“Chamber Music” originally appeared in Little Star and is included in Solarium — out now from Sarabande Books.
 
Jordan Zandi is the author of Solarium (Sarabande Books, 2016), which was chosen by Henri Cole as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize. He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Boston University, where he was an Elizabeth Leonard Fellow and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow to Bolivia. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Little Star, Bluestem Online, and The Laurel Review. He is founder and co-editor of Prodigal, an independent print and online journal of poetry and prose. He currently lives in Indianapolis with his wife and their two rabbits.
 
 
Get Jordan’s Book  
 
More About Little Star

Did you like Jordan’s poem? Share it.

 
“Oswald’s Ghost Addresses the Warren Commission” originally appeared in Forklift, Ohio and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
 

Matt Morton has poetry appearing in Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. A finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, he is also the recipient of the Sycamore Review Wabash Prize for Poetry, a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the John Hollander Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He serves as associate editor for 32 Poems and is a Robert B. Toulouse Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of North Texas.
 
More About Forklift, Ohio  

Did you like Matt’s poem? Share it!

 
“Anniversary” originally appeared in Columbia Poetry Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.

Max McDonough is a poet based in Nashville, Tennessee, where he’s pursuing his MFA at Vanderbilt University. He’s currently the nonfiction editor for Nashville Review, and has work appearing or forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Meridian, The Adroit Journal, CutBank, and elsewhere.

Did you like Max’s poem? Share it!

The old man stands at the bedside, hands cupped, steam braiding up from the bowl like ascending phantoms. Rails of light peel through the window slats, score tense wires of gold on the walls. She is writhing beneath the duvet, clutching her pillow, screaming . . . a high terrible wail, mournful, undulating . . . like the struggle of train brakes.

“Take some soup,” he says. He dips his spoon, offers it to her lips, but she swipes it away, sends it clattering to the tiles.

It was the same scream in Stryj, metallic, rhythmic, with the dirty water pouring out of her and the doctor refusing to look him in the eyes. For two nights she screamed, her skin shedding heat, while he pressed cold towels to her head, and for two nights the fever did not break and the baby would not come, and the doctor could not once look him in the eyes. On the morning of the third day he left her to go visit a friend, a druggist on Kilinskiego Street who sold bloodsuckers.

Hat cocked low, his coat frayed at the bottom, he tramped through the market square. The weight of the evil eyes like a clinching pressure around the yellow band on his arm. At the corner, he felt the solid bite of a nightstick on his woodsman’s shoulders, but he did not flinch, did not break pace.

When the druggist ignored the bell he banged hard on the glass and cried out so that anyone might hear, “Sabka is dying!” Out of fear or pity, the old Pole cracked the door open and passed him out a cup. He took it, threw a gold coin onto the steps.

At the hospital the nurse spread the beasts over her face and plump arms, and dripped water over the heads until they fell off, blind and polluted. It was a miracle, certainly it was a miracle that both mother and child survived. And the boy was beautiful.

She bites down now on gold piping. Her screams cascade into low sobs. She gazes at him through twists of steam. Her eyes are bright blue, trimmed with red. “Ohhh Elu,” she moans, “I make too much noise.”

He squats for the spoon, his knees cracking like dried wood. “Maybe a little piece of bread,” he says, but when he stands to face her again, she is gone, her eyes rolled back, drowning in blankets. He carries the soup into the kitchen.

The baby slept most of the way to Lubynsti, breathing in shivering breaths the damp wind, the sweet spice of the soil. The moon hung full and bright on the child’s face, on the wet leaves of the forest floor, and on the solitary Jew, walking with his newborn son in his arms. She had wept when she told him to take the baby to the old estate, to give him to a Polish woman who might raise him as her own.

Now the chank chank of snapping branches startled him, and he sat on a downed oak to listen. Three German soldiers appeared on the far bank of the creek, tall and silvery as wraiths. Their voices cut like axes through the slanted woods. “They are like mice, tucked into their little holes,” one said. All three were carrying Lugers, and the tallest had a shoulder-slung carbine. They moved at a stuttering clip, as if tracking a wounded animal. When one of them tried to descend to the water, he came crashing into a dead tree and woke the child with his curses.

The boy’s eyes were peaceful, blue as twilight. They seemed, to the father, unnaturally wise. He tried to chase away the old proverb of wise children and short years, then some new urgency shone in those eyes, and the tiny fingers began to work and gouge at the cheeks. Soundlessly, the father rolled up the blanket and pushed it hard over the beautiful face and held it there for a long time, muffling the baby’s peals. Wet moss soaked up through the seat of his pants.

It was a long time before the Germans passed on to the north, and still longer before the father rose, sore and stiff-jointed. When he arrived at the farmhouse, the sun had already freed itself of the trees. The bundle in his arms lay motionless as a sack of grain. The air smelled of chopped pine, of baking bread. The Polish woman stood shivering at the door, clutching her necklace. Behind her, a man sat eating eggs and onions at a wooden table, refusing to look him in the eyes.

“He is Ben Zion,” the father said, projecting his voice so the man at the table would hear. “But you will give him a Polish name.”

It was a miracle that he had not choked the boy out in the woods, and again a miracle when the Polish woman agreed to take him into her home— this Ben Zion to be named again. In the cool hush of the forest, the father paused to gaze up through the fringed arbor, then he turned around, returned to the house, and stood beneath the window, listening. But he heard nothing.

She is not screaming anymore, only sitting with her back against the carved wooden headboard, the covers pulled up to her waist. Her eyes are watchful; sweat films her upper lip. In her left hand she dandles a diamond bracelet—bright and supple, a masterfully crafted strand of art-deco finery. She smiles, or tries to smile, when he comes into the bedroom. Her white shadow. Tilting the bracelet to the sunlight, she shimmers it like snakeskin. “Do you remember where this is from?”

“From Paris,” he answers. “Sabka, take a piece of toast.”

“Not from Paris, aiver butel, your mind is gone!” She clucks her tongue with such force and petulance that for a moment he forgets the train brakes, forgets the torment of the night before. “From Vlasek’s, in Warsaw!” she cries. “I told you many times. My mother brought me there in the summertime! Vlasek’s . . . oy, such dresses they had in the windows, so luksus, and the hats with the white feathers!” With an upward flinging of hand to hair, a reflex action performed tens of thousands of times, she sets off the hollow cannonade inside her stomach and doubles over in agony.

The phone is ringing, but he cannot hear it over her screams.

High-cheekboned, deliciously thick, with sapphire eyes upturned
like a cat’s, Sabka was a once-in-a-village beauty. Even on the march to the arbeitslager she stood out like a princess among commoners in her high heels, black Persian coat, and golden earrings. Her elegance made it all the stranger, all the more dream-like, when the German soldier cuffed her on the head with his bayonet and barked at her, “Dirty Jew, your gold!” Blood dripping from her temple, Sabka slipped the earrings off and handed them over with such dignity and grace that the soldier blushed like a child.

Later, when the column had stopped, the young soldier came back dragging the town watchmaker, Nachmann, by the wrist. Nachmann’s daughter, a girl of eight, scurried along behind them. A cold rain was falling, and Sabka’s coat was matted and lustrous. The soldier stopped before her and fingered her shimmering fur and looked her hard in the eyes. “This pig tried to hide a gold ring from me.” He smiled then, this leather-bound Wehrmacht youth with his bright boots, as if to prove he no longer felt ashamed, could no longer feel ashamed, and he put the pistol in the watchmaker’s ear. His smile twisted into something else the moment before his face caught fire.

The body of Nachmann lay for hours at her feet. His face was white, semi-translucent, like a wax mold of the watchmaker’s face. The daughter kept howling and staring at the wax mask and clawing at her scalp. Sabka tried to calm her, but the next day at the camp the girl became quiet and would not eat, and the Germans took her into a field and sent her along with her father.

Diamonds, like sunlight enchained on the ocean . . . the long manicured fingers of the saleswoman clasping the bracelet over the girl’s wrist. Outside, through the great glass windows, the women of Warsaw are glowing.

In the work camp you waited in line for a crust of bread and watery soup skimmed from cattle feed. You peeled potatoes until your hands bled. You shoveled manure. You slept in the stable, like a pig. When the lights went out, swarms of black flies fed on you, and if you did not clean the stings with saliva the sores became black and infected. Some went barefoot. Some starved. If you could not work you were shot, or taken into the field and chopped to pieces and stacked like so much cordwood. At four o’clock each morning, you lined up outside, and when they called your name you had to say yes.

Each night the Germans took some Jewish women into a room and raped them. The Jewish men sat on the other side of a thin wall and were made to listen. Twice they took Sabka in. Her mother had sewn a secret pocket into her stocking girdle, in which she had stashed the diamond bracelet from Vlasek’s. When she went into the room, Sabka folded the girdle in a corner, tucked it under her rags, and turned slowly to face them. Grappling with a suddenly uncoiling universe, she rose and collapsed, rose, collapsed, like Anna Pavlova’s dying swan, some bewitched contortion of horror and grace . . . Sabka, whose mother had fed her plums in bed, whose nanny had massaged her feet and
told her stories of faerie queens until she slept . . . they hurt her, certainly, they devastated her, but they could not go deep enough to destroy her, nor did they find what she was hiding.

She sleeps now, and in sleep her face becomes smooth and quiet as milk. He slides two fingers between the window slats and peers outside. Far below:
a blue and bending sea, encrusted in white. Cracking, ever cracking, he lowers himself into the bedside chair and studies her, this woman he never deserved. His body might be gone, he would admit that freely enough. But not his mind. No, a liar must keep a good memory, and his he has nurtured like a fine blade.

He remembers the smell of the chemical tanks, the sheen of the tanning oils in standing vats on the earthen floor of the basement. Remembers her father stripping the animal hide, his arm scraping violently, eyes aflame, shouting from behind his rusty beard, “Go back to your shtetl! You are not for her!”

Sabka, who rode on horse and carriage, who smelled of sweet butter
and cheese and rose syrup . . . he could not resist her, though she was only fourteen. And when her father went away to Lublin to treat his arthritis at the hot baths, he came to her every day . . . thus Ben Zion was conceived. And a month later they were arranged to be married.

He hears the phone, but cannot move to answer it. He sits like stone, watching her sleep. Watching her dream.

The train came on a Sunday night: black, cylindrical, pluming evil smoke from the funnel. A triangle of amber lights like demonic eyes. Rumbling, hissing steam from its wheels, towing behind it fifty or so wooden cattle cars. The pale, emaciated Jews, weak from months in the work camp, were herded like sheep across the station floor. Elu pushed toward the back, pounced up onto the ticket counter and stood in peril of his life, scanning the crowd. Upon seeing her he jumped down, forced his way through the waves of prisoners, snatched her by the arm, and tugged against the tide.

“Where are we going?” she said. “This is the wrong way.”

“The train is nearly full,” he said. “If we are lucky, they will have to keep us until the next one.” Toward the back, the soldiers were beating and kicking at the laggards, and husband and wife were turned once again toward the wagons. He drew her close, clamping back his tears. The sight of her gaunt cheeks, the bruised skin beneath her eyes, her thatched hair and black fingernails, sent his throat into convulsions. Every so often, the crack of a shotgun would still the crowd and create a moment of terrifying silence. Then a high German voice would shout, “Macht schnell!” and the shoving would recommence.

They were still on the station floor when the wagons had loaded. Those nearest the tracks began to shuffle away to allow the doors to shut, but the soldiers clubbed them onward and forced them to climb up on top of the others. A frightening sound, like the howling of dogs, caterwauled inside the cars. One woman escaped from the train, gasping and screaming. Her face looked familiar to Elu, a face from his recent past . . . but it could not have been . . . no, the eyes were too black, too bulbous. The woman fell, struck her head on a bench. A soldier came up and shot her through the brain.

As they mounted, men in masks and white uniforms passed along the cars with heavy white sacks, dipping their gloved hands in and tossing quicklime over the passengers. He tried to shield her from the powder, but it rained down on them both, burning like fire on the arms and in their throats. The doors were shut and barred. He held her tightly, coughing, his eyes stinging, unable to breathe.

He remembers. Walking over dead bodies. No, not dead, they were hot . . . breathing . . . old people, children. One boy’s face he remembers. Beaten so badly he had only a nose. No eyes in his face. And some were dead. He remembers. The feeling of teeth and tongues on his legs. Sabka retching, vomiting. Only the thinnest flume of air whistling through the window. Dragging her like dead weight over the slimed limbs. Coughing, everyone coughing. He remembers. His hand rising like a detached thing from the pool of the damned, grabbing hold of the wires in the window. Remembers the scarlet blood, his own blood, coating the metal, and wrenching until he was sure bones or wire must give. And the wires popping loose from the wood. His life . . . an unbroken string of such glittering miracles.

Gathering all his strength, he hefted her full weight above his head and forced her out the window. The cold air roused her and she gave a cry, twirled to grab hold of the sill, and stood with one foot balanced on a small ledger board. “Jump forward!” he shouted. “With the train, jump forward!” The cattle car swayed wildly. Her foot slipped and she dropped, did not jump forward, simply dropped away.

He pulled himself up and launched into the wind and flew and flew and came slamming to the speeding earth and rolled head over legs and popped to his feet and rolled again. Then he was running with the tracks. The train roaring away, the poo-poo-poo-poo-poo of gunfire following him from the last car, bullets slicing at air and earth and trees. He slid on his heels down the bank and dove to the ground, and he lay there until the train was gone. When he stood to his feet, he saw that his hand was badly damaged, perhaps lost. Coughing, he hobbled along the tracks. A pale moonglow like frosting upon the forest.

When he found her she was lying face down on the gravel slope. “Sabka! Sabka!” His voice crackled like burning hay. He turned her over, and with a plunging of the stomach he saw that her face had been shot through . . . open, black, mutilated. But it was not her . . . no, not his Sabka . . . he dropped the body and ran, for minutes or hours he does not remember. He ran, and when he found his wife she was limping at the bottom of the swale, half naked, her ankle swollen, her arms scraped and bloody. But alive. He seized her, looked her in the eyes, and for a moment they did not know each other. Then they went together into the forest.

He picks up the telephone, angles it to his hearing aid. “Let him up,” he says.

Rising now, trying not to wake her with his snares and crackles, he leaves the bedroom, shuffles in socks over Italian marble floors, past silk palms and antique Chinese urns and impressionist oils of windblown poplars. Sunlight filters through the glass dome of the elevator foyer, and he stands under the golden air like some marble museum piece, watching the arrow trace its slow arc up the seventeen floors. It is the waiting that kills you, he thinks. Only the waiting.

The doctor has come alone. Bearded, grizzled, bespectacled, tufts of black hair overflowing the neck of his polo shirt.

“How is she?”

“She doesn’t eat.”

“Did you take her temperature?”

“No. She is cold.”

“How do you know she’s cold if you haven’t taken her temperature?”

“I can feel her, can’t I?”

The doctor frowns. “Where is the girl?”

“She was no good, the girl. She let her go.”

“What?” The doctor straightens up, alarmed. “Why would you do that?”

“Not me!” The old man points toward the bedroom, where the whine of train brakes keens up, as if on cue. “She thought she was stealing. It doesn’t matter. Come, come.”

In the corridor, the doctor’s eyes catch and hold on a black-and-white photograph of a younger Elu: tanned, muscular, in a bathing suit and fedora, standing under a wind-brushed coconut palm, one arm draped around a pudgy boy in striped socks and black-framed glasses. “You should have told me you let the girl go,” the doctor says. His voice is quivering.

They tramped through the forest, poison-sick, bleeding, until Elu’s legs gave way atop a pine ridge and he could not stand again. She sat on the ground beside him and wrapped his hand with her scarf. It was not yet dawn. Down below, the light of a cottage glimmered through the trees.

“We can’t go there,” he rasped. “They will turn us in.”

“What do they want with trouble in the night?” she said. “We will ask for something to clean your hand. A bit of food. Then we will leave.”

She lifted him to his feet and supported him down into the hollow. They knocked on the cottage door and a peasant woman—a Ukrainian with red, inflamed eyes—opened it. Behind her, on a dusty bed, lay a skeletal old man, either dead or dying.

“No, no,” the peasant woman said. “I don’t know who I was expecting . . . someone else . . . ” She tried to shut the door, but Sabka thrust her leg forward and blocked it.

“Please, we only need a few things.”

“Fah!” the woman cried. “You jumped from the train to Belzec! They will be looking for you. Go! Go, leave me in peace.”

“Wait!” Sabka held her shin firm against the denting pressure of the wood. “My husband is a doctor, a very well-known doctor, please, let him look at the old man.”

The peasant woman released the door. She had the nose of a drinker, rosy and pustulous. Her hands were covered with soot. She looked at Elu, and her mouth hung open and she began to sob.

“I don’t have my tools,” Elu said, limping inside, “but I will do my best.” He went to the bed and put his ear to the chest and listened to the slow, dull thumping of the old man. He knew nothing about medicine, but he nodded his head knowingly as he inspected a bottle of violet liquid on the bedside table, swirled it to the lamplight. “Good,” he said.

He remembers this. Saying “Good,” and meeting Sabka’s eyes.

Perhaps it was the most astonishing miracle of all when the old man suddenly opened his eyes and folded himself up to a sitting position. As if Elu’s word or the placing of hand to heart had blown wind over his dying coals.
The old man’s eyes were so deeply engraved in his skull that when he stood
to his feet, Elu had to glance again at the impression on the bed to be sure it was the old man rising and not his ghost. A miracle, no doubt. A resurrection
. . . the old man skittering about the room, parsing out clothing and food to the strangers while the peasant wife, half-unbelieving, washed Elu’s hand and dressed it with bandages.

When the sun came up on the next day the old man took them far into the woods, to a deep hole he had dug, and he gave them a board to cover it with and told them to stay there, that he would bring them food. The hole was only big enough for one person to sleep in at a time, and so they would have to take turns. The next day it rained, and water sluiced down the walls and filled their burrow with mud.

A week passed, and they assumed the old man had died. It was spring, and Elu knew how to forage for the good mushrooms. When it was dry enough he built a small fire to fry them on. Rats walked over their faces in the night and they had an old can to hit them with. So they survived the spring and early summer of 1943.

The doctor lays his hand on her forehead. Her body flexes, stiffens, then melts back into the mattress. Her screams take on a slower, deeper tone, as if the touch of his palm has relieved some internal pressure. The old man sits, his joints snapping like timpani drums.

“Elu, what is happening?” A strange noise had woken her in the night, and when she climbed out from the hole she found him crawling on hands and knees, dripping with sweat, and grunting like a beast. “Is it you? Is it you?” he kept saying.

She sat him up against a tree and called out his name until he cocked his head like a dog and looked at her. “Elu! You are sick. Your skin is hot as an oven. You must lie down. Try to drink some water. I will go find vinegar compresses.”

“No!” He pointed toward the hole. “To hell with them! To make us wrap those belts while they watch, to kiss the tzitzit . . . no, I won’t go in! I won’t!”

“You don’t have to do any of that. Come, Elu, lie down.”

“I took the bima, didn’t I? I called Josiah! Josiah! And the old men passed around whiskey? Stuffed their beards with leikach! Stones on the Bes Medrish, I won’t go! I cut my payes! I threw it all away!”

“Elu, you are confused. Lie down, drink some water.”

“Yes, yes . . . ” A look of slow recognition came over his face, like a lost rider happening upon some distant, familiar landscape. “You are right, my Sabka. Of course.”

When he was asleep, she put on the peasant skirt the old man had
given her and went out into the forest to look for the cottage. She wandered aimlessly for more than an hour until she came finally upon a dirt road. The dawn was like a blue whisper on the horizon, and the forest began to take shape about her. Certain aspects of the road seemed strangely familiar: the clustered oaks on one side, the tall birches leaning in even rows on the other. She rubbed some earth on her face to give her the tanned look of the peasant girls, and she walked for a while before her heart gave a flutter as she realized where she was.

The doctor’s fingers are blunted, thick as a mason’s, and yet as he draws the liquid into the syringe his motions are tender, almost effeminate. He dabs her arm with alcohol. She opens her eyes, blinks at him. The faintest echo of a scream escapes her lips. Her hand, knobbed and arthritic, rises toward the doctor’s face. “My Schaefela,” she says, removing his eyeglasses. The doctor forces a smile, one blue eye lazing toward the center.

As the needle slides into flesh, her leg muscles constrict and a deep- wrinkled, beatific smile overcomes her face. “I am happy now,” she says. “Please, it was like an emptiness before. But it doesn’t matter anymore, Schaefela. You are here.”

Padding in bare feet down her old gravel drive, she wondered if the cows were out to pasture, or if the servants still sat on the haystack to take lunch. The wet leaves, the road, the budding peonies, all this smelled to her of childhood. She thought of Elu, spreading jam on his bread, clicking his heels together, laughing at some joke of the stable boy’s.

Weightlessly, as if inhabiting a dream, she climbed the steps to the front door. Where her mother’s marigolds had once brightened the porch, a gray urn now stood, and a knotted broomstick.

The Polish woman smiled politely at her. Then her lips turned white.

“I need some vinegar,” is all Sabka said. “My husband is sick.”

The woman backed away slowly, her fingers seeking out her necklace, wrapping it tightly around her knuckles. “Stay there, stay there . . . ”

A trembling excitement, a terror, overtook Sabka. “May I see him?” she said. “Just for a moment?”

But the woman was gone. Muffled voices rose and hushed in the hall, and then the husband appeared in his robe, with his flattened nose and small ice- blue eyes . . . a demonic face, Sabka thought. He stood at a distance from her and hissed, “So, you wanted we should all die, too?”

The ground seemed to fissure, to gape beneath her.

“They would have killed us all! You are lucky, Jewess, to be alive. Now take the medicine and go. And don’t come back! There is nothing for you here.”

“What were you thinking?” The doctor is chewing nervously on his beard, punching numbers into his phone. “She wasn’t eating soup. She was shouting all day! What did you do? You let the girl go!”

Floating, floating now through the forest, her feet swollen and tired, the sky an empty blue cavern, she made her way back to Elu and the hole. He was crawling on all fours, chuffing like a pig. “He made me do it!” he cried. “To study the codes, you understand? To follow those hypocrites in their low black hats! No, I won’t go!”

She lay him down and worked the vinegar compresses over his skin, and after many hours his fever broke. Another miracle. It was the end of May, a month before the Russian bombing raids. A fresh wind blew all the next day, and when Elu was strong enough to stand they went down to the stream and she undressed him and washed him and took him in.

The doctor thrusts open the blinds, tries to crank open the window, but the lever is jammed. He strikes the glass with an open palm and cries out,
“I told you to call about this window!” Again he punches the window, this time with a closed fist, but the pane does not budge. The sunlight reveals
white streaks in the doctor’s beard. He rears back for a third strike but checks himself, envisioning broken glass. Instead, he swivels around to curse his father, the old fool, for not having the window repaired. But what the doctor sees renders him mute.

Elu is standing over the bed, palms held downward, fingertips fluttering, as if conjuring some fire from Sabka’s chest. What ancient ritual is this . . . this drawing upward of invisible matter from the sleeping woman, this wringing together of hands, as if washing, washing . . . then tossing them skyward?

In the autumn of that year he found work brushing and haltering horses for the Russian soldiers in Lwów. She rolled a cart in town, going from door to door to collect potato skins for the cows. They lived like peasants, worse than peasants, but they saved every zloty and soon they had enough money to travel to Crakow, where Elu came in touch with a cousin who dealt gold on the black market. Poor? Yes they were poor, they had nothing, but did he ask her to pawn the bracelet from Vlasek’s? Not once, though it would have helped very much. He was her servant. He had tilled her father’s soil, had felled trees at the old estate, and though she begged him to sell the bracelet, he would not think of it. It took most of a year to save enough to pay their passage across the sea.

Joy does not keep you alive, nor do you die purely from sorrow. You are created in the moment, made to worship the moment, and so you work and raise this boy conceived in the Holobotow forest, this miracle who will grow in time to be a doctor, you raise him and you feed his mouth in a cold basement of Edward Charles in Montreal. You walk on aching feet to St. Laurent to push your carriage, to buy cheap fish and meat, and it is a great distance every day. You work and save and you bargain and fight to gain purchase on life, and your fortune does not come quickly, but only at the end of a very long walk. The miracles persist, and if they lose their sheen it does not mean they are not miracles all the same.

Her body is not like wax, but of finer stuff. Of porcelain. The paramedics hoist her up onto the gurney and something magical happens: her hand unfolds, and thousands of tiny diamonds waterfall through her fingers, pour into the creases of the bedsheets, shower to the floor like shattered crystal.

His heart convulses as he watches the glittering stones spread and dance over the tiles. Sparkling memories. He remembers. Certainly, he remembers. The women of summertime, in their white feathered crowns. And the windows of Warsaw, all turned to gold.

“All Your Firstborn” originally appeared in The Florida Review, where it won the 2014 Editors’ Award for Fiction, and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.

Dan Reiter is a third-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors. He lives in Cocoa Beach, Florida. You can read more of his fiction and journalism here: www.dan-reiter.com.

Did you like Dan’s story? Share it!

 
“Thanksgiving” originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
 
Jon Loomis is the author of three poetry collections: Vanitas Motel (1998), The Pleasure Principle (2001), and The Mansion of Happiness (forthcoming in 2016), all from Oberlin College Press. He’s also the author of the Frank Coffin mystery series, set in Provincetown, MA. He teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire.
 
Get Jon’s Book  
 
More About The Gettysburg Review ]]> https://litragger.com/poetry/thanksgiving-by-jon-loomis-via-the-gettysburg-review/feed/ 0 https://litragger.com/poetry/the-unthinkable-botanical-gardens/ https://litragger.com/poetry/the-unthinkable-botanical-gardens/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2015 14:54:45 +0000 https://litragger.com/?p=16479 Read More]]> The Unthinkable Botanical Gardens

 
 
“The Unthinkable Botanical Gardens” originally appeared in Crazyhorse and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.

Travis Smith lives in Durham, NC and works as a bookseller. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Little Star, Parcel, Redivider, The Collagist, and other journals. He was a Grisham Fellow in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and can be found on Twitter: @travis_oliver
 
 
More About Crazyhorse  

Love Letter to Nike Alighting on a Warship originally appeared in The Kenyon Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
 
Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, winner of the 2012 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, as well as multiple scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. A former Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellow at Stanford University, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2014, Best New Poets 2012, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is currently the 2015-2016 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.
 
More About Kenyon Review  
 
Get Corey’s Book  

Did you like Corey’s poem? Share it!

“Look at her eyelashes,” a woman says to her friend. “She doesn’t need mascara.”

“Look at his lips,” a man says with faint disgust.

The camel lumbers to its feet and sways gently. Its expression doesn’t change and it doesn’t look away as –

“It’s pooping!” a boy yells. “Look at its poop!”

The camel strolls along the fence, moving towards a woman who calls to it. “That’s it. Come to me. Come to me,” she croons. The camel stops near her, murmurs its lips over a few strands of hay, swings its head to look at some unknown movement, some object of interest only to camels.

“He knows, he knows,” the woman chants. “He walks with the people.”

*

In the museum it is much more quiet. The rooms are high-ceilinged, the floors bare, the light cool and controlled. So are the people, mostly.

I stop in front of Domenichino’s The Rebuke of Adam and Eve and look. Adam is half shrugging, half gesturing to a cringing Eve while God swoops down to them, reclining on a couch of angels, a red silk canopy flaring above him.

“Driving them out of the garden,” a middle aged woman narrates to her friend.

The friend plays God: “‘Get out. You screwed up – now get out.’” They laugh and move on, their hard heels echoing on the bare floor.

A man looks for a moment, pauses, says: “Adam’s like, ‘I don’t know. Don’t look at me – look at her.’” Another brief laugh.

A child reads the title out loud. “The Rebuke of Adam and Eve. Mom, what’s rebuke?”

*

When the model walks in the classroom we are all disappointed. Too old, too fat, and – for half the class this too is a disappointment – male. His thinning blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail and a thick handlebar goatee obscures his mouth. He has crow’s feet and sloping shoulders and his deeply cut tank top shows the curve of his hanging stomach.   When he shakes hands with the teacher and leaves to change, I imagine him either riding a Harley Davidson or sweeping a metal detector over a beach.

The other students, most of them barely in their twenties, all of them at least ten years younger than me, exchange glances. I look down at my block of clay.

When the model returns he is wearing a thin teal terry cloth robe and black plastic flip flops. He climbs onto the turn table in the center of the room, adjusts a cushion and sits on a wooden cube.

He shrugs out of the robe, which drops to the floor.

The room is silent.

*

“Mouna is not a shy woman,” the presenter says. “But she is not used to standing up in front of a crowd and being looked at.” I am in the crowd at the Adornment Pavilion at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival looking at Mouna.   Mouna stands on stage, not used to being looked at.

When prompted, Mouna holds out her palms so that we can see the henna designs intricately stained into her skin. When asked she lifts the hem of her robe so we can see the cuffs of her trousers, embroidered with ornate silver vines. When instructed we look at her elaborate makeup, the kohl lining her eyes and extending her eyebrows so that they almost meet over her nose, the bright lipstick, the harsh lines of blush. But her eyes remain aloof, her gaze skimming over the tops of our heads, never meeting our own.

*

He walks with the people? No. This camel hasn’t walked with the people for years – possibly for his whole life. He walks separately from the people, not with them, not alongside them – as he might have in the deserts of Siberia. Instead a waist-high fence and a camel-deep pit keep us apart – but so does our gaze and our speech. We contain this camel – as well as all the other animals at the zoo – with words, narrating each and every action: “It’s looking at you … It’s getting up … It’s pooping!” Our words walk with the camel. It can do nothing without our commentary.

*

Later in the museum I walk into a room of Van Goghs and overhear the typical docent’s speech: “You can see he had a different world view from the impressionists. Notice the brush strokes … notice his use of color …” Notice his missing ear, I silently add.

But then I notice the word notice. At the zoo there was only looking at things – no “Notice that big pile of poop!” or “Notice how fat that hippo is.” The expert instructs us to notice but the people who walk though museums look. In the medieval wing: “Look at their floppy hats!” Of a painting of a painter painting: “Look – he’s painting it. Hey, look at that; that’s pretty good.”

Paintings are made to be looked at. They have no life outside of our gaze; we animate them with our words

*

When the model’s robe hits the floor he is facing away from me. All I can see is his back, an expanse of rusty body hair, the points of his elbows, and his surprisingly compact behind that almost disappears as he sits on it. But I can also see the faces across the room, the wide eyes flicking immediately to his midsection, looking first at what is usually seen last.

Every five minutes he rotates a quarter turn, and twenty minutes into the session I am faced with his bristly chest, his hanging stomach and what sat immediately beneath it – his enormous penis.

I blink and look away, at his arm, at the clay arm I pretended to work on. I don’t want the people across the room to assess my face the way I had assessed theirs, but most of all I don’t want to blush. But God it’s huge. It lies like a sultan on a fleshy satin cushion and as the afternoon passes it relaxes and – unbelievably – uncoils further.

Break is called, the model puts on his robe and his flip flops and the class flees to the hall and the steps outside. There, in clusters of two and three, they whisper; those who are alone flip open their cell phones. All look furtively back at the art room as they describe the naked body of the man they have been looking at for the last half hour, their tones ranging from scorn to fascination.

I hold myself apart from these conversations, keeping my words to myself. I don’t want to talk about what I have seen – especially with strangers. I don’t want to feel like I have to talk about it. It was a naked man. No more, no less. But later that day, during a longer break, when the rest of the students leave to buy a sandwich or a cup of coffee, I pull out my cell phone and made my own call.

*

Mouna’s gaze does not meet ours, but why should it? When the presenter/interpreter speaks in English all Mouna hears are sounds, punctuated occasionally by her own name. After awhile she stops responding to her name, trusting that “—— Mouna —— Mouna’s ——” is as benign as “As a woman from the southern part of Oman, Mouna wears a such-and-such head scarf. You can also tell from the embroidery on Mouna’s sleeves that she is from Salalah.”

The Folklife Festival is in Washington DC and people from all over the country are there. We make quiet comments to our friends and family – “Look at that embroidery,” “Look at her bracelets,” “It must be hot under all that” – until the time comes to ask questions.

“Do you have to cover your head?” Yes, the interpreter says. If you leave your house without covering your head it’s like you’re not fully dressed. “Don’t you find that restrictive?” No. It’s what we do.

“How do you clean your clothes?” We wash them, the interpreter says. “Do you use washing machines?” Yes – if it’s cotton. If it’s silk we get it dry cleaned. “Dry cleaned! You have dry cleaners – the same kind we have?” Yes. A smile.

“Are there meanings behind the patterns?” No, she says. We just like the way they look. “Really? I find that hard to believe.” Really. Another smile.

Having visited the Adornment Pavilion before, many of these questions sound dumb to my now educated ears, but I remember wanting to know the same kinds of things on my first visit. I had been afraid to ask. Now, though, I start wondering what these Omani women think of American women who are amazed that they have washing machines and insist that each pattern on their clothing has meaning. The stitching on the back pockets of my jeans doesn’t have meaning, nor do the stripes on my t-shirt. What are we looking for through these questions? And what do the Omani women hear in them? What do they see?

*

Is the Siberian camel looking at you? I want to ask the crooning woman. Or only at a shape that’s making foreign sounds and meaningless gestures?

I leave the camel and go to the Ape House. A small tribe of gorillas is on display. One paces in front of the glass, one picks through a pile of fruit and grasses, one has its back to us, and one sits removed from the rest, high up on a rock outcropping – a female with rich brown eyes. My gaze meets that of the sitter. I think we are really looking at each other. I want us to be really looking at each other. I want her to see that I am different from the other people here – the boy pounding on the glass (despite the sign that says not to), the woman who grimaces and says “It stinks in here,” the teenager who laughs, pointing – “Look at its tits!” I want her to see sympathy and understanding in my eyes, that we are two primates separated by only a few twists of a chromosome – and a wall of shit-splattered Plexiglas.

The gorilla’s gaze shifts an inch to a spot just above my ear – a spot she stares at just as intently, just as soulfully – and I know that to her I am no different from any other moving sound-making shape on this side of the glass.

*

In the museum, Rembrandt looks back at me. Not when he is a young man, but in his Self-Portrait 1659.   It is as if he is trying to communicate over 300 years and 3000 miles. The painting is dark, with rich hues of brown in his clothing and his eyes, a slightly duller brown for the background. From these dark surroundings emerges his face, framed by twin clouds of silver hair and a faint goatee under his shadowed mouth. But all of this acts as another frame – a frame for his eyes, which shine out of all this darkness with a pained warmth. I can feel the weight of his stare, the weight of experience behind his stare, and I feel that he is trying to tell me something, even if I’m not quite sure what it is he is trying to say.

But Rembrandt’s gaze is not a separate gaze, like that of the camel or the gorilla. Those gazes are independent from mine – even if they pass over me with indifference. The gaze of the art is reflective, as the gaze of animals has become. Art shows me back to myself – and me to you, and you to me.

Do you laugh at Adam and Eve Rebuked? Do you play God? Or do you stand back silently, listening to others talk, saving bits of what you hear to mull over later?

When you stand in front of Rembrandt, what does he tell you?

Whatever you read in his gaze, like the gorilla, he’ll look at the next person to walk by his frame – the bored teenager, the struggling art student, the recent widow – in exactly the same way.

*

Does the model ever look back at me? Yes.

Occasionally I meet his eyes when he is on the turntable, usually when I am working on his head or face, sometimes (disproportionately often, it seems to me) when I am working on rolling a bit of clay into a penis or flattening a ball of clay, like a jelly donut, to rest it on. Whenever our eyes meet, we both quickly flick our gaze away.

On break we all stalk the halls of the art building or sit outside, stretching, in the sun. During these breaks the model often eats Goya chocolate wafers and I try to fit this detail into the lives I imagine for him – the Harley rider, the beachcomber – but without success. An unseen boundary seems to separate him – the one who has been naked – from the rest of us, protected by our clothes. When our eyes meet outside the classroom I quickly drop my gaze, duck my head and pull the corners of my mouth into that flat, tightlipped smile that never fools anyone. I know how it must look. I don’t want to appear cold, distant, uncomfortable – but I am. I want to keep that distance between us more than I feel the social need to connect.

Back in the classroom, his nakedness begins to lose its allure. We are busy trying to replicate his shape in clay and it matters less and less what his shape actually is. The teacher points and says, “See the line of his shoulder” or “See how his calf muscle curves” or “See the angle of his knee.” That I can do; I can see his shape and understand how it can be reflected in my own sculpture. But I can not find a way to see the person who inhabits those lines and curves and angles. In the classroom or outside, naked or clothed, I can not do it.

*

Mouna never looks at me. When she is on display in the Adornment Pavilion she doesn’t look at the crowd there, but above our heads towards the crowd outside. It is hard to tell if she is looking at anything, or only standing in suspension, waiting to be released from the presenter’s droning, her incomprehensible spell.

Later I see Mouna dancing as part of the Al Majd Ensemble, a traditional dance troupe from southern Oman. Immediately I notice that she only really looks at the other female dancers. In fact, all the female dancers only look at each other. The male dancers prance and whirl around them, smiling with bright eyes, inviting them closer with a soft word or a swoop of the head but the women stay nearly immobile, each waving a corner of her robe at hip height, eyes fixed to the floor or deliberately staring into the middle distance. Is this part of the dance? Or part of the culture? I don’t know. There is more than the language barrier between us.

When the presenter had asked Mouna to show her hands, her cuffs, her makeup, she used the phrase “You can see …” This both invited me to look but it also implied a hope of engagement, that some kind of exchange would pass between us, the observer and the observed. I could physically see the henna on her hands, but with the interpreter’s help I could also see how and why it was applied. Watching the dancing I can see the motions and gestures, but I can’t see the motives behind them. I am on my own.

But of all the Omani women I see, the image that stays with me is one of a masked Bedouin woman. I can look at her – her black robes and her busy hands, a dark velvet mask covering her nose and upper lip – but through this mask I can’t see how she looks back at me. I can see her eyes clearly, but nothing else – no expression, no gesture, no words.

I know that she is looking out at the world and at me in it, but I can only guess at her thoughts. She might be looking at my bare arms the way I would look at a woman’s nipple peeping out of a bikini top. She might see my cropped hair as a punishment, a rejection of womanhood, a sign of mourning, a mark of liberation. She might think of my freedom with envy or distrust or pity. Or does she look at me with a more reflective curiosity, as I look at her?

I have no way of knowing what is behind her mask, any more than she knows what is behind my bare face. We are two people with nothing between us but distance, a distance bridged only by looking, being looked at, and trying still harder to see.

“On Looking” was originally published in The Massachusetts Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
 
Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times; Brain, Child; The Georgia Review; Shenandoah; The Rumpus; Brevity; Fourth Genre and elsewhere.  She is a nonfiction reader for r.kv.r.y quarterly, Reviews Editor at PANK, and a reviewer for The A.V. Club.  You can read more of her work at www.randonbillingsnoble.com.
 
More About The Massachusetts Review  

Did you like Randon’s Essay? Share it!

Part of me wished I’d been lied to my entire life because prolonged exposure to reality, much like inhaling noxious fumes, seemed to either kill you or leave you in a vegetative state. After my father’s suicide, I lived with my grandmother until she died when I was ten, at which point I was sent to Houston, Texas to live with my uncle.

The journey from Kolkata to Houston was my first time on an airplane. As the plane began to descend, I saw that the buildings below resembled tiny carved stones, illuminated to a saintly glow by the artificial city lights. It was exhilarating to view the world from such an enormous—and deceptive—height. In India I lived with my grandmother in a modest, one-story house on the outskirts of the city, and when I walked through the heart of Kolkata, I’d look up at the three-story mansions towering above the streets, at the kids standing on their flat roofs, and imagine seeing the world from up there. From the roof of a mansion, your lens is larger, your sight panoramic, and you can remain a stranger to the grotesque. From such a height, you are not level with the rest of the world. You are above it.

My wife Caroline grew up in a suburb of Dallas, but her childhood home resembled those Kolkata mansions; it was massive, overseeing the entire neighborhood. Caroline, who had a vaguely stoned-looking Jesus tattooed on her lower back, clung to an absolute faith in God that is anachronistic in this day and time. She was an oncologist, like me, trained scientifically. When I married her, I attributed her optimism to her youth (she was twenty-four and seven years my junior) and her money. Personally, I’d seen far too much misery to harbor such delusions. But Caroline believed in God, which is why she was bowled over when she discovered that the Jesus tattoo on her back might be killing her.

The doctors suspected that the needle used by the tattoo parlor had been contaminated, causing an infection. Her symptoms mimicked those of Hepatitis C—significant damage to her liver and fatigue—but she had tested negative for that disease. She became the obsession of several prominent doctors in Houston.

When one doctor mentioned the possibility of the Jesus tattoo being the culprit, Caroline was stunned. “But it was a tattoo of Jesus.”

“If you contracted your illness through a contaminated needle,” her doctor said, “the tattoo itself wouldn’t make a difference. You know that.”

She shook her head. “A Jesus tattoo?”

The doctors had no answers for Caroline, so she insisted that faith would salvage all. With enough prayers and determination, she believed, Jesus would make her disease disappear. After all, He was responsible for it in the first place.

Caroline had always been a vigilant Baptist, one of the qualities that initially drew me to her because I’d lived in Kingwood, a suburb of Houston, after moving from India, and everyone there was Christian. I grew up Hindu. On Sunday mornings my uncle and I played tennis because the courts were empty then— everyone was at church. As we passed by the church on the way to the courts, I imagined the hot girls in my classes in button-down tops and pleated skirts, their thighs grazing as they clasped their manicured hands in prayer, sensual and reverent at the same time. And I begged my Hindu Gods to let me briefly court Christianity until I landed one of those gorgeous white girls who volunteered in youth groups but also wore shorts revealing heavenly legs sculpted in step-aerobic classes. The Hindu Gods didn’t respond to my prayers, probably because it wasn’t kosher of me to ask their permission to stray. But, to a teenage boy, the possibility of sex trumps anything God has to offer.

Caroline was one of those Baptist babes I’d dreamt of bagging. She was as pious as she was sexy, fiercely devoted to Jesus, her patients, and her husband. Because she’d remained faithful to Jesus her entire life, she was certain that Jesus would eventually zap away her illness. But she grew impatient as, months later, her health continued to decline despite her perfect church attendance. One day, she lost it. The church parking lot was divided into sections named after characters and places from the Bible, and every Sunday we drove to church early so we could park in the “Jesus” or “Virgin Mary” sections instead of a lesser one like “Bethlehem.” That morning another aspiring Jesus parker nearly T-boned me trying to steal the spot, and Caroline shot the bird at the tiny elderly man—a gesture I believed her incapable of. Then she started sobbing.

“I’m done with church,” she said. “It isn’t working.There’s this cat retreat in Austin that Emily told me about. She hasn’t needed chemotherapy since she came back from it. I want to go.”

Everyone was high-strung then—shaken by the threat of terrorism and discouraged by a war that seemed unending. People had grown impatient with relaxation techniques like meditation or acupuncture or yoga. The newest social trend among the upper classes involved trying to inhabit the minds of domestic animals: dogs, fish, even iguanas. Cat retreats were the latest fad.

“Please,” she said. “Please.”

I found the idea ridiculous, of course, but I’d have done anything to mitigate her pain. And so we made the three-hour drive from Houston to Austin on a gray Sunday morning, our car battered by a bullysome rain, the kind that pounds you relentlessly, breaks, then belts you for another half hour. Caroline was reading from a review about the retreat she’d found on the Internet—after her health declined, she’d gone on medical leave and spent more time in cyberspace than she did in the natural world.

“‘By the end of the retreat,’” she quoted, “‘you will achieve the purest, most sublime expression of happiness, the purr. Additionally, you and your partner will be able to communicate through meows and resolve disputes not with the fractured, judgmental shards of language, but with the distilled tones of raw feline emotion.’”

“We can’t tell anyone about this. We’re doctors, for Christ’s sake. We’re going to spend the weekend on all fours, meowing?”

“This is totally legitimate,” she said. “Research shows that the experience can help cure cancer. And it should speak to you anyway. The guru who founded The Magnificent Purr lived in a colony of cats in India for like a hundred years. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him.”

“There are a lot of Indians in the world,” I said. “Not all of us know one another.”

I occasionally suspected that she married me because I was a giant of a man, six-foot-four, and Indian. She hadn’t traveled outside the United States, and when we first started dating at Baylor College of Medicine and I told her about living in Kolkata—the mansions, the begging children, the temples—she’d peer into my eyes, transfixed. I embodied a world entirely unknown to her, a land as mystical and unknowable as God. And I’d never imagined that a devout Baptist would willingly fall in love with a non-practicing Hindu foreigner. I was grateful for her attention, grateful that I could bring to her the fuller understanding of the world she so yearned for, and my gratitude in time morphed into love.

We were about a mile away from The Magnificent Purr when Caroline told me about the no sex policy. “Why?” I asked. “Cats have sex all the time.”

“The expression is ‘hump like dogs.’ Have you ever heard anyone say ‘hump like cats’? Cats are too spiritual to be concerned with sex.”

“Why can’t we just be happy to be human?”

“Because the cat’s purr is the purest expression of happiness,” Caroline informed me.

“Why can’t it be the purest form of happiness for them?” I asked. “Why can’t a hug or kiss be the purest expression of happiness for us? Or even, um, self-love?”

I shouldn’t be condescending towards cats, she admonished me.

“I’m not being condescending.”

Yes I was. And, according to Caroline, I was a skeptic too.

“I just have an objection to spending five grand on a retreat so we can eat tuna out of bowls and groom each other. Where does the five grand go?”

Toward the training, Caroline informed me.

“Who’s training these people? A bunch of stray cats?”

The supervision was important, Caroline explained. People trying to purr magnificently on their own could seriously injure themselves. And, by the way, this negative mode of thinking was exactly what was getting in my way. I was so afraid of hoping for anything.

“Maybe you’re afraid of losing hope,” I shot back.

We’d arrived. You could see the sign for the compound from the highway, and the entrance was marked with a monstrous tree with two burly branches raised in a triumphant “V” surrounded by smaller branches. It stood the height of ten Carolines stacked on top of one another.

I’d hoped the tree would put Caroline in a better mood—she was mesmerized by anything grand in nature. But as soon as I’d parked, Caroline virtually leapt out, her bangles rattling as she slammed the car door shut. She raced toward the white compound with The Magnificent Purr painted in big green bubble letters. The owners probably decided upon green because it signified birth and renewal. What a load of crap.

My wife’s arms sliced the air as she strode away. Lately she’d started wearing linen dresses, hoping, perhaps, that the carefree attitude of the linen would seep into her state of mind. As she marched toward the registration office, I could make out the tattoo on her lower back underneath the transparent sheath of a dress, that homage to Jesus that cost Caroline her health.

The meeting room for The Magnificent Purr was crammed with people with tensed bodies and loose-flowing linen clothes, just like Caroline. Everyone was missing something—an earlobe, three small toes, hair. Those with no anatomical losses had someone or something stolen from them: a teenage boy his father, a matronly middle-aged woman a husband who, while stationed in Iraq, fell in love with a civilian. These people believed that they were victims of deprivation, so you saw them no other way.

The space looked like a huge garage decorated with bright, oddly shaped rugs. Large banners crowded every corner, with sayings like “The Purr = Peace” and “Claim your Inner Cat.” The retreat leader introduced herself. Her name was Ecstasy Brown.

Ecstasy wore a loose vinyl dress that hung from her body like a shower curtain. She made us store our wallets, purses, and cell phones in lockers because she didn’t want us to be concerned with material possessions (after I’d written the check, of course). Then she began handing out these hideous bodysuits made out of synthetic fur. Caroline got the Calico, and I was stuck with a Russian Blue’s coat.

“Please remove all your clothes and put these on. Everyone should wear one to experience the sensation of having fur. There are dressing rooms in the back.”

“Have these been dry-cleaned?” I asked.

Ecstasy flinched. “We ask that you don’t worry too much about hygiene while you’re here. Focus on your soul.”

“I knew it! They haven’t been cleaned,” I whispered to Caroline. “When do we shower?” I asked Ecstasy.

“Cats don’t shower,” the woman said, “so we ask everyone to refrain from bathing during these seven days.”

“But we’re not cats,” I pointed out.

“But you’re here so you can live inside the mind of a cat,” Ecstasy explained.

“But we’re not cats.”

Caroline dragged me to the dressing rooms. The catsuit was a one-pieced atrocity with hands and feet shaped like paws with tiny acrylic nails attached to imitate claws. I dropped my pants, and my dick drooped in grim resignation. “You and me both, pal,” I whispered. The catsuit swallowed my body. I pulled the mask—a cartoonish creation with whiskers and ears and holes for your eyes, mouth, and nostrils—over my head. Here I was, being forced to wear a furry costume, crawl on all fours, and meow persistently. And I was paying five grand for this torture.

I left my dressing room in a huff and waited for Caroline to finish getting dressed. I could see through the tiny blinds on her dressing-room door. Caroline was naked and hunched over in a small chair. She had been an avid runner before her illness, and up until a year ago her body was enviably graced with muscle. But now her skin was stretched over her skeleton like a glove; no muscle provided a buffer between body and skin.

I hadn’t seen her naked in months. All that time, her body had been dwindling. At that moment, reality socked me in the face. My wife was no longer just sick. She was dying.

When she came out of the dressing room I whistled, twirling her around. “Until now I’ve never considered bestiality,” I whispered in a thick faux Russian accent, “but you, my darling, are simply too delicious.” She laughed in surprise. I grabbed her hand. Too much time had passed since we’d stood still and taken in one another.

“That is why I’m called a Russian Blue. Because until I can make love to you this Russian will be blue,” I growled. At some point, I realized, I’d lost sight of my playfulness; I’d soured my temperament until it was as miserable as Caroline’s mysteriously declining health.

*

The group meeting, which began around eleven that morning, consisted of Ecstasy’s preaching.

“You will purr.” She repeated it several times in a hypnotic murmur. “You will purr. You will purr.” Then she paused. “Two conditions. One, if you do not believe, you will not experience the Magnificent Purr. And if you do not follow our rules, you will NOT purr. Our technique is foolproof—unless you question or undermine it.” She assured us that it was all about willpower. Experiments proved that cats were the happiest of all the mammals. I wondered exactly how these tests had gauged feline contentment, considering we couldn’t exactly poll cats about it, but I let it go for Caroline’s sake.

“Cats,” Ecstasy continued, “have the capacity to transcend everyday anxieties. They are graceful creatures with an intrinsic sense of balance. And their expression of happiness, the purr, is a scientific enigma.”

“Immerse yourself in the experience of speaking cat,” she said, lowering her voice. “Soon your pain will evaporate, and you’ll be wrapped in an aura of absolute peace.”

I was sweating underneath the synthetic fur, and a rash festered in my crotch. I scratched myself and felt half the room staring at me. Don’t be so damn judgmental—I wanted to shout. No mammal, however graceful, is beyond scratching his balls.

A group of assistants strolled around as Ecstasy lectured to us. They wore yellow T-shirts with logos in big black letters on the front reading: PURR YOUR WAY TO GOD.

“Your cat suits might seem uncomfortable at first,” Ecstasy said to the crowd, though I was quite sure she was addressing the ball-scratcher of the group, “especially because we have chosen not to indulge in air-conditioning. Happiness is a state of mind. Once you learn to tune out external discomfort, you’ll be able to endure any obstacle.”

A twenty-something kid inched toward the exit. Ecstasy called out to him. “You’re leaving?”

He nodded. Poor bastard.

Ecstasy approached him. “Fear always precedes the sublime. This retreat relies heavily on the group energy of its participants. Without you, who knows what we’ll accomplish. It’s your decision. But our founder had a mantra: ‘Unless all stay till the end, we cannot transcend.’”

Two assistants ushered him back to the group. The room broke into applause and catcalls. The next hour, Ecstasy said, would be our time to silently explore our surroundings and access our inner catness. “Remember,” she said. “The purr will save you.”

Caroline scurried past me. Crawling, I followed her limp calico tail until I lost her in the crowd of furry, uncoordinated people slogging around on the floor. Double doors opened onto a lawn featuring a pond and the enormous tree we’d seen at our arrival. It had stopped raining. A man, whose portly body had been unfortunately forced into a tiny black catsuit, beat me outside and raced to the tree. I rushed toward the pond on my hands and knees, desperate to dip my paws in the water. The cat costume was unbearably hot. When I was a few feet away, someone called out behind me: “You don’t like water.”

Ecstasy was chasing after me, panting. I dashed on all fours toward the water.“Stop!” She yelled. “You’re a cat. You need to fully inhabit your feline nature.”

The huge man clawed at the tree trunk, attempting to climb it before falling on his ass. For a moment, Ecstasy was distracted. “Don’t give up,” she called out. “You are a cat.”

There’s a reason cats don’t come packaged in 300-pound bodies, I thought. I dipped a synthetic paw in the water, sighing with contentment.

She turned her attention back to me, and for a moment I thought she might bend down and swoop me up. Just try it, bitch. “You either support your wife or leave, so she can recover in peace.”

“Fine,” I mumbled.

“Good then.”She turned to walk back to the compound.

The 300-pound man-cat again tackled the tree. He made it a few inches up the trunk before crashing onto a cluster of rocks. He limped behind me as I crawled back to the compound. “I’m really trying,” he said. “But I feel like such a pussy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a bitch being a cat.”

*

On Day Two we began the meow dialogues, which had apparently healed Ecstasy’s own marriage, giving her and her husband the ability to communicate complex, nuanced feelings.

“A meow,” she said, “can convey love, anger, or sorrow. Words and sentences splinter our emotions. But a meow is entirely pure, uncensored. Don’t hold back.”

A cat psychologist supervised us as Caroline approached me on all fours. “Meow!” she belted out. “Meow,” I said, grinning at her.

“Meow!” This one was more confrontational.

“Meow.” I tried to summon the appropriate amount of fervor.

“Meow!” Don’t be so passive, her meow said.

“Meow.” Do you really expect me to get excited about meowing?

“Meow!” What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just try?

“Meow.” Because this is ridiculous. And it’s insulting to cats.

“Meow!” Fuck you for not believing in miracles.

She raised a paw, sprung toward me with a low growl, and scratched my nose.

“Meow!” I hollered. I lunged forward to head-butt her.

A woman too heavy for her tiny Siamese cat get-up yelped and threw herself on all fours in front of Caroline. She lifted a thick paw threateningly at me. Ecstasy stomped over to us, gripping a blue spray bottle. “No, no, no,” I said. “She scratched me.”

She squeezed the trigger and sprayed me in the face with a bitter blend of water and vinegar. “No,” she barked, spraying me again in the eyes. “No.”

An assistant knelt by me, holding the consent form we’d signed. She pointed to the clause reading: Violence, including but not limited to growling, scratching, clawing, biting, wrestling, head-butting, and or humping will not be tolerated under any circumstances and may result in expulsion from the premises and forfeiture of entire deposit. Day Two, and I was already being condemned for feline domestic abuse.

Apparently our skirmish had distracted the crowd from mastering their new language. Ecstasy ended the session early. “We’ll now take a brief cat-nap,” she announced to everyone. “Purr away your hostility. Forgive those who have interrupted your meows.”

I crawled to the other side of the room, curling into a fetal position. I tried to purr as magnificently as I could. All that emerged was a thick, phlegmy sound. God, I prayed silently, this better help Caroline. Have we lost our minds in trying to save her life?

*

After breakfast on the third day, which consisted of tuna fish and vegetables in cat bowls (they’d advertised it on the website as “grilled tuna mixed with delicate greens”), we attended the Creative Expression seminar, during which we were ordered to channel our emotions through imitating cat poses. When struck with a memory or emotion, we were to contort our bodies, liberating repressed feelings through our postures.

“Cats are astonishingly flexible,” Ecstasy said. “Remember, this is an opportunity for you to push the limits of your body. Now, act out your greatest hope.”

My greatest hope as a cat, I mused, would be to stand as tall as a human. I stood up and stretched into tree pose. I towered. Ecstasy rushed to my side.

“It would be impossible for a cat to get into this pose. Please try another.”

“It’s impossible for me to be a cat, right? So why can’t a cat be a human? If I were a cat, I’d want to stand taller than all the other felines.”

“You’re not permitted to talk,” she said. “Please obey the rules. This, sir, is the kind of attitude that interferes with everyone else’s ascent to inner peace.”

Unfortunately, no one seemed to be ascending; most of my fellow felines had already fallen out of their postures. One poor kid landed on her chin and started wailing. “Cats don’t wail,” Ecstasy admonished. “Enact your grief using your feline instincts, not your human ones.”

I really hoped the kid would sue the crap out of Ecstasy.

Caroline was curled up into a ball behind me, grimacing. She had folded into herself because of the pain, I realized. At times my obstinacy diverted me from the reality of her disease, which, despite her prayers and attempts to subvert it, doggedly harassed her.

“I can’t be sick anymore,” she said. “This has to heal me. It has to.”

I crawled over to my wife, placed my paw on her shoulder, and began to lick her hair, ears, face, and neck. Ecstasy nodded her approval.

“Yes,” she said, hovering over us, “grooming demonstrates that you two have an affinity towards one another.”

I ignored her. But I continued to lick Caroline’s hideous synthetic coat, her fake paws, her matted tail. Caroline leaned into me after I finished.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “That was the most beautiful thing you’ve ever done for me.”

*

Caroline and I separated for our individual therapy sessions. My feline therapist was a pretty, restless woman who had an unhealthy attachment to her pen—she tapped it against her desk, stuck it in her mouth, twirled it in the air.

“So tell me a little about yourself,” she said.

I tried. I meowed away. I complained about how unfair it was that Caroline got her Jesus tattoo to consummate her faith, and then it came back to bite her in the ass. I talked about the sweets my father brought me after work when he was still alive, and how my mother scolded him because I was already chubby, and he said that every pound I gained added weight to my happiness. And how I cried for months after he died because his ashes weighed next to nothing, and all the happiness he’d stored up in his body over the years of his life were gone. I shed all the excess weight on my body in the year after his death and mourned the loss of my own joy.

I meowed all this the best I could, and tears congregated behind my eyes, threatening to escape. The cat therapist jotted something down and said, “Your poor pet squirrel.”

I stared at her. “You’re having some problems, um, translating.”

“Really?” she asked. “I’ve been translating for The Magnificent Purr for years. Maybe you need to hone your meowing skills.”

*

I crawled out of her office at three, exhausted, and curled up in a corner with my towel. I had just closed my eyes when something furry rubbed against my feet.

Caroline peered up at me. Her eyes were amber, her pupils tiny black specks preserved inside those orange orbs. They were lovely.

“Let’s get out of here,” I begged.

She shook her head. “I haven’t been able to purr.”

“Of course you haven’t. You’re not a cat.” Her eyes clouded over. “I thought you were growing here. But still you have no faith,” she said and stalked away. I had no energy left to coax her back to reality.

*

I reported her missing at the 5:30 p.m. purring practice on the fourth day of the retreat, and at six we began searching for her, crawling around the compound. I was surrounded by a medley of meows as we dispersed. Ecstasy was driving me crazy with her tirades—she kept saying, “Someone must have seriously upset that fragile kitty” and glaring at me.

I wandered outside. It was still light out as I crawled toward the pond. The leaves on the tree were a crisp, vibrant green. In the winter the leaves would curl into decay, overtaken by a dull brownness, but for now they were in their prime. In the pond yellow and red slivers of fish ventured close to the surface.

“Meow.” The noise was coming from above. I glanced up. Caroline was shimmying up the trunk of the massive tree. She’d made it halfway to the top. A human could have never made it that high. I wasn’t sure a cat could do it.

“Jesus,” I said. “How did you get up there?”

A coquettish smile passed over her face. She responded with a demure “Meow” as she ground her nails into the bark and ascended higher.

There she was, scaling the tree with her furry appendages. In the pond I could see the reflection of my face and the smooth, elegant line of Caroline’s climb. She was no longer an awkward human, but a bold feline. The water rippled gracefully, and I wondered how the water could move on a day so still. But the water seemed to possess a grace, a rhythm, unaffected by the world’s moodiness. Light emanated from beneath the water, transforming our reflections into something divine. And, for a brief moment, I swear the entire world glistened.

Then, Caroline squealed.

There she was, straddling a tiny branch near the top of the tree, stroking the leaves like they were the ears of a beloved horse. She extended her furry arms toward the sky in triumph, grinning at me, as proud as a kid on bicycle boasting “No hands!”

I laughed, staring up at her and the light and the benevolent sky. “You’re unbelievable!” I was still laughing when the branch snapped like a broken neck. It was a swift amputation. The branch plummeted to the ground, with Caroline on it. She didn’t tense up during the fall, as humans do, anticipating the devastation to their bodies. Instead, her body remained entirely unclenched, as sleek and confident as a cat dismounting after scaling a tree. But, despite the strength of her faith, she was no cat. I was too transfixed to move for a few moments. Then I hurriedly extended my arms to catch her but couldn’t get to her in time. Part of me expected to see her navigating the skies on that branch. Moments earlier, at that tremendous height, she’d seemed invincible. But there she was, a few feet away, her head angled in such a way that I didn’t have to look closer to know she was gone.

I crawled away on all fours and kept going until I stumbled into a ditch and buried myself underneath a thatch of leaves.

Surprisingly, Caroline’s death garnered little negative publicity for The Magnificent Purr. My lawsuit—I was never able to muster my wife’s level of faith in this pursuit—was summarily dismissed after the judge ruled that neither The Magnificent Purr, Inc., nor any of its agents or employees, had encouraged, expressly or implicitly, the climbing of trees. Instead, Caroline was touted as a martyr, a woman so immersed in her inner feline that she’d achieved the impossible in climbing that tree, and had died for her faith in the Purr. Over the next several years many aspiring purrers attended the retreat, some hopeful that they too would die and, like Caroline, be proclaimed a messiah. One guy heaved himself five feet up the tree, threw himself off, and suffered only minor bruises. But no other person ever came close to Caroline’s legendary transcendence.

*

Before my wife got sick and we stopped making love, sex with Caroline occasionally aroused in me a transient sensation of God. Sometimes we’d spill into one another as we finished, and if I opened my eyes Caroline’s head would be tilted back, her lips parted in a smile more goofy than alluring but gorgeous in its sincerity. My mind would drift to the purest and most psychedelic of images— golden ornaments suspended in the sky and pillows of blinding light wafting along like clouds. I’d assail her with gratitude—I never knew an orgasm could be so celestial—and she’d laugh and press her hands against my face as though it were wet clay she was molding with her fingers. After Caroline, I never again stumbled upon the celestial. She was my last link to the divine.

I am, however, unable to part with those few moments before her death; even years later, they replay constantly in my mind, and leave me only half in the present. There is Caroline, taunting me from the impossible height she somehow conquered through her faith in a notion every bit as absurd as it was—it turned out—miraculous. She lets go of the last branch and waves her arms in celebration. She will fall, of course, but that comes later. For now, I gaze up at her delighted face from the ground, as I once gazed upon the wealthy children playing on their roofs in Kolkata, and wish once more that I might view the world and all its mysteries from that great height. —

“The Magnificent Purr” originally appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author. 

Keya Mitra is currently an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Pacific University and graduated in 2010 with a doctorate from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she also earned her MFA.  She also worked as an assistant professor of creative writing at Gonzaga University for three years.  In 2008, Keya spent a year in India on a Fulbright grant in creative writing.  Keya’s fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Arts and Letters, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Southwest Review, Slush Pile, Best New American Voices, Ontario Review, Orchid, Event, Fourteen Hills, Torpedo, and Confrontation and is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review.  She has completed a novel as well as a short-story collection and memoir. 

Furthermore, one of Keya’s novels has been a semifinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and her short story collection has been a finalist for the Bakeless Prize, the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award, and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and a semifinalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award. In 2005, Keya received a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference.  Keya also had the privilege of working as a fiction editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts for two years and edits the literary journal Silk Road.

Did you like Keya’s story? Share it!

Against the instructions, she hid what was in the brown paper bag—probably crystal—in a hollow carved out of her diary like she’d seen in soap operas on the TV. When her boyfriend discovered this, he hugged her close to his chest, rough in the orange-denim jumpsuit, and whispered, “You’ll get us both killed, doing it this way.”

She needed to do it the way the men had told her.

A few days before, in the parking lot of St. Pious High School, after the last bell sent all the girls to their cars or the cars of their boyfriends, instead of Amaya’s boyfriend she’d found a Lincoln Continental full of all his knucklehead friends, telling her that if she didn’t do someone a favor her boyfriend Thumper wouldn’t get no protection on the inside.

“The inside of what?” she’d asked.

Finally, Amaya had giggled when they told her where she’d have to hide whatever was in that brown paper bag they handed over the half-lowered tinted window. “Un-uh,” she’d said. “I’m not that kind of girl.”

In the car, the men were nothing more than four sets of black sunglasses, empty of their belief in what she’d said

 *

A week later they wanted her to do it again but, this time, it was songbirds.

Again she said no.

Again the phone calls.

“What do they need with songbirds?” she asked the voice on the phone. She missed the response because her little sister toddled onto a juicebox and squirted punch at the TV. She called her mom into the room for help, “Amá!” She asked the man on the line. “—Well, why the birds?”

“I said don’t ask questions, bitch. This is serious.”

Her mother came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands with a towel. “Mija, who was that on the phone?”

Amaya lifted her hand from the receiver she only just now realized she’d hung up. She soothed her nervous fingers against the softness of her scapular necklace. She said, “Just a boy.”

*

The songbirds sang side by side, where they perched on the flourished white rail of her childhood bed. Why had he told her not to bother feeding them? What would the men use them for? She did it anyway, pinching her father’s sunflower seeds up to each of their beaks.

Their heads cocked with hers when the doorbell rang.

*

Amaya’s friend, Christina, who Amaya admired for her correlative skills with hair, makeup, and boys, and who Amaya suspected had befriended her because her help with Comp/Lit essays was invaluable, sat on the couch using the remote to flip through channels. Amaya was scrubbing the TV screen and touching it in-between scrubs to check for stickiness. Christy settled on a soap opera and Amaya pulled her fingers away from the screen, where a woman’s naked belly was a landscape for a man’s traveling tongue.

Christy popped her gum. “Move.”

A while later, Amaya asked, “Does it hurt?”

Christy stuck her gum to the side of a bowl of popcorn and began dropping kernels into her mouth. “What?”

“You know.”

“You mean, you and Thumper ain’t never…?”

Amaya didn’t know what she was waiting for. She only knew it hadn’t come to her yet. Just a week before Thumper had been arrested, they’d been making out on the couch’s loud plastic sleeve—her mother insisted to her father that it would protect the flowered pattern. Her parents had taken her little sister to the simple-meal at church, and Amaya had told them she had a stomach-ache so that her and Thumper could have the house to themselves. But when she’d felt Thumper’s hands spider up under her shirt, and even tug the cup of one bra down under her unresponsive nipple, she mouthed the word stop like a fish gups for air.

He ignored her.

When he’d begun to hike up her plaid skirt, she’d stopped him. “I told you already.”

“I’m older, you know,” he said with his nose scrunched like the idea of youth smelled bad to him. “I’m not the one waiting, you are.”

She sat up. She crossed her arms.

After a while, he’d eased up beside her. He said he hadn’t meant it, and that he was just frustrated. He told her that it was a really painful thing for a guy, to get so close to a girl and to do nothing about it. He told her that some guys ended up in hospitals. “You know,” he said, breathing into her ear between kisses. “There are other things we could do.”

She’d turned her head away from him, but let her hand travel downward.

But none of that had been the subject of her question.

Now Amaya wrung the damp cloth in her hands and smelled the fruit-punch there, while Christy leaned toward her from the couch—its protective plastic crackled when she planted elbows on knees. “Is this about God, and shit like that?”

“No, Stupid. Why do people always ask that? It’s not like I’m waiting for marriage or nothing. I’m just, I don’t know, waiting.”

Christy looked over either shoulder for Amaya’s parents. Outside the window, as usual, Amaya’s father watered the lawn. “Then you should try it with something else, first.”

“Something else?” Amaya whispered through her teeth. “Did they talk to you?”

“What?” Christy shook her head, hoop-earrings jangling. “Who?”

“Oh.” Amaya blushed, tugging a naked ear-lobe. “Right.” She laughed. “Something else.” But then she snatched the remote from Christy and changed the channel from the soap-opera to a game show.

*

She split her rib cage open with her mother’s kitchen knife, and there was surprisingly little blood. Using paper from old Comp 101 essays and PeeChee folders from Chem, she made a nest the shape of a small tiara in her rib cage. The songbirds sang and perched on her finger, two of them side by side, like lovers. And for a moment she missed her man. Missed the smell that radiated off his shaved scalp when he was hot and sleeping against her breasts.

The birds sang for her, and she smiled. But once she sent the birds to perch inside the cage of her rib-bones and she shut the double doors, the birds went mute and turned to face the inside of her spine.

*

Next time, the knuckle-heads found her power-walking behind her sister’s stroller on the way to the park. She knew she looked thinner, but she still refused to wear her stretchy pants with the waistline folded down a few inches like the other girls did. She just wanted to look fit for when Thumper was released.

“Dang, girl,” one said from the passenger seat of the Lincoln.

She hid her loose styled hair behind her head with a scrunchy from her forearm. “What is it this time?”

*

She created a pocket, in the flesh beneath her chin, for the bull-frogs. There was no pain, but she dried out from thirst all that day because any time she neared water her throat ballooned with the frogs’ croaks of excitement.

“Que pasó?” asked her father, kneeling at a pile of weeds beside the flowerbed where the hose ran trickling.

She hurried on, clutching her throat.

*

Her bare hands served as scoops for the matter she disposed of in her father’s compost pile. After she abandoned the slippery liver among soil and egg-shells and coffee-grounds, she held up an equally slippery water-balloon, and the fish inside nosed its yellow boundaries.

*

It was a long walk down the prison’s cement hall to the visitors area. Where there’d been intestine—the large one, of course—the python writhed worse than nerves.

The python didn’t want to unwrap itself from her arm when she handed it over. Her boyfriend took it, grinning. His brown eyes reflected the wounds in her pale belly-skin before she tucked the blouse into her skirt. He was hard against the crotch of his orange-denim. “I miss you,” he said

The door clanked open and they both turned to see the guard take up the doorway. He shrugged apologetically at Thumper. “Time.”

*

When the time came for her final visit, she was excited to have done so well and she knew her boyfriend would be proud, so she did her hair and makeup extra-special before the bathroom mirror. When she opened her mouth to brush her teeth, the hermit crab—who she’d forgotten—was already busy, scuttling from tooth to tooth and picking each clean.

Its black marble eyes shone at her and she smiled, but its excited antennae tickled her uvula and in one sharp, violent chirp, she sneezed. After she’d ensured that the shot from her mouth into the sink hadn’t killed the poor creature, she placed the hermit crab on her tongue like communion, and apologized.

It chirped its own message, not insistent like Morse code but like three sharp kissy-noises, before scurrying back to lodge in her sinuses. She rushed out the door, and had already turned to lock it when she heard the rustling at her feet.

A shoebox jittered on the cement porch. She crouched, careful to slide a lady-like hand down the back of her skirt, and removed the box’s lid.

Her father called from the garden, “Mija, vén. Hurry. Look it how good my roses are doing. I told you the compost pile would work.”

Peering inside the box, she saw four mice sniffing at her rosy perfume in the air. The note inside said, Don’t forget us.

She sighed and, once in the house, shut the door hard behind her.

*

The heart had worked well, she thought, the bus pulling into the lot at the prison. Inside those fences her boyfriend was waiting for her. And inside her breast, her heart’s ventral openings and chambers rattled when the mice ran.

*

In the visitors area, where corrupt guards winked and knowing inmates whispered their deals, her boyfriend received the mice proudly into his cupped palms. “They’re all jealous,” Thumper said, and smoothed a strand of hair over her webbed ear. A spider scrambled over his knuckles and he plucked it up, put it in an orange pocket. “It’s so easy to lose track of the little guys, eh?”

“Why are they jealous?” Amaya asked, wanting to hear compliments. “Of who?”

“Of me,” Thumper said, and after her face fell in disappointment, he laughed. “Because I have you, stupid. All their wives just smuggle it in their—” and he made a gesture she didn’t want to see. “What else do you got?” he asked, looking over a shoulder, then back to her. He snaked a hand up under her skirt and set it high on her thigh. She closed her knees tightly.

The caterpillar no longer felt knuckled like a pinky-finger in her nostril. Instead, when she tugged it out, the cocoon fell away dry like the skins of peanuts. The blue butterfly perched on the tip of her nose and she oooh’d and aaah’d until its wings’ patterns stared deep into her eyes. Her brow sweated like she were under an interrogator’s lamp, until her boyfriend snatched the butterfly away with a hairnet strung across mattress wire.

“What do you use them for?” she asked.

“What’s it matter what we use them for?” He caught sight of a familiar guard and smiled, sent off a nod. The guard went back to trading something into a prisoner’s hands.

When Thumper tried to wrap Amaya in his arms, she shook her head. Amaya wanted to have it over with, to be able to say that she’d done her duty and not at all like those other girls did, and she opened her mouth to say that there was finally only one more thing left inside of her. But she couldn’t speak.

“Is there something else?” he asked. “Come on.” He crossed his arms, the net he’d crafted tapping his temple to show her where his doubt lived. “Give it here.”

The hermit crab cluttered her lips. It had perched on her bottom front teeth, where it wagged its claws and insisted its chirp on the room, at the man.

“What did you say to me?” Thumper asked, and her bridge to him collapsed on her with his brow.

Amaya shut her mouth and shook her head no, to signal that the hermit crab’s critical tone had never belonged to her. But this felt like a lie, so she smiled and ducked her head into her lap. When she attempted to pluck the crab from her mouth it pinched her. Oh well, she thought. I should just let him handle the poor creature. What more is there to say? He should know it by now. They should all know it. I’m not that kind of girl.

Just then, the guard’s curse called their attention to where he leaped and swatted the air like a child after a balloon. And there, hovering out of reach of his grabbing hands, was a lone songbird flapping up to the ceiling. It flitted at the highest window, a bright shard of stained glass against the bleached light. It sang a call to something that she knew couldn’t respond, and it made Amaya feel the no-feeling of heart-valves that didn’t rattle, of a rib-cage with nothing perched in it. She tongued the hermit crab into her cheek and stood. “That’s everything.”

Amaya walked the long hall, tongue-petting the chittering crab watching out over her lower lip. She walked away from the place shrinking now behind her as she tried to shrink it from her memory. Amaya tried to think of one more place inside herself, this time not to hide but to abandon, and she found that the best place to abandon a memory was right here in a bare cell in her mind, in a place no one else could get to. She imagined that the cell had no entrances, and no exits. And she imagined that, forever, he would be there—her boyfriend, surrounded by the other jeering men—standing on stacked chairs, swatting a net. And, lastly, she imagined she’d be forever out of reach. No matter how many times he whistled, or how sweetly he said it: “Here. Here. Come here, you pretty bird.”

This story originally appeared in Versal and has been reprinted here with permission of the author. 
 
Christopher David Rosales’ fiction has appeared in anthologies and journals in the U.S. and abroad. His first novel was published this summer by Mixer Publishing. In 2009 that novel, Silence the Bird, Silence the Keeper, won the McNamara Creative Arts Grant. He won the Center of the American West’s award for writing in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Rosales is the fiction editor for SpringGun Press, and he is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver. His second novel, Gods on the Lam, is forthcoming in 2016 from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing. 
 
Purchase the Book  
 
More About Versal  

Did you like Chris’s story? Share it!