Writing saved her.
Words strung together, forming a lifeline to pull her from the deepest, darkest, swirling waters of heartbreak and despair.
Phrases came to her, as if divinely inspired during moments of trying her best to think of anything but the confusing sting of betrayal.
The Justices’ conference room, ordinarily the witness to judicial sparring, now became the battlefield for a newspaper war. Justice Stephen Field led the first charge, greeting his colleagues the day after the election with The New-York Sun, whose bold headline declared “TILDEN IS ELECTED. THE DEMOCRATS JUBILANT.”
The morning after the upheaval of the night protests, the city was surreally quiet. Waking in the parking garage, Eleanor lifted herself out of the nest of old coats and her backpack on the floor of the backseat. As she drove away from the one sanctuary she could think of as streets were shut down, Eleanor saw evidence of the night’s violence in the strewn litter, broken glass, and the watchful police presence.
I have not ferried a living soul across the straits since Orpheus and Eurydice. I think of her and how she clung to Orpheus and wept into his chest, and he crooned softly into her hair not daring to open his eyes. Orpheus smelled of sunshine and song. Eurydice smelled narcotic like a field of hyacinths, and smoke. Orpheus calmed her with his beautiful baritone warm as a patch of sunlight in the forest.
The new priest dropped consonants from the ends of words, causing consternation and some mirth among the few who still attended mass. Juan, sitting with a group of women near the fountain, an empty plastic water jug by his feet, listened as they talked about him. They were waiting for the bread and making fun of the priest’s Argentinian accent.
“If he were serving coffee, not communion, it wouldn’t matter what he sounds like!” Laura complained. She unfolded a handkerchief and laid it on top of her gray hair against the sun.
“Lion,” Artemis chokes out. She needs an excuse. “I want to check on Quill. My porcupine friend. He’s worried about me. Give me a moment to find him.”
Up she leaps, striding through the forest’s thickness, her pace accelerating as fast as her pounding heart, refusing memory with every panting breath.
People have commented how stoic I was about my brother’s death, how graceful all the sons were about losing the third in line, but most of them don’t realize we were born with genes for fatalism that had been switched on for generations. On both sides of my family before the emigration here, our ancestors knew little but stress, war, and hard work.
The sun blazed down upon Cave Hill Cemetery, bathing the graves of the fallen with tribute for their ultimate sacrifice. John Marshall Harlan stood among an impatient crowd. He knew some of the men interred here, who had departed their sweet Kentucky homes, their beloved creeks and valleys, for the sake of the indivisible Union, and from time to time he would visit their graves.
David Abbott was the last person the citizenry of Centerville expected to commit suicide, much less in broad daylight and by such unsightly means, his broken and bloody corpse splayed on impact from its five-story fall onto the sidewalk in front of the Playhouse Cinema.
Back in the spring, when the thawed warmth of early morning felt new through the concrete lattice of the parking garage, Eddie and Margaret would not have been so free in their intolerance of Marshall, or so close that handholding felt natural. In the spring they were just becoming accustomed to the others’ short stops, hard turns, and personal music preferences.
Because it’s always dusk, we make everything neon: our clothes, our furniture, our streetlights. The City is far north enough that the sun never breaches the sky—it skates the horizon’s rim, dips up and under like a coin circling the drain. Neon is our bioluminescence, and it’s always cold in the city.
I don’t remember how I started researching liminal spaces. Couldn’t even say which ology my post-grad work is classified as.
Arleen Dunson was there. She was there, outside Boise, among the other surrounding police, when three pit bulls came blitzing towards tactical from around the corner of the decrepit house, like sharks with legs, swinging ropes of drool, rodeo-eyed and thinking kill kill kill. Two of the dogs were hooked and pulled away, no problem. The last one, incensed and alone in the dust, bucked and sprung back and forth…
Laurenda did not like the look of those men, not at all. She had been hanging the washing up on the clothesline behind the cabin when she heard the tortured whinnying of horses driven too hard, and the whoops of men careless about their steeds. She dropped the children’s clothes in a heap upon the grass and hastened into the cabin.
I woke up to my grandmother whispering to me: “It’s over. She’s passed.” Like a puppet on strings, I got up and forced myself to send the work assignment I had been working on before the frenzy of organizing a funeral began. A calm sky was lazily rising, as if nothing had happened. In the distance, the roosters were alerting the villagers that it was time to wake up. Their crowing, accompanied by the incessant barking of neighbors’ dogs, was the most precise alarm possible.
It wouldn’t take long until the first horse-drawn wagons passed by on their way to the fields. It was Sunday, but a few sinners would be seduced by the iridescent vineyards and the large corn or alfalfa fields.
They eye me as I walk towards them. But I must be so worn in appearance that all see I pose no threat, I am no bandit. And that appearance of mine must be very sorry indeed, for I have known bandits, and they are most ragged in face, tattered in clothing, and thin in frame. It helps that I come along an open road and alone. But degradation works in one’s favor at times.
One stands near the road, attempting to press an old rusty hoop onto a dilapidated and splaying barrel. Beside him a young girl, perhaps seven years of age, carrying her baby sister on her hip. When I greet them, a few others come around.
Colonel George Corkhill of the Chronicle was ushered into Justice Samuel Miller’s parlor, and anxiously removed his hat. His face was flushed, and his countenance bore the marks of bad news.
“The position of Chief Justice will be offered to Senator Conkling, sir.” Corkhill spoke with hesitation, for he was thrusting a dagger into the heart of his father-in-law.
I nursed a lamb when I was eight or nine. Its mother had forsaken her, and Dad, sensing a good learning opportunity, tasked me with feeding her every morning. She had watery eyes with dark, horizontal irises; a wet, pink nose; and kinky, brown wool that felt fantastic against my cheek. We called her Rosie.
They sat in an outdoor café having a latte and a ham cachito. Her boss talked about the weather, how the government wanted to subsidize payroll, which was their way to get inside the company and eventually take it over. He put a cigarette in his mouth and offered one to Alejandra. She declined. She didn’t smoke. And while she enjoyed watching the clouds above the Avila mountain, the spacious sidewalks covered in tables, and people playing an afternoon game of chess, she was still wondering why her boss asked her to lunch.
My head felt like an overripe summer squash.
It was starting out to be a grim day. Though you’d never know it from looking at me, I felt like I had been cloistered all night in an assisted living facility for psychopathic chairs—a command centre for the flotsam of miserable furniture, retired and warehoused, a hub with just enough of a pleasant environment to give the illusion of living in luxury. Night terrors. I struggled to make sense of my present reality. Being a chair had its complications.
Jake tried to kill me, Lizzie had said.
A lie, of course. But she spread it far and wide before she left California for Indiana: He tried to choke me, she’d repeat.
But—Christ!—it was just a hug, and it went down like this:
Hannah had burst into our room, turned on the light, and demanded to know which one of us was taking her to practice. Lizzie kicked me under the sheets—evidently it was my turn—but I kicked her back, club swim had been her stupid idea, just grant me a little rest.
You knew your father had been having heart problems. Of course, you knew that. But you had not been paying enough attention—not the right kind of attention—to factually comprehend just how critical his condition might have become. In the year following your mother’s death, you were aware that he was paying ever-lessening attention to what she had hopefully called her “heartful, healthful” advice regarding his diet. And he had slacked off his previous daily walking routines and even stopped his weekly bowling league participation.
Words are my enemy. Spoken. Written. It doesn’t matter. They’re out to get you. Birth certificates, applications, references, diplomas, licenses, interviews, gossip, whispers, family stories, newspapers articles, books, magazines, all of it, all of it, is just waiting to do you in. Words are a trap, a snare. They will catch you, crush you, cripple you. They push you around from the moment you’re born.
The Chief Justice would not consent to die. He had felt the tremors first in his fingers, when the train had departed Niagara Falls, but dismissed the barely perceptible tingling as the motion of the locomotive over the rails. But now, the right side of his mouth began to droop, and he sought to speak but could not. He tried to lift his arm, to motion to the other gentlemen in the first-class compartment, the rocking of the train having lulled them to sleep, but it was too late.
Hannah’s death was doubly final. Lizzie burned her, then took the whole urn with her when she left for Indiana—you don’t get any part of her, Lizzie told me.
And then Lizzie buried her.
Heaven and Earth are full of thy glory, the preacher said.
But I keep her toenails around my neck, in a locket strung on a silver chain.
Hosanna in the highest, the preacher said.
Holy shit.