Prose Credit: submarinedreams]
One. Your eyes have learned to trace the same arcs between the numbers that explain your surroundings. The other senses are unnecessary, incidental to the task, so you shut them out. This is the way you have been taught. If you know the numbers, nothing will go wrong, nothing will spin out of control, nothing will be unexpected.
Two. You watch her on closed circuit television as she screams at the walls and pulls out her hair. The others are complacent, quiet, still. But she beats her fists against her breast and you can imagine the sounds escaping her throat. You imagine they are something primal, unevolved, animal.
Three. A woman with a name badge prepares your lunch, and you eat and talk with the men who share your position across from the LED digits and cathode ray screens.
Four. You recall physical laws as her body bounces off the walls of the cubic space with no visible doors and only your electronic eye for company. You watch the bruises spread, and you note their locations and their color. The chemicals are not working on this subject. She tires, slows, sinks to the ground, and grows quiet.
Five. You pipette a pale green fluid into a tube and insert it into a cold centrifuge. You spin it down. The precipitate is grey, the supernatant: neon green. The foam on the subject’s lip matched this color. The computer quantifies the composition of the liquid. Your eyes trace the arcs between the numbers.
(Source: submarinedreams)
One. Your eyes have learned to trace the same arcs between the numbers that explain your surroundings. The other senses are unnecessary, incidental to the task, so you shut them out. This is the way you have been taught. If you know the numbers, nothing will go wrong, nothing will spin out of control, nothing will be unexpected.
Two. You watch her on closed circuit television as she screams at the walls and pulls out her hair. The others are complacent, quiet, still. But she beats her fists against her breast and you can imagine the sounds escaping her throat. You imagine they are something primal, unevolved, animal.
Three. A woman with a name badge prepares your lunch, and you eat and talk with the men who share your position across from the LED digits and cathode ray screens.
Four. You recall physical laws as her body bounces off the walls of the cubic space with no visible doors and only your electronic eye for company. You watch the bruises spread, and you note their locations and their color. The chemicals are not working on this subject. She tires, slows, sinks to the ground, and grows quiet.
Five. You pipette a pale green fluid into a tube and insert it into a cold centrifuge. You spin it down. The precipitate is grey, the supernatant: neon green. The foam on the subject’s lip matched this color. The computer quantifies the composition of the liquid. Your eyes trace the arcs between the numbers.
Monty Python reference to the side, stay tuned for an announcement of next issue’s theme, for which submissions will be opened on Thursday.
Thanks to everyone who’s purchased a copy of the inaugural issue on Amazon; we hope you enjoyed it. I’m also pleased to announce that the inaugural issue is now available on iBooks and Barnes & Noble. Just 99 cents (US) in all three places, so there’s no reason you can’t have a copy of A Literation on any device you own!
We appreciate your patience and support as we break through our growing pains. There will be some changes to the submission guidelines, so make sure you read through those before you submit.
Thanks again!
Jen
Editor-in-Chief
Yo! This is what’s up.
: a portrait
Here is how I build a bicycle: I start with the back and move forward, the way the camera pans up the actress’ legs, starting with her high-heeled shoes. I don’t know what her face looks like yet; I haven’t gotten there. I build the rear wheel, carefully choosing the cassette. I attach the wheel. A camera pan up the actress’ front is very different from a pan up her back. We are left imagining the hollows behind her knees, or the places where her stockings lift away so slightly from her skin behind her ankles. With the bicycle, however, you walk all around the repair stand, you have to make sure that the wheel is on properly, check how the rear derailleur lines up when you attach it. I move on to the bottom bracket, this is the heart of the bicycle. This is where the camera seems to pause on the tantalizing hem of the actress’ skirt, your imagination flies up under that skirt, along those hips, between those thighs. I thread the bottom bracket cartridge into the frame, tightening it with a torque wrench until it is firmly in place. The cranks are supposed to be tightened to about three hundred pounds of torque. When I attach the front derailleur I slip a penny in between it and the large sprocket to line it up just right. At the top of the actress’ skirt, the camera shows her white shirt tucked in. The skirt nips in her waist and the flare of her hips swallows you up. Next it’s time to attach the fork. The headset cups hold everything in place and the fork slips up through the headset. You need to put the stem and the cap on the headset to keep the fork from falling away. This is where the camera threatens to stop on the swell of the actress’ chest. And when I attach the handlebars, this is when the camera slides over the skin on her collarbones, her shirt slightly open. By the time the camera gets to her face, I’m ready to move on. I don’t even see it. I attach the brakes and the chain and the saddle and the pedals and run all of the cables and get on the bike and ride it.
Then on Monday I’m sliding into black stockings and a tight but sensible skirt and a white shirt with the top two buttons undone, and I’m putting on grey shoes and climbing into my American car. Because you wanted to know: my bra size is a C-cup, I’m five feet and ten inches tall—six-foot-one with heels, my waist measurement is a skinny twenty-seven inches and my hips curve out to thirty-six inches. My eyes are green, my hair is brown, and my skin is a warm olive color, but if you are like me, you were done before you got to my face. I don’t blame you, when I look in the mirror and run my hands over my body, I make myself wet.
At work, I always have lunch with one of the women who works at the front desk. She thinks we’re best friends. She’s small and quiet, with smart, perky breasts and a tight, athletic bottom. She doesn’t know how great her body is. She always talks about how if only she could lose five pounds or why doesn’t anyone look at her in that way. She wants to have someone desire her. At Ruby Tuesday’s she points out men from our office and asks me if I will introduce her. I won’t. I want her all to myself. I tell her that I’ll pay for lunch. She complains that I always pay. I explain that my salary is ten times her salary. She gives up. I smile and flip a french fry into my mouth. She has no idea what I’m doing to her.
There’s another girl, in the group I go cycling with after work. We’re the only two women in the group. The other women, a while back, got tired of getting dropped by the guys so they formed their own group. The guys don’t drop us. She asks me if my boobs ever get uncomfortable when I’m riding, and she worries about the loss of sensation between her legs. No, I say, thinking, if anything, the way my breasts sway—ever so slightly in my sport bra—is too comfortable, exciting even. I notice the way drivers look at me when I ride past. And the other thing I tell her is that sexual pleasure is all in your head, anyways. I wonder if she knows how much that concerned look she gives me turns me on.
The man who comes to my house almost every night has a wedding ring on his finger. He works for a rival company in hardware development. He’s Asian-American, with skin as smooth as a baby. I will never be in trouble for his affair because Americans are still racist and I can still pay a lawyer enough to accuse this man of rape. We have rough sex. I like it when I feel like I am being punished for something. I like it when he feels like he can do anything to me. I like it when he bites. I make sure he is very drunk when he leaves. I want to stop seeing him.
He doesn’t mean anything to me. One of my friends from college invites me to a gallery opening she is having in New York. Afterwards she wants me to fill her in on the last five years. She says I look like a model. I think she would benefit from some plastic surgery. She invites me to spend the night at her apartment and I tag along. I keep thinking of a photograph in her gallery. It’s a picture of the hollows behind a girl’s knees. It’s a beautiful photo, and it’s very innocent. When I tell my friend that it is my favorite photo, she asks me if I remember it. When I tell her I don’t, she laughs and tells me it’s a picture of me.
We get out of the taxi and climb four flights of stairs to her apartment. Along the way I learn that she shares the apartment with her boyfriend, the stairs smell like bleach. I thought you were a lesbian, I say. Not anymore, she answers, shoving the key into the lock and checking the door open. Once inside, she immediately changes into a set of yellow flannel pajamas. I smile at her from the kitchen, a glass of whiskey in my hand. She looks at my shoes and laughs and asks if I’m planning on getting comfortable. I ask her if she is ever attracted to women. Who isn’t, she says. I ask her if she’s attracted to me. Who isn’t, she says.
I only loved one woman. Where is Rebecca?
When I got tired of shaving my legs I paid for laser hair removal. I’m told models do that all the time. It didn’t even hurt as badly as I thought it would. Pain is all in your head anyways. When I do work on my bike I wear shorts and a tight tank top, that way I can glimpse my legs out of the corner of my eye. They are really incredible legs. You’d think so too, if you ever met me. You’d remember me, and I would probably forget you. Nobody gets me off quite like I do.
Nobody but a man knows how to get what he wants. They’ve perfected it for thousands of years, and they always get what they want. Men always knew how to get me. They had to own me. I always wanted to be possessed. I wanted to feel trapped, controlled. I always managed to belong to powerful men. You make them bid for you. The most powerful, manipulative, and brutal men will win. You’ll belong to them for a while. It’s fine though, because if they are powerful enough, they don’t want you forever. I always managed to get what I wanted.
Do you remember when we first met? At the beach. We were both there alone. That happens when you are successful; you spend a lot of time being alone. I was buying an ice cream cone, and I caught you staring as I slipped the change back into my bikini top. I smiled at you, knew you from somewhere. We’d seen each other in the library. We both loved to read. That’s what you were doing, reading. You were shaded by a beach umbrella with a school of fish printed on it. I was suddenly shy. You licked your lips. I’m Rebecca, you said. The way your hair fell over your shoulders made my knees shake. I was lost in your hair.
It’s a bright Friday and the girl I ride with is wearing a kit from her favorite pro team. One of the guys wants to take my picture with her; they really like having the two of us ride with them. I let my hand slide a little too low on her hip as we’re smiling for the camera. She has her arm around the small part of my waist. She likes to bump her water bottle against her ass to close it while she’s riding. I’m riding behind her and I see the small wet circle on her left buttock. I chew on my lip.
After the ride, I’m at home. I’m still wearing my kit. My nipples pucker quickly when I massage my tits. I’m lying on the carpet in the living room. I run my hands over the slight cavity of my stomach, into the pinch of my waist. My breathing is harder. I slip my hands under my jersey; the sweat from the ride makes the skin on my stomach cool to the touch. The skin on my breasts is cooler, and they get goose bumps when I slide my hands under my sport bra. Soon my fingers turn around and slip under the waistband of my shorts. I’m all wet between my legs, but I don’t touch there, I never have to. I rub my hips, my butt—I massage my ass—my inner thighs. I chew down on my lower lip for a moment and then I orgasm right there on the living room carpet.
I play online video games on my LED high definition television. When the boys in the game hear my voice they want to know how a girl got so good at the game. I just shoot them in the head. No need to explain how I got there, I just need to prove that I can. I’m also ten years older than they are. I know they think I’m the most amazing woman in the world. I walk into video game stores just to get that look. These boys are nothing to me. How did I get here?
I’m refining some more nuanced aspects of the proposed advertising campaign—brainwashing an entire segment of the population is truly an art—when a message appears on my desktop. This is the last you’ll hear from me, it says, goodbye. It’s from the man who has been fucking me every night. I don’t reply, just close the window. I see that my hands are trembling so slightly, think, that’s odd. I line up the smart-phone on the advertisement with the model’s bellybutton; it nestles in the curve of her hip. I smile. Women want to be it; men want to have it.
Later another message appears on my desktop: I’m sorry but I was just wondering if we were going to go to lunch today, you know, like we’ve been doing. It’s from the receptionist at the front desk. I look at the time in the corner of the screen; it’s one thirty. I stretch my arms over my head, squeezing my eyes shut. Yeah, I write back, I’ll be there in a few. My jacket is hanging on the door of my office, it’s a trendy thing, cropped just below my breasts. Three-quarter length sleeves. Black. I like to wear black. My pencil dress has a satin panel across the stomach. I lock my office door behind me.
I ask if she wants Japanese food for lunch. She would love it. The restaurant smells of fish and sugar. I know how to use chopsticks. She tells me she is planning to see a movie tonight but she is wondering if I will join her. I smile at her, there is a grain of rice stuck to her lip. We’ll carpool, I suggest, ask her to write down her address for me.
Do you remember that fight? How I won? How all I needed right then was to win the fight? You were so pitiful there, crumpled on the carpet where you’d collapsed in tears when I grabbed your wrist. I needed to win the fight and then I needed to make it up to you. I’ve heard people talk about how “make-up sex” is the best kind of sex. I’m not one of those people. I do it grim, dutifully. You looked up at me and I pulled you up in my arms and led you over to the bed. If I could do it again, I never would have led you to the bed. I wouldn’t have fought you in the first place. You were the only thing I couldn’t own.
One summer in college I got a job driving a limousine. I drove white-collar professionals to and from the airport. I wore a black skirt-suit, black high-heeled shoes, black gloves, and a little black hat. I loved the uniform. I would pull up in the pickup lane at the airport, take two suitcases from a red-eyed businessman and put them in the trunk. He’s slightly overweight, smelling of cologne and recirculated airplane atmosphere. I open the back door of the limo and he gets in.
That was the summer when I learned that, with some men, you can just tell when they’re not satisfied with what they’ve got. He’s staring at the hem of my skirt; then he’s staring at the breast pocket of my jacket. I take the next exit and park the car away from any traffic. He’s salivating. I slide into the back seat next to him. I ask him if everything is all right. He reaches for my knee. Bold, I think. I slap his hand. I ask him what company he works for. Won’t agree to anything until he tells me. Then I name my price.
The first time I went to your apartment you let me borrow your pajamas. They were cotton. You told me I looked cute. Would you believe that was the first time I can remember being called cute? You made penne, and we drank cheap wine while we wore our pajamas. I laughed. You couldn’t afford a bed, so we slept on a mattress on your floor. I buried my face in your hair and held your warmth against my belly. In the middle of the night my crying woke you up, do you remember that?
In ultraviolet light, scars stand out against the canvas of the body. Fault lines criss-cross the sacred skin, inside of which I slide and twist and turn. Science has not yet discovered a way to stop the body from aging. Every incision we make to cheat time takes its toll, leaves its mark. After all the implants, the lifts, the tucks, why do we care? This thing is just a body, no scalpel can change who I am. Then why do I care?
After a month I wasn’t cute anymore. You called me hot. The words fell in the air as I panted under your lovemaking. You made the air heavy around me, I felt like I could fill every corner of the room. The faults and fissures of my body slipped and struck, seismic waves rumbling through my core. And as I opened my eyes wide in orgasm, you kissed me.
On the last night of his affair, the Asian-American man left my house, climbed into his SUV, and drove slowly down the street. I stayed inside and picked up the fifth of whiskey he had been drinking and cradled it in my arms as I slid into bed. I remembered how he showed up earlier in the evening, after telling me I would never hear from him again. Says his wife found out, they’re getting a divorce. Says he couldn’t think of a better place to go. He drinks in my kitchen. He drinks all the way into my bed. In bed he says he thinks he loves me. I say, who doesn’t. We fuck. I tell him it’s over. I think about the girl at the front desk and the girl in the cycling club. I think of the beautiful things I will do with them. They found his remains inside the SUV at the bottom of the bay. Apparently it was rather gruesome.
On the highway I see billboards that I produced. I have never met a man like the ones on the billboards, but I am the woman on them. Don’t call me a monster. People are afraid of monsters, monsters do horrible things. I only wanted beauty, I wanted to live a beautiful life. I smile as I think about the cyclist and the receptionist. I hope they like each other, I tell myself. I am driving to dinner with the two of them, it’s on me. Afterwards, we’re heading to my house, a girls’ night. I have high hopes. Women are beautiful.
Where did you go, Rebecca? Why did you leave? I still love you. I hope you read this. I never got a chance to say goodbye. If you care I’ll say it now. Goodbye, Rebecca.
Chandra wore her face like a cracked mask dug out of the recesses of her grandmother’s attic. Decades ago it had been bright, framing green eyes at a Twelfth Night party put on by the Crystal Club in a city whose name was tangled in Gulf Coast seaweed. The scar across her right eyebrow shone against her olive skin; the scar in her lower lip formed a hollow in her burgundy lipstick.
She was a girl who wore her face, inhabited it like a borrowed thing. When we were girls we would dig through her grandmother’s closet and find old shoes pushed into the back corners. Styles we never saw on our mothers. We paraded around the room wearing the shoes and too much jewelry while Chandra’s grandmother made beer-batter waffles downstairs, on Sunday mornings when the sun was bright on the herb garden. When we were older she said, “I never thought I would want to borrow the light reflected off of basil leaves.”
Many years later we dug through boxes buried at the bottom of my closet, two weeks before I would say goodbye and fly to a city whose name was caught in the jagged fault between ocean and desert. Chandra pulled a book from a tattered cardboard box. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. My grandmother had given it to me when I was a young girl. “May I,” she said, “borrow this?” She had always been so brazen about asking to borrow things, but this time her voice grew soft. I remembered sitting with her and reading about painstakingly logical Alice on the bank beneath the herb garden.
I took the book in my hands. It was worn. I had forgotten it was in this closet. And I handed it back to Chandra. “Keep it,” I said, “I never lend a book.”
Ten years vacant, her eyes scan the cracks in the concrete as she waits for the bus. The bus will take her away from this place. These doctors, these pills. She smiles for the first time in years, and as the bus approaches, she tosses her pills down the storm drain.
“Sarah, it is so wonderful to see you like this,” says her mother, wrapping her arms around Sarah’s narrow frame.
“It is wonderful to see you too, Mom.” Sarah kisses her mother on the forehead. But her eyes drift to the locked knife drawer, the locked silverware drawer.
“You must be exhausted. Dad brought your things up to your room. I hope you like them. They should be a nice change.” Sarah stepped back and stared at her mother with a gentle smile. “Well go ahead, honey.”
“Okay. I’ll be back soon.” Sarah tiptoes up the carpeted stairs to her bedroom. The bedroom of the eighteen-year-old girl she left behind. The room is exactly as she left it, besides the window over the bed, which has been replaced. And the sheets have been cleaned. She buries her face in the pillows. They are softer than hospital pillows, and they feel safer. They aren’t harsh and sterile like the sheets in the institution.
Sarah opens the bottom drawer of her dresser and unfolds a set of pink flannel pajamas. She breathes in their scent, and puts them on slowly. She looks in the mirror on the back of her door. Already her eyes look more alive.
Sarah wakes with a start in the middle of the night. She can hear the house creaking, the tree across the street groaning. The quiet, the darkness, she does not remember them ever being this intimidating. This oppressive. “Mom?” She whispers. “Daddy? Evie?” She starts to fear for her family. They are all in severe danger. She takes her blankie and walks out into the hallway.
The nightlight in the hallway is motion sensitive and it flickers on as she walks past, illuminating the empty landing. The doors to her parents’ and her sister’s rooms are all closed, and when she places her ear to each door, she can hear her family sleeping.
“See Sarah,” she whispers, “It was nothing. You’re just not used to the quiet. Tunbridge always was noisy at night.”
Sometimes I had dreams about flowers. The kind of flowers that Old Yao Fei used to talk about, blooming in fields, dressing the branches of trees each spring, dropping petals to the wind between the buzzing of bees and a sky sprinkled with clouds like pillows, clouds like the dumplings Mama would cook each year on my birthday because they were my favorite food.
Super old story of mine. Bringing it back because I was thinking about it.
