All gone to oranges now once flamed with pink on spring green tendrils that climbed our matching dresses to touch the shocking white of our lacy bib collars accented at the throat with plum satin bows. My sister smiles a broad white that reflects my broken child’s hair. I smile with my teeth out a touch. Light bounces from the lenses of my half-transitioned Coke bottles, near permanently dim, to one of my sister’s neatly arranged auburn Botticelli curls—one twist of many about her I envy.
We each have one hand on a taxidermy-stiff, red eyed plush bunny the photographer shoved between us to encourage something shared and quiet. The closest he got us to sisterhood that day was leaned-away touching at the shoulder— the furthest torso point from our hearts.
All gone to adulthood now and Valentine’s Day vacuum cleaners received with kisses like hand cut doilies, my sister and I have become pre-midlife reawakened to something like crystal-sucking New Agers without the liberalism, too much nature stuff, or any urgent concerns about the patriarchy.
I step off the train on a wet, sky-spitting Saturday night to celebrate my sister’s 29th-again birthday. There is streaked silver in the puddles through which the train runs, upside down, loping on to LA. My sister wears a demure sweater as accent to a royal purple petticoat that flounces in the whoosh of the train. I wear an oversized silver lotus petal with seven fake stones masking a magnifying glass behind. We hug.
We are the gods of piss and bile— dead skin that flakes from the body mingles with dust and sweat makes a sweet filthy paste worn in the groin and under the breasts.
We are the gods of ashes— rendered fat that drips from a wide-eyed sacrifice, pristine bone, survivor of the fire, that glints and pings against the grinder blade makes the stuff for sausages.
On a frequency we mostly ignore the city council speaks with a single yawning head about a great, gray, bewildering bus that authorizes right turns only that only invisible riders ride that lurches
Is he the black dog in the night when it’s noon and all the lights are on, or is he the star around which noon and all the light revolves. To know him with bare eyes is blindness. We see him once, poorly, and never anything again but the flash burned into our corneas— the red, the lightening purple, the terrible white. The half memory our only light. And he would still not be black dog in the night, nor black dog at noon. He would still be the light itself and we irreversible, starless, dying.
Father Time is the G-rated Version of the voracious God who ate his children.
Father Time taps his Tick-tock at me gently Sighs, smiles, shrugs and Smooths his lustrous beard.
The voracious god, belly Full of children Looks me up and down and Makes rude comments about How my tits used to be higher.
I trust this god more. Our relationship is complicated. When he leans in for a kiss His breath stinks like children And it gets my childless womb All in an uproar.
I kiss him back anyway. I kiss Him passionately until his Breath smells like safe sex, Liquor on weeknights, and A liberation I’m not even sure I believe in. It makes him gag And vomit up his precious children.
My dad, divorced from my mother for more than ten years at that point, told me that what she really loves is jewelry. She has the bling gene, as we call it. That’s not what he said. That’s a little too clever, a little too caring for my dad.
She loves costume jewelry, but has a grounding in the real. Always reality on her fingers. On her left hand, she always wears a blue topaz ring she had made. The topaz is set in a simple, modern swoop of solid gold. It’s meant to show off the stone, bold as a blue diamond. The way she wears it, you would swear it was a diamond.
On her right hand, she wears a ruby set in a cluster of diamonds. The ruby is her birthstone. It is pigeon blood red. It is the best you can get.
A little silver ring I gave her. A simple gold chain bracelet on her left wrist.
A touch of reality around her neck too. A shy diamond set in another modern swoop of gold, smaller, more delicate—a stylized teardrop. It sits against a black backdrop, created shadow. The diamond is from her mother’s engagement ring—her mother’s first engagement to my mother’s father.
They took that necklace off my mom when she went into the hospital so it wouldn’t interfere with the MRI. They took her rings and bracelet too.
She had to be in the hospital alone because of the virus. She was there a week. I called her every day, at least once a day. She told me many times about how they had taken her jewelry. She told me many times she was sure she would get it back. She had faith they were good, honest people, and that she would get her jewelry back even though she couldn’t quite remember where they had put it in her room. It seemed she thought about that more than she thought about her infection, her surgery, the second attempt at her surgery, and what life would be like after.
She recovered enough to come home. Once home, it took her another two weeks to recover enough physically and mentally even to want to put her jewelry on again.
She fished it out of her purse. It was all jumbled up in a green, semicircular plastic holder that looked like something you would put false teeth in. All that reality. All her reality. All those precious gems.
She put the topaz on first. This was what she earned, her badass career—the woman she was before retirement who made male lawyers quiver and go limp. The woman who could afford a topaz like that and all that swoop of gold.
She put her ruby on next. This was the woman she was born. Badass in essence from the start. The little girl who chopped down an entire row of bird of paradise in front of her mother’s house because she didn’t like the way they looked at her when she got home from school. She planted snapdragons there instead. Their fierce little faces were sweeter.
The gold bracelet. She fastened that on herself. She bought it somewhere borderline seedy while on a Caribbean cruise—her first. First of many with a group of globetrotting women, badass as she was, exploring everything, planting their flags everywhere.
She needed help with the necklace with the engagement diamond. I tried for more than fifteen minutes and couldn’t get it. The clasp is so tiny, I wondered how she ever got it on in the first place as her well kept fingernails are long and lustrous and mine are bitten to the nubs. It should have been easier for me having my actual fingertips to work with, but it was impossible.
She sighed as I handed it back to her. She looked down. “I don’t like to be without it,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how easily the nurse took it off.”
Finally, she slid the little silver ring with the created pink gemstones I gave her for her birthday on to her little finger. The ring had turned black. Something they injected her with had burned her inside, leaked out of the injection site, ran down her arm, and burned off whatever real silver there was on the ring. This was before the MRI. Before the box. Before she was bereft of everything. Before it was all protected.
That silver ring I gave her—the timid whisper that is my life’s contribution to hers, turned black in her illness—she wears it anyway, right alongside her gold and precious. She wears it anyway.
We sat at the table with less light you picked carefully. Nervous, I walked around it the wrong way twice. I had walked around the car the wrong way too before stepping up onto the curb.
I hope you didn’t see that. I had trouble finding the door.
Before, I padded through my cool bedroom getting dressed, getting ready, and stuck the mascara wand directly in my eye. I forgot here and there which garment came after which—and I tell you it’s a miracle I met you with my bra on under my clothes.
Inside you found me, dressed and made up with the same kind of hot trouble that adorns your coffee. I did one eyebrow darker than the other accidentally but only worried about you noticing in the fraction of time it took for us to embrace and stake the flag of our friendship through the vanquished body of fear.
No self-consciousness here. No need. Not one.
We held hands and spoke of esoteric things. I will tell you the light was all yours that attracted a witness prowling for converts and a man with a chaos tattoo. The prowler wanted to suffocate the light. The tattooed man poked it curiously. And I sat looking with one dark eyebrow raised loving you for it— for your fire for your shadows too. Call. Call.
The breakfast with Jeana at the botanical gardens in Nashville. You never saw so many nouveau riche people in one place at one time. Not one colored face among them.
They all sat on the lower level, next to the wide windows overlooking the butterfly garden, but they were mainly looking at each other, what was she wearing, who was she with, who should we say hello to, what hands should we shake, how many rungs can we climb this beautiful Sunday morning we are spending with our faces buried in our mimosas and our backs to the beautiful garden.
Or at least this was our impression as we sat on the upper level, close to the door we should probably have been grateful they let us through in our jeans and t-shirts. Clean jeans and t-shirts, mind you, but jeans and t-shirts nonetheless. Mine was burgundy and had a baseball style swoosh on it with the words, “Think dark thoughts.” One of my favorite t-shirts of all time, and we were. We were thinking dark thoughts about these people when these people we assumed didn’t want us there, were probably not thinking about us at all.
At the brunch buffet table, this lady in a white dress with heels way too high for a garden… we were in a freaking garden after all… elbowed me over the eggs. Elbowed in the boobs, over the chafing dish full of rubbery eggs. Strangest things. I suppose my low class ass wasn’t moving fast enough and she was at the eggs in a hurry because maybe she had some ass to kiss back at her table right then or the ass wouldn’t be ripe for kissing anymore.
Dark thoughts.
At our table on the higher level, the undesirable section, we were the only table up there after all, the waitress came over to fill our water glasses. Jeana, with her Jeana wit said to the waitress, “How are you today.” Fine, the waitress said. “A little stuffy in here, ain’t it?” The waitress smiled in a way she wasn’t supposed to and said, “Sometimes.”
M. N. Ashley 