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My hands get no cleaner than an old bathtub. My fingernails are all clipped as short as possible, but the chemicals have managed to claw their way through the dead skin, into the bone. As if there’s no enamel. When I say bone, I mean the nails, because nails are a kind of bone. Or rather, horn would maybe be a better word, but at any rate, it’s as if some chemicals have blended with the proteins that weave the nails together. When I say dead skin, I just mean the outermost layer of the skin. It’s just dead cells. Then under it, there’s the dermis, and under the dermis is the hypodermis. Life.
First lines
I’m not going to lull you to sleep with dreams—but the signs make it clear to me that the brain is not something you can touch. The same is true for all things, and that’s what this story is about. But not about a girl. Whose name is Ellen.
No one’s crazy. I mean what I say. There are so many sides to reality that, in the best-case scenario, it’s cubistic. Worst-case scenario, predictable. Never flat.
I found my reading glasses next to the TV remote and then went back into the kitchen and sat down to read again, but I couldn’t stay focused. When I’d looked up rhinos online a few days earlier, countless close-ups of wounds had come up and ever since, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about this act: ripping a horn off a rhino’s face.
All things end in the sea, she said. In the landfill, said her mom. The landfill is in the sea, said Ellen. Then we are in the sea, said her mom. We are in the sea, said Ellen. Everything is clean in the sea, said her mom. Everything is always moving in the sea, said Ellen.
The fingers know better than the mind how a wound on a sawed-apart neck feels to the touch, knows the thickness of skin, how fat bursts, where bones are and how they break.
If it weren’t for the stuff I was made of, I would have never stopped traveling. The world would have become a mold and I would have poured into it, would have become a grain of sand in a shell, a pearl in a beach vendor’s strand, around the neck of a woman, tapping lightly on her skin and stretching taut over her collarbone when she moved.
That’s probably what sparked the idea. I say idea, when I mean infatuation. That was probably when the idea took shape. Infatuation. When we ordered at the restaurant, which was full of people like us, my face burned and the rain dripped out of my hair, and I shook off like a Labrador, and the drops went flying, and Mike laughed, and laughter is one way to shake yourself. Shaking yourself is the only way to survive. Like an antelope that just barely escapes shakes itself. Like a cat that encounters a handsy child shakes itself. What ails me is grief, I thought. Grief that refuses to be budged.
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The idea to hide the house key under a mat or in a flowerpot has never crossed my mind. I’ve never understood why people didn’t expect a break-in. Not that I’m so afraid of thieves or in fear for my life, but rather that I expect them and, in some sense, we’re always being robbed, every day of our lives. Sometimes of love or happiness, but always, at the very least, of truth.
I always felt a little uncomfortable in a theater. It seemed strange to see people moving and speaking in such a performative way. Like catching someone in a lie. Then it would happen every so often that the script would move me, and I’d hear what the actors said—feel, even, that they were talking to me. After one such performance, I described my experience, and Grandma said that that was the mark of a high-quality show—it got you to forget yourself. Just think, she said, that’s what we humans are always striving for—to forget ourselves and to let ourselves be forgotten. That’s what it’s all
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Most often when police put out missing-person alerts, they are for teens who people figure will end up being found at some party or just hanging around. Somewhere in a heap of other lost teens trying to get even more lost. If the missing person is older, you suspect that they’ve walked into the sea or committed a crime or been murdered. Sometimes, you’ll see an announcement a few days later that they’ve turned up again. Sometimes not. I’ve often thought about disappearing myself, but only when I’ve been certain that someone would notice. When I was a child, I plotted my escape. Pictured bare
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There are so many ways to disappear. When I’ve been at my lowest, I’ve thought about how I could vanish without a trace. I didn’t want it to end with someone stumbling upon my body at the edge of a forest. A rowboat out in an open sea of sleeplessness and a shotgun report. Still, the most common, most unostentatious disappearances take place within a person. When the personality takes over the work of the soul and continues onward, fully mechanized, with the help of the body.
The mind decides what it thinks is important.
People come, people go . . . some without changing anything and others so much so that afterward, there’s nothing but ruin.
Trauma is, of course, nothing but an enchantment:
The first story in the sheaf is about elves. I was fourteen years old when I wrote it, and it ends with the main character waking up—it had all been a dream. I remember that when I showed it to Grandma, she said that’s how all stories ended, and I didn’t understand what she meant, thought she was saying that my story was unoriginal. But when I think about it now, I understand exactly what she meant.
