Despite how strict St. Mary’s School had always presented itself, I never really felt held down by the hardline rules and consumptive studies. I embraced them. I was always pretty religious. My mom daily recited hymns to me before bed. She had chickens. And she kept them out in the back by the shed under the horse troughs for shade. And the horses, amusing themselves, would snort and kick at the cages, keeping the chickens in a persistent frenzy. My mom and I would sit inside and watch the show from my window and laugh and laugh.

My mom taught me a lot over the years. She introduced me to many musicians and would wake me up in the mornings by waltzing into my room dancing to music on the house speakers. She had these big red lips, the weighty build of a working girl, and an ass like a hippo. Her frizzy hair was always in a mess of a top bun pulled skin tight so that when she let it down she would shed a whole layer of it. I hated it because I always found her hair stuck to my clothes. And of course she wore Boucheron. She smelled like the eighties. And she loved her husband so much. Orange, Bergamot, Verbena, Basil, Lavender. She would spray me with it every time before I walked out the door for school.

My habitual spasms or seizures developed right around the time when my father started traveling for work when I was eight years old. I guess I didn’t know him very well. And I thought I knew what he meant to me as a part of my life. He was a young man with an old soul. Long black hair to his shoulders, sometimes slicked back, deep grooves in his forehead, and stubble around a persistently unsmiling mouth. He was handsome and strong. Every night that he was home he would spend hours outside riding his horse. I wasn’t allowed outside when he was riding, but the taboo piqued my curiosity. I would haunch myself on a landing on the stairway that offered a window view of him galloping back and forth over and over again. I could faintly hear him breathe and the horse too, and since he rode at night, the acute view from the window offered little glare. Often, I sensed my father knew I was watching him. His sweat dripped off his hair passing globules down to his shirt, swelling above his waist, and releasing from the bottom hem onto the grass. And his horse would smell like him.

Apart from when we ate dinner he barely offered me any attention. But it wasn’t upsetting because I understood that he felt I received enough love from my mother. My father, for the time he was around, moved around the house like a ghost. For me, he was mythic. He began to work away from home more and more. He stayed away for months at a time on business. Sometimes I would know he was back in town, but he would not stay with us.

When he left, I missed him so much, my body couldn’t handle it. I was obsessed with him, and his absence always felt urgently violating and distressing. But the spasms that lay in his wake, were sublime.

They happen when I sleep. Every muscle in my body contracts, and I’ll wake up, but I’ll be helplessly paralyzed in nervous agony. I can’t feel my bedsheets against my skin and my dreams begin to materialize before me. Prior to high school, all I could see in those moments were visions of my father. In my states of contraction he would leap into bed with me and somehow become one in my body; soft and warm. And the warmth turned smoking hot. And it burned my skin until I pissed myself, wanting to writhe, and was left only angry and unsatisfied that I could not… I started to smell the street. A dirty city square, a bustling food market right at close, sitting at the foot of some grand Spanish Cathedral. Swarms of people lining up at booths for furs, and cheese, and medicine, and meat. And I would approach a crowded circle outside the butcher shop. Men off work on their way home and servants picking up dinner brimming at the place. And I had to squeeze my way in to see the putrid scene. It was a donkey. It was groaning and bucking in the middle of the circle as two butchers tried to hold him steady. The people tormented him, twisting and prodding at his skin. He tried to escape but the circle only grew smaller. He bellowed and squealed like a pig. Everyone was laughing.

Finally, out came the head butcher, with his knife freshly sharpened, grinning as he teased the edge along the underbelly of the animal. Then he turned to the crowd, hushed them to silence, and swung down the cleaver against his sack. Two bloody eggs came rolling down, touching the fronts of my shoes.

I would wake up sore in piss-stained sheets and with dried blood on my lower lip. For years, I became exhausted gathering up the pain brought on from a haunting father. The pain soon built up and molted itself into an intense lust, an urge which I could not expunge by simply masturbating… I took to his closet. When I found a quiet moment, I would sneak in and scrutinize his clothes, inspecting underwear for shit-stains, wrapping rings of his paisley ties around my neck, and weighing down my wrists with sums of his watch collection. But these symbols of his presence offered little relief to me.

For those times he did briefly visit home, I would leave his closet pillaged to spite his ignorance. But his work demanded him more and more. And he would visit me less and less. He soon made it a point to visit only once a year around Christmas. It was easier for me to think of him as a stranger then. And when he visited I would always be sure to re-introduce myself to him, in case he had forgotten. But I was never truly angry at him for being absent in my life. It was that I craved an external force that could render me powerless, inflame my curiosity, and bend my will. For these reasons, I was pleased to enroll at St. Mary’s Catholic School for the fall.

I learned to channel my urges I had for my father towards my studies. I got straight A’s. Girls at my school ran fast and loose. I saw that first hand becoming Cheer Captain and Lead Flyer my sophomore year. I would go to parties at our brother school and watch contemptuously as my teammates would let themselves get thrown around and fucked carelessly by the boys. Brain dead, autistic, truly helpless women, whom I’ve held no sympathy for. It confuses me as to why they would let themselves be subsumed into nights of devilish chaos with some confidence in their own moral impunity. It was a shame, and something I would distance myself from going forward.

That is not to say that the girls on my team found me offbeat and would ostracize me. Really, the opposite. They took an interest and strange attachment to my otherness while I took notes from my father and began to ignore the niceties from the girls. I would stare them down and mock them openly. I paid them no respect and I made sure they didn’t seek consolation in other girls or teachers. I sprayed them with perfumes to earmark them. They were a desperate tribe and they were mine.

Almost immediately, I started seeing changes in their behavior. They began to respect and revere me. I realized that since I had no real stake in the success of the team, it was easy for me to create a hostile environment for them. The girls would cower as they walked by me in the locker room. In the open shower, they turned their naked bodies away from me. The attention or lack thereof was something I reveled in. I would begin heavily monitoring the girls behavior. Before and after practice in our locker room, I studied every girl on my team, noticing the size of their breasts, the progression of their weight, and the length and frequency of their cycles. The lineup and pyramid position would alter accordingly. I would supervise bulimic practices and even begin inspecting shit textures and piss colors. In the locker room, it was really all just very fun for me and seemed very serious to them. I wanted to be their mythic hero. In a catholic school, I’ve learned, it couldn’t be God. The environment revolved too heavily upon fearing the lord as opposed to serving him. And how could you please a man, if you’re too frightened to kiss his boots?

I soon began to spray myself with my mom’s Boucheron just once every day to preserve as much of the last bottle she had left on the entryway console. The day I ran out of it was the first day of senior year. I indulged myself in a thick coat of it to make sincere impressions walking into high school for the last time, not having seen any of my classmates over the summer break. That night, I went back into my father’s closet figuring he might have an unused bottle of cologne. I sifted through the strewn ties, shirts, and underwear I left a mess of.

Notes of leather, vanilla, and juniper. Its stained smell overwhelmed with rank melted plastic. The perfume itself was dyed black. It had a cork top. Pictured on it was an amateurish drawing of King Arthur pulling a sword from a stone. The stone was the shell of a turtle. The lake at which he stood was black. I pulled the cork off from the open mouth and titled the bottle against each of my wrists, then pressed my wrists to the sides of my neck. I smelled like a city on fire. That was Maison Noir.

That night I had a notably powerful spasm. A dealing of Maison Noir. My high that night was looping the soprano singing doll in Olympia’s Aria. A-flat above high C. An opera I had seen frequently growing up. Bouncing higher and higher in my mind. The player’s forearm strikes upwards as she hits the summit and I awoke in a state of sleep paralysis, crying over those notes.

The next day, the second day of school, I went drenched in my father’s perfume. Our team would start every year with an all school assembly pep-rally at 8 am. It was my final year with the team. This was the year I would be leaving my indelible mark on the women around me. This year, I acknowledged no-one. They knew what they were to do. I was still the lead flyer. As per my request, my girls came dressed to cheer. I did not want to see their naked bodies this early in the morning. I led them in prayer for ten minutes in the locker room before the assembly.

As ordered to, they lined up at my locker. I sprayed each one of my teammates four or five times with my father’s perfume. I could see some of them holding back gagging. I giggled to myself. When it was time, I led the team into the gymnasium smelling like a galaxy of burning rubber. Teachers coughed and whispered as we positioned ourselves opposite the uniformed girls sitting on eighteen rows of bleachers staring down at us. An embarrassingly dingy class president shuffled her way out to the floor before us, announcing. We were to perform the school cheer, a traditional number, but right before us was the new choir professor Mr. K, to sing Pie Jesu, something in the vein of what the choir girls might sing in our chapel.

I barely noticed Mr. K as he made his way toward the president. I was in my head, reveling in the settling sillage we had brought into the gym. His back was facing us, as he turned to the bleachers to sing. An amorphous form, a black tuxedo, a child’s face like a fisherman’s boy. Pinned down brown hair, fat cheeks, and pencil lips. And he started to sing. And his voice broke me. When he sang, the first words that came out his mouth were: merciful Jesus, merciful Jesus, merciful Jesus, merciful Jesus. Father, who takes away the sins of the world. He granted me….restlessness. I began to teem with confusion and hatred, the smell of smoke. It was utterly primal!

And my hatred swelled. It was the voice of a boy yet Mr. K was nearly forty. It was the most supremely satisfying experience of my life because for the first time I had been sincerely violated. Experiencing this sublime sound rendered me powerless. All authority I had developed over my time at St. Mary’s vanished with his voice. Mr. K had done to me what I always wished the idea of my father would. And now I could not live without it.

He finished his song. As the girls in the audience were applauding, I was swollen with angst, nearing uninhibited rage. Mr. K bowed and shifted off towards the side of the gym. I barely got a good look at him before our cheer song began. On the first lift, T pose to Broken T to High V and I began to seize. I fell straight through the hands of my spotters and hit the ground. I broke my left collarbone, my wrist, two fingers, and my jaw. I was out of school for a month.

That moment of suffocation on the floor reminded me of my mother. And there I was, strapped to my bed, in her old shoes, in the bedroom below hers, in the house. And her oud slipping down into my bedroom, hanging around the crown molding.

Drenched, my ceiling glistens in the moonlight coming from my window. I can hear the horses neighing desperately in the yard. They’re whimpering because I am the one that usually tends to them. For a week now, I haven’t been able to. The moon catches my tears dripping down from my chin onto my chest. I see Mr. K in every mirror. I see my nakedness through his eyes. He wakes me up at night. I smell the stars. Each one. One after the next, burning out. My tears, the sea. I laugh. Oh, the tears!

My naked, moonlit image stands stuck like a tiny, unaffecting crucifix in my mirror. I can’t sleep. Night falls again and again. And I strike my head against the wall. The silence is only affected by the raining corners of my room. My mother, stinking, weighing above my head. The beams, I’m sure they’ve rot. The stairs creak without a step, the pipes breathe her dank storm.

The cigarettes I watch men smoke. I never have, but wanted to, so I began to smoke. How silly of me. I laugh through my tears. When I felt well enough to stand that was the first thing I went to do. Out to the store, down the street, to pick up a carton of cigarettes. I smoke them from bed in the next two days. It helped to tamper the smell oozing from the ceiling. The ceiling.

The ceiling, drinking her saturated carpets. I lean back in bed, bare, and drag my eyes up. White, turned yellow, then green, then black from mold. It shifted and expanded, and dried and re- pooled, and hung, fat.

My hands turn to black, black, birds, the room fills with smoke from my cigarettes. My breasts swelled, pulsing with the ceiling, rising and falling with the tides of the sea, the salt ruining them, turning me dry. My lungs pile up with nettles from the smoke. It was hard to breathe. The horses are surely nearing death. Their whimpers turn from desperation to hopelessness.

I’ve been in my mother’s room once since my father has been gone. I understand that once, now years ago, my father held the same influence over my mother as he did with me. Now, she lived in putrid squalor, alone in her room. She too became absent in the house. She had no friends and spent all of her time in her bed, in her long silk bed dresses. She was taking out her hair with tweezers. She was taking photos of her husband and burning them with matches, and taking the burnt pieces and black dust and shoveling it into her mouth. She began to plant, bury herself in her bed. Sitting idle in her own filth, it filled the bed, and it soaked the sheets, and it dripped down onto the carpeted floor, to the wood and through my ceiling. It just leaked. She was a stupid, lazy, fool, caught up, still in love with my father. I always worried about growing up and becoming my mother, but by high school, I knew I had no choice in the matter. She was immobile and her love was boundless. And now, so was I. And now, so was I.

The flies kept coming at her head. I didn’t bother swatting them away. It kept returning to the same spot on her head. Her eyes were so black and sunken in. Her fingernails were black too. I don’t feel it. It stands still on her cheek. It starts sucking at her cheek, growing fuller and fuller with blood. It pulses and grows, full and bulbous. That selfish little thing. So, I take my cast and curse her skull with it. CRACK!

My ceiling gets darker and darker, the moon moves behind thick, red clouds. The night in the house starts…Oh, red cloud! Dyed my hands red…

I pull out a cigarette, sparking a match against my cast. I sit, calmer than ever before against the edge of her bed. The wood post came off soft and hollow. I take her blanket and toss it over her face. I couldn’t raise a finger, I was so suddenly calmed. My mother, some sort of heat-consumed leper, is getting colder now. I run the faucet. Smoke is filling the room. I open a window to watch the horses. They’ve trampled the chickens. The faucet keeps running and running in my mother’s bathroom. The horses, the ghost horses are galloping around the backyard. My calm is fleeting.

She was a very beautiful woman. She would have such a warm gaze taking me to our church, rubbing my thigh, pinching my shoulder, closing her eyes and praying. She wore white gloves, her hair pulled back, a green dress that reached the floor, that billowed out each time she knelt. Every dress was a gown. She made me breakfast, she bought me clothes, she put flowers in my room. She brushed my hair, and as she grew older, I noticed she grew many wrinkles and spots. And she went to more confessions and confessions. Buying more mirrors and pillows for her bed. When dad was gone, she had holes where her eyes were supposed to be. She drank in the cellar, riding horses outside. Getting them drunk then sending them sprinting into the woods blindfolded. The pine trees at the edge of our yard were cut down.

I used to sit in my room listening to her brush her teeth and my father brush his. This house used to be a clean place. I heard bells, the birds at the window, the beating wind. Something is swept up with it. The stars.

I went to my father’s closet that night. I decided I would try on his clothes. A purple plaid button-up shirt, pressed and starched, stiff and cold, running well over my fingertips. His underwear, ill-fitting without two bobby-pins, and his khaki pants with a belt. It was cold with all the space between my skin and the underside of his shirt. I walked outside, the moon sat bearded with clouds, the horses were still dancing… dogs were fighting over the remains of the chickens. The sink was still running. I shut the windows and turned back to bed. I fell asleep in my fathers clothes even though they were cold. I did not have a spasm that night so the next day I went back to school.

I sulked and felt like a loser walking through the halls. A silly, small, idiot, wearing adult mens clothes and a cast! I hadn’t put on perfume for weeks now, so I still smelled like my house. Classmates turned away from me and held their noses. Nobody signed my cast, even when I cried and begged them to. They just turned their backs and walked away. I walked down an empty hall crying like a little girl. What was I doing, I thought, I must be a fool, I must look like a goddamn buffoon,and I smell so bad that people think I must not have washed for days. I sat on a bench in the locker room.

Right now, I hang my head in the halls, skipping class, getting looks. Like, why is that girl in clowns’ clothes? Why does that crow, jolt and jerk its head in a big long blanket? That girl used to be so pretty, they whisper to each other. That girl who fell and broke her bones on the gym floor… I’m not even wearing a blanket because I’m cold. I have it dragging behind my neck like a lord. I have a sense I’ve lost respect from these girls. But all that slips my mind quickly because as I mope through the school, dragging this sopping wet blanket behind me, I only have one man on my mind: Mr. K.

So I walk into his office and he tears off my cape. I am violating school dress code policy. It is extremely strict. He tears it off me. I never expected him to administer such a sudden, powerful gesture. It frightens me. So much so, his hand shot to his abdomen to stanch the blood. He smiles and groans and drops to his knees. I unsheath my sword. That penguin of a man. That sad sack. That fat buffoon. He smiles at me again. He reaches for his pocket and takes out a piece of paper and hands it to me. It is a bookmark with a picture of a worm. An earthworm. I stand there, above Mr. K, tilting it back and forth, the glossy thing shifting before my eyes and turning into ten worms. I crow! I coo! I can’t control myself. He knows my weakness for worms! Oh! My appetite goes wild! My stomach turns. My beak snaps and snaps. My eyes sink. Jesus, Lord! This man smells like earth, like dirt and worms. This man smells like food, like sour feet, the soles of dirty shoes, a chocolatey face, and scallion hands. And his body is squirming desperately on the white floor. His aroma is so rich. So rich! A pot of chicken broth! Easter ham! Oh this man! This man! My mother lives on in this man! The moment passes. I close my eyes. We were sitting, staring at each other. He was fine, I think, and he wanted me to leave his office. I don’t know if I hate what I’m becoming.

Oh, how my mother could sing! She was called up by the priest to sing a song every week and help lead the choir. The aroma of fine leather bibles, candles, and heat. Oil and oil skin. My mother stood up on the altar before the air of God and she took the air with her lungs and screamed out from… And she would lay in bed with me at night and run her fingernails lightly along my back, up and down, singing songs. She sang softly against the back of my ear. And she would paint the room with the blue of her voice and my beak would turn back to clay, face down in my pillow, so I could go to sleep even though I didn’t want to.The moonlight passed through the clouds and my window, landing on my mothers head, asleep on my back.

I stand in choir class like a statue. Everyone around me is a slim beautiful Christian woman and I am unrecognizable. Mr. K swings his hands in a triangle with his little baton. I run up and hug him in the middle of class. His stupid hands push me away. I coo at him like a crow. KAW! KAW! The girls in class laugh at me. I can’t bear it. It’s so embarrassing. Why do I embarrass myself like this?

My love for Mr. K only grows and grows. I smile as I sing. But I can’t sing. He puts me in the back or in the middle so my voice doesn’t travel far, so it doesn’t hit his ears. I stomp my feet and whine. Like a little girl!

There’s a dead woman in my house but I leave the windows open to air it out. After those packs of cigarettes, I had to quit for my voice. The deceased, my mother, has yet to ascend to heaven. She sits in bed, her soul, waiting for her husband to come back. I sit by her side and hold her black fingers, and brush her thin hair, and comfort her. Because I’ve finally realized, too late, we both want the same thing.

I stopped singing. I stood still staring into Mr. K’s big bulging eyes. White eyes like a marble statue.He stands, without remorse or even looking at me in my sad, pathetic eyes. His face is shining, all greasy. My crow wings shudder with delight. I threw a stone at Mr. K in class. I couldn’t help myself! Destroy the statues! Let them crumble, and the ones that are too beautiful to break, bring them to me and I will hammer off their phallus myself!

The next day, I stood in the back again but it was so tiresome. I hadn’t slept the night before. I wanted his attention. But he had not put any faith in me. That silly man. Today I would belt and get his attention. I wanted him to hear me sing, or speak. But he was surely tired of my abuse. It didn’t matter. To me, his voice ringing in my head. My mother and Mr. K., gentle and kind yet cruel and cold. Oh Please Mr. K, can I have a solo? Can I? Please? You know these girls here don’t know God like I do, they don’t know you like I do. Please, I begged at him, groveling, petting him. He sat in his office chair, turned away from me. Was he holding his nose? I still wasn’t putting on perfume. I didn’t need it. Perfume was that mask. I’ve found my voice, I said. I said it again. A challenge. Is he challenging me? If he sings three pitches and I get all three pitches right…a solo. Give me a solo, Mr. K! I don’t know what you want. Your voice, your angel notes! The beads..his brown rosary hangs idly on his desk lamp. I grab at and stuff it in my mouth, falling to my knees. Mr. K, I pray, my mouth full of beads. My mouth starts to drool. What a fool I must look like! He gets up in his chair. I tug at his pants, my black fingers, talons at the seam. Insolent. Don’t be mad!

Don’t push me away Mr. K.! Sing the notes, sing them! I’m sobbing. Sing them! I shout, I shout again! Birds pecking at the window, the door locks, the beads fall out from my mouth onto the floor, running around like little dancing people- those beads. I look up and smile and he screams! Screams a note of ecstasy! It is pure and feminine and smooth like how a leaf falls on the grass on a day without wind, how that note of divine terror shoots from his lungs to the back of his teeth and darting, plummeting into my ears. My head bends back looking up at his gullet swell and my hands come open and then back together again, clasped in prayer. I had managed to tear down his pants to see the cloth around his groin. Scars ran up his inner thighs like angel wings. And they coursed around routes of cellulite veins that ran tracks around his undercarriage. He was a castrato.

I had become my father – black, ivy-crowned, gorgeous, wild – and I have met my mother’s eye in the trappings of Mr. K. I’ve found a golden, limping God, singing God, that goes up to the altar in church, clean and ripe, green and proud, and sings visions of black back into her husband’s eyes in the pew. My dry thin hands clasped in prayer. My eyes roll back as I pant and heave. The stars form a stigmata, naked arms, chest and legs. I am reconstructed, new and alive. I fall asleep next to my mother. The smell is gone. I try to reconstruct the notes for my mother. I’m sure she would have loved to hear him sing. Oh, how she would praise his voice. She would nudge me and smile. A big toothy smile and turn to her husband and kiss his shaved neck. Oh, how he hated it when she touched him. She touched him because she was in love with him at the shop in town, the shop in town.

The woman stood before the counter. Her probably sad hands were cutting slices of oranges to put on cakes. The stallion boy walks in unsmiling, pulls out his leather wallet and slams down a dollar bill. That woman jumped, she was jumpy and didn’t notice him when he came in the door. He lights a cigarette. Just like I did for two days, very cool. One orange cake please. She looks up at his eyes wearing shades. Her hands tremble as she garnishes his slice of cake with a twisted bit of orange peel. He takes the plate from her, ashing his cigarette on the plate. God how long I’ve waited to see your shining eyes, she thought to herself. Your shining white eyes, and your matching white teeth. You come in here every day and you order orange cake, but never take off your shades. The woman and the man, the imprints of their hands merged on the passing plate, the kitchen filled with fresh bread and the windows were open to let steam outside. Any word would have been a way out.

I no longer wore Boucheron because I was out of it. I couldn’t hold myself together wearing Maison Noir. But I used it up anyway. I recognized it was a mask for me, but one I needed to keep me in check. I needed to go to the store to get more…so I did. I doused myself in nearly a third of the bottle right away. Now Mr. K tastes me. I am oversized with heavy beauty. I am Hoover dam. I have outdone nature. A marble foot as big as a car. I lost all sensibilities at the wrong time there in the mall. And there he was, beneath me at, having just gotten off the escalator, Mr. K was walking past a fountain, beneath a palm tree.

I was perched on a bare branch, cold autumn evening, wind against my reddening face, my eyes watering, the sky is empty except for the moon, blue and pensive. I sleep for a second, the muffled hum of his tv, my eyes no longer complicit as he shuts it off, he sighs and rubs his temples. I am exhausted. I now realize how exhausting this all is, always barely breathing, always my heart fluttering. I couldn’t bear myself, so tears. I am perplexed, angered, nearly moaning, eager. He got up from the chair and went to the bathroom, light flickering on, the shower, the frosted glass window left me with only his aura. He cut me open, opened his mouth music notes dissect me. Her light burning me. Weave of his jacket, seams of his pockets, her body was so fragile. His song, her bathroom light, a substance perfumed our space that night. A great innocent of a woman, saintliness. I sank into my body. I was a mule driver, a cicada, some adolescent fish, a… He stood, open, a hum creaked off, cracked open the window to relieve the house of song and steam. Woosh. It came several feet to me against my cheek. He hid behind this rock shyly. My eyes gathered vision finally at his thighs, wrought with the scars. The sky was small, the moon could fit in the palm of my hand, a line of crystals reach from my lips to the windowsill and stopped before the daylight. I fainted then and there, but I did not have a spasm.

The sun is rising. I take out my sword! Oh what glory, the sun is rising! I was at war! So it was victory! I can barely believe my eyes. Mr. K stands over my hospital bed looking down at me with the sweetest eyes. It’s only been you.

When I see you in this bed…hideous and diseased, unable to even walk! He must think that of me! Mr. K, you are holy and divine. Your voice, which I have heard truly sing only once is proof enough. I must admit, it has driven me mad, I must admit, how embarrassing it is for you to see me in this state. My love for you, bursting out of me, like the conqueror with the conquered, subsumed into its victim. I must eat you, or something of that nature. My love for you is independent of any sex, beauty, or animal attraction, although you are very cute. My love for you is what you are. All this I wanted to say, but couldn’t. I just stared at him and he smiled and stared back at me.

What a silly girl I am. I only asked for what I wanted, I believed in myself, and here he is by my bed. The most beautiful things in life are those that are the most useless. Peacocks and flowers, for example. I felt tired immediately. Mr. K gave me some sort of sickness when I heard his voice. I closed my eyes and tried to fill my head with different thoughts and drown out his voice. Was he humming a lullaby? I was thinking of sounds. Birds and beetles, windows and wind, loud winds. I tried to hear inside my body, thumping and gurgling, and dripping. What was dripping? Something sliding around like an earthworm in dirt. I could faintly hear his humming.

The hours move slowly in the day. I try to push back his limits of happiness in my head. It shouldn’t be that way, I thought. Where I live, life is old and sick. The streets still unpaved, the sewers leak, the dirt and vegetables all rank. I could feel his humming, vibrating parts of my hand. My hand was still next to his leg next to my bed. I open my eyes. He’s not looking at me. That pig is off in his own world.

“Who are you humming to, if you’re not humming at me? I feel like, in my hand, that you’re humming at me. If it’s not for me, please stop.”

“I’m sorry, Emily. I’ll stop.”

“So, It wasn’t for me?”

“You need to get up and go home.”

I started to cry.

“Nurse!” I shout. I shout again. I sit up in my bed and spit at him. “Relax, Emily. I’ll stop.”

“I can go home with you.”

“No, you can’t. You’ll go home, Emily.”

“Why are you here, at my side then? Get out!”

He scurried away. He scurried away. He scurried away. I sat back down, took a couple deep breaths, thought about burying my mother, about how I must have missed the funeral. Then I fell asleep.

I woke up the next day and left the hospital. I was fine. I walked outside and decided to call for a taxi. When the taxi arrived I told him I was going home. On the ride home, I realized I couldn’t pretend any more. I couldn’t pretend to be a bird, to be at war, to be sick, to be mean, to be unfeeling about my mom’s death, my dad’s exit, to be desperately in love with Mr. K, and to reject god. The past month or so, I wasn’t kidding around and I wasn’t playing games. But I realize, with a clear head, and some fresh air, and some time alone, it wasn’t worth it. The sun was shining. It was July. School was over. I think I had failed my classes. Hopefully this moment in my life won’t come again. I have been exhausted. I pay the taxi and get out. And walk down my street. The street sidewalk! A man walks at the end of the street and rounds the corner. Another man rides by on a bike. A woman looks out her window. A little fly flies by my head. I swat at it. There’s a little river around the corner. I walk down the road, then to the bridge, then across it. It’s such a small bridge, and there’s barely any water flowing this time of year in the river. Maybe it will feel nice. The sun is shining, it’s hot outside. I’ll have a sip of the water. The flowers with their petals spread out. At this moment I realize I can’t smell a thing. Anything. I wonder if my dad misses me. I wonder if he would be upset about mom. I take some water in my hand from the river and sip it. A man crosses the bridge pushing a stroller with his hands. He was walking too fast for his kid who was dawdling behind him. Hurry up or I’ll strap you in, he yelled at his son! He yelled it! Some bird flew away from a tree. The trees around here are so…

My mom used to make orange cake for my dad, who was out back riding horses. It was one in the morning. She was making orange cake, finishing it off with the icing and the orange peel. She put it on a little blue plate and with a fork, brought it out. She stood on the back porch watching my dad pull out all the stops. Turning and turning. He had utter control over his horse. Her hands were quivering looking at him. He hated when her hands shook. The cake almost fell off the plate. One day, he swore, he would sever her hands. Cut them off! He kept riding the horse, back and forth, back and forth, pulling, yanking, the reins, the horse’s lips bloody at the bit. I have your cake for you, she yelled to him! He was mad because she should have never been scared in the first place. She should never have been scared in the first place! He kept riding back and forth, probably trying to wear it down. Probably trying to get it to drop to its knees. He had done it once before. My mother with her head down, walked away and went back inside.

Now, the grass was no longer fragrant. I was sick, and I couldn’t beat it. I think I wanted to. I really think I did.

Under the house was a grave that I tried to imagine. I tried to imagine the smell of an invisible orange grove. Stars glitter in the sky, my eyes are heavy, and my head is throbbing, my eyes feel small. I grab a glass of water and sit down and drink it.

I grab a big black trash bag, I walk upstairs, and I go into my mother’s bedroom. My mother’s bedroom where parts of her body still cling to the bed. I take them off the sheet and put them in the bag. They kind of stick to the sheet when I pull at them. Her head was still there, just less distinct. It was more of clay, a sunken chest, and nails and hair, denuded skin and muscle. I placed all that was left of her in the bag. And then I tied it up. I felt bad for her.

I got hours of really good sleep then I took the bag and went downstairs. I went outside. The sun was out and it was shining so beautifully. It was lighting up everything! There was a heavy, damp, mist in the air. I heard cheerful voices from the street! It was a simple and good morning where everything glistened. I wore a fresh set of clothes, I had brushed my teeth for the first time in a while, and I had brushed my hair too. I missed being a cheerleader, and being a girl, and being beautiful. I wanted respect back in my life. I had the garbage bag in my left hand.

I went out back to see if any of the horses were still alive in the barn. Unfortunately, they weren’t. Oh, except one! The black one with the golden mane! The black one with the golden mane! It must have been weak, but it would be good. I took it out of its stable and fed it grain from my hand. It was so hungry. Then I gave it water. I was nursing it back to health! After this was all over, I would have to name this horse. I sat with the horse on the grass in the sun, taking in measured breaths. I thought about how embarrassing it would be to go back to school in the fall. There would be rumors about what happened to me. I would have to brush those aside.

Could I get there, on the horse? Holding the black bag in my left hand, the reigns in my right. Or would I have to wait? I suddenly got really giddy and excited.

It was the Fourth of July and it was the afternoon, but I already started to hear fireworks going off in the distance. And as the sky began to deepen, the rosy hue began to fill me with a feeling of great warmth and comfort. Then regret. I recognized all the wrong I had done, to myself and to others. So I went inside quickly, and came back out with a letter, stationary and a pen. I sat beneath the fireworks writing an apology letter to the man I thought I loved. The black horse breathing beside me, asleep.

I try to understand my love for you. The need I felt to emerge from myself. Man is an animal which adores. My love for you was depleting and wasteful. To adore you, was to sacrifice myself. And I am wrought with shame. You made me dream and you made me confused. I felt pleasure and I felt sadness. You gave me a desire for life, to bring my life into yours and a contradictory flow of bitterness, deprivation, and hopelessness. It takes air and reflection to realize your beauty is too close to my sorrow, my love for you is too close to my sickness. Your singing is lovely, but it inspired horror in me and made me hungry and thirsty and in a rut. I wanted your possession and in that, a war. Some sort of sacrificial prostitution. But that was just nervous excitement. I hope this clears things up and you understand that I am not devastated or mad. I trust that you will keep the soul of my mother on my behalf and not punish it. Hopefully, in return, I can promise to regain my strength, dignity, hygiene, and sense of smell.

                                                                                          I can’t deny I never loved you,

                                                                                                                                        Emily

 

Skyler Sugar decadent reader-consumer and misanthropic drop-out, has remained for the past two decades, locked away in a very tall tower where he has developed a fetishistic relationship with his book and artworks. He has also developed a great, big tumor that grows out the side of his left hip that fills up with froth and tells him what to write. Unfortunately, they get into frequent arguments about whether or not they should send for help. Tumor is ashamed to admit how scared he might be of life outside the tower. Skyler hopes that one day, they might come to an agreement.