A body in motion

Tag: fiction

  • Salt

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    I woke up yesterday in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, clutching a soggy sweater, waves slapping my face. 

    I gathered my energy and paddled with my arms and kicked with my legs until I came to a nearby cable twice as thick as my torso. I wrapped around half of it and my soggy shoes slid back into the water. 

    Someone in a scuba mask touched my shoulder, their lips curled around a black tube. Water streamed down their face mask, obscuring their eyes. I climbed higher and higher on a cable until I could see out over part of the bay. It may have been a mirage but I swear that I spotted a whale. 

    And now I lay here in an empty room. Machines buzz at my head and a chair sits empty in one corner. I would like to know what happened but, in the meantime, I quietly feel all of the parts of my body still working. I can’t remember who should be sitting in that chair but I am sure that it will come to me soon. 

    After a while the door opens and my mom steps in. Behind her is my five year old daughter. They both smile as they sit on my bed. My daughter is excited to tell me about the best lunch she has ever had just now at some place down the street. The calamari was so good and so salty, she says. This makes me smile and the giant love I have for her pounds in my chest.

    Later, when I am discharged, fully clothed, dry, and rested, my daughter and I settle back into our routine. I pack her lunch for kindergarten and stop at a coffee shop on my way to work, just as I did before. I drink coffee, work, come home and make us dinner. One day her dad calls to invite us to come see him. He lives in another city, in another state. We used to live there, too, but now we just visit sometimes. My daughter is excited to see him, he who she barely knows but loves dearly. I am excited, too. 

    On the plane my daughter wears sunglasses and carries an adult sized purse. An older man with white hair and money hands stares at us. He introduces himself and begins to ask a lot of questions while being sure to drop little hints about his successful wine business. I smile and nod while my daughter writes in her notebook. 

    While my daughter visits with her dad I spend time with old friends and revisit old habits. I meet a friend at a bar and I feel at home in the darkness. My friend steps out for a few minutes to buy some weed because he doesn’t really drink and would rather get high. I feel drops of water on my shoulder and turn around to see a man in a wetsuit standing behind me. He opens his mouth and out pours salt water in a stream. Another man, who has been sitting down the bar, gets up, shuts the man’s spewing mouth and puts him in the fish tank out back.

    My rescuer wipes the seat next to me dry with a bar towel and sits down. He has a sarcastic and dark sense of humor and a half smile that makes my breath draw in deeper than I knew possible. When my friend returns he leaves soon after as I am wrapped in the arms of new conversation and end up going home with this man. 

    When we return from our trip it is no longer home. Home is back to that other city, in that other state. Home is closer to him. I call him GW, short for Guitar Wizard. This is one of our inside jokes. I have a shirt made and sent to him with “GW” written on it so that he will remember me. Two weeks later I quit my job and give notice to my landlord. I am in love and we move back. 

    We move in with my daughter’s dad. As roomates. It is the same house that he went to in secret, back when we were together, to visit his girlfriend. It is the same home where I took my two year old daughter by stroller to throw the dried out wedding bouquet on the doorstep after discovering his secret. The pain of the past now replaced by new life and belly laugh at the turn of events.

    The house is a broken mess full of leftovers from former roommates, girlfriends, mold and a food cart truck parked out front with a painted medusa head on the side. I no longer walk but float about as my dreams come true in the arms of GW. 

    As with my other dreams, this one eventually ends. One day, in his apartment, my mouth opens and out comes  a judgmental comment about how he only has salt and pepper in his kitchen. I declare that an adult man should have more spices. This is the beginning of the end. I move on, righteous in my conviction that he should get it together and go spice shopping and come back to me only after he has a formidable selection. 

    It turns out that my heart is broken and I regret letting GW go. Time passes and one day we meet up. We end up drunk and have sex. He tells me as we lay together that he is in another relationship and cannot see me again. I am distraught and send him away in anger. A few weeks later I am pregnant. When I tell him he assures me that he will give me money for the abortion. To get the cash I meet him at a corner near his apartment. My daughter is with me as I drive by, roll down my window and quickly grab an envelope from his hand as he stands at the curb. We drive away and I never see him again. 

    At the clinic the technician squirts lube on my belly and asks me if I would like to see the fetus. I turn my head and say no. I shut my eyes and listen to the sound of the machine, pulsing like the radar of a submarine. I go home,  take the first pill and spend the day bleeding on my bathroom floor. It is my 35th birthday. The pipes in my old bathroom moan, echoing inside my empty gut. I recognize the sound as that  of a lonely, lost whale down way too deep.

    I think about my almost baby as I flush the toilet. The sun is out but I can only see deep red-black waves coming over me, crushing my flesh.

  • Envelope

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    When I spotted you sunning yourself in the lap of that lizard I could not help but stare. The air was soft and thick like your famous chocolate chip cookies. Back then, before we met, I already felt their sweet aftertaste in my mouth. 

    I remember how you yelled when your feet burned on the hot sand while running from your pet to the ocean. I wanted a lizard, too, and tried to catch one as it ran by.

    A turtle noticed my attempt and told me that my technique was all wrong.  I listened to her stories and she listened to mine. I was especially interested in her gossip about your lizard.

    The turtle and I went on and on while your lizard lounged nearby and you swam out to the island and back again. 

    I smiled at the turtle as you reached the shore and ran back to your lizard. You threw something towards me and it hit my cheek. It was the smallest piece of driftwood that the ocean could carve and was all it took for us to spend a lifetime on the beach, between lizard and turtle, always finding another excuse to stay.

  • Liberty bell

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    I am in Philadelphia for the first time. I take a walk in an area full of founding fathers. There are shadow horses and ghost men in wigs with straight backs walking in lines between long rows of big box stores. The color of the bricks has not changed in 250 years but the land around is unrecognizable. I wonder if it  is the history of the place that I feel in my body or if it is jet lag. I visit the Liberty Bell and feel awe when I see that it is much smaller than I had imagined, and its crack so large. How can something forged of metal have such a gash? I read about how many people have touched it or been photographed with it over the years and about its symbolic uses. 

    The crowd pushes me to the side and I make my way through a metal detector that funnels me into a courtyard between old brick buildings. There is a lonely sign in the middle of the cobblestone that lets me know that there is a talk at this spot every 30 minutes. I look up at a brick tower and wonder if there is still a bell up there. Broken bells go down in history and unbroken ones remind us that it is time for lunch. 

    As my eyes leave the tower and travel back to the ground I see a man in a park ranger uniform standing by the sign. I associate his look with mountains and trees, two things that don’t exist in this vast expanse of pavement and brick.  

    The man talks to a small group of three as I linger behind. He is full of facts about the constitution and about the many dramas that unfolded inside the nearby buildings. As he speaks of the long and important history of men debating, I notice that he is very familiar. He mentions that he is from California and then I remember how I know him.  He is the Pink Floyd guy. He looks exactly the same, only older and with a small pony tail and a clean uniform in place of lop sided hair and a cigarette smelling once-white  t-shirt.

    He has the same crowded eyes. Like there is a whole town trying to look out of just one set. And his mouth is straight, unchanging no matter what words it forms. I dissect his features while going back into my mind to dig though old memories as he stands there, reciting facts and wearing a Smokey the Bear hat. Life comes into focus, now, like the moment a kaleidoscope’s pattern opens up before it closes again. 

    He would regularly visit the small town general store I cashiered at to buy cigarettes and 40-oz  of the cheapest beer. I was 17 and found him deeply interesting. I wanted to know what was going on inside this man with nicotine fingers and a walkman.  He was older than me by a handful of years. I could tell that he drank and smoked a lot but I didn’t yet understand what this meant. 

    One day, close to my high school graduation date, he waited for me after work. It was well past sunset as we drove west. I learned that his favorite band was Pink Floyd. I also learned that he believed that the world was about to end. He gave me the exact date. He was certain. He told me that there was a voice in his head that sounded like the Pink Floyd lead singer and this voice talked to him about important things.  We parked next to a cliff that overlooked the ocean. The waves crashed below, water spraying up against the rock face every few seconds. He turned to me and said that the end of the world was happening all because of him. His eyes watered and his bony body sat rigid.

    I listened and then drove him back to town and let him out on the side of a small road. He lit a cigarette and adjusted his headphones as he walked away. 

    Soon after, we met up again and drove out to a bluff overlooking the ocean. We walked through some scrubby grass in the dark and fumbled around for a few quick minutes, kissing and then laying down and then realizing whatever we were trying to do was not going to happen. I drove him back to my house. I let him out a few yards before the driveway and gave him instructions on where to hide out until I could retrieve him. 

    My parents were so worried about me that they had called the police. I’d never before seen them so upset at anyone other than each other. Eventually they went to bed and I went out to my room. It was in what had once been a storage room detached from the main house. I pulled him out of the darkness and through the sliding glass door. He lay stiff in my bed all night, not moving an inch. In the morning, he snuck out and hitchhiked down the rural roads to get back to wherever he lived. 

    My fascination with him broke after that night. I realized that his identity was the end of the world and mine was not. What he heard in Pink Floyd was not what I heard. His song was a broken bell and mine had not even been forged. A few months later I went off to college. The end of the world came and went and somehow he found his way across the country and into the national park service. 

    I think about lingering after his talk but the focus I felt a few minutes ago is now fading. I hear a bell ringing and realize that it is getting late. I walk away, wearing the sound between my ears, listening and feeling it speak to me until I fade away to join the other cobblestone shadows.

  • cinnamon rolls

    I wake up to the sound of my cat breathing loudly. How does she make that noise? Is that normal? No. No way is that a normal cat sound.  What a strange snorting bed hog, curled up contentedly and snuggling in the exact middle of the mattress. 

    I am craving a cinnamon roll. Ah, it was one of those nights. Once again I traveled the lit up highway of my brain to the smaller world that reflects inside my eyes.  I spend all night in the familiar place I visit while my body rests. This one is on the other side of my eyes and inside my cells. A smaller but equally cyclical world full of repetitive problems and sweet treats. 

    For some reason I have the belief  from others or movies or books that dreams are metaphors providing one with clues about what they should do next. As a child my mom had a dream book on the family bookshelf. It was like a mysterious dictionary where the words translated into ghost-like apparitions that pointed in a direction that seemed solid but then crumbled upon a good solid stare. In my memory many of the definitions insinuated that my dream had something to do with sex, which I did not understand. Are my nightly cinnamon rolls trying to tell me something?

    This dream book and countless friends and influences tell me that the mind is the all knowing wizard laying down artsy hints in the form of dreams for the dumb consciousness to follow. Or it’s like the super computer inside that is secretly optimized for happiness but is playing coy and holding back like an evil narrator. 

    At some point my mind started to serve me up a world complete with a sometimes haunted, sometimes perfect home and a city full of secret bakeries. It is as real of a place as this is and I have since spent countless nights on a break from my literal dream job looking for the most amazing underground bakery that my dream city has to offer. It is always the same, complete with a long line and a selection of yeasty treats waiting to be decided upon.