Tenderoni

My boyfriend and I grab our bikes and pedal across town for a parade which has probably been cancelled anyway. Ahead, Mark's skinny calves pump, his day glo rain poncho flaps behind him like a flag. He stops and gets off the bike and I catch up to him. 

"Oh, damn,” I say. “A kitty.”

"It looks sort of lumpy," he says. There's a drop of rain holding on to the tip of his nose and steam rising from his shoulders. "We should move it."

There's a big to-do for several minutes as he searches for something to push it with. He tells me he doesn't want to use his bare fucking hands and I tell him of course, no one would. He finds a sodden cardboard box and peels off one side of it and shapes it into a sort of scoop. 

"These ponchos are worthless."

"Stop goading me," he says. He's trying to work the cardboard under the kitten's carcass. He takes off his sneaker and nudges it. Stuff oozes out, soiling the toe of his shoe.

A car comes and we go back to the side of the road. It weaves around the kitten, but another one comes behind and roars right over it, flattening and severing its head from its body and we go back out and stare at it awhile. 

"Put your shoe back on, baby." 

He studies my face and tells me if I have to smoke, if I'm going crazy, I can go clog up my lungs under the viaduct and I tell him I'm not going crazy yet. 

The scoop falls apart in his hands. His glasses are splattered with rain. He pulls them off and rubs his bruised looking face, the new whiskers on his chin. I hate watching him struggle, but he struggles a lot so I'm getting used to it.

"Fuck," he says. "And fuck and fuck and fuck and fuck."

Though you are dead now. Though I walk covered in dust through this strip mall in Iowa. I remember the collection of tendencies that led me here. The flat landscape. The blazing heat of cornfields. The landscape and body are one sensation.

Everywhere the books of atmospheric pressure. This book smells like miracles. That you were the chapter. That I was the slaughter. That sheep, my inheritance. That you were the shepherd who lead me here. Your hand reaching out to strike. Your hand reaching up to brush the hair from your brow. I never knew which. I never knew when. Your hand.

The cornfields are memories. You can not remember anything. The road is filled with dust haze. Your life is. Your death. I can not find it in this landscape. This collection of tendencies.

Though you are dead now. Though your hand would reach to strike. Though your hand would reach up to brush. The hair from your brow. Though light penetrates this. It is flat. It is frozen in self-image. I must resist the symbiotic wish. I must void the infantile condition. That region. This region. The atmospheric pressure in the vicinity of living.

Though you seemed invincible when your body moved. Though the way your hand. Would reach to your brow. Even though dead. Even though each wave of light penetrates. Even though only seems to slaughter. Sheep of inheritance.

Wake up at 4 a.m. Walk out naked to the porch. Skin shimmering. The way the word porch clings. The creaky swing. Dark lake of the body. What is always erased. The way your hand would reach to your brow and wipe your hair away. And it was always your hair. Always yours. And your face jutted into the landscape. This nowhere. This clicking sound of insects. Late summer.

—The twins were found dead Sunday night in their father’s home after police got a call around 8pm.

We found him lying

on the bed—

not asleep, but neither

quite awake—his eyes fixed

on the wall behind us,

and below him, tucked

beneath the bed

were the two small

bodies, bundled together

in a large towel and placed

face down.

 

How long had they lain

there? And him

above them, covering

them with his body,

the way a man might

throw himself on a grenade

and wait

in that long still moment

for the world to erupt.

"hello.

i'm marie calloway.

thanks for your XXXXXXXX XXXXXXX blog and other writing. especially your essay on pornography called XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX. those things have really broadened my mind. (before was strict classical marxist.)

please look at my tumblr if you want."

I sent that email in March. He didn't respond for months, so I felt a little embarrassed thinking he must have seen my email and ignored it.

But then I got this response in May:

"thanks for reading!

You can tell I don't check this email account very often, too lazy even to set up a forward — sorry for not responding sooner — I will start following you on tumblr —"

"thanks for replying

i didn't know you have a tumblr

i couldn't find a non XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX email for you.

if you want please read my writing zzz

http://thoughtcatalog.com/author/marie-calloway/

tao lin liked both stories zzz

x"

"I liked the Thought Catalog pieces in a Tao Lin-ish sort of way — that is, they are so direct yet make me experience an abstract discomfort, a spiritual sluggishness — reading that I realize it may not sound like a compliment, but it is.

also — you can email me at ___@_____________.com — I think I am shutting down the XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX thing."

"i'm glad you liked my writing. zzz maybe this is weird but sometimes i wondered if you would hate it/hate my blog since it could be seen as the self-absorbed narcissism you write about a lot zzz getting writing published felt weird though, and all the attention. i kind of didn't like it. still i asked tao lin if he would be interested in publishing a compilation of my stories/photographs thru muumuu house. zz

will you release a book soon?

plz add me on fb if you want."

"couldn't figure out how to add you on Facebook — I am sort of a Facebook dummy, despite writing about it all the time

maybe you can add me

Because you loved me, you grew
cybernetic sparrows as beautiful
as real sparrows, programmed them
to always inhabit the sky so I would forget
what it was to be lonely. How you broke
into the eggs before the birds hatched,
pierced the membrane and vitelline to attach
receiver electronics and tungsten electrodes,
I’ll never know. The day I made your heart
into a machine, the air turned black
as a sickening. Sparrows fell to the ground
like every mistake I had ever made.

It would be foolish to assume

that anything is composed of tiny dots.

That dots make up the universe.

That the universe is a kind of dot.

It would be disastrous to assume these dots

cohere by way of an invisible force

which extends from nowhere

into everything, everywhere.

When someone dies their soul

looks just like them and floats

above their gurney. If they were 30

years younger, they would tear the dress

off a nurse. It’s been this way

in every war ever fought. Souls

hovering over the battlefield.

Nurses completely dressed.

It’s impossible for a cube of light

to exist. Impossible for you to carry

that cube of light across a vast plane

of darkness through a forest of pines trees

to a house in the woods. It’s impossible

to enter the house and hand the cube

of light to William Butler Yeats.

Time flows up and down and around

the tiny dots. Birds fly out of the trees.

I don’t care for perfectly clear weather.

I keep myself busy all day.

Para Isabel

Francisca said: Marry my sister so she can stay in the country.
I had nothing else to do. I was twenty-three and always cold, skidding
in cigarette-coupon boots from lamppost to lamppost through January
in Wisconsin. Francisca and Isabel washed bed sheets at the hotel,
sweating in the humidity of the laundry room, conspiring in Spanish.

I met her the next day. Isabel was nineteen, from a village where the elders
spoke the language of the Aztecs. She would smile whenever the ice pellets
of English clattered around her head. When the justice of the peace said
You may kiss the bride, our lips brushed for the first and only time.
The borrowed ring was too small, jammed into my knuckle.
There were snapshots of the wedding and champagne in plastic cups.

Francisca said: The snapshots will be proof for Immigration.
We heard rumors of the interview: they would ask me the color
of her underwear. They would ask her who rode on top.
We invented answers and rehearsed our lines. We flipped through
Immigration forms at the kitchen table the way other couples
shuffled cards for gin rummy. After every hand, I’d deal again.

Isabel would say: Quiero ver las fotos. She wanted to see the pictures
of a wedding that happened but did not happen, her face inexplicably
happy, me hoisting a green bottle, dizzy after half a cup of champagne.

Francisca said: She can sing corridos, songs of love and revolution
from the land of Zapata. All night Isabel sang corridos in a barroom
where no one understood a word. I was the bouncer and her husband,
so I hushed the squabbling drunks, who blinked like tortoises in the sun.

Her boyfriend and his beer cans never understood why she married me.
Once he kicked the front door down, and the blast shook the house
as if a hand grenade detonated in the hallway. When the cops arrived,
I was the translator, watching the sergeant watching her, the inscrutable
squaw from every Western he had ever seen, bare feet and long black hair.

We lived behind a broken door. We lived in a city hidden from the city.
When her headaches began, no one called a doctor. When she disappeared
for days, no one called the police. When we rehearsed the questions
for Immigration, Isabel would squint and smile. Quiero ver las fotos,
she would say. The interview was canceled, like a play on opening night
shut down when the actors are too drunk to take the stage. After she left,
I found her crayon drawing of a bluebird tacked to the bedroom wall.

I left too, and did not think of Isabel again until the night Francisca called to say:
Your wife is dead. Something was growing in her brain. I imagined my wife
who was not my wife, who never slept beside me, sleeping in the ground,
wondered if my name was carved into the cross above her head, no epitaph
and no corrido, another ghost in a riot of ghosts evaporating from the skin
of dead Mexicans who staggered for days without water through the desert.

Thirty years ago, a girl from the land of Zapata kissed me once
on the lips and died with my name nailed to hers like a broken door.
I kept a snapshot of the wedding; yesterday it washed ashore on my desk.

There was a conspiracy to commit a crime. This is my confession: I’d do it again.