Again.
I...you know what, just read the gosh-dang title. I have an awful cold and I've been in a daze all day. I'm not explaining things to people!
(Uh, except that this is the beginning excerpt from another story I started on Wednesday or Thursday.)
(Also worth a mention: the universe apologized today, I think. What are the odds of thinking, "I wonder if x will be on the train I'm about to board?" and then having the doors open up to reveal that person? Very bad odds, very good situation.)
---
But he’s here, isn’t he?
Oh, no.
But he was just gone, wasn’t he?
Well, yes. And the water outside glanced meanly at the sun, which stared into the tall eyes of the woman answering in two words. He was gone, again, and she (his wife) didn’t particularly enjoy nosy people probing her about it. There was the expectation of an explanation, a spreading of palms and a laugh. Maybe a roll of the old green eyes, and a shake of the head, hair growing spitefully white in streaks following. She gave neither of these, instead letting her face fall closed. It was easier to shut these annoyances off than to let the interaction flow the way they’d been learning since they all’d emerged, beating their hearts and wailing loudly, from their mothers’ contracting wombs.
Jess, you’re alone too much up here.
Oh? She wasn’t too concerned about that, but her name provoked a response. She clenched her jaws closed, to retract the small admission of participation.
What if you were attacked or got hurt?
By what, Mama?
The older woman shrugged, her hair long ago whitened like the valley sun unmoving above her shoulders. They weren’t in the valley. Mother was visiting.
Anything might attack a woman alone.
Jess grew tired of these insistences: a woman alone was more susceptible than a man alone, a woman alone might fall down and then she’d have to lie there and die but a man might pick himself up, or heroically crawl for help. Mother wouldn’t have said such things about Bill being home alone. She sighed and stood up, lifting her sweating glass of lemonade off the table.
Mama, I’m going inside.
I’ll stay out here. Lake’s nice today. There’s a good—
Come inside later. It’s hot out here. And keep drinking that glass, alright? The door swung shut behind her, rattling indecisively to usher the taller woman inside. Mother, left outside, put her sunglasses back on and resumed her passive study of the lake.
Behind the door (and a slight left down a short hallway), Jess pushed the glass of ice across a smooth countertop and pressed her palms into its cool trail. Bill used to make her lemonade, on summer days when she was younger and working outside—never constrained to womanly work, gardening or lazily manicuring the juniper bushes that rimmed their front yard, but pitching the gaps in the small rowboat Bill built, trimming large arms from the trees and hauling the broken branches on her own scratched and sweating back. The light would play across her strawberry blonde hair then, she imagined, dusty and mangled by the breeze off of the lake. Bill wasn’t home now, and as a manner of habit hardly ever was. Jess bit her lip and supposed that the days of working for small treats were over.
She walked past herself in the hall mirror and sat on their bed, feeling weighted. The days that had passed since he’d left this time—Just going Somewhere, darlin’—were without number or consequence to his wife. Thirty-three years was too long to count on. Her palms against her forehead still had the moisture from the glass; she expected more coolness from the clinging water. The obnoxious tepidness stirred her to get up, suddenly—away from the bed and its hot heavy sheets and untraceable memories. With her hands cradling each other, Jess swept her way back into the kitchen. The blue jeans she wore as a remnant mannerism from her more labored days slid unevenly over her legs in the thinness of the foothill heat.
Jess, there’s a few of those turkey vultures circling out here.
Her daughter ignored her; turkey vultures were always circling in the hills. It was certainly nothing new to the older woman, either, having lived her long life in the valley between (by very definition) two sets of foothills. And so she only knocked on the wooden frame of the screen door as she slid past. Her mother turned her head, just slightly, eyes ripe with cataracts sweltering in the afternoon heat.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Raw city
Hello hello.
I haven't updated in a while because my life has, once again, become quite hectic. I was hardly writing for a week or two, which is kind of something I do when big things hit me--I broil in my emotions for a while without even touching pen and paper, and then suddenly I just have outstanding output. Last night alone I wrote something like twenty pages: started and finished a short story, finished that short story that's been up here for a while (at long last), and started another story (about 10 pages in already). No poetry, shockingly--I've just been in the mood to write a lot of raw, gritty, depressing-as-all-get-out stories.
And that brings me to the started-and-finished story! It's pretty short, just barely eight pages long, and it's pretty much just an open sore of everything that's been compounding in my psyche as a result of aforementioned recent events. Writing it hurt and exhausted me--usually a good sign. But I'm still undecided on the issue of actually publishing it, as it leans heavily on actual people and real situations, and I really have no idea who all actually reads this thing (hello to my visitors from Asia and Europe! There are apparently a lot of you. Cool.). Because I don't want anyone to be offended or weirded out (omg this writer girl I know she like...WROTE stuff about me, who even DOES that), I'm going to chicken out and not put it up....yet.
So I'm going to give you the finished story that I've been working on forever. This one ended up--shockingly--totally depressing and dismal. Eh. You'll live. UNLIKE THE MC AMIRITE
P.S. I abhor the way this damn thing changes my formatting. It gets rid of my italics and won't let me indent. Obnoxious. I'll try to fix it.
----
Something. Reach a hand out, flex the fingers just to feel the skin stretch and strain against the cold (but I never knew cold and he always did and didn’t like it so we must’ve met halfway and that was how we defined it: cold). Turn over. Fragments: something: honey eyes bouncing their light off the trees and an owl perched on his shoulder. He says, a whisper quieter than if he’d said nothing at all, “You could go if you wanted.” The blackness of something—something used once to stop boats their uselessness fills in the gaps left by his words as his mouth continues moving. The owl flutters its wings. Hoots.
“There was a nest of great horned owls that lived in the tree in front of my house.” I say it. He smiles to it. “I liked sitting on the driveway at dusk and waiting for them to fly out.” Smile again and a new chuckle. Blue filaments, light, filing towards the owl; it looks back at him. Laughter from one or both and I feel warm. Smells of dense soil, orchard soil late in the growing season: watered and rewatered and rewatered again, perfect mud and horrible footing. It’s cold. My feet, for no reason, feelings they’ve no business muddling in down in their nice cool mud while my body shivers. Enjoy that soil, baby.
In the morning I’ve made pancakes, and I look up what an owl means. Change; fluidity of life, as it turns out, to which I rub my nose with the back of my hand (it’s cold) and my mouth’s corners twitch hard upward.
“It’s almond blossom season.”
“I know.” My nose doesn’t hate this time of year like most others’ who’ve lived their whole lives around the trees. Maybe it’s because I never accepted that the body would slowly be beaten down by the pollen rather than build up a yearly immunity; that’s how it should operate. My hands find a rough patch of denim to slide into because it should be colder but it’s not. I’m outside anyways, and the sky is its effervescent slightly-green blue, the specific cool kind that slices meanly at your eyes. That blue looks nothing but honest, so I keep my hands in my pockets and hope for rain.
The car’s silver like those disgusting bugs (fish? silverfish) that eat at bookbindings and the glue of wallpaper (we get those bastards in the house every winter and the earwigs replace ‘em in the spring) but it makes me want to go anyways.
“Thinking of going somewhere?”
“Nah.” I am a liar: in my head I’ve been picturing the hundreds of places I’ve been that aren’t here in this house, with its disgusting equinoctial infestations. A city that emerges from urban highway rolling into sensual hills filled with lusting green and you can feel its inhabitants writhe (pulse) to the city’s movements from the foothills where it spills out pure vibrating breasts heaving towards the sea (the bay). Then: someplace so isolated and dense and free anyways that I stumbled upon sex (“stumble” is an apt word not for the circumstances of discovery but because certainly it lead to some deep falls later on, my grace forever affected), unleashed something triumphant and heathen from somewhere soft and filled with the sound of heavy breaths that tumble out onto heaving breasts and on towards some deep wetness; twigs snap around and I shone a flashlight into the dark in the afterglow but there was nothing to reflect it, so I turned it off and moved over to the other sleeping form which was just that: sleeping—so I just slept alone. And then: walking to the old-style water pump in the cold and the dark (god-fucking-damnit it’s summer why’s it so cold up here), stumbling on stones and branches and as I clumsily pass hearing a loud, thick lapping at the river—flup flup flup—that stops curiously as the distance between me and whatever extremely large looming beast (or monster) is over there closes like its mouth—flup flup fl—and I return to ridiculous shelter in moonlight that forces me to shed, one by one, all of my various security constructs (bears don’t lap like that deer are too small must be a cougar cougar shit it must be a fucking cougar) and my pace quickened with my pulse.
“Nah,” I say again and push my hands deeper into my pockets. My feet twitch slightly, toes cracking beneath my shoeleather and I step further down the slight angle of the driveway. I am no liar; I don’t really want to go back to any of those places, anyhow. They’re just pretty carrion, slowly decomposing into a mass of uniform and oozing sap, like blighted almond tree bark split by thick viscous amber, vicious and bitter. But their containers are still pretty, and if I can enjoy the places in my head as just places and not settings per se, I don’t have to pay attention to the hatred that happened in them.
My name’s being called and I choose to ignore it, though the tone is getting more mean and full of warning with every syllable. I kind of like the way those fluctuations of warning dance together: hon-ee HON-ee hon eeHONwherereyouGOin. Right at the end of the driveway. Left onto Nan. Right onto Jeppson (past the uncomfortable low-income units). Right onto Toomes. Left onto Kiernan. Long gravel road, sidewalk on the side of the street I’m not on, wait for cars to clear and listen to make sure there aren’t any barking guard dogs near and then sidestep through the gaps in the trees (somewhere in the back of my head I’m always [every damn time] aware this is a crime and farmers will always have guns before they have the chance to see that I’m just some woman).
Looking for dogs reminds me of when I was almost a woman—or maybe I was, since it was after the sex that I’d really taken to orchard-walking; I’d done it my whole life, but only really when I needed to clear my head; or maybe once you’ve dabbled in sex your head always needs clearing—and walking through the orchards out here. It’s summer, so the trees are green and tortured with the tightly holding drops of ripe fruits. Cracking the dull greenish shells is always satisfying, then, because you get to see the little sad gem of a budding almond, pretty and golden-brown without the beautiful fullness, like brown eyes.
(I didn’t know my own eyes were hazel until someone pointed it out to me, not even a boyfriend just someone, maybe even the optometrist—I thought they were just dull brown but then I was fascinated and actually looked and there, light amber brown and green like Sierra sweetgrass and even some pretty yellow honey-colors and then spots of teal, too. My friends [girls] thought it was unusual that I hadn’t scrutinized every goddamn square inch of self I had, and I blushed but secretly took pleasure in that small gesture of late self-discovery.)
I’ve been walking the seam of the orchards, Hammett Road (or Drive), just ambling and letting the valley summer lift its hot, dense fingers over my brassy shoulders while the occasional car zips past, rumbling over the shred of asphalt gravel. A few of them infuriate the summer’s humid pregnancy to stir, slipping around my body a merciful cooling lace of wind that’s there and gone, the valley having regained her staunch composure. I cross over the canal, a cool non-liquid green vein of murk flowing under a weathered “No Trespassing” sign, and veer hard to the left, across the gentle slope of Hammett’s eastern end. Of course there are more orchards over there, and like all the other orchards in Salida, it’s an almond orchard: green leaves flitting over the rich ripe shells of its clinging spring-conceived fruits, trunk finely lined and rough, a thick gray hide that occasionally is broken with hardened glowing bubbles of sap too thick and airy to flow down, so they froze there waiting to fall from gravity instead of fluidity. I peel one of the sick oranges from its wound and play with it as I let myself diffuse into the walking.
It smells bitter, which is a switch that people who haven’t had the chance to spend their lives less than a block from acres and acres of almond orchards tend to expect to be the normative state of anything related to the almonds; for whatever reason, bitterness comes to mind in the consideration of the fruit, probably because of its extract. But the orchards are fermenting in earthiness, thick and hooded with the moisture of immense decay in the summer—and in the spring, light and fickle and sweet-smelling, not dry but just warming up from the winter. I’m not paying too much attention to all of my surroundings—focused too intently on the task of tracking a raccoon that’d left fresh prints in the mud—and the realization propels my mind into an awareness singularly conserved for contrast with unattentiveness. Something is pulling on me, a staccatoed bit of noise that I didn’t hear and my mind did. The second time, I hear it: barking.
Dogs, I’ve gathered from years of strange looks cast at me by city- or suburban-born friends, are only a threat if you are a newspaper boy. When you live in the country, this is most certainly not the case, and especially so if you are on the dog’s territory. I am; the sound of an uneven gait passing through clumped mud tells me so. Farmers raise their guard dogs to be fast, strong, mean as hell because stupid kids like to drink and fuck in orchards and stupid wanderers like to daydream between the trees and empty bottles (full condoms). I can just make it out: a huge thing, grayish in color, pert ears back for the chase that I give now, a moment after making that observation. How I run doesn’t matter, through already-stagnant puddles from the morning’s sprinklers or crushing weeds and roots and grasses underfoot, but that I do and quickly. So my mind is free to take in the unusual sensations of blurred sounds and colors that arrhythmically go with the information my feet are taking in: the sound of a twig snapping though my feet felt it five steps ago now. (If you live in the country and actually end up feeling the country you learn to run, even if you don’t go where you aren’t supposed to and don’t need to; it just manifests somehow.)
Two more technical things you learn growing up in the country: the layout of the land, which orchards end where; and that a good dog, no matter how excited to be chasing something that doesn’t just launch up a tree, will not ever run outside its territory. (I’m not precisely sure when this knowledge comes or in what order, but it does, and eventually you learn to combine the two, probably the first time you get chased hard.) My blood shoots through my wrists and back up to my heart again while my breath departs my lungs for a good five minutes, my body an afterthought of these as it winds deeper into the orchard and then thrusts myself, veins and blood and wrists and lungs and all, out, eastward, towards the little spur of a gravel road off of Hammett that will get me to the rough shrubby patch along the edge of 99. I’m not sure when the thing stopped chasing, but I won’t stop running until I burst, totally voided of breath, onto those stubborn ugly grasses. I can see them between the trees and their papery olivey leaves and then comes the burst between packed edgedirt and gravel and finally sticky, sweet shrubs clinging. I fall on my knees in them and their rock-hard dirt and have left a fine trail of blood running down the tanned skin of my shins, both sides. My legs have always been used to that abuse, and so I just pick myself up, smiling, and walk on back home, sticking mostly to the streets and cutting through the Ciccarelli orchard to Kiernan (which never had a dog that I’ve ever seen).
The orchard I walk along now is quiet, one of my favorites. It blends mile after mile together into more almond orchards owned by different people (broken by the occasional long dusty road) whose property lines don’t matter if you know how to walk the orchards without drawing attention to yourself, and if you walk to certain latitudes within those orchards, you can find places that don’t matter to the rest of the world: an old farmhouse with a small enclosure, where there are ducks, and geese, and chickens, and a bull who will charge the unstable fence if you linger at the property too long. There’s another one, further back into the miles, with an old bay mare that walks right up to the fence and lets you pet it until the property owner comes out: git, git. It’s California, but the farmers still say things like “git” when you loiter on their farms petting their animals.
My car—no, not my car, the other one—drives up, past the orchard, slowing down and I know its driver is peering through the trees for me. But it’s not like I haven’t been terrified in my fair share of orchards by burly farmers protecting their stock with a vengeance: I crouch slowly, taking up against a bulky tree, and wait until the engine whirrs off somewhere. Then I move quickly, deeper into the orchards, westward, because that driver can run faster than I can, can probably outsmart me, but doesn’t know these trees like I do.
I stop myself near one of the dirt veins that run through the orchards, housing small wells and debris piles full of trimmings, and sit down on the concrete lip of a buried cistern. It’s filled with pond scum, missing the pond, crawling up miraculously along the chinked side walls. I smile without feeling it and move my eyes up into that metal-cold blue, the sun a spot of chillier-still non-color, wondering what I’ll say when I get back home. Maybe nothing; maybe it’s time to just say nothing. I lean a hand hard onto my jeans and watch the trees for the birds, whose songs mingle.
(Mourning Doves have the most beautiful bird songs I’ve ever known. I used to only get to hear that lovely heartaching song when I was down in Arcadia to visit my grandparents, because there was a big oak tree in the front yard and the doves loved to perch in it and sing in the southern California morning sunlight [sunlight accompanies every season down there, and people tend to assume the same of up here]. I wonder whether the new owners took the oak tree out.)
I feel like a hick, picking birdsongs out, but it’s such an honest knowledge that I don’t bother to try to censor it for anyone. I grew up with them, knowing what the birds are and what they look like too—just like I grew up to know where to run through the orchards, how to avoid mad dogs and men alike. The last thought strikes me, and I’m recovering from its pause when a dog I wasn’t prepared for breaks loudly through the brush lining the trees, barking and spitting.
“Shouldn’t’ve done that. Why did you go?”
I don’t reply, and try to resist the feel of alcohol eating at my blood (dog saliva, crazy fucking mutt). The wince comes slowly over my face.
“I was driving, you know.” There is a pause and another sting. “Looking for you. It’s impossible for you to not have seen me.”
My eyes are lowered and I stretch my hands out, curl the fingers back in, feel the skin tighten and scowl at the floor. My right fist is running red, coated in dried splotches settled over purpling flourishes from under the skin. The patterns are pleasing. If I said that, there would be laughter of some kind in response, but it would be unpleasant; not endearing or even tolerant. I don’t. I stopped saying what I thought at some point before my hair started turning gray-blonde, and I feel the slow stupid dryness of my mind, blank. Instead, I’m thinking images—impossibly tiny fragmented pieces of sensation like my left foot rolling over the smooth oval of an almond shell and interrupting my running, the warm sweating soak of the dog’s breath on my fist as I wrestle with it, a hard staple of pain in my shoulder as white knives hit me and tear, the up sensation—just up, no vision of down or thought of how—of scaling a chainlink fence and then the hateful pregnancy of waiting for my feet to move me home.
“You should thank that dog. I could have hit you myself.”
My jaw tightens. I would give anything to smell bay laurel, eucalyptus, to be driving along a highway rimmed with ferns and moss and picketed by stern tall redwoods. I can breathe. Drive further along the ridge and there’s a view of the sea over Pescadero, and on the other side I can’t see yet there’s a big marsh, golden brown like almonds right now but filled with migratory birds; beyond that, acres of farms bordered by rolling hills that find themselves quickly and rise higher (mountains). I know there’s an animal sanctuary hidden in those hills, and a restaurant that says it’s famous for its artichoke (best in the world) but is really just a local joint (artichoke from this strip of Pacific is the best in the world, it’s true), and a pick-your-own farm that has blackberries, olallieberries, boysenberries (my favorite) and strawberries in the summertime. The smell of the Pacific brushes past somewhere I can’t name and I shudder.
“But really—” the sound of the alcohol-soaked cotton ball hitting the trashcan next to the toilet I’m perched on is sick with phlegm and grows like a thick moldy gauze in the air—“you’re almost forty. I’m not sure why it is you think this is acceptable. Walking in the orchards.”
“Sorry, baby.” I’ve mumbled it to myself, and the words are bitter in my mouth as they bubble out.
“Don’t call me that.”
I look up, my cuts bandaged, and go to sit on the windowsill of my old room. There is no resistance to this need and that, at least, takes a festering weight from somewhere hard and boxed in me. I kick some of the boxes aside, filled with my mom’s old china dolls and the children’s books (mine when I was little) she gave to me, hoping I’d have an edge over my brother on reproducing. A short storm of dust flowers out, clinging to my moist legs (to get the wounds clean I had to strip down) in the heat, and I stir up countless more as I make my way to the dirtied sill. Dirt doesn’t bother me and it will wash off the underwear, even if I’ll catch hell about it first, so I sit down without reservation and stare outside.
I’ve never been attacked by one of those dogs. I’ve always been able to outrun them. It drags on my mind and I wonder: is it because I’m older? Maybe my instincts just aren’t as sharp. I laugh painfully. Nah. You know it’s because you’ve given up. My back curls into the straightness of the wall, head rolling back, and I feel thin. Not fragile, maybe, but soluble. What a word. I used to feel things like feminine and poetic and embarrassed, but now I just curl my hands over my shoulder blades and enjoy that I haven’t lost the shape of my body.
My eyes close around a brush of winter air from the window. One of the owls from the fir trees out front calls out something sharp. I’m realizing as I run my hands over my bruised and scraped legs (raw and scabbing, still dirty on the skin between abrasions) that I never cleaned them (my hands), and there are cracking rivulets of red scattering from the hard blossoms of rubbed-off skin, looking oddly polished on the knuckles so close to the bone. The bite marks that make my tannish hands into fleshy imperfect constellations are deeper, though, and the blood has made a rotted brown lining for them. The edges of tattered, punctured skin are fresh, still, pinkish and slowly turning white like dying. My eyes are dry, but I don’t want to touch them with the awful dirt of my hands.
I walk out of the cluttered room and call down the hallway: “I should go to the hospital.” There’s a laugh from what used to be Mom’s bedroom (it was pink when she bought it and she painted it yellow before I went to college; I picked the color scheme for her) and a “You don’t. Shut up” mercifully overridden by the sensuality of a curling summer wind. I sit down by the door jamb and hold my dirty knees.
*
A few weeks (couple of months) after the dog, I’m sitting, hunched, on the edge of the cheap white bathtub which has been flaking pieces of its skin off for as long as I can remember. It hurts.
“Why do you always get sick as soon as it’s flu season?”
“Bad immune system. You know that.” My face is flawed, collapsing in the weight of the pain. My stomach is cramping, electrical tremors moving smoothly through my torso and making me sweat. When my fingers touch the white elastic pools all down my arms and over my hands I feel a numbing pulse of fear. I’ve stayed away from that orchard since. I’ve obeyed. It hasn’t done my hands much good.
I cough into them (hands, two of them), which are clean now but pocked with the difficult scars. “Can you check my forehead?”
There’s a cold pressure on my brow and then, swiftly, nothing. “You’re burning the fuck up. Jesus.”
“Make me some tea?”
“I’m doing things. It’s not that hard for you, right?” I stare blankly at a figure that is solid but shallow. It feels like a sculpture. There isn’t anything I can do; I pull myself further into my coiled body. The peach colors of the linoleum my thin toes are touching is changing, the full roses blooming until the petals burst out of the modest leaves and scatter around, rippling under the floor. I drag my toes away and my stomach contracts hard. The bile comes up smooth and hot, and I choke on its texture.
I want to go walking. My legs are poised to get up, but footsteps fall into the room and there is a slight scoff at the sick liquid in the toilet next to me. I reign over the impulse to move and it leaves me, for fear as much as anything. More sickness, now, as my stomach staples itself together again; I can feel it sticking to my other organs, collapsing them all into an aching collage, and my vomit is seeping into my gums.
“Can I have my toothbrush?” It’s in my hand and was always there, its bristles gleaming cleanly, and my skin flushes under the enormity of letting this thing clean me. My head spins and I need to go again. I forgo the toothbrush, and the cries are more urgent now as I flee into the hall, out the door and turning down all of the streets whose names I know and whose directions I don’t care about now—honey honey! honey! honey where’re you goin’, honey?—but I can outrun the shock in that voice. The trees I’ve been so studiously avoiding loom large in front of my vision, a hard wall asking me a million times where I’ve been, where’ve you been honey where you going where ARE you going where ARE you? They’re dark and the paths between them twist and intertwine and become similar and same and my scars ache and burn when their branches dig into them hard, deeper, plunge into a pool of tainted blood as my legs set an electrical (motorized, mechanized) path past them, uncaring unfeeling unthinking: animal. And then, and then the other side and my feet plunge into dirt as my body falls out of them and lunges onto hard blackened night-gravel and there are lights that collide into each other, the trees, the asphalt, and then my own scantness. It feels like breaking through the orchard’s branches, some parts restrained by hot hard twisting living limbs that take mine and deform them and some left to fly forward into sublimity and the infinity of the orchards, safe. I crash into myself and my body falters on the edge of its own life while blood creeps up my throat, refilling the scars and warming the hollowed body I’ve spent years living in, cold, for years hard-pressed to find a reason not to move (leave). I never did do that for myself. (You could go if you wanted.) My eyes wrap around the thick heaviness of a car’s headlights, light filtered through their beams and showing all of the particles of—what—my blood and the trees’ blood in the air, trained on a tree, probably, behind me, because that’s all there is to see for miles: my body on the country road, passed over by the boldness of the light, and trees.
And the owls, somewhere, as my heart finishes tearing into the scraps of the body I left behind years ago. They must be there, too.
I haven't updated in a while because my life has, once again, become quite hectic. I was hardly writing for a week or two, which is kind of something I do when big things hit me--I broil in my emotions for a while without even touching pen and paper, and then suddenly I just have outstanding output. Last night alone I wrote something like twenty pages: started and finished a short story, finished that short story that's been up here for a while (at long last), and started another story (about 10 pages in already). No poetry, shockingly--I've just been in the mood to write a lot of raw, gritty, depressing-as-all-get-out stories.
And that brings me to the started-and-finished story! It's pretty short, just barely eight pages long, and it's pretty much just an open sore of everything that's been compounding in my psyche as a result of aforementioned recent events. Writing it hurt and exhausted me--usually a good sign. But I'm still undecided on the issue of actually publishing it, as it leans heavily on actual people and real situations, and I really have no idea who all actually reads this thing (hello to my visitors from Asia and Europe! There are apparently a lot of you. Cool.). Because I don't want anyone to be offended or weirded out (omg this writer girl I know she like...WROTE stuff about me, who even DOES that), I'm going to chicken out and not put it up....yet.
So I'm going to give you the finished story that I've been working on forever. This one ended up--shockingly--totally depressing and dismal. Eh. You'll live. UNLIKE THE MC AMIRITE
P.S. I abhor the way this damn thing changes my formatting. It gets rid of my italics and won't let me indent. Obnoxious. I'll try to fix it.
----
Something. Reach a hand out, flex the fingers just to feel the skin stretch and strain against the cold (but I never knew cold and he always did and didn’t like it so we must’ve met halfway and that was how we defined it: cold). Turn over. Fragments: something: honey eyes bouncing their light off the trees and an owl perched on his shoulder. He says, a whisper quieter than if he’d said nothing at all, “You could go if you wanted.” The blackness of something—something used once to stop boats their uselessness fills in the gaps left by his words as his mouth continues moving. The owl flutters its wings. Hoots.
“There was a nest of great horned owls that lived in the tree in front of my house.” I say it. He smiles to it. “I liked sitting on the driveway at dusk and waiting for them to fly out.” Smile again and a new chuckle. Blue filaments, light, filing towards the owl; it looks back at him. Laughter from one or both and I feel warm. Smells of dense soil, orchard soil late in the growing season: watered and rewatered and rewatered again, perfect mud and horrible footing. It’s cold. My feet, for no reason, feelings they’ve no business muddling in down in their nice cool mud while my body shivers. Enjoy that soil, baby.
In the morning I’ve made pancakes, and I look up what an owl means. Change; fluidity of life, as it turns out, to which I rub my nose with the back of my hand (it’s cold) and my mouth’s corners twitch hard upward.
“It’s almond blossom season.”
“I know.” My nose doesn’t hate this time of year like most others’ who’ve lived their whole lives around the trees. Maybe it’s because I never accepted that the body would slowly be beaten down by the pollen rather than build up a yearly immunity; that’s how it should operate. My hands find a rough patch of denim to slide into because it should be colder but it’s not. I’m outside anyways, and the sky is its effervescent slightly-green blue, the specific cool kind that slices meanly at your eyes. That blue looks nothing but honest, so I keep my hands in my pockets and hope for rain.
The car’s silver like those disgusting bugs (fish? silverfish) that eat at bookbindings and the glue of wallpaper (we get those bastards in the house every winter and the earwigs replace ‘em in the spring) but it makes me want to go anyways.
“Thinking of going somewhere?”
“Nah.” I am a liar: in my head I’ve been picturing the hundreds of places I’ve been that aren’t here in this house, with its disgusting equinoctial infestations. A city that emerges from urban highway rolling into sensual hills filled with lusting green and you can feel its inhabitants writhe (pulse) to the city’s movements from the foothills where it spills out pure vibrating breasts heaving towards the sea (the bay). Then: someplace so isolated and dense and free anyways that I stumbled upon sex (“stumble” is an apt word not for the circumstances of discovery but because certainly it lead to some deep falls later on, my grace forever affected), unleashed something triumphant and heathen from somewhere soft and filled with the sound of heavy breaths that tumble out onto heaving breasts and on towards some deep wetness; twigs snap around and I shone a flashlight into the dark in the afterglow but there was nothing to reflect it, so I turned it off and moved over to the other sleeping form which was just that: sleeping—so I just slept alone. And then: walking to the old-style water pump in the cold and the dark (god-fucking-damnit it’s summer why’s it so cold up here), stumbling on stones and branches and as I clumsily pass hearing a loud, thick lapping at the river—flup flup flup—that stops curiously as the distance between me and whatever extremely large looming beast (or monster) is over there closes like its mouth—flup flup fl—and I return to ridiculous shelter in moonlight that forces me to shed, one by one, all of my various security constructs (bears don’t lap like that deer are too small must be a cougar cougar shit it must be a fucking cougar) and my pace quickened with my pulse.
“Nah,” I say again and push my hands deeper into my pockets. My feet twitch slightly, toes cracking beneath my shoeleather and I step further down the slight angle of the driveway. I am no liar; I don’t really want to go back to any of those places, anyhow. They’re just pretty carrion, slowly decomposing into a mass of uniform and oozing sap, like blighted almond tree bark split by thick viscous amber, vicious and bitter. But their containers are still pretty, and if I can enjoy the places in my head as just places and not settings per se, I don’t have to pay attention to the hatred that happened in them.
My name’s being called and I choose to ignore it, though the tone is getting more mean and full of warning with every syllable. I kind of like the way those fluctuations of warning dance together: hon-ee HON-ee hon eeHONwherereyouGOin. Right at the end of the driveway. Left onto Nan. Right onto Jeppson (past the uncomfortable low-income units). Right onto Toomes. Left onto Kiernan. Long gravel road, sidewalk on the side of the street I’m not on, wait for cars to clear and listen to make sure there aren’t any barking guard dogs near and then sidestep through the gaps in the trees (somewhere in the back of my head I’m always [every damn time] aware this is a crime and farmers will always have guns before they have the chance to see that I’m just some woman).
Looking for dogs reminds me of when I was almost a woman—or maybe I was, since it was after the sex that I’d really taken to orchard-walking; I’d done it my whole life, but only really when I needed to clear my head; or maybe once you’ve dabbled in sex your head always needs clearing—and walking through the orchards out here. It’s summer, so the trees are green and tortured with the tightly holding drops of ripe fruits. Cracking the dull greenish shells is always satisfying, then, because you get to see the little sad gem of a budding almond, pretty and golden-brown without the beautiful fullness, like brown eyes.
(I didn’t know my own eyes were hazel until someone pointed it out to me, not even a boyfriend just someone, maybe even the optometrist—I thought they were just dull brown but then I was fascinated and actually looked and there, light amber brown and green like Sierra sweetgrass and even some pretty yellow honey-colors and then spots of teal, too. My friends [girls] thought it was unusual that I hadn’t scrutinized every goddamn square inch of self I had, and I blushed but secretly took pleasure in that small gesture of late self-discovery.)
I’ve been walking the seam of the orchards, Hammett Road (or Drive), just ambling and letting the valley summer lift its hot, dense fingers over my brassy shoulders while the occasional car zips past, rumbling over the shred of asphalt gravel. A few of them infuriate the summer’s humid pregnancy to stir, slipping around my body a merciful cooling lace of wind that’s there and gone, the valley having regained her staunch composure. I cross over the canal, a cool non-liquid green vein of murk flowing under a weathered “No Trespassing” sign, and veer hard to the left, across the gentle slope of Hammett’s eastern end. Of course there are more orchards over there, and like all the other orchards in Salida, it’s an almond orchard: green leaves flitting over the rich ripe shells of its clinging spring-conceived fruits, trunk finely lined and rough, a thick gray hide that occasionally is broken with hardened glowing bubbles of sap too thick and airy to flow down, so they froze there waiting to fall from gravity instead of fluidity. I peel one of the sick oranges from its wound and play with it as I let myself diffuse into the walking.
It smells bitter, which is a switch that people who haven’t had the chance to spend their lives less than a block from acres and acres of almond orchards tend to expect to be the normative state of anything related to the almonds; for whatever reason, bitterness comes to mind in the consideration of the fruit, probably because of its extract. But the orchards are fermenting in earthiness, thick and hooded with the moisture of immense decay in the summer—and in the spring, light and fickle and sweet-smelling, not dry but just warming up from the winter. I’m not paying too much attention to all of my surroundings—focused too intently on the task of tracking a raccoon that’d left fresh prints in the mud—and the realization propels my mind into an awareness singularly conserved for contrast with unattentiveness. Something is pulling on me, a staccatoed bit of noise that I didn’t hear and my mind did. The second time, I hear it: barking.
Dogs, I’ve gathered from years of strange looks cast at me by city- or suburban-born friends, are only a threat if you are a newspaper boy. When you live in the country, this is most certainly not the case, and especially so if you are on the dog’s territory. I am; the sound of an uneven gait passing through clumped mud tells me so. Farmers raise their guard dogs to be fast, strong, mean as hell because stupid kids like to drink and fuck in orchards and stupid wanderers like to daydream between the trees and empty bottles (full condoms). I can just make it out: a huge thing, grayish in color, pert ears back for the chase that I give now, a moment after making that observation. How I run doesn’t matter, through already-stagnant puddles from the morning’s sprinklers or crushing weeds and roots and grasses underfoot, but that I do and quickly. So my mind is free to take in the unusual sensations of blurred sounds and colors that arrhythmically go with the information my feet are taking in: the sound of a twig snapping though my feet felt it five steps ago now. (If you live in the country and actually end up feeling the country you learn to run, even if you don’t go where you aren’t supposed to and don’t need to; it just manifests somehow.)
Two more technical things you learn growing up in the country: the layout of the land, which orchards end where; and that a good dog, no matter how excited to be chasing something that doesn’t just launch up a tree, will not ever run outside its territory. (I’m not precisely sure when this knowledge comes or in what order, but it does, and eventually you learn to combine the two, probably the first time you get chased hard.) My blood shoots through my wrists and back up to my heart again while my breath departs my lungs for a good five minutes, my body an afterthought of these as it winds deeper into the orchard and then thrusts myself, veins and blood and wrists and lungs and all, out, eastward, towards the little spur of a gravel road off of Hammett that will get me to the rough shrubby patch along the edge of 99. I’m not sure when the thing stopped chasing, but I won’t stop running until I burst, totally voided of breath, onto those stubborn ugly grasses. I can see them between the trees and their papery olivey leaves and then comes the burst between packed edgedirt and gravel and finally sticky, sweet shrubs clinging. I fall on my knees in them and their rock-hard dirt and have left a fine trail of blood running down the tanned skin of my shins, both sides. My legs have always been used to that abuse, and so I just pick myself up, smiling, and walk on back home, sticking mostly to the streets and cutting through the Ciccarelli orchard to Kiernan (which never had a dog that I’ve ever seen).
The orchard I walk along now is quiet, one of my favorites. It blends mile after mile together into more almond orchards owned by different people (broken by the occasional long dusty road) whose property lines don’t matter if you know how to walk the orchards without drawing attention to yourself, and if you walk to certain latitudes within those orchards, you can find places that don’t matter to the rest of the world: an old farmhouse with a small enclosure, where there are ducks, and geese, and chickens, and a bull who will charge the unstable fence if you linger at the property too long. There’s another one, further back into the miles, with an old bay mare that walks right up to the fence and lets you pet it until the property owner comes out: git, git. It’s California, but the farmers still say things like “git” when you loiter on their farms petting their animals.
My car—no, not my car, the other one—drives up, past the orchard, slowing down and I know its driver is peering through the trees for me. But it’s not like I haven’t been terrified in my fair share of orchards by burly farmers protecting their stock with a vengeance: I crouch slowly, taking up against a bulky tree, and wait until the engine whirrs off somewhere. Then I move quickly, deeper into the orchards, westward, because that driver can run faster than I can, can probably outsmart me, but doesn’t know these trees like I do.
I stop myself near one of the dirt veins that run through the orchards, housing small wells and debris piles full of trimmings, and sit down on the concrete lip of a buried cistern. It’s filled with pond scum, missing the pond, crawling up miraculously along the chinked side walls. I smile without feeling it and move my eyes up into that metal-cold blue, the sun a spot of chillier-still non-color, wondering what I’ll say when I get back home. Maybe nothing; maybe it’s time to just say nothing. I lean a hand hard onto my jeans and watch the trees for the birds, whose songs mingle.
(Mourning Doves have the most beautiful bird songs I’ve ever known. I used to only get to hear that lovely heartaching song when I was down in Arcadia to visit my grandparents, because there was a big oak tree in the front yard and the doves loved to perch in it and sing in the southern California morning sunlight [sunlight accompanies every season down there, and people tend to assume the same of up here]. I wonder whether the new owners took the oak tree out.)
I feel like a hick, picking birdsongs out, but it’s such an honest knowledge that I don’t bother to try to censor it for anyone. I grew up with them, knowing what the birds are and what they look like too—just like I grew up to know where to run through the orchards, how to avoid mad dogs and men alike. The last thought strikes me, and I’m recovering from its pause when a dog I wasn’t prepared for breaks loudly through the brush lining the trees, barking and spitting.
“Shouldn’t’ve done that. Why did you go?”
I don’t reply, and try to resist the feel of alcohol eating at my blood (dog saliva, crazy fucking mutt). The wince comes slowly over my face.
“I was driving, you know.” There is a pause and another sting. “Looking for you. It’s impossible for you to not have seen me.”
My eyes are lowered and I stretch my hands out, curl the fingers back in, feel the skin tighten and scowl at the floor. My right fist is running red, coated in dried splotches settled over purpling flourishes from under the skin. The patterns are pleasing. If I said that, there would be laughter of some kind in response, but it would be unpleasant; not endearing or even tolerant. I don’t. I stopped saying what I thought at some point before my hair started turning gray-blonde, and I feel the slow stupid dryness of my mind, blank. Instead, I’m thinking images—impossibly tiny fragmented pieces of sensation like my left foot rolling over the smooth oval of an almond shell and interrupting my running, the warm sweating soak of the dog’s breath on my fist as I wrestle with it, a hard staple of pain in my shoulder as white knives hit me and tear, the up sensation—just up, no vision of down or thought of how—of scaling a chainlink fence and then the hateful pregnancy of waiting for my feet to move me home.
“You should thank that dog. I could have hit you myself.”
My jaw tightens. I would give anything to smell bay laurel, eucalyptus, to be driving along a highway rimmed with ferns and moss and picketed by stern tall redwoods. I can breathe. Drive further along the ridge and there’s a view of the sea over Pescadero, and on the other side I can’t see yet there’s a big marsh, golden brown like almonds right now but filled with migratory birds; beyond that, acres of farms bordered by rolling hills that find themselves quickly and rise higher (mountains). I know there’s an animal sanctuary hidden in those hills, and a restaurant that says it’s famous for its artichoke (best in the world) but is really just a local joint (artichoke from this strip of Pacific is the best in the world, it’s true), and a pick-your-own farm that has blackberries, olallieberries, boysenberries (my favorite) and strawberries in the summertime. The smell of the Pacific brushes past somewhere I can’t name and I shudder.
“But really—” the sound of the alcohol-soaked cotton ball hitting the trashcan next to the toilet I’m perched on is sick with phlegm and grows like a thick moldy gauze in the air—“you’re almost forty. I’m not sure why it is you think this is acceptable. Walking in the orchards.”
“Sorry, baby.” I’ve mumbled it to myself, and the words are bitter in my mouth as they bubble out.
“Don’t call me that.”
I look up, my cuts bandaged, and go to sit on the windowsill of my old room. There is no resistance to this need and that, at least, takes a festering weight from somewhere hard and boxed in me. I kick some of the boxes aside, filled with my mom’s old china dolls and the children’s books (mine when I was little) she gave to me, hoping I’d have an edge over my brother on reproducing. A short storm of dust flowers out, clinging to my moist legs (to get the wounds clean I had to strip down) in the heat, and I stir up countless more as I make my way to the dirtied sill. Dirt doesn’t bother me and it will wash off the underwear, even if I’ll catch hell about it first, so I sit down without reservation and stare outside.
I’ve never been attacked by one of those dogs. I’ve always been able to outrun them. It drags on my mind and I wonder: is it because I’m older? Maybe my instincts just aren’t as sharp. I laugh painfully. Nah. You know it’s because you’ve given up. My back curls into the straightness of the wall, head rolling back, and I feel thin. Not fragile, maybe, but soluble. What a word. I used to feel things like feminine and poetic and embarrassed, but now I just curl my hands over my shoulder blades and enjoy that I haven’t lost the shape of my body.
My eyes close around a brush of winter air from the window. One of the owls from the fir trees out front calls out something sharp. I’m realizing as I run my hands over my bruised and scraped legs (raw and scabbing, still dirty on the skin between abrasions) that I never cleaned them (my hands), and there are cracking rivulets of red scattering from the hard blossoms of rubbed-off skin, looking oddly polished on the knuckles so close to the bone. The bite marks that make my tannish hands into fleshy imperfect constellations are deeper, though, and the blood has made a rotted brown lining for them. The edges of tattered, punctured skin are fresh, still, pinkish and slowly turning white like dying. My eyes are dry, but I don’t want to touch them with the awful dirt of my hands.
I walk out of the cluttered room and call down the hallway: “I should go to the hospital.” There’s a laugh from what used to be Mom’s bedroom (it was pink when she bought it and she painted it yellow before I went to college; I picked the color scheme for her) and a “You don’t. Shut up” mercifully overridden by the sensuality of a curling summer wind. I sit down by the door jamb and hold my dirty knees.
*
A few weeks (couple of months) after the dog, I’m sitting, hunched, on the edge of the cheap white bathtub which has been flaking pieces of its skin off for as long as I can remember. It hurts.
“Why do you always get sick as soon as it’s flu season?”
“Bad immune system. You know that.” My face is flawed, collapsing in the weight of the pain. My stomach is cramping, electrical tremors moving smoothly through my torso and making me sweat. When my fingers touch the white elastic pools all down my arms and over my hands I feel a numbing pulse of fear. I’ve stayed away from that orchard since. I’ve obeyed. It hasn’t done my hands much good.
I cough into them (hands, two of them), which are clean now but pocked with the difficult scars. “Can you check my forehead?”
There’s a cold pressure on my brow and then, swiftly, nothing. “You’re burning the fuck up. Jesus.”
“Make me some tea?”
“I’m doing things. It’s not that hard for you, right?” I stare blankly at a figure that is solid but shallow. It feels like a sculpture. There isn’t anything I can do; I pull myself further into my coiled body. The peach colors of the linoleum my thin toes are touching is changing, the full roses blooming until the petals burst out of the modest leaves and scatter around, rippling under the floor. I drag my toes away and my stomach contracts hard. The bile comes up smooth and hot, and I choke on its texture.
I want to go walking. My legs are poised to get up, but footsteps fall into the room and there is a slight scoff at the sick liquid in the toilet next to me. I reign over the impulse to move and it leaves me, for fear as much as anything. More sickness, now, as my stomach staples itself together again; I can feel it sticking to my other organs, collapsing them all into an aching collage, and my vomit is seeping into my gums.
“Can I have my toothbrush?” It’s in my hand and was always there, its bristles gleaming cleanly, and my skin flushes under the enormity of letting this thing clean me. My head spins and I need to go again. I forgo the toothbrush, and the cries are more urgent now as I flee into the hall, out the door and turning down all of the streets whose names I know and whose directions I don’t care about now—honey honey! honey! honey where’re you goin’, honey?—but I can outrun the shock in that voice. The trees I’ve been so studiously avoiding loom large in front of my vision, a hard wall asking me a million times where I’ve been, where’ve you been honey where you going where ARE you going where ARE you? They’re dark and the paths between them twist and intertwine and become similar and same and my scars ache and burn when their branches dig into them hard, deeper, plunge into a pool of tainted blood as my legs set an electrical (motorized, mechanized) path past them, uncaring unfeeling unthinking: animal. And then, and then the other side and my feet plunge into dirt as my body falls out of them and lunges onto hard blackened night-gravel and there are lights that collide into each other, the trees, the asphalt, and then my own scantness. It feels like breaking through the orchard’s branches, some parts restrained by hot hard twisting living limbs that take mine and deform them and some left to fly forward into sublimity and the infinity of the orchards, safe. I crash into myself and my body falters on the edge of its own life while blood creeps up my throat, refilling the scars and warming the hollowed body I’ve spent years living in, cold, for years hard-pressed to find a reason not to move (leave). I never did do that for myself. (You could go if you wanted.) My eyes wrap around the thick heaviness of a car’s headlights, light filtered through their beams and showing all of the particles of—what—my blood and the trees’ blood in the air, trained on a tree, probably, behind me, because that’s all there is to see for miles: my body on the country road, passed over by the boldness of the light, and trees.
And the owls, somewhere, as my heart finishes tearing into the scraps of the body I left behind years ago. They must be there, too.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Writing from home
sometimes I need to jut
out into the sun
somewhere bright and blooming
where we might consume ourselves
it would be fate to tell us,
"no, and find yourself,"
when all we can do is unwind
here, we're sitting here
and can't stand the fare
we can't return to far-flung places
where we wore our shoes out
looking about for something to find
and sometime soon
I'll have to try
the air at home is full
bursting through the curtains
like ginger incense and sex
I stand before myself and breathe
softly, try to glare
try to tell it "thank you
for making me" but I'm not free
enough to manage that
night wind quiets me
if it comes from the trees
the orchards meet my pulse
as I sit against the sill and
just try to be something
tomorrow morning I think
I will need a vaster sunrise
I can walk free down there
down the road, where I flush
flustered at the facts of being
I could sleep or
I could dream
there used to be a nest
of great horned owls, who
lived in the trees
my body beats softly
I can hear their cries still
my window feels frail
as a gate to everything
this smell is what
every inexplicable thing has
become; my years lived
flowers grown or shells found
you know I love the sea
and fleeing my own waves
I'm bound and have demons to contend
understand, understand
I need you with your troubles
and I want you
who might see me with eyes
and might see this room
in which I've written
and loved and curled in
and feel somehow whole
come home, come home
---
I'm home, in California. Finally. I'm in love with my state.
out into the sun
somewhere bright and blooming
where we might consume ourselves
it would be fate to tell us,
"no, and find yourself,"
when all we can do is unwind
here, we're sitting here
and can't stand the fare
we can't return to far-flung places
where we wore our shoes out
looking about for something to find
and sometime soon
I'll have to try
the air at home is full
bursting through the curtains
like ginger incense and sex
I stand before myself and breathe
softly, try to glare
try to tell it "thank you
for making me" but I'm not free
enough to manage that
night wind quiets me
if it comes from the trees
the orchards meet my pulse
as I sit against the sill and
just try to be something
tomorrow morning I think
I will need a vaster sunrise
I can walk free down there
down the road, where I flush
flustered at the facts of being
I could sleep or
I could dream
there used to be a nest
of great horned owls, who
lived in the trees
my body beats softly
I can hear their cries still
my window feels frail
as a gate to everything
this smell is what
every inexplicable thing has
become; my years lived
flowers grown or shells found
you know I love the sea
and fleeing my own waves
I'm bound and have demons to contend
understand, understand
I need you with your troubles
and I want you
who might see me with eyes
and might see this room
in which I've written
and loved and curled in
and feel somehow whole
come home, come home
---
I'm home, in California. Finally. I'm in love with my state.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Shitty poem of the day!
there is living in somewhere--
in wherever I most bare my chest
or the bruises that best me--
a seeing knowledge of my guesses
the ability to see what they are or attempt
when they fall against me and then
straighten their shoots
twisting those fibers that make me
I am taken but only hide when I ask;
I can watch askance the recurrence:
trace the pattern and take it from my skin
but then we've always been stronger than that.
something feels out of its settings,
and its surroundings are collapsing
where a million words and things were
that they might go on to have more
or to be more, but it's not quite certain
they hang curtains on our stage
and I bring myself to tears
where I spent years collecting mussels on the shore
but then the stars I sought were never the bright ones.
there is something to be said for your eyelashes at earlier than we thought in the morning.
I have to work because I need to
whatever carried my impulses through me before
now flushes my mouth, grasps my hand
wherever this land might be or represent
I have chosen it because I needed it
and I choose it because I mean it
and because your eyes are still brighter
I lit some fantasies into flame a year ago
their ashes, a loam for us
a cradle for our beating luxuries
I will take your hand because I know
(Edit: 11/10/11 - this poem needs some help, so it's in the middle of being edited. Right now it ends abruptly. Sorry.)
in wherever I most bare my chest
or the bruises that best me--
a seeing knowledge of my guesses
the ability to see what they are or attempt
when they fall against me and then
straighten their shoots
twisting those fibers that make me
I am taken but only hide when I ask;
I can watch askance the recurrence:
trace the pattern and take it from my skin
but then we've always been stronger than that.
something feels out of its settings,
and its surroundings are collapsing
where a million words and things were
that they might go on to have more
or to be more, but it's not quite certain
they hang curtains on our stage
and I bring myself to tears
where I spent years collecting mussels on the shore
but then the stars I sought were never the bright ones.
there is something to be said for your eyelashes at earlier than we thought in the morning.
I have to work because I need to
whatever carried my impulses through me before
now flushes my mouth, grasps my hand
wherever this land might be or represent
I have chosen it because I needed it
and I choose it because I mean it
and because your eyes are still brighter
I lit some fantasies into flame a year ago
their ashes, a loam for us
a cradle for our beating luxuries
I will take your hand because I know
(Edit: 11/10/11 - this poem needs some help, so it's in the middle of being edited. Right now it ends abruptly. Sorry.)
Monday, June 6, 2011
In the Lining of Her Skin
Nnnn it's Monday.
So instead of watching an insultingly patched-together version of Godzilla (wherein the American director cut the Japanese film up and interjected bits to give the film a white protagonist for no apparent reason) in class today, I started writing. Shocking.
Anyone who's known me since high school might know that I've had an elaborately-planned novel pretty much constantly in the works in one way or another for several years. Last year, I wrote 50k words of it for NaNoWriMo. It isn't pretty. I'm frustrated with the settings and the characters, and I've basically been stuck on it for way too long. So it hit me--I need to revamp everything. It needs a new shot at life, because I've been developing this for years and to abandon it totally would suck lots (I know you love it when I'm eloquent like that, baby). So I've changed the genre, modified my characters, absolutely discarded and reconstructed the setting, and so on. And finally, it seems like it could be good; I'm excited about writing it again. Thank god.
The title I gave this post is also the (extremely tentative) title of the novel, and it's based on my favorite Neruda poem; the full line is actually "The moon lives in the lining of your skin." But this ain't no romance novel. Oh, no. It's going to be horrendously dark. (Of course it is. Look at the writer. When do I write upbeat things? NEVER, that's when.)
Here's the opening scene, which I wrote during class and can't wait to play with. Oh, so much pacing!
--
The oceans had been throbbing in her veins for years and years before she really met them. The salts had been drying her blood, pushing all of the red slivers through her wrists, and when she could no longer stand it (that is, when she turned thirty-four), she moved to Hite's Cove. The coastal town so gnawed at her, with its tides alternately raging and comforting, that she stayed until her body was broken and gone.
Five gulls circled smoky gusts of salted air over the last trickle of the creek that ran over ferns into the ocean the day she arrived with her suitcases light in her hands. They scattered their wings along the coast, flying in tangents until they were gone in the bay laurel, or out of sight over the horizon line. The waves were calm, just timidly touching the shore and fingering the grains of sand idly with swift webbed hands. Fragments of seasshells restlessly twitched on the beach like cracked pepper, splotchy calcified pieces left wounded to be beaten by the later, stronger waves into sand.
She set her suitcases heavily into a bed of damp earth against an outcropping of gritty rock, and placed her soft feet against the beach, letting it fit her soles like rippling foam before walking on. The grove of bay laurel around the creek's struggling outlet was shot through with headstrong eucalyptus, the combination perfuming the entire town with crackling sweetness that ebbed like the tides when the seas winds blew in. She walked over to it, around the peak of trees that concealed the creek from those rough horns of granite she'd entrusted her bags to, and a strong gust of wind thrust every piece of dark red hair she had into angry contrast with the blue-gray ocean behind her, her loose braids short and whipping like taut ropes.
The creek bore what it had to her, and she skirted its flow politely, careful not to distract its direction. The dirt was pocked with rocks where she stepped; the riverbed would have been soft. It bent around the roots of a tree, and she followed it curiously, her eyes firmly tracing the ground. She saw footprints in the soft clay where the river beat its path and looked up to warm gray eyes.
The two women stared at each other, and she, quite a few years older, extended a hand softly. The younger woman took it in both of her unpleasantly rough palms, grasping as if to beg for life though her face betrayed nothing beyond curiosity. She drew her hand back after a few moments. The girl took no pains to hide the wariness that flushed from the pit of her stomach and into her eyes, clouding them and closing her.
"Vianna," the newcomer said. The thin eggshell of ocean roar and gull cries cracked open with the admission. The girl nodded, and Vianna studied her as the world's notes seeped back into the space reserved for her response. She looked wild, with long black hair falling out of a careless attempt to hold it back, her skin a color hinting at some part of her being more profound than exposure to sun, and those eyes, which echoed the discomfort of a warm sea ready to swell into storm. She was standing in the riverbed, letting pathetic rivulets of water charge uselessly against her skin, and stepped back from the paleness of Vianna before finally allowing: "Sol."
It did not surprise Vianna that her voice was as rich and smoky as the laurel leaves that brushed against her hair. The girl named Sol turned away from Vianna, gently tugging at the silver strands of a necklace with a gull feather charm as she vanished into the thick, peeling stands of eucalyptus that hid them. Vianna stared at her ghost, placing a soft hand on her neck and thrusting her violent honeyed eyes to the sky's throat, where the trees let their branches linger.
--
And that's all for now, given that I have homework and my commission to attend to. Any comments are welcome and appreciated, unless you're being a giant jerk.
Incidentally, Hite's Cove is the name of one of my favorite hiking trails. It's back home in California, in Mariposa County. It's best in the springtime.
Anyways. Bai bai.
So instead of watching an insultingly patched-together version of Godzilla (wherein the American director cut the Japanese film up and interjected bits to give the film a white protagonist for no apparent reason) in class today, I started writing. Shocking.
Anyone who's known me since high school might know that I've had an elaborately-planned novel pretty much constantly in the works in one way or another for several years. Last year, I wrote 50k words of it for NaNoWriMo. It isn't pretty. I'm frustrated with the settings and the characters, and I've basically been stuck on it for way too long. So it hit me--I need to revamp everything. It needs a new shot at life, because I've been developing this for years and to abandon it totally would suck lots (I know you love it when I'm eloquent like that, baby). So I've changed the genre, modified my characters, absolutely discarded and reconstructed the setting, and so on. And finally, it seems like it could be good; I'm excited about writing it again. Thank god.
The title I gave this post is also the (extremely tentative) title of the novel, and it's based on my favorite Neruda poem; the full line is actually "The moon lives in the lining of your skin." But this ain't no romance novel. Oh, no. It's going to be horrendously dark. (Of course it is. Look at the writer. When do I write upbeat things? NEVER, that's when.)
Here's the opening scene, which I wrote during class and can't wait to play with. Oh, so much pacing!
--
The oceans had been throbbing in her veins for years and years before she really met them. The salts had been drying her blood, pushing all of the red slivers through her wrists, and when she could no longer stand it (that is, when she turned thirty-four), she moved to Hite's Cove. The coastal town so gnawed at her, with its tides alternately raging and comforting, that she stayed until her body was broken and gone.
Five gulls circled smoky gusts of salted air over the last trickle of the creek that ran over ferns into the ocean the day she arrived with her suitcases light in her hands. They scattered their wings along the coast, flying in tangents until they were gone in the bay laurel, or out of sight over the horizon line. The waves were calm, just timidly touching the shore and fingering the grains of sand idly with swift webbed hands. Fragments of seasshells restlessly twitched on the beach like cracked pepper, splotchy calcified pieces left wounded to be beaten by the later, stronger waves into sand.
She set her suitcases heavily into a bed of damp earth against an outcropping of gritty rock, and placed her soft feet against the beach, letting it fit her soles like rippling foam before walking on. The grove of bay laurel around the creek's struggling outlet was shot through with headstrong eucalyptus, the combination perfuming the entire town with crackling sweetness that ebbed like the tides when the seas winds blew in. She walked over to it, around the peak of trees that concealed the creek from those rough horns of granite she'd entrusted her bags to, and a strong gust of wind thrust every piece of dark red hair she had into angry contrast with the blue-gray ocean behind her, her loose braids short and whipping like taut ropes.
The creek bore what it had to her, and she skirted its flow politely, careful not to distract its direction. The dirt was pocked with rocks where she stepped; the riverbed would have been soft. It bent around the roots of a tree, and she followed it curiously, her eyes firmly tracing the ground. She saw footprints in the soft clay where the river beat its path and looked up to warm gray eyes.
The two women stared at each other, and she, quite a few years older, extended a hand softly. The younger woman took it in both of her unpleasantly rough palms, grasping as if to beg for life though her face betrayed nothing beyond curiosity. She drew her hand back after a few moments. The girl took no pains to hide the wariness that flushed from the pit of her stomach and into her eyes, clouding them and closing her.
"Vianna," the newcomer said. The thin eggshell of ocean roar and gull cries cracked open with the admission. The girl nodded, and Vianna studied her as the world's notes seeped back into the space reserved for her response. She looked wild, with long black hair falling out of a careless attempt to hold it back, her skin a color hinting at some part of her being more profound than exposure to sun, and those eyes, which echoed the discomfort of a warm sea ready to swell into storm. She was standing in the riverbed, letting pathetic rivulets of water charge uselessly against her skin, and stepped back from the paleness of Vianna before finally allowing: "Sol."
It did not surprise Vianna that her voice was as rich and smoky as the laurel leaves that brushed against her hair. The girl named Sol turned away from Vianna, gently tugging at the silver strands of a necklace with a gull feather charm as she vanished into the thick, peeling stands of eucalyptus that hid them. Vianna stared at her ghost, placing a soft hand on her neck and thrusting her violent honeyed eyes to the sky's throat, where the trees let their branches linger.
--
And that's all for now, given that I have homework and my commission to attend to. Any comments are welcome and appreciated, unless you're being a giant jerk.
Incidentally, Hite's Cove is the name of one of my favorite hiking trails. It's back home in California, in Mariposa County. It's best in the springtime.
Anyways. Bai bai.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
and I will say it loudly and I will shout it
how can I ever say goodbye
to the man who liked his tea black
his coffee never
who preferred spice to salt
who would rub either in my wounds
how can I ever say goodbye
to the man whose poetry was sporadic
whose songs were scarce
who unfolded like a flower
who denied me my blossoming
how can I ever cry
for two years that were not mine
that clung only to my body and my eyes
and whose years were they
and who would carry me from them
but myself
--
Song for tomorrow.
to the man who liked his tea black
his coffee never
who preferred spice to salt
who would rub either in my wounds
how can I ever say goodbye
to the man whose poetry was sporadic
whose songs were scarce
who unfolded like a flower
who denied me my blossoming
how can I ever cry
for two years that were not mine
that clung only to my body and my eyes
and whose years were they
and who would carry me from them
but myself
--
Song for tomorrow.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Fantastic News!
Hi!!
First off, I apologize deeply for being so generally uncommunicative (I haven't even really been talking to my mother lately--I wished her a happy Mother's Day and that's it, and we usually talk once every couple of days); I've been moving into my new place via the subway here, which is hellish all on its own, but I'm also in the middle of finals. So...that's fun. I've had little to no stress-free down time recently.
But that's whatever; GUESS WHAT?
You are talking to (reading from) an official Bachelor of Fine Arts - Writing student! Yeah, that's right: I just got accepted into the school's (highly selective -brushes shoulders-) BFAW program! With all of the other various hells I've been facing lately, that was a wonderful little pocket of sunshine. That and, of course, the literal sunshine here today--80 degrees! Perfect! I wore a sundress and showed off my sexy peeling shoulders from the extensive sunburn I acquired from the last warm sunny day we had.
Also, got a nice (if not extensive) critique from my Creative Writing class this morning, and it's one of those classes I'll genuinely miss. I would take it again. Really, I would. The professor was top-notch and I got a ton of great feedback. It also turned me into a FAR better reader than I was before, which is really saying something.
Oh, and I have a job interview tomorrow morning.
Anyhow, I need to go finish up my finals (revising all of the poetry I wrote in my Lyric class this semester--oh god), so...here's a poem. This one's for Ashveen, who is your one-stop shop for everything unsavory you'll ever need to know about me.
She ran to flee her ground
She paced herself, she wandered around the
byways and faires of our surroundings.
(but) She would never walk
She picked a flower from the side
of the road and ran home.
Some time, later on,
After the hours when flowers on the road
gave her the world, she fell
And when she fell—
(of course she fell)
the ground cradled her
a mother, its sounds
Her footing lost, she let herself down
She fled herself:
it hurt her, she pushed
her hands against it
and her life pushed back
And the ground--
She’s gone--
The ground--
She--
She must have filled herself
with its hands
gathered its songs
and gone.
--
That's all from me today! I'll be adding this one to the sidebar, and probably a few others--I want to discuss a couple of them when I have some more time!
Ciao!
First off, I apologize deeply for being so generally uncommunicative (I haven't even really been talking to my mother lately--I wished her a happy Mother's Day and that's it, and we usually talk once every couple of days); I've been moving into my new place via the subway here, which is hellish all on its own, but I'm also in the middle of finals. So...that's fun. I've had little to no stress-free down time recently.
But that's whatever; GUESS WHAT?
You are talking to (reading from) an official Bachelor of Fine Arts - Writing student! Yeah, that's right: I just got accepted into the school's (highly selective -brushes shoulders-) BFAW program! With all of the other various hells I've been facing lately, that was a wonderful little pocket of sunshine. That and, of course, the literal sunshine here today--80 degrees! Perfect! I wore a sundress and showed off my sexy peeling shoulders from the extensive sunburn I acquired from the last warm sunny day we had.
Also, got a nice (if not extensive) critique from my Creative Writing class this morning, and it's one of those classes I'll genuinely miss. I would take it again. Really, I would. The professor was top-notch and I got a ton of great feedback. It also turned me into a FAR better reader than I was before, which is really saying something.
Oh, and I have a job interview tomorrow morning.
Anyhow, I need to go finish up my finals (revising all of the poetry I wrote in my Lyric class this semester--oh god), so...here's a poem. This one's for Ashveen, who is your one-stop shop for everything unsavory you'll ever need to know about me.
She ran to flee her ground
She paced herself, she wandered around the
byways and faires of our surroundings.
(but) She would never walk
She picked a flower from the side
of the road and ran home.
Some time, later on,
After the hours when flowers on the road
gave her the world, she fell
And when she fell—
(of course she fell)
the ground cradled her
a mother, its sounds
Her footing lost, she let herself down
She fled herself:
it hurt her, she pushed
her hands against it
and her life pushed back
And the ground--
She’s gone--
The ground--
She--
She must have filled herself
with its hands
gathered its songs
and gone.
--
That's all from me today! I'll be adding this one to the sidebar, and probably a few others--I want to discuss a couple of them when I have some more time!
Ciao!
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