spider
Mae pulled a file from a drawer and the clock fell off the wall. She did not know why everything was so heavy, why the weight of this file disturbed the balance in the room. The clock, of its stark and characterless industry, dangled face-to-the-wall by three wires – one red, one black, one white. Mae’s mouth curled down at the ends while a phone clanged in the office next door.
The walls had been moving closer — she’d been feeling the shift for months — and the black squares on the tan-and-black checkerboard floor began to raise almost inperceptibly like teeth. She tripped over them on her way to the shelves, on the way to the desk, on the way to the conference table, on the way to plug in her dying laptop whose battery drained faster than it did a year ago.
A spider crawled out from under the desk, bulbous black body with long slender legs, scrambling symmetrically and without error across the vinyl tiles to the wall. Mae watched the small creature climb straight and then diagonal, like mapping out a crack, to the tall windows, where she paused briefly before slipping through a gap in the frame.
“There is no ceiling,” Mae realized.
Spider said, “Go up.”
12/6/21 – ororaphidia
She thought she was lost
But Old Woman came to her in a state somewhere between life and sleep Shook her arms, tapped her sternum, tipped her neck this way then that Until the vertebrae that held her skull on a podium grated Until the casing around her shoulders came loose, cracked and crumbled Until it all fell away. She thought she was lost But instead she was ancient ororaphidia caught, stuck, preserved in amber Sleeping, safe but still, mighty small winged thing who forgot to fly Mighty small winged thing whose wings closed and forgot to open Mighty small Paused and suspended while the world around her ended.
3/3/20 – crater
The wound is gone (I cleaned it out with vinegar and a scouring pad.), but it left a crater behind — the kind you find on the moon — gray and hardened as clay in a kiln. You left your moon boots by the door, and I check them nightly. I don’t know what I expect to find, or what I wish. I only know that they do not move.
I jostle the knobs on the door and debate whether or not to leave it unlocked.
2/18/20 – balsa
Maybe I’m the one capsized, never too good with an oar. I do not know how to negotiate right and left if both sides aren’t mine. Regardless, I am not alone here in the murk: Many of us, our paddles lost, are desperate and water-logged.
Our rescue becomes a job for shipwrights. “Be coarse as a Balsa tree,” they say. “Grow fast. Grow tall. Do not apologize for your proud insistence.” But above all else, I think it is a wise design to leave space between the grains.
This is how to float when the streets flood.
2/17/2020 – hook
I have studied you through the portholes of solitude. You stand alone in a houseboat built for four. Its panels are loose, and your hands are fists. When you sleep, I tiptoe through and tap cabin walls for sturdy beams, looking for some place to drive a nail — but nothing taps back. I think we are at sea, heeling port then starboard then port again, and the waves make me sick. You sink 20 leagues deep, and all I have is stick and string. I do not even have a hook.
2/3/20 – the matchmaker
Maryann could not keep a plant alive. Their leaves turned yellow and fell, leaving shoddy patchwork on the dining room table.
“You’re probably over-watering them,” Kendra said. “Or you could be under-watering them.”
“How about this one?” Maryann stroked one rubbery, variegated leaf. “Its leaves are already yellow.” Light from the wall-sized window fell like a sword across her face, and she squinted.
The small plant shop on the corner smelled of soil and sage and grew from the jungled mind of a woman named Blue who smelled of lavender. Tall and feathery as a Norfolk Island Pine, Blue dyed her dreadlocks green, and they hung just to her shoulders. She never said, Hello; only, Greetings. Her feet were bare, always, even now, in February.
“A Croton!” Blue trilled. She carried something short and spindly in a gray pot on her hip.
“If it’s already yellow, how will you know when you’re killing it?” Kendra asked.
Blue placed the short spindly plant by the cash register. “Who is speaking of killing plants?” she called. Her feet pattered toward them over the concrete. The bell over the door jangled as it opened and closed. “Greetings!” she called to a man in a furry hat.
Closer, Maryann noted that Blue’s large toe was wrapped in a Star Wars bandaid.
“They can hear you, you know,” she said to them. She leaned over and kissed the yellow blade of the Croton. “Now, what is this talk of carnage?”
Kendra pointed toward Maryann whose hands fell at her sides.
“I don’t think I’m a plant person,” Maryann said. “I kill everything. Not on purpose. I just… I don’t know how to keep them alive.”
“Nonsense, Honey. Everyone’s a plant person.” She cocked her head to the side and studied Maryann’s face. “Come here,” she said.
Blue wrapped one hand around Maryann’s wrist and pulled her closer.
Lavender. And something else: Lemon. Cedar.
Her hands on either side of Maryann’s face, Blue’s fingertips felt warm pressed against Maryann’s cheekbones. She exhaled slowly through her nose. She repositioned her fingers, moved them farther out, closer to Maryann’s ears.
Kendra coughed awkwardly.
Blue closed her eyes.
The man in the furry hat cleared his throat at the cash register.
Maryann shifted her focus left, then right, then up, finally settling on an overgrown vine clinging to the far wall.
“Okay,” Blue said. She pulled Maryann’s right hand into her left, laced her fingers through. “Come.” She smiled broadly, and the two women followed obediently to a shelf by the front window. “Tillandsia Streptophylla: The linguine plant.”
Its leaves, slightly hairy, curled like party ribbons and spilled over the small wicker basket containing it. It boasted no flower, no bright flashes of gold or amber, no particular aroma distinctly its own. Its green did not shine.
“An air plant,” Blue said. “This is your plant.” Again, she smiled. “Soak it upside down once a week — but never at night. That’s when it likes to breathe. Otherwise, it’s exactly as it needs to be. Let it.”
Maryann pressed one finger to a pale green leaf.
“It takes care of itself, Honey.” She tipped Maryann’s chin with her fingertips. “Do you understand?”
Maryann nodded, and her eyes filled.
“I thought you might.”
Blue pressed her hands together and bowed, her face as pleased as a matchmaker’s.
1/30/20 – no fascism.
A ghost hair stretched from somewhere behind her right temple to her left eye lashes. It slashed her purview with a blurry, crooked line. She’d forgotten about the gathering, four blocks from her house, and had taken the wrong exit. Traffic stalled between bars and convenience stores, a pizza shop, the contained center of a college campus, and a grocer selling Halal meats.
A young man, tall and lanky, wore red pants and a cowboy hat emblazoned with the American flag and lined with red, white, and blue sequins. It shimmered under a layer of glitter. Cartoonish sunglasses — also depicting the American flag — covered half of his face. She watched him stride by the grocer, tapping the glass absentmindedly. His mouth pulled into a straight line.
A middle-aged white couple in matching leather dress coats and brown shoes held hands as they crossed the street, aided by a security officer waving one hand and holding the other to say STOP.
A boy in a parka, no older than 18, held a sign on the corner. “NO FASCISM!” it read, in thick black block letters. He stood motionless, his face grim, one hand in the pocket of his parka. She watched him shiver in the cold. There would be more of him. Where are the rest of you? she said out loud through the window.
Someone honked. Another car honked in response. Soon, the line of cars, all pointed at the same 4-way intersection all honked like overlapping Morris Code messages. She bowed her head over the steering wheel and exhaled long and slow until her chest emptied.
Between a van and a nondescript sedan, a child’s red wagon sat parked and unattended. Red ball caps and beanies, scarves, and lap blankets, sat in tall piles, each boasting the short quip of the man in the suit making his way by motorcade through the streets of her city.
The boy with the sign waited. The young man in the cowboy hat disappeared into a sea of others.
She opened her glovebox and dug through the debris, past her secret cigarettes until her fingers closed around the lighter.
The air was chilly but not frigid when it hit her face. It took four casual steps to the wagon and five pulls on the lighter to spark a flame. The lap blankets were felt and caught easily. Hungry flames ate fabric and propaganda. No one notice. When the world is on fire, what’s a few more flames?
The boy with the sign nodded his approval. She flashed him the peace sign on her way back to the car. The crackle of the flames only audible to her.
1/29/20 – sticky note
I’ve got sticky notes where my thoughts should be. Nothing is permanent.
I leave them on the bathroom mirror, and they lose traction in the steam.
I leave them on my computer screen, and they turn upside down, then fold in half, then disappear all together, turning up months later in crumpled knots between couch cushions or under the bed.
I leave them on the dashboard of my car, and the messages they contain bleach out in the sun. There, but not there.
The fancier the color, the less likely the content will stay long. An unassuming pale yellow would have such staying power if it weren’t for glue that never holds.
1/27/20 – banana bread
“I think I’ve started wearing life on my hips.” She stood in the dining room and tugged at her shirt, tugged at her sleeves, tugged at the collar.
“Maybe it’s all the banana bread,” he said over the top of the newspaper. Always practical. Steam from his coffee spiraled like a question mark over his head. He never saw her metaphors.
(Although, it was true: She did like banana bread.)
But she had always liked banana bread. “It’s not the banana bread,” she said. “There’s nothing new about my banana bread habit.” She sat in the chair across the table from him, pulled on one boot and then the other. Folded in half like that, her breath caught. Air was not the only thing caught at her sternum. Nothing flowed anymore. It clustered and globbed.
“Menopause is new.” He folded the newspaper until it lay flat on the table. “Women gain weight when they reach menopause.”
She pressed her hands into her belly — soft — uncomfortably so. Her shoulders hunched.
Everything felt heavy. Everything felt full — loaded — and she was under it. It had not felt this way when she was 20. Not when she was 30. Not when she was 40. Only now. It was as if age piled weighty tomes of bullshit on a shelf, higher and higher, until the bulk tipped the whole thing over. She lay beneath the rubble: Buried.
He raised his eyebrows at her, pursed his lips. “I can see you’re being dramatic,” he said. “The face you’re making is the face you make when you are being dramatic.”
The oven timer dinged from the kitchen. The banana bread was ready.
1/26/20 – hubris 2: wreckage
The boy with the feathered hair climbed into the silver truck with the maroon stripe. “Don’t fucking ask,” he said to his father.
His father said nothing.
They drove in silence out of the parking lot. Geese gathered on the pond beside the school, everything muted behind a veil of fog.
The boy reached across his father’s chest and with a clenched fist pounded the horn five staccato blasts, timed in unison with his words:
“I!
Hate!
All!
Those!
Fuckers!”
Startled, the geese ascended en masse from the pond, and beat black-tipped wings across the road.
“Put your seatbelt on,” his father said.
The boy did. He settled into his seat and watched the landscape, lined by clouds and mist, glide past the window.
At the 4-way stop, they should have turned right, but they turned left. No one spoke.
A white farmhouse, chewed by time and neglect, leaned left. It appeared to hobble and kneel on one knee, its shoulders heavy with story. The front door hung open and on one hinge. No glass panes remained whole in any window. Raccoons and coyotes left their mark.
This is where the boy with his feathered hair and his father turned in.
They came at least once each month and picked through the wreckage, looking for something to salvage.
“The ground will take it soon enough,” the boy’s father said, “but there’s always something left behind.”
teeny tiny story windows 