Elsewhere

by Alexis Schaitkin

She walked to the edge of the top step and unleashed a wail. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, down from the clouds and up from the earth and from inside me, like my bones had all along been tuned to the frequency of that wail and had now been set vibrating by it.

was awakened in the dead of night by strange noises, like the sounds of nocturnal animals in the forest. The sounds came from my father’s room. I pressed my ear to the thin wall that separated my room from his and listened, and though I had never heard such sounds before, I knew that this was lovemaking: the rhythmic knocking of the headboard against the wall, my father’s grunts, a woman’s hitched breath, faster and faster until all at once my father cried out in pain and the woman released a moan of boundless pleasure.

Yet I suspected that being a good mother had little to do with possessing those traits good mothers ought to possess, that it hinged on something else entirely, required other, obscure qualities that could be neither honed nor harnessed.

What if it was possible to love too ferociously, and to burn yourself up with it?

semen almost floral in its perfume, and so thickly laced through the stagnant air in our room that I took it into myself with every inhalation.

When they arrived she was always pale, her skin dry and ashen. I watched her grow up this way, in cycles of contracted presence followed by long spans of absence. For a brief time each year we belonged to each other, then she left the sea tanned and was gone for months, and the Gabi who returned was not the Gabi who had left, but a paler, older girl, who carried within her a world I couldn’t see and could only guess at by the changes in her.

What bound us was also the reason our bond proved too frail to endure; it was the lesson our lives had taught us, one we had learned too well: You do not get to keep what is sweetest to you; you only get to remember it from the vantage point of having lost it.

I recognized the beauty of this place without loving it, as one recognizes without loving the beauty of all places one passes through too briefly to claim them or be claimed by them.

went where I went and my movements and actions signified nothing, portended nothing, and the years accrued rather purposelessly, their only meaning that they were mine.

it seems to me that everyone has come from a place they will never move on from, a place they hate and love in equal measure, a place people elsewhere can never understand; they find me here, and I believe I am useful to them, though I know this place can only ever be a disappointment to them.