It’s going to be over a hundred here this weekend so roaches have started coming up from under the slab. Great big ones of the outdoor variety looking for water and morsels of dog food.
It gives me nightmares of Oklahoma, of poverty, of you leaving empty syruped peach cans on the floor, open cereal boxes on the counter, making coffee anyway in a machine the water container of which was infested with molting nymphs.
You called them albino roaches, Fucker, and laughed and said I was your freakshow baby.
The base note has something to do with sunscreen—a fair haired girl’s most important piece of camping gear next to bug spray which is the sharp second layer of the scent. The whiff of stiff, chlorinated towels, unwashed and hot from the top of the waist-high chain link fence they were draped over to dry completes the first perfumer’s chord.
For nuance, a drop of happy sweat from happy children come to wash their hands and faces with pink powdered soap from lime green metal dispensers hung over shabby sinks on which daddy long legs perch each rolling their eight dull eyes at the rush and frivolity of the new generation.
“I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” -Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
I wonder if, when Eve came along, Adam was as much in wonder with her naked existence as he was with the plants and birds and butterflies and the approved fruits, because we all know he didn’t even think about the unapproved fruit until evil Eve came along.
I wonder if, the seed of evil and rebellion apparently already in her, she was jealous at first that Adam did look at her naked existence with the same sight he used for the trees and butterflies and approved fruit. She was nothing special, or, I should say, she was equally special and no woman wants to feel that. I know it would hurt my heart if a man looked at an orange with the same kind of wonderment he looked at me. I would probably take it as a comment on my cellulite. I doubt I shared that in common with Eve before the fall because I’m sure god didn’t create her with cellulite. Or maybe he did and cellulite is divine and the only thing that convinces us that it isn’t is the evil rottenness that came out of evil Eve doing her thing.
If she had only known that first bite would mean a world full of Adam for the rest of eternity, no longer as enchanted with the orange as he was with her body, but forever commenting on it and, “If I don’t look at the orange with lusty innocence any more, then what makes you think I want to look at your orange skin thighs?
It’s like we live a great distance apart and come to visit sometimes, but usually when the other is away. We walk around, touch the dust kindly, see we’ve both been busy breaking and stacking colored glass in the windowsills— methodical about hue and striation. This one is like a bear and this one a bird. This one is like a wave and this one a glacier. This one is sunlight. This one is also sunlight.
How are you? I’m embarrassed it’s been so long. I know there has been so much and I care very much. I hope you know.
When my grandmother knew she was dying she picked out an opal for me, had a ring designed and sized it, for the short time being, for her own hand. I was an infant then, recently diagnosed lifelong colorless and could-be blind.
My grandmother was a force— a farm girl who took beatings for sneaking away to read, a young woman who left her family to work among foul mouthed boys at the Pentagon during WWII, a single mother, a stone wall, razor tongue, acid wit, first female management at the FAA.
She held me at the hospital in a hallway while the final diagnosis was pronounced to my parents in a tiny, sterile room. Her breast was warm, though the breathing behind it was labored. Her embrace was soothing though her hands were not soft from folding crust-cut sandwiches in wax paper for her children or grandchildren’s outings of uncomplicated youth.
She explored my hot face and closed eyelids with her wise yet diminishing fingers, the opal slipping forward and upside down under her nearly exposed knuckle, resting against my forehead, cooling a spot just above my eyes. She leaned forward and blessed me, “My dear little Michelle-y, I do hope you can see.”
She sheds herself one rough skin at a time, drops them dripping into the hamper, and, naked innards walking, drags the dripping hamper to a sly-smiled laundress who has her discount ticket pre-filled.
“Heavy duty cycle,” she says, “and remember, hang is the only way to dry.”
One sanatorium in particular, given back to time and riveted to an island at the seaward head of a canal in an ancient city, became like a Galapagos of spooks where all manner and species of good ghosts were left coughing blood and lovers’ names into collapsing hallways.
My Uncle Chuck’s house backed up against one of the humps of Little Mountain. As far as I know, Little Mountain has two major humps separated by two apartment complexes, two tracts of homes, two schools, and, lately, a strip mall, an iHop, a McDonals’s and a Starbucks always bustling with CalState Berdoo students.
My Uncle Chuck’s house butted up against the back of it and there was a small piece of it in his yard. I knew it intimately. He landscaped the crap out of it. He not only planted gorgeous plants everywhere, but he dug great paths and steps into the dirt so my sister, my cousins, and I could go run and chase all over it, minding the ankle-eating gofer holes of course.
We used to love to dig holes in that hill ourselves. My uncle had shovels for us all and, wherever he was working on some worthy project on the hill, there were my two boy cousins and I also working, digging holes to China or, if we were really ambitious, digging a hole large enough for us to sit it. Sometimes that took days, but the prestige that came with climbing into your own hole was well worth it.
I dreamed of a very short person, flailing, asking me if I knew Brutus. Yes, I said, yes, yes I knew Brutus. Et tu Brute, and all that, chewed forever in the second mouth of Satan. Yes, yes, I did. Brutus and I were familiar. The short person, neither man nor woman, older than young but not old, dark haired, flailed wilder and screamed, No, no. No. You do not know Brutus. Not that Brutus. You do not know.
Now, of course, waking, I worry about twenty-three stab wounds on the Senate steps. I worry about most of them finding mark in my spine. I worry about not being hero enough for my bloody back to be counted a travesty. I worry about cruel gravity pulling me into the arms of a son or daughter metaphorical who I failed to acknowledge in real life, and trading betrayal for betrayal with my child by each other’s sticky, dilating eyes.
M. N. Ashley 