The Grip of It

by Jac Jemc

we ask the agent if we have to worry about crime living so near the woods and he explains that the woods are bounded on the other side by a beach and there is nothing to be afraid of but waves, and we smile politely but, in our minds, we think, A wave can overwhelm and a wave can take away.

THAT NIGHT, I find a body in the attic and it’s hard as diamonds and I look for more. The second body I find is a pile of soft bones and surprising shapes of teeth behind a panel in the basement. In the middle of the kitchen, the third body’s nails have screamed themselves out of the retreating fingers of collapsed flesh, a pile of rot that lies there as if it hasn’t been moved in decades. I go outside and find a cranium, a tibia, a phalanx, and a pubis scattered from an open grave, as though dropped out of gathering arms, and I assemble them into a skeleton, ablaze under that broad and bleeding moon. I dream these bodies as answers and then wake and stir at how close this nightmare felt to reality. I drift through them again at the breakfast table, these dreams shaped like memory.

I think about how smoking is a way of trying to satisfy each moment. It disregards the future. How many cigarettes must this man have already smoked? How many more will he smoke in his lifetime? Is there a way all the filters could connect end to end to bridge the gap between this man and me? This man—who I’ve assumed lives across the ocean because of the information on the placard—and I could be united by some superglue that would bind his cigarette filters together. They’d stretch up and over the ocean. Some magical force would suspend them. I know, though, that the shape of the earth would refuse this happening. I will never find this man. I will never ask him what was bothering him. My breath rushes in and out. Did this man make it through whatever issue caused his mouth to jack into such a sprawling smile? Neck strung tight. I want to tell that man that the smoke will never fill him up. Nothing will. The yellowing it leaves behind will get closer and darker. The thing he’s trying to expand will shrink into nothing. What he’s found is a way to close in on himself. I stand in front of that print. Sweat prickles my skin. A photo is reflections of light. Everything invisible comes together to show you something.

James and I are living in a Latin mass, memorizing ritual, reciting mysteries we’ve given up on deciphering, foreign syllables unrolling in order.

The officer doesn’t break eye contact. I never know if I’m supposed to do the same or look away. Which is more confrontational? Is this a moment to abide or resist?

My thoughts guide themselves like imitations. If there was another voice in my head, what would it sound like? I try out different inflections, like writing a script, until one of the voices comes through easy and clear, less like I’m making it up and more like I’m listening. I wonder if that’s how those letters got written. I ask myself if the voice that wrote those letters is my own, my other voice, a not-Julie’s, like James is not-James, if it was this other voice that took over for a while, thinking of the neighbor constantly, feeling what it is to be absent of oneself and worrying that my shape might shift the way the house seems to grow and shrink, the way the figures on the wall breathe, the way the bruises pulse with unusual life, the way the stains glow and dim and the pipes blossom, and I decide to keep a close eye on myself. I decide it is best if I note where I end and the world begins, boundaries to be defended.

What is better? To accept the horror presented before you or search for a way out? To hunt in yourself for a comparable defect or to pull yourself tall and strong to support the correction of someone else’s faults?

There is no acceptable, untainted name for a wilderness of the mind. People will always wonder what to believe. They expect the stray inaccuracies to be looted out and abandoned. They expect the mind’s voice to unstitch only when alone. When the seams rip, they look away.

The sunrises start to feel like failures and not-James tells me he’s been going to the chapel and I want to beat my chest and refuse his prayers because the man I married would not believe that simply placing his body into such a structure could make a difference. Not-James tells me he feels less alone there, his ears cocked to the silent prayers of the hospital, and I tell him that I am his god, and I watch his chin start to twitch, but he doesn’t deny it.

I search for proof that the world is one way rather than another, but it doesn’t matter what is coming from inside us or around us. Our brains allow it either way. We can lose ourselves behind a trapdoor, whether in our mind or in the house.