And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

by Amber Sparks

She shows up at her friend’s apartment, shouts up at the window, tries to persuade the doorman. Can she throw rocks? It’s a fourth-floor apartment, so it’s doubtful. She’s never had any upper body strength. And she might be arrested. Can she make a scene? And where? She considers her options, as a friend. Scenes are for lovers. Friends are supposed to move on. Friends can be ghosted. But best friends? She feels she’s missed a beat, a line. A scene has been left accidentally on the cutting room floor.

Her sweaters always smelled like lilac and jasmine and sandalwood after visiting her friend; now they smell of exhaustion, of thin threads. She does not, she realizes, has never known, the family of the friend; she cannot call or email them to ask. She is not a lover, so she cannot track them down with some great passion.

History will tell you we made quick peace with our rapists, bore them children, married them. History will tell you how we launched ourselves into the battle like burning arrows, how we landed between kin and assaulters. History will tell you we united Rome. History likes to lie about women.

This fairy tale, in the way of most fairy tales: a warning disguised as a wish.

Perhaps they could have stayed together then, if he had only known his Greek tragedy. Maybe then he would have understood her better, understood how suffering steals the aptitude for happiness from you. Maybe he would have been okay with her melancholy then.

She remembers the feeling, finally, of that door closing on everyone. The feeling, not bad, of being alone again. She almost wishes for another love affair, sometimes, just to be able to end it. Just to feel that door close once more. Would that be true love? The relief of loneliness, replayed forever and ever?

Other people just possess you, she’d told her friend, the butcher. Is that so bad? he’d asked. To be possessed? It’s the worst fate of all, she’d say. The donkey skin, she thought, was everything else in the world; it was solitude: anonymous, bloody, and happy ever after.

And we’ve done okay ever since. Maggie gives me a small allowance to do chores and buy groceries, and take care of Christmas sometimes when she’s asleep or at the casino. I guess people can get to depend on each other, even if they don’t really belong with each other.

This time when I get the big heavy thing home, I turn to the tragedies (carefully because the pages are cracking and falling out of their binding). More specifically to Hamlet. I want to eat up all the lines, all the words, since Hamlet really is the most amazing thing ever written by anyone. I feel the same way every single time I read it—like somebody gave me a very tiny, sustained electric shock and I just can’t stop my brain from quivering.

We laugh like we always do when we pass by the Meadow Park Casino, with the big neon sign in front that flashes, EVERYONE’S A WINNER AT MEADOW PARK!!!! Four exclamation marks, no kidding. And what a fucking lie—if everyone was a winner, would the parking lot be full of the same Winnebagos, day after day, the owners inside dropping their Social Security money into the slots one quarter at a time? Nobody’s a winner in Meadow Park. But everybody keeps trying just the same.

SOMETIMES I HATE NOT HAVING a history. I mean, I know a little about the English side of my family, but nothing about my dad’s side. Maggie thinks he might have been an American, but she’s not sure. My mum never told her. It makes me feel off-balance sometimes, the not-knowing.

Sven was really the ghost girl’s dad. That’s her story. It was easier than admitting I didn’t have a story of my own.

For me, I just like to see all the people and places and emotions and conflicts and struggles all exploding out of the pages of one single amazing book. Because that’s how life really is, right? You don’t get to just sit there and concentrate on one tiny little thing. Life just comes at you from everywhere and you have to deal with it all at once. Human life is a huge, messy, complicated, unbelievable thing. No wonder some people still don’t get that we used to be apes just flinging our shit at each other.

Ms. Lisa’s eyes narrow even more, until they’re practically closed. There are ghosts in every town, she says, and shakes her head. But I wouldn’t go hunting for them.

It’s not that I want her life. Horses and wall-to-wall carpeting and a perma-tan mother? No thank you. It’s just that I don’t want my life to be amusing. I don’t want my life to be small and funny and disposable.

Oh, honey, she says. She has not ever for real ever called me honey before. I’m leaving everything to you, she says. The house, my money—all of it. You’re the only one who’ll ever amount to anything—maybe you can use it to go to college, huh?

This is not the kind of surprise where you drop things, or jump up and down, or faint, or even let your jaw fall like characters in books. This is a different surprise. This is the kind of terrible surprise where you just sort of stand there, doing nothing, holding your hands in fists. This is the kind of surprise where your insides quietly eat each other, and your brain goes dark and red and sad.

Lavoisier’s wife said, Screw these revolutionary assholes. Lavoisier’s wife held up a glass to show us not everything about the French Revolution, or indeed any revolution, was enlightened. Lavoisier’s wife knew that reactionaries are often, well, reactionary.

Lavoisier’s wife was like, Do you see me over here writing this preface? Lavoisier’s wife was like, Do you see me over here demanding the return of my husband’s papers? Lavoisier’s wife was like, What are you going to do to me? Which was quite brave, because she certainly knew exactly what they could do to her. Lavoisier’s wife had no more fucks to give.

Lavoisier’s wife was called Marie-Anne, and in full Marie-Anne Pierrette Lavoisier, née Paulze, but for the purposes of this narrative she shall be known as Lavoisier’s wife. This is not intended to strip her of her humanity or personhood, as a woman; rather, it is meant to focus a tight and somewhat ironic spotlight on the role she will play in her husband’s drama, and to signal (wink wink nod, as the OED would do) her eventual and historical erasure from it.

And what is history, anyway, but the chance to dig up our skeletons and give them new stories?

I considered the words we typed and shared, what trended, what was tossed. I swore not to be like you—a scam artist; or like them—the scammed. I took notes and I took screenshots and I researched meanings. I wrote down etymology and comforted myself in language’s long and twisting track record, shaped and reshaped, long before we got here.

I thought to ask your ex-wife, but she wasn’t online, wasn’t anywhere at all where I could find her. I thought that was strange once, but no longer; no doubt you made a hungry hole in her life. No doubt you swallowed her up.

SWALLOW. Takes on the meaning “consume” or “destroy” after 1340. Cognate with the Old Norse svelgr, or “whirlpool.” See also “devour.”

It’s always raining now, or always dry now. And all our days are like this now, here at the end of the world. Everything feels like a memory already. Everything feels like it’s happening for the last time.

PAREIDOLIA. Attaching significance to insignificant things. It’s supposed to be an evolutionary advantage. We recognize human beings, can sort friend from foe. We make sense of a cluttered and chaotic world. We learn the shapes of the faces we love, learn to memorize the swollen tear-frown, the tilted smile. We memorize the sonnet of that strawberry hair.

I was living there alone by then, surrounded by the things you had renounced and left behind. You’d come and gone in my life, just a few years together between your sorrows and your delusions. But now you wanted my artistry, and maybe, still, wanted me, too. Or at least I pretended so. No one else can make a crown fit for the gods, you said. We need you for our final glory.

But then after, you slipped on your robes and that ridiculous hat and you became a deity once more. You’ll do it? you asked, You’ll make the crown for me? and I understood then: this sex was never about love, never about your own body’s need. It was about mine, and how you knew it would undo me in the end. It always has, this great need to melt the world in the flames of passion, to burn everything down behind me, even in the savage dream of these sorry times we inhabit.

BURN. A combined word from the Old Norse “to kindle” and the Old English “to be on fire.” The later expression “to burn one’s bridges” probably stems from the Civil War and a series of reckless cavalry raids. But in the end it was you who burned your bridges, not me—and then you were your own blaze. You died in the great fire that swept the floodwaters away, and your unfinished temple was consumed by the blaze like everything else.

It is always this way, at the end of things, you said. The people will need a god. Are you fucking kidding me, I said. Same thing, you said, and kissed my forehead, chastely, like the saint you were becoming. I despised you when you got this way; I wanted to ask Herod for your head.

END. Usage in Old English meant death or destruction, the literal end. It wasn’t until 1917 that we got “end-time,” for the end of not just one thing but everything, #endofallthethings.

AND IT WASN’T UNTIL 1927 that we got “end” as in “finished,” as in “the limit.” As in “the last goddamn straw.”

At first I wondered what you wanted him for, this stranger. For love? For friendship? To be another of your disciples? I remembered the way you turned to me, months ago, during a commercial for #syntheticgardens, and told me that I was your acolyte. You said it the way normal people say “baby” or “sweetheart.”

APOPHENIA. The human tendency to seek patterns in random nature, where there are no patterns to be found. See also: ghosts, gambling, and the passions of religious mania and prophecy. See also: what happens when your lover’s brain breaks down while the world is burning.

Your name before you changed it: a fusty yet furious string of syllables, Old Europe braided with the raw spirit of the New World. Your name after you changed it: the dead name of a lost god, buried ten thousand years ago under a swollen, ancient sun. You said it meant the son of Ra.

MOON. Face notwithstanding, the moon is a source of madness just the same. Or so say the police, hospital staff, and good old Pliny the Elder, who theorized that perhaps humans were so affected by the moon because they—like the tides—were made mostly of water, especially the brain. The full moon, in particular, is believed to hand us lunatics, werewolves, and criminals. The moon reaches down with silver fingers and toys with us; and we reach up and destroy the moon.

At your funeral—held like those of the kings of old, your pyre signaling only the absence of a body—I wore my bluest dress and wondered if there really was a world beyond. There was a feeling of bacchanalia in the room, your worshippers mentally popping champagne corks and dancing in frenzies. It seemed possible to see a kind of heaven in their stares, a cruel human dream of heaven. And I did not forgive you.

Her plainness had been a source of some small pain in her youth; often, she would wonder if she’d ever find love, ever cash in her virginity. Eventually, the disappointment of loneliness gave way to a kind of exhilaration, the understanding that she alone possessed a sort of superpower. As long as she was careful and committed only small crimes, and carried a little luck with her, she could do more or less as she liked.

My mother’s second husband, and my father, was only somewhat more reasonably named Hollis Barcus. The newly christened Wendy Barcus, besotted with martyrs and medieval saints, married a thoroughly modern man who’d martyred himself to that twentieth-century tyrant, time. Wendy made space and stillness, Hollis made lists and timetables. It stood to reason the marriage would be troubled.

She was up there on the roof, green blanket spread over beige shingles, conversing with the bear like she did many mornings. Sometimes she told him stories. Sometimes she prayed, though she didn’t exactly believe in a benevolent god. Hers was an angry god, furious and disapproving, and she prayed mostly for revenges and disappointments. She prayed to be martyred in briefly agonizing ways.

SOMEDAY, THIS STUDIO will be mine. I’ve memorized it. I’ve come to love it drearily, in the way I suppose you’d find love in an arranged marriage, or a secondhand dress you didn’t pick out. Would you like the official tour? I get my stillness and strangeness from Wendy, but like Hollis I am a guide, an organizer. I gather, weave, divvy, and make a path for making meaning, through the detritus of Wendy’s faith and mine. I’ll show you what I mean.

We would pretend we were married and old, like Hollis and Wendy. Do you suppose I’ll have affairs like Hollis? he would ask. If you do, I told him, I’ll kill you and bury you in the field where Hollis found you. That seemed to make him happy. FB never wanted any friends other than me, and I knew he was in love with me very early on. I knew I could be in love with him too, if I let myself, so I waited and put off deciding what to do about it until we were grown.

Scene: The fancy party we snuck into, in the richer suburb next to ours. Where we crawled in through the open basement window, one of those old-fashioned ones with a crank and latch, and drank half a bottle of expensive scotch before they found us. Where we sat, in shame, on somebody’s spotless white leather sofa, and watched the police car park in the driveway to take us back to Hollis and Wendy. Where Hollis said I shouldn’t be running so free, and Wendy said it was your fault, and they both said they’d have to send you away, and I put my foot down in the middle of the new blue shag and said I’d follow you anywhere they sent you. The fight that followed, long and dreadful, when I said I loved you.

He is very busy working, and the gossip magazines tie him to all manner of glamorous ladies, but I know the truth: we swore never to love another as long as we’re both alive. We can’t be lovers—Wendy told us why—but we’ll be together in our shared loneliness. It’s a good vow, almost as holy as a religion.

I’m making a diorama of Saint Urith of Chittlehampton; her stepmother had her killed by harvesters with scythes. The flowers line the spots where her blood soaked the earth. Legend says that red gave way to white, to great blooms of yellow, of green and pink and palest blue; legend says spring itself was born of Urith’s suffering. Life blossoming out of the long dark stain of winter.

Of course we believed it was a spell. It was easier to understand than the grunts and eye-rolls our fathers made when they saw Oliver, when we mentioned Oliver, when the thought of Oliver crossed their minds. Our big, bearded fathers seemed afraid, though we didn’t understand how they could be afraid of anything.

Next, the memory of traumas; self and the world’s. Everything that burns: grass, forests, skin, aircraft, cities, crops. Her second husband to smoke. Her two sons to fever. Her daughter: a strange cult and a series of feverish marriages and too many children she didn’t quite love. Maps, too, gone, so no path can be left to trace through the wreckage.

To be dissolved: the long nights, alone in dark clubs and alone in dark bars and alone in dark bedrooms, trying desperately to find light. To be dissolved: the visits from grandchildren, hesitant and shy. The smell of young skin, too much memory in that downy scent. But always enough love, always hands in the dollhouse, more figures always needed.

Finally tragedy, finally weeping. Finally the memory of man’s hubris. Finally the iceberg, the bomb, the burn always lurking to fill the trenches, the beaches, the ovens, the jungles, the deserts. The hubris that will eat up trees and children and even the dead with relish; the way man will peel history like an onion, or sometimes drill a hole right through.

The men. The last to go: the men, the collective men, and she will finally do the leaving for once. She’s held to them too long, given them too much place of impo...