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The corpse of a black widow your mother smashed on the side of the front door; for three weeks you insisted on going out the back. Until your mother scooped you up in her arms, squeezing you around the ribs while you screamed, kicked, pounded disobedient fists between her shoulder blades. So afraid you nearly seized with it, she carried you out to the sidewalk. “See, Maura? It’s fine. You’re fine.” That incident was what first put you on a therapist’s overcushioned sofa. You were far too old to be screaming that way. *
Literalllllly ny mom and bees
Last year, at the onset of an episode so bad you ended up having to switch medications, you went to the Getty. You love the Getty. If a museum could be your boyfriend, if you could run away with and marry a museum, the Getty with its sharp angled jaw would be second to none.
Looking past you, at the screen, your mother murmured, “It’s terrible to have a child.”
Sometimes when you’re daydreaming you imagine writing one very long, important essay, to eat all your mother’s essays like a row of eggs.
I liked how closely she looked at herself now. It was a beautiful way to live.
Arthur stretched out on the couch, letting the bones of his back crack. “I don’t want to impose,” he said. “Don’t let me impose.”
Bro is imposing
Agnes is self-conscious about that, those places where her clothing sinks into her body instead of lying flat against it, but it’s always made me want to run my finger under that strap, smooth those red marks.
I roll my first bite on my tongue like some people say grace,
But Agnes said, “Take your bra off,” and I did.
I ate of my lover between her breasts, and held the little heads of the enokis in my mouth for her to taste. I ate of my lover at the musty crease of her belly, where the smallest frill of oyster mushrooms had begun.
guileless,
He kept leaning nearer as she spoke. And she would lean away from him. Not far, not obviously, but like those plants that curl themselves inward when you touch them. Her shifts in parallel to his. “That’s amazing,” he kept saying. “That’s fascinating.” He licked his teeth.
I slept in the backyard that night, and not much at all. I looked at the clusters of the stars, watched a spider stringing up webbing in our rosebush.
Beside me, Arthur started to cry. He did it soundlessly, with a quiet catching breath. So startling, that for a moment I imagined he was sorry. He swallowed, and his throat bobbed, muscles sliding under skin. There was a thick sweat shining on his forehead, I noticed, and beginning to trickle down his face, a drip suspended from the tip of his nose and then falling. His hand lifted, trembling, to his throat. I backed my chair away from the table. “I didn’t.” Shaking my head already. “I didn’t.” I would go for the phone. I would call whoever needed to be called, the helivac that should have
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Agnes had put three or four, perhaps, in his dish, drizzled with balsamic. I got up from time to time to check on her. She lay very still in our bed, not weeping, watching the ceiling. I have always known my lover to be very sure in her choices. I kissed her, and I ate the shiitakes from her clavicle. I went back to Arthur, as the shock set in.
The woods know what to do with a body.
California burned down every year, of course, and had all my life. Fire was one of the only seasons we had. But it was getting worse in a way you could see.
Harry loaded her old Camry to its limits with boxes, and together we strapped a black roof bag to the top.
her hamster, named Emily Dickinson,
Recently she liked Joan Baez, so that was what we trailed out our open windows, her long, sweet melancholy, and Harry’s own untuned voice. Harry sang like someone who so, so badly wanted to sing beautifully.
“Then why are you picking them up?” Harry winced, and tugged on the long fringe of her ponytail, a nervous gesture she would have up until she lopped it off. “I just feel bad letting things die.”
There would always be something compulsive and anxious about Harry’s kindness, which made me think sometimes about the difference between not being bad and being good.
Mmmmmm real
Both of us quiet with our headphones in, or me reading my book, which was about cannibalism in the natural world,
I slipped my hand into the purse and tried to pet Emily Dickinson’s fragile little skull. She bit me.
That bit of “Wild Geese” that goes, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” except that I always misremembered it, until I looked it up, as ending with “want what it wants.”
It was just that, Do something, whore, was the funniest thing anyone had ever said to me.
I’d heard you could rent cabins here. I wished we’d gotten a place to stay overnight. I wished I had come alone, so I could focus on this singular emotion, just me and this place that looked like a different planet because it looked so much like earth in picture books.
felt full of the kind of mourning that comes with moving away from home, even though it was Harry who was moving away from home, and I was going back.
It tasted like the cobblers my mom made sometimes when I was little, which meant it tasted like sitting at the gray-marble-topped kitchen island with the chandelier my mom always hit her head on, the lights off in the rest of the house, and the sound of whipped cream hissing out of a can.
The difference between a Shakespearean comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy is whether there’s a marriage at the end. Here whatever has come before is answered with love, which means sex, which means children. Let’s fuck and be plentiful. That’s how you send death out of the room for a while.
