Pew

by Catherine Lacey

Can only other people tell you what your body is, or is there a way that you can know something truer about it from the inside, something that cannot be seen or explained?

A gold plate was passed up and down the aisles, hand to hand to hand. People dropped in coins, bills, and envelopes, then passed the plates back to people who carried them to the altar like a casket toward its hole.

I felt this gentle urgency around her, a bruised kindness, as if something had been threatening to destroy her every day of her life and her only defense, somehow, was to remain so torn open.

it seemed to me she was a woman hanging off the edge of a cliff, telling me not to worry about her, asking what she could do for me.

Perhaps an honest feeling will always find a way to force itself through, an objector crying out in a crowd, hoping someone will hear.

I felt I wasn’t the only one, that there must have been others, that I was a part of a “we,” only I didn’t know where they were. We were and I was, not entirely alone. Maybe we were all looking for one another without knowing it.

A moment only happens once but some of them take so much longer than a moment to understand, to see.

Once, I don’t know when, I had been sitting in a diner and a small child was screaming and weeping and a person behind the counter was frowning at that child, telling the person with that child to make it stop, angry about being an audience to all that tiny pain. The person behind the counter must have forgotten the feeling of being so small that anyone could just pick you up and take you anywhere at any time. What a terror a body must live through. It’s a wonder there are people at all.

I keep thinking about how you can’t be sure of who someone really is, or really was, before you knew them … or even after, sometimes.

I sensed the room was really listening to her, which was a little unusual—most people who spoke up did it too often, so no one ever really listened to anyone,

in the end no matter what a person says in that room, it will always be misunderstood, then forgotten.

Sometimes I felt we were all breathing in unison, other times it seemed we had no relationship to one another, that he was walking and I was walking and neither of us was even aware that the other was there, that even if I hadn’t been there, he would have told this story to the dog or to the lawns or the trees or the air.

Did everyone feel this vacillating, animal loneliness after removing clothes? How could I still be in this thing, answering to its endless needs and betrayals?

I hung in this flesh that all those unknown centuries of blood that had brought into being. I had to tend to this flesh as if it were an honest gift, as if it had all been worth it. Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?

The body is already dead, I thought. I was still smiling. The body is your tomb.

How lucky we are to have the moon. It seemed that hardly anyone ever saw the sky anymore. Had we all forgotten it was there? All this time below it, we forget. Maybe the sky will leave us someday, then we will be able to realize what it was.

We know we haven’t always been fair to everyone. Certainly—no. But we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time.

Why did we draw our conclusions with our bodies when the body is so inconclusive, so mercurial?

The human mind is so easily bent, and so uneasily smoothed.

Did you have parents or just some people who thought they should own somebody?

Too much light will blind you and too much water will drown you. It is a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.

that a mean thought? Hal looked up at the ceiling fan, held his pipe in one hand, and squinted. Glad about someone’s suffering because at least it ain’t your own.

but I was still thinking about Nelson’s dream, and wondering why it was that anyone believed the human body needed to be any particular way, or what was so important about a human body. Was it possible for a human’s mind and history and memory and ideas to live inside the body of a horse, and if it was, did that make that being a human or a horse? What difference did it make, one life or another?

it’s natural to go looking for the dead in new faces. But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become—what kind of grief is that?

When someone says they heard something you did not hear, and they know you did not hear it, then you cannot tell them they did not hear what they believe they heard. They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest. It is the loudest and most confounding emotion—wanting.

They laughed like a herd of something running.

Sometimes I think that nobody is just one person, that actually we’re a bunch of different people and we have to figure out how to get them all to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that we’re just one person, even though everybody else is doing the same thing.

I came to understand that I was not a field. I was not, today, just dirt and seed and grass. A field is a living thing. Fields began and ended. Every plant has a true name that no one had to give them. People were the end of something. The body is already dead.

People cannot be kept waiting. Sometimes one of us will hold the other by the neck. Sometimes one of us will hold the other by the neck and no one will do anything about it for many years, so many lifetimes of necks being held. I know what I am. The body is already dead.

It was somehow more important than ever that I see the fireflies hovering in the yard, the way they flashed and vanished and reappeared and vanished—that they could be and not be, be again and again not be.

It’s one of the ways we’ve decided to actively reconcile with our past, unite both sides of our community, and acknowledge that everyone—every single one of us—everyone is born broken. That’s what we believe—you know—that’s a core part of Christianity. That we’re all broken without God.

I don’t know how it is I can sometimes see all these things in people—see these silent things in people—and though it has been helpful, I think, at times, so often it feels like an affliction, to see through those masks meant to protect a person’s wants and unmet needs. People wear those masks for a reason, like river dams and jar lids have a reason.

It began to seem possible that a person might have pains and thoughts that resisted language and had to be transfigured through an instrument, turned into pure sound, spun into the air, and heard.

It takes something, you know, it takes something from you to take care of another person and there’s only so much a person has to give.

Nobody’s mother should ever not be there, but my mother told me all mothers eventually are not there. I can’t understand it. I don’t even want to.

I felt so sure then—of course I was younger. It’s easier to be certain of things then—and the older you get, the more you see how certainty depends on one blindness or another.

Forgiveness is sometimes just a costume for forgetting. I don’t want it to be so—but every year, just before it begins, I start to feel this way. And then what? I forget about it.

It’s a ritual. We make them, people make them, and they don’t really mean anything, even the ones that supposedly mean something—even they don’t really mean anything. They’re just something to do.

Did she feel she’d wronged or been wronged more in her life? Did anyone ever know which was true? How much harm did we cause without knowing it? How much harm did we cause when we were certain we were doing such good?

Her face needed to be washed with tears, warm water from the body, the body’s way of saying, Yes, I am still in here.