Story & Five Poems

By Ivy Char

A More Singular Fortitude 

7

It was Celia who first called me H. Although we were close, having known each other since kindergarten, I had learned to stray from topics that might turn to points of contention, as was apparently the case with the letter. And besides, there existed the distinct possibility, advanced by the satisfied look on her face, that this was all some sort of friendly challenge. “Why ‘H?’” I wondered, and wondered often. Perhaps there are a number of different ways to answer this question, but I couldn’t think of one myself. By neither maidhood nor marriage had my names begun with H, let alone contained any, so forget abbreviation or acronym. Sometimes my eyes still search the air the way they did when this all started, stumbling aimless through the schoolyard hand in hand, your strange grin on mine.
Maybe there was a brief period I’d meant to forfeit our game, but by the time others had taken to using H, it was almost certainly too late to ask : revealing I wasn’t in on it might’ve proven too great a humiliation to bear. I’d just have to nod along, and let a not-small degree of incoherence into my life if I wanted to eke out anything resembling, however faintly, a place to belong.
Winter Break of our freshman year, on account of her dad’s promotion at the bank, she moved away to Colorado, a place I hadn’t been and whose name signified as little. ( During one of our first long-distance calls, I said that I pictured her speaking to me from an elk-covered cabin somewhere in The Rocky Mountains, as if on a cheaply printed postcard, only for her to chime in, That’s nowhere near us, leaving my mind a complete blank ; I surveyed the messy phonelines outside my room to no conclusion. ) Still, the letter she’d given me remained, demanding its answers.
H, it was saying now. You hear me ?
I did. I waited, tired : we passed through a concrete tube beside little scholastic gardens lined with brick. I guess I should not say gardens of Perlite, mulch, and a few sprouts. He paused and I.
Why do they call you by that ? Clue me in here, I’m lost.
Me too, I had wanted to say. But didn’t : glanced : the face in the rainpuddle : mine. No not. Ah, well. . . You would sort of have to have been there, I lied ( — though with, I hoped, an apparent playfulness ) ; of course I myself had been there, and I was more confused than anybody. I went on, Kind of a. . . you know, inside-type thing ? I hadn’t wanted at all to reject him who I wished would embrace me bye. Pathetically, a bookcart squealed as it went as I waited.



The lot black and mirrored with rain glowed as I passed a few portables and through several gates onto stadium grass, faintly wet, that skimmed the ochre track. Diffuse through the air of water, the light was general. White skies white with gullsquall. Why scowl, clowdy prince ? ( could he call me his by that ? ) is it at me you or some other ? From the cloudvague light I turned away : light rain. I leant my umbrella open over the turn of my body, and fixed the handle, questionshaped, by the weight of an ankle, head pillowed in the grass. Near the far wall a vaulter alone thrust her ramming stalk on a mat, tumbled : cung. I remembered the blanket you lent, threw its latticed print over me as if you. At the top of the hour ( with one still to go ) with the call of the rock dove I dialed your number but you didn’t answer so I sent a message halfblind in my drowsing. Sweet wind through the palms traced my jersey limbs. Envisage the meeting place, helpmeet his in the sweetbriar. Go there. Tilting a watering pail, his hus. Her word for him I mouthed but was not mine. Mouth. Still scalds. Then give.
Halfaware — less — stranger to my own breath, in the dark of eyes I plead to wake. If not wake then speak : I make no sound, no hand I have to touch. Strangled in secret with dead fingers. My rabid breath more shallow grows, the smoke my body is becoming singeing my throat. Wheeze, quiet bellows. Suffer more. Till some stroke of flame ignites the crucial chamber. I captain my body to see, draw air.
Invisible hands cup my eyes. Confusion of incense and rosewater : through mine I spoke her name.
Keenscented hound ! You’ve gotten better at our game : instant.
You are the only who plays with me like this. And if you are going to call me a dog’s name, you can at least pick one I like. Settle, surly brach.
Oh. Are you alright ? Nora, why ask ; too many now, hovering the far reaches. Say nothing, know nothing. Too few, then this : ever that way. Dear setter ?
I armed an obscure gesture. Why are you here ? Had you seen my dying, ragged breath, are you come to save me, or else drag my body from the filth and black mud ? Again, I had failed to be kind.
Our teams are practicing together, I guess. Looks like we don’t have to wait till summer. The Clique and all that. God. A thought, apparently of the touched and bitter kind, contracted the center of her face. Why do we never speak apart from then ? she might’ve been thinking. Mercifully, the wind rushed in on us ; and we stilled all talk, frozenhappy, noting the way it carressed our bodies, hair and too-large clothes flagging in it, pulling us in its direction. Scattering scuttleleaves scratched our arms slightly. Nose cold feels wet. Something burning through the damp. A moment’s peace. Cung. She admired the vaulter with her stake a sword on the mat. Could she too forbidden want ? Returned to the topic at hand : Wonder what caused the sudden change of heart.
Intimation of a shrug. Somehow I doubt very much their hearts are changed. More likely it’s some sort of fluke, a usually-forbidden enticement. Like Beach Day.
I suppose you’re probably right. Integration of the Sexes. Ha. I mean like last year we had the Battle of Them.
Sold a lot of tickets. Change of heart, — they would sooner ours.
My phone chimed with dear Celia’s message : lately my conversations revolve around the best way to live life. How good. Live life. Later.
Then : A Matter of Some Importance : a colony of upperclassmen came by, speaking a rare kind tongue. There’s Lancet oleaginous smiling hard to believe he’s even the same person. She drinks, his girl ? She drinks in his sweetener eyes too.
The Teams soon had gathered. We all did Core as a Senior counted off reps militarylike his cadence. By the end most of our chattiness had been subdued. Cadets.
We’re off !
I wish I could tell you what song it was we sang. Apologetically, I ask you to think of this and all my omissions like the large but insignificant fractures borne by a single statue in a city of ruins : to be — if they cannot be accepted — understood and forgiven. Whatever it was, we sang it howling, Nora, Rudy, and I, impolite as often we were when our Clique trotted down the River Trail. Companionship and the rushing of my limbs had invigorated me, ringed my mouth with a froth I spat happily, and cleared me of any lingering sense of immobility or fear. Graced with Runner’s High.
H ! Lancet called out, slowing ahead, loud steps heading back around. Again he calls, stops. Folds in, slyleaning on his haunches, vampirebats his eyes. Mine he cannot know what fill. You serious ?
I am. Ascon, creator of that dark lagoon beside us now, each day we passed your stretch of fences long and huffing : you hung them up with black tarp, why ? so we wouldn’t see ? oh, toxic waste, oh, fumes’-dust. Say nothing, know nothing. I know you. I tremored with anger beneath him ; he shook his head, heaved his hard sigh of complaint, and went, silentsuckingbat. — Good. I had heeled to this man. If there were not law, he would have liked to hurt me. So why ? I soon slipped back in among the docile pack ; I could not, at last, defy my father.
Quiet here. Just the rare snickering. I recalled another looming of bodies. First, the laborious running on sand, sinking, pulling ; the horrible tenderness of shin splints, splashed them in the icy waters ; saltwinds carrying spray and lotion and shrieking seabirds ; and Twin Dolphin Dr signposting our return, attached at the hip as it was to a hazing : last ones back get beat : give all the bad kids a good kicking : Beach Day. I might have liked to tell Weaver this, but I was still mute by resentment. Our little class of seven : spared : though perhaps they all were, all the way down to the ’70s — a great, longstanding tradition of credible threat. But probably they weren’t.
We ran Squirrel Park. A driveway had lately been put through it : the desalination plant inactive loomed behind : Poseidon delays, but I see it now, poison eidon. Bossman sez JohnEarl’snofriend, won’t getanywhere withhim. But a friend is forever your fellow to paddle the nowheres of ocean together : each droplet seeks drop(?)let(s) of water. 
A poison ? Far worser, far farther by far. Rrarf arf arf ! little seekers go singing ; stuck in a screen, sealsealioneyes popburst like a bubble. Harshgnashing holybodies, O, O. HOLyboDies THEyMake saltbrine of turtles whose onegiven shield stands no match ; and slithering fish with their eyes and their eggs in their millions : crunchingcrushing eachandevery oneofthem ! ! ! He hides his hopeful slaughter in the gay robes of theme parks while underground funneling blood from the Newland plant, dark Satanic mill of Blake’s London. Only creditable threat right now but see what surrounds us here already a whole nineteen teeth bent to the same ancient purpose. 
Oncethrough : high tiny bark. Seal said she the world was writ in water.
Marring the sky, big dolphin’s bluefin, billowing smokestacks behind : we’d seen it like that from the Bluffs, yes : Celia and I. Always wondered what it was. Never knew, couldn’t tell her then. Fairview. Oh. Then the night. We danced on the deck at vernalspring’s edge, tucked behind thickfields of mustardflower, companied by moths and fairyshrimp and the duskhappy güirocroaks, flashlights on our near bodies fair. Olive and tan. Went back. Ran alone. Hot breath. The thousand meter pool that saw us. The million sheathes of barley swayed had our boardwalk enclosed couldn’t even see how to get in. All that water. The whole lake of it. All would go to cloud, leaving the shrubs in the pit. Kingdom of seed of wet dust a cloud is.
Shake of heavy rain. Over. Wetfaced we panted. Veered into the entrance of the subdivision we would spin about for an hour.
I had only joined that September, but the trainings were nearconstant, allowing the clemency of Sundays, so I had already beat this same course more than 100 times before ; when my brother graduated, he must’ve 500. I would not. Once the State requirement had been filled, I would be gone from here, silent and going.
Silent as the rest, for want of stimulation, I began to scent a guilt that would only come to bloom in my nighttime isolation among the full, fragrant tree. A song : the silence was a song to them. Monastics. Too brutal, but I could understand it. Clinging to what little happiness still strained through the net of my sorrow, I had lost my head. It seemed increasingly that it wanted to be lost, as if to return to some more natural state that it, and all things, arose from. New thoughts on old roads.
Why, I asked, newly tender, should I have to listen to it everyday ? their pet quiet ? There were many kinds of silence : silence was the emptiness of sound : and there were many kinds of emptiness. I only wanted to know what mine might sound like.



As I ran, I looked to the ground with an obscure determination, trying to bring about a magic effect. I learned the ritual from Celia. When we first became friends, I couldn’t look her in the eye ; to my embarrassment, this went on for some months. She was better than me in most ways I can judge. This is how I saw it then, but I have to admit the thought still strikes me as credible. Though perhaps this is mostly because I’ve held to it for so long. 
Noticing my avoidant posture — craned-neck of a navelgazer — she mimed it, laughing, but not cruelly, I don’t suspect. In truth I felt sort of flattered that she would want to look like me, even for a moment, or as a joke. Again, it was possible this was yet another friendly challenge, maintaining her exaggerating gait, which after a little time I copied in turn. By the end of our stroll, which lasted all through Lunch, she looked up at the blue sky : clear, yelling wordless for joy. I joined her there : it was warping, pulling away from me, toward what I cannot imagine.
I continued to stare down at my worn-out shoes, a bit subdued of color, as they thumped against the ceaseless blacktop.

1

( Same time. Same place. )

The projector rattled. Under her desk 4th-year Amber Stufflebean refreshed the /lc/ thread “Inanimate Objects of Diminutive Scale #10 — Have Yourself A Merry /littlechristmas/ Edition” by tapping a button labelled “update” centered at the bottom of a hundred post scroll. Occupying an especially slow board on an already minor codefork of an influential Japanese BBS, IODS10 had managed to survive three whole months, though not without learning to embrace a less stifling theme than originally intended. Amber liked to visit /lc/, or the /lowercase/ board ( its name invoking a bit of site-specific jargon referring to all things “miniscule” ), when she was biding her time, waiting for something more important to happen, which was not a rare state of affairs, though this often seemed to transform into its own form of waiting ; perhaps everything in the world would share this tendency. There were no new posts. She looked to Ms. Rosin, at her black buckled shoes which still paced the length of room between the podium and the far wall where, Amber hoped along with several others, she would soon find herself endesked at grading papers in an absorbed state of concentration that made her seem older and more melancholic than she really was, as well as uncaring ( “turning her back to the world” ) and a tad stern, which was basically true ; she took slow, halting steps and continued her lecture at a moderate volume. Between words, the silence of the class had a grain to it owing to the uneasy coëxistence of afterlunch sleepiness and the tension asked for by an at-times strict instructor. There were no new posts.
She tapped the href’d banner depicting a character of her same age ( 17 ) and occupation ( student ) only with cropped seagreen hair ; and donning a Spring Semester seifuku ; and comparable in size to the bead of dew threatening to drop from its leaf behind her ; and linking arms with a pastel and subduedly ecstaticlooking cohort. Amber was returned to the index. A towering, square lattice of honeymelon bgcolor enwrapped the variegated imgs. There might have been around a hundred of them to scroll past on her way down and, reluctant and afraid to reach her destination — which she had put off too with her checking into IODS, a consistently high-rowed and active thread —, she did so slowly and without any tangible interest. Her eyes glazed over a papercraft of Moetron ; a Belgian waffle ( /lc/ metonym used for any conspicuously big thing that thereby miniaturized its user via contrast — whether these were to be considered on- or offtopic was the subject of much spirited and likely unwinnable debate, though there existed a passionate demand from some users that the site’s admin create a sort of obverse to /lc/ in /uppercase/, spoken of as a containment board for the recusant many ; but as it stood, no such place existed, so most remained within the confines of their home-thread, or else hid this aspect of their lives from the wider world of the board. ) ; two Ziplocs on a paintedwhite shelf scattered with pricy, PVC moe figurines, the caption to which posed the question, So, are my nail clippings and baby teeth collections /lowercase/ ? and then finally, all the way down in the row second to the last, beyond which lay oblivion, a tiny white cross, 3 x 7 px., centered in a 400 x 400 px. field, verdant yet cold and full of ~50 yellow and occasionally white dots, intended, she supposed, to evoke the humble wistfulness of the dandelion. She glanced up to her instructor, who continued toward the wall, then pulled her roller chair across the linoleum, rubbing Amber’s eardrum with a melodious screech. A collective sigh of relief, though not actual, could be felt in the room, and the tight grain of the silence unspooled into a fluffy thing. The thread, originally posted by an irl friend of his, broke the news concerning the death of EggSaladSandwich!, a particularly beloved tripfag, though this praise was always ready to be put in doubt by the very nature of his designation. It had received no update, nor a bump of any kind, in the last week. Actually, looking at the timestamp now, it’d been three weeks and some change. Yes, and he had died in late November, and today was the second of April — all of these facts felt equally unreal. She let them fall.
As it first had again, her heart raced, wanting to put the soft mark of a word or two upon him before he turned to go, but — obviously — he had vanished, never to be heard from again, a faceless passerby among the thousands here who slowly shift and wave, coming and going without greeting or goodbye, tracing the arcs of unimaginably rich interior lives. Well, she liked to think she would know if he was posting offtrip, and she had seen no post that wore his most telling signs, but of course this was often a question at the back of her mind, as well as the credibility of the whole deathnews in the first place. Perhaps he had only paused for a meaningfully considered period of detox. A great many questions. No way of knowing. She let them fall. In the end, she supposed, whether he had been struck by infarction or simply moved on, it had all been really nothing more than just another mild afternoon somebody sort of akin to herself had spent halfthere and watching fingerpuppet shadows lengthen in empty streets from up high in her summer window, and the day had simply ended. Yet her face still leant cool against the pane, spooring an indecipherable note of suggestion.
Soaking in what faint dregs of natural light still lived on through the portable’s windows’ high-VLT tint, which disorientingly reproduced the precise effect of those Fall Semester evenings that followed the first Sunday in November whose ambiance always sent her tilting, then hurdling toward Solstice and all it meant in the many shadowy grooves of herself she could not yet put her finger on, she recognized something wispily beautiful in /lowercase/, though the observation was too fast becoming general, which slightly perturbed her, as she would not be able to wrangle it into something useful, a fear she often felt when thinking. There was a reason, she thought, that BBSes had appealed to the varied tastes of so many different sorts of visitor : the Bulletin Board System modeled the hyper-urban city in miniature, — smaller than the size of a notecard, here in Amber’s hand — with its specialized districts, billboards and street signs, traffic, slowdown, and crashes, hollerers and quiet functionaries ; a city of the displaced and looked-over, as experienced by someone perhaps she might say gifted with a merciless and angel-like telepathy. (Not coincidentally, it is just this sort of ESP she would very much like to have all the time. She imagines this might diminish many of her deepest frustrations, which she understands as ultimately rooted in some sort of terrible, intractable naïvete, and whose total volume has expanded to fill uncountable hours of stilted latenight calls with strangers plucked blindly from the yellow pages since she was a pre-teen, studiously re-summarized in a series of .txt files no one else has regarded. Too, one thing she considers with a degree of vocational seriousness when deciding on how to reduce and re-combine the vast number of hand-me-downs she’s been left by her three much-older siblings into a personal wardrobe is how well it might inculcate an impression of her in others as an authentic, sexually invisible confessor. ) Yes, say what you will but something would at least always be happening in a place like that. She considered how the figure of the megacity spoke to her especially as a species of repressed suburbanite living in the long, commutered shadow of a more culturally vibrant world, namely, the third most populous city of the continent, second of country, and first of state, Los Angeles, and the exact place from which she had been driven as a former childmodel ; at the height of a swift yet sidereal career, she’d been afforded the rare opportunity to play toys with Bullseye, the Target dog, or at least his first incarnation, which she took for 0ne of the highwatermarks of the story so far of her life. She pursed her lips slightly.
Back in IODS10, there had been a fitful precipitation of new posts. Someone waxed joyful about a snowglobe they’d recently purchased and were just now awaiting an ETA on from the forwarder. They had attached a generic product photo from the manufacturer’s website :

Looked like the sort of thing Lucy might be into, Amber guessed blandly, chin on her palm. There were three  replies, which Amber skimmed with disinterest : the first offering praise ( “omg precious moments ! soo adorable for easter T_T” ), the second a criticism of the first ( “PM never made anything as shite as this. Not that Im a fan of them. They never even put out a baby Jesus. A natural fit if you ask me. Appreciate where their heart is tho. The idea that Gods meant to dwarf you.” ), and the third rejoindering the second ( “waffleposters cannot stay ontopic to save their damn lives lol, anyway cute snowglobe anon” ). There were no new posts.
She navigated to another site that occupied a good chunk of her bided time, ourkive.net ; searched her OTP’s tag ; scrolled down till she saw the fanart of her fav masked magician but with a painted nose more ski-slope, and hole-eyes more emotive than in canon ; tapped ; skimmed the hurried AN, which introduced the intradiagetic music of the chapter the reader was meant to imagine playing from the protagonist’s motorcycle’s speakers buffeted by speedwinds and enginegrowl ; she wasn’t willing to compromise on flow or immersion by naming the song ( “Next Level Charli” ) in the main body of the text ; and for the eleventh time in her life, thoroughly delighted, Amber read the songfic’s opening :

Night City pushed back under the wheels of his bike. Block after block disappeared just as soon as it could be seen, if this could really even be called seeing. At the speed Dimi rode, light expanded beyond its length, loitered a second too long, burning to stay ( very dangerous business ) : the isolate language of twistglass, clawmarks ran all together in a single, asemic screed. No, he couldn’t much see after all, but it didn’t matter, he knew the feel of it, knew every gridded web of urban core like the back of the floating hand that turned the throttle. He gave menace and sicko laughter and a name to all the fears that prod the “sensible” back in their cages, ever so grateful for the little prisonguards and -bars.

She paused, eyed the satellite of an eraser stuck to a distant ceiling panel. Sure the last line was a bit on the nose. Yet she could’ve sworn she felt in her words the same — no, some cöordinate desire at work within the Author. An ardent neon stubbornpiercing through the haze of. . .

hi ! what’s up

Nothing really, you ?

oh you know. up late. plighting my troth. the usual.

I have no idea what you’re talking about
But it sounds NSFW and I’m at school right now

no no !
it means devoting yourself to the worship of your husband

My what

okay i admit he has not yet pledged me his but i trust he soon will !!!

No offense but why is everyone acting weird

i wouldn’t know the slightest thing about that
surely you’re not implying our romance is ill-fated, or that you consider my onesided pining an unsavory aberration of some kind ?

Uh well

on the offchance you do cast this judgment on me, allow it may be lack of faith on your side that bends you to such an unhappy conception of things

Wow
Yes I think you’re really on to something here
This definitely doesn’t sound like yet another anachronistic and offputting statement in an awfully long string of them that’s increasingly come to asphyxiate the old you I know best
Not that I’m owed or desire insincere repetition
Anyway how have you been

I’m stuck in class like normal -,-‘

though it might do nothing to remedy your present estrangement from me
which im really very sorry to hear of </3
i’ll offer you a vindication of my abiding love regardless
because despite whatever spiritual malady now ails you
it remains important that we know each other well :
1. my husband has not yet returned from war
& 2. i have not yet made my fealty known to him
BUT after much slow burning the day will come when all these facts ring true as wedding bells
***ring false
actually nvm
abandon ship
how is class darling ?

I don’t know, I never seem to pay much attention to it
My life is unremarkable as ever
I think to say “I had a bowl of Corn Flakes this morning and liked it so much I had seconds, which is unusual for me” are the best words I have to describe my current emotions
So perhaps I am feeling somewhat better about things

yay that’s great !!!
i had honeynut cheerios w/ skim
super yummo

This is very good news, Lucy
I toddle the earth in the night of an irritating epistemological blindfold
And it is this sort of meaningless fact that does the hard work of pinning my soul on the paper mule of existence
Anyway, I want to specify that it isn’t for any leanness in narrative I demurred
I think I can intuit the whole iceberg-y thing of your heart in the precise way I cannot my own
I just don’t really understand self-shipping
Or the typical forms of sexuality
But then I can’t say I understand most things
That, and I am fundamentally incapable of roleplay
Even the regular, non-internet kind
The white lies, greetings, and goodbyes
So many concepts spin me around
Lead me down a black hallway of isolation
Perhaps this sounds childish
But it is who I am today
And this is why breakfast is so important for us
Anyway, you’re a wonderful storyteller

( As she waited, she reread what she’d sent : alarmbells. Amber could already see the words “invincibly chaste” and “charm of the ingénue” flinging themselves through Lucy’s head like little Gingerbread Men. She could only hope such hostile, mysterious forms would get swirled about in a turbid stream of secondguessing to die there chomped by an alligator. Yes, if the opposite of that were to somehow narrowly avoid happening, she would be quite beside herself indeed. )

thank you !
you say such thoughtful things
i don’t think i have the same degree of insight as you at all
you should write something ! you’re very gifted i think O:)

While I don’t read any of your other pairings I follow the Jeventio material quite closely
I try to read each chapter the night of its release
Another small thing that makes my life less wispy and insubstantial
And I actually have written a few things !

omg what did you writeee
profile link ? :D

I deactivated, sadly
I don’t even have my fics on my laptop anymore

what nooo why ??? ToT

The comments I received mostly spoke to how strange and inadequate I am

booo ! names !! get me some names !!!
i’ll sic my rabid dogs on them D:<

Someone even did a reading of one of my stories
A pasta featuring Doopliss
Which I thought I might like to hear
But they kept stopping every so often to make jokes at my expense .-.
This was some years ago now
Rationally I know their criticism no longer applies
At least the counts of inadequacy
Still the incident bred something in me
A doubting servility, maybe
And thinking of myself as Author to anything,
Even my own life
I don’t know
It makes me tremble a bit somewhere inside

i know exactly what you mean
i’m really sorry

I am one of your rabid dogs aren’t I

well. . . would you like to be ?

You meant your adoring fans I presume

i did, yes

Well I certainly am that
Each moment I am here, there is also someone else in another place and time
In this other world, there is a little pet
Her owner moved overseas
And as I await the latest volume
Trying to stop myself from falling asleep
Hunched in my jagged metal desk
She haunts the wharf of some bay
Licking puddles of saltwater and dropped candies from the dirty boardwalk
Sniffing the air
Every puff of smoke, every distant bark could be the one that brings her home
There is a special agony of waiting but also a reliable pleasure in loyalty
You taught me this above any other
And as she waits and numbers her worries
That no, her master will not appear again
That in fact no one will
I find myself somewhat mollified by the constant, terrifying aggression of the green tide
Another thing I have in common with others

omg yeah love an angry sea !!!
i’m landlocked rn though ToT
i mean there’s lake sevan but ive never been
but yeah i took my little alarm clock with me
one of those old guys with the nature sfx built in
and i’ve always favored “ocean waves” B)
f*ck “birdsong” that sh*t is so annoying !!!

Are all your friends your rabid dogs

gosh what an embarrassing and loaded question
honestly most of them
i rarely reach out to others
i keep pretty busy
but i’ve made a couple myself
you might know one actually
they run that site encyclopaedia of obscure scents
or i guess its gonna be a book now maybe ?

She had never heard of it before and felt slightly curious, but when she went to google it, she was tempted off course by an old impulse that led to a purpled-link for “Catullus 85.” 

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask.
I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.

She read and re-read it several times, and was relieved at once to feel something within her loosening up. This something, what could it be called. . . She frowned : a tiny but disconcerting seed made itself felt in her brain. She read “85” again, to make it go away — but it did not, and she was forbidden her enjoyment ; in another world, someone else sat chewing her favorite meal with a sharp pebble in her shoe. Even Catullus, her onetime soul’s friend in swift repudiation of knowing, could so confidently declare that it was love and hate he felt, concepts she was still barred from understanding. Her jaw tightened. Perhaps, when she had read it last, during Summer Vacation of four years prior, early morning at a one-star motel ( she couldn’t recall now where ), her parents still asleep in the stiff queen beside hers, surrounded, she could see out the picture window through one of those diaphanous inner curtains, by asphalt decorated with gulls pecking scraps of cinnamonbun under the stars of the Carl’s and the Texaco station ; and further flat brown earth that would grow hotter and hotter with the passing of the day, — perhaps it was this exact moment she had imagined someone would teach her the meaning of these things, love and hate. ( Though this assumption — so thoroughly mixed and baked into the feeling of adoration she held for the poem — had remained a secret to her, expressible only dimly through other distal concepts, lending the poem an intoxicating, mysterious sense of depth. ) But now she had had a boyfriend, a best friend, even a brief contingent of so-called haters, and not one of them had taught her what Catullus knew. So while the poem had first felt charged with aspirations ( st. 1 ) and kinship ( st. 2 ), one magnifying the other and vice versa, now it primarily spoke to her immeasurable disappointment in people : others, that they could not make her well ; and herself, that she would not be healed. She strained to remove the kernel of doubt, but couldn’t begin to imagine how. It was embedded so deep inside. She tried to call to mind a single moment of unadmixed feeling, squinting hard, and her face began to flush. The heater buzzed on with a whoosh, startling everyone a little and waking a kid in the back who, Amber observed, had an awfully long string of drool running down his shirt.
And Amber Stufflebean recalled then her first impression of Lucy Sisoulith, the handsome fake of it. Starved for the nourishment of real companionship, Amber S. had taken Catallus’ words as right and true as a real prophet’s ; after all, where could falseness hope to conceal itself in the forceful shout of a couplet ? She felt dizzy, yet eager. But what if. . . Yes, what if he’d really only wished to know love or hate like she h —
A startled sense of the lie of everything. No, her mind began to shout, tilting on a sharp tip of ecstasy. Enough : I’m alone, I’m alone !

6

On her return from the Big Island the doorbell rang and the clipclop of dalmatianhoof threw quick echoes about the tile hall and vaulted ceiling while like a doorman her daughter-in-law stood to receive her, gingerly taking her Great Dane–sized travelbag : Welcome home. How was it ?
Oh just great. It was the longest they’d been away. She came toward her grandson, reeking of noxious cream : Oooh, oh honey I missed you like the dickens. Squeezed ow him breathless ! Full of the breath of the breath of life, she wrested her suitcase back, riffled through its zippered pockets, and made a show of concealing what she held behind her : Pick a hand. 
Oh, well ummumumm. . . ( Must be past bedtime. )
Left or right.
Left, he laughed. Red and shy.
A small flat box. Magic Bracelet, it said. What ?
So you wear it every day and when it breaks apart it grants a wish.
Later Nang moved in to the basement of her eldest daughter’s home. But her room here still stunk of the floral balm she habitually lathered herself in. Its long-expired tub glinted on her walnut dresser. The second story window had not been opened in the same length of time, and so the room sat gathering dust, slowly losing pieces of furniture to friends or the curb. 
One day when cleaning his room, selecting plushies to be provided the new lodgings of a high cupboard, Ari discovered the box, still unopened. A nervous excitement altered the air of the room. It sucked out the atmosphere ; and a sensation took hold within him like static and the tiny bouncing of raindrops in a foot that’s fallen asleep. Box in hand — the feeling, it was coming from in here. . . — he clattered downstairs, taped the lid shut, slipped past the screen and sliding glass to the garden in the sideyard : donned mother’s too-big gloves and took up a trowel, and — right where the popcorn tree had failed to take root, not far from potted basil and Mandy’s stone — he dug and dug and shoved the gift way down and scattered it with dirt like a fermenting jar of kimchi.
Here, the box’s treasure would continue to break apart and rot. Its container would grow densely suffused with the invisible particles of an otherworldly power ; a power which had simply grown too large for his hands to hold.
Behind the patch of earth he’d toiled, he saw two wings in stone, laced with grey bands here and there. It would certainly be better to have a protecting angel perched and watching over this strange power. With effort, he pushed the figure through the red woodchips, and turned it around to face the buried box. But it was no angel : it was a wing dog.  
A wing dog ! He was shocked and unsettled. He sulked on back to the muffled sound of the tv and bright chirping of his mother’s coffee machine dark sweet deep bitter.
In the frosty morning, as Ari stood in line for class the next day, Celia, forsaking the post of her Number, seemed sort of theologically offended by his discovery. A dog was one thing : Hachi in the movies. Good boy, she summarized. But H : a dog cannot be an angel, cannot so much as walk through the gates of heaven, not even to visit his own Master, not once. 
H’s spoken mind vaguely wandered as it walked the dog of his mind : a bird. Could be a bird’s behind it. Right on doggie’s back. No body, a faceless bird white. Funny little bird.

5

just painted my room
sorry *THE room
my dad is a wonderful pedant and always makes sure to remind me
he keeps telling me to chin up
to just think how happy the buyers will be 
when they see a fresh coat of beige !
the most i can say for my chin is i love wetpaint, it tells me something about my nature. . 
but all our little murals are gone
it looks kind of sad

damn yeah those were cool
especially the ones i did
i used to be pretty good at drawing

so um do you happen to have like
even a vague conception of the future
just wondering

well if you want my view of things
its sort of like this crazy fucking mandala of tightropes
perilous as hell
straddling an insane chasm of unknown depth
and if i had to wager a guess id say thats hell down there
so best i dont lose my footing
yes i think that would be best for both of us

wtf
yk im afraid of heights c,q

just how i see the world kid
crazy ik, but thats life
also what kind of angels afraid of heights lol
arent they supposed to like
fly around on doves wings delivering holy messages and shit

yes but mine never grew in
and to be honest i fear they never will

could be they were pinioned ever think of that

i had always imagined they would come to me in a horrible shriek of burning light
but the horror i’ve known has only diminished and broken and left me to lick my wounds alone
and yes i’d rather they were not pinioned actually
that would represent a pretty dire situation
i suppose either way it may turn out i’m nothing more than what i seem to be

i like what you seem to be

but you already know this
just like you already know all my fears
so feigning ignorance on these points is not cute it’s perhaps a little cruel
and it would be better that you not like me
okay i am doing it, i see it now, i’m sorry
i think i may have to go on some sex hormone or other
low dose maybe fuck idk
just moodswings been worse lately c_q
but no
i will bear it
i just have to keep reminding myself god isn’t punishing me, that this is just another one of nature’s senseless beatings

im sorry bby
that really sucks
also wtf is that thing you keep appending to the end of your messages

speshul emoticon i invented
obvs

ok honestly this one’s a bit of a reach, even for you
i mean whats going on with that damn eye
the poor mutant bastard
you’re like a dogbreeder breeding all their weird shitty dogs
all the time in the world for aesthetic curation
but do you ever stop to think for a second
the lives they must lead
one shudders to imagine
alr so did you want to meet today or what

yes !
but i can’t c.q
seeing hen and su in a second

ok glhf

Vapor trails like the mark of some huge claw swelled and twisted slowly in the aquasky out the browncar’s window : browncar so it won’t get dirty ! Ari and Hen Hen talked about Twee Pop, famous tweeërs, Stuart Murdoch, the gift he had : a gentleness with horrible things. His voice Glaswegian fey, he sung of misunderstood women in struggle. They parked overlooking a narrow backstreet loaded with crates and flattened cardboards and glistening with runoff from the mopped floors of kitchens and spoke of all the unplanned beauty in the world that came and went unadored. This was Hen Hen’s favorite kind of beauty. Sushi tapped the window.
They stood at the border of a huge parking lot, idly gripping chain link as the sun fell down. Behind it, a high hedgerow ; beyond that, a tower of grey concrete slab amid 2-story ranch-style suburbia. All it took was for Sushi to point at a sort of spacetimely warp in the fence and they were on their way in. Hen Hen’s oversize tee got caught and Ari’s skirt somewhat distressed at the knee on the entrance. A world forgotten, of an illogical construction. Yes, it had been abandoned, it seemed, partway finished : missing a wall here and there, girders exposed, silvery ducts poised to fall, gilt with piss and semen and other stains not so easily discerned ; and there was a great litter — empty milk gallons and beercans and those spider-infested pallets that just seem to appear from out of nowhere in the special places of urban neglect — while shone on floor and wall graffiti of an illegible type ; or rather, decipherable but to a select few disciples, and so to Ari only a bright noise of color. There was an energy here to what had been left alone to develop and accumulate in years of disuse. This much was clear.
They ascended the stairway to the toplevel and sat on the edge of the garagelike roof swinging their legs. Sushi indicated a house of a friend of hers that neither of her auditors could recall. Ah Hen Hen you know her, you know her.
I bet this place is slated for demolition, a great dynamited collapse, Ari offered.
Hen Hen pulled a case out of his backpack, assiduously took from it a miniscule bottle, tiny as a lacewing, inspected its label : Yes, alright. You guys wearing anything already ?
They weren’t. He aerosolized some oil on Sushi’s inner wrist, fanned it with a flat hand. It’s. . . mm. . . ( infinite unknowing touches knowing the first time again ) wow. That’s really good Hen Hen, she nodded.
Ari and Hen Hen sniff sniffed. Okay. Now, what do you smell ?
Wait. . . it’s. . . like. Like a bakery. Or a boba shop ?
That’s what I get !
Exactly, or even like an ice cream parlor.
Hen Hen pressed an upsidedown glass in the crook of Ari’s elbow and rubbed a few small circles. No speaking until everyone has felt it alone and by unknown light made it theirs. Can I smell again ? Sure. Mmn. Hands held arms dearly steady as noses travelled soft skin searching out the potent source. Oils and oils on less commoner pulse points. Each fragrant spot invisible from a milliliter vial imbued you with the sense of some intangible, new, and precious thing and, for this, a surprise-gratitude with nowhere to call home welled up inside you and spilt, pouring off in a flood on the world or what’s more than that. This was the closest Ari had felt to them. Sniff sniff : it brought the stinging threat of tears to their eyes, the thought.
Hen Hen mentioned a friend of his in trouble and, as if to comfort him, Ari assured Hen Hen that for their part they were doing well despite everything. That this past year had been possibly their best. That they were proud of themselves, for once.
I’m proud of you too, said bestfriend Hen Hen.
Aw me too, nice Sushi said.
Yeah I’m. Really proud of you guys too, Ari returned, so effusive there was a hint of pain in it. Anyway I’d like to get some new clothes is what I'm thinking — just got some money from the cyclopedia.
Oh yeah, I saw one of your words on a new development in Newport. So insane. Didn’t they use one to name a hotel or something too ? Anyway, we should all go thrifting sometime.
You guys, my mom thinks you shouldn’t go to GoodWill or any place like that.
Why, Sushi ? Hen Hen puzzled inquired.
Well ‘cos you don't know the person who gave away their stuff. You don't know their life or the feelings they had or how they died, if  they died. They could have been a murderer. My mom says one of her friends’ friends, she bought a tie for her husband right. She died the same night in her sleep : couldn’t breathe. Sushi seemed happy to report this, although maybe she was just smiling out of habit.
Oh my god, Hen Hen said. And Sushi got a call from her boyfriend and went down to the second story to take it in privacy. At the darkening sky Ari stared up : a white web on a lightpole. It had become disattached at several structurally significant points and blew now in the wind as a delicate flag. A spiderweb, a fence, and a net. A word for this kind of thing. What comes before them : must be some language with a classifier for that. Then Hen Hen said, Honestly, when I heard about Celia, I thought you might go crazy. It may be an odd thing to say, but I think she would be proud of you too.



It got to the point where receiving your call would make my stomach drop. I would lose all sense of place and time. The whole world became a fake, and you were all that existed for me. In class, I felt your vibration. I went to the foulsmelling restroom where you were and heard you smacking your head against the stall, locked shut.
I needed more focus to complete my cyclopedia. A patently stupid thing to tell anyone, given the circumstances. Yet it was the only way I could think to name what I wanted. Yes, I had spent countless hours in fear of your inner life, of losing you, of it being my fault. But would you have really wanted to know all the harm I felt at the hands of your much deeper and more irretrievable suffering ?
You had often asked me about my book, when you would be able to read it. I had my policy. I didn’t want to show you anything until it came to print. When it did come, I didn’t send you a copy. Why would you want another reminder of my poor, inconstant love ? Still, you sent me a cardboard box with all your favorite books and magazines. Why didn’t I guess it then ? I did. ( Your favorite song was “100,000 Fireflies,” the saddest, most hopeless-pleading song I’ve ever heard ; your eyes live in it still. My favorite had been “Only You,” the stripped-down recording from Fallen Angels ; but of course I never told you my cheap pop song either, nor the love I still felt for you that it spoke to. ) I read none of them. I kept them on my floor for several months. I couldn’t even touch them. I gave them all away when you died. Celia, there was too much pain. Even now, through the aggressive sieve of terrible years, there still is.



In the vacuum of Hen Hen’s car headed home, with the catching-up having been done, and nothing about the immediate environment rousing any interest — after all, they were taking the same wide roads they’d been down hundreds of times since childhood — the way the end of a night that won’t soon be repeated tends to bring out a person’s most earnest side, the conversation picked up. 
Sushi and Hen Hen conducted a review of various people they knew, updating one another on their whereabouts and goings-on. Not knowing any of them, Ari thought of Nora. They found their feelings for her perfectly preserved through the years of silence, like a bright plastic figure in a shallow creek. Remember Nora ?
Yes, did you guys talk recently ?
They hadn’t, and with no real plans to do so, the subject should have sputtered and died there. But after a space of silence Sushi continued : Well don’t worry about that. You two will always be friends.
We will ? Ari wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it hit them like a punch to the stomach.
Yes, same as us. We’ve spent so much time together. Of course, we’ll all be friends.
Friends for one hundred years. . . Sushi, I like that idea. I really want to believe in something like that.
What do you mean ? she scoffed, as if Ari had said something especially unwise. I don’t want to believe in it. That’s just how it is.
Though they had first met her when she asked to copy their homework — a request they assented to, chatting as she sat with them on the planter and scribbled in her composition book — she was one of the people Ari had most looked up to in life. It was with this continuing sense of awe that they held their silence. This took no effort, as they weren’t really thinking of anything, just floating about in the impressions she had left on them. Hen Hen dropped off Ari at the park near their house and they watched, still floating, the red of his tail lights disappear.



My signature ? You know, I don’t think it’s changed. God, I love Lost In Heaven. Hen Hen fell silent. It’s. . . really an amazing scent. Ari had called him as he reached the Highway, to keep him company. As if underwater the car’s interior thrummed with a profound bass.
Why do you think you like it so much ? I mean, I like it okay, but I don’t think it does the same thing for me.
There’s something about it, he said with a faraway look, as if he spoke from the bottom of a deep pond. I think about it often. I mean, I get these ghost-smells, hints of it that aren’t really there, and I just freeze up. I don’t know. It reminds me of corn. Somehow when I try to put it to words, I always end up back at corn.
I can’t say I get that from it. . . But that sounds sort of pretty, they said, then sang out the opening lines of Simon Finn’s “Jerusalem” as they passed through streetlit shadows of palms that extended several times higher than the walls, which were done in a white stucco and quite tall themselves, lending the air of a corridor to the subdivision.
It’s like you with Muskmelon. You always say its like a cube for some reason. You say, Oh it’s got this sort of cubeyness to it, and I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.
In Alice in Wonderland, you know, the Hatter asks, How is a raven like a writing-desk ? And you go through the whole movie and by the end all he has to say for that is, I haven’t the slightest idea. I think our signature asks us a question whose answer we can sort of feel but never hope to phrase.
More than that, Ari ! We don’t even have the words to say the question. 
Ari paused to consider this. But it’s delivered in such a way. . . I mean, that is the question, isn’t it ? Corn, melon, a raven, a desk. And that’s the answer : that’s the answer too.
What do you mean ?
How can I put it. Okay, so Sylvia’s been real into Rilke lately. Read his letters twice back to back, the poems. She gives me advice sometimes, you know. So she showed me this passage the other day.  Now that I think of it, I didn't even ask her for advice, she just knew me well and went and gave it to me. I can’t remember the last time I gave someone advice like that. . . It’s been a long, long time, that’s for sure. So Sylvia tells me, Be patient, like Rilke says. She says to me, Our questions will be answered by living them. Or something like that anyway. Maybe it’s because stuff like this belongs to no logicking sequence of words at all. You see ? To draw close to the matter. . . . I mean, the question has to escape sense to get anywhere even halfway soulish. The soul is huge, you know. So, so huge. . . It takes something that big and vague to. . . I don’t know.
And in the dead air growing before their friend’s reply, Ari began to feel afraid. They had said too much. They had gone crazy after all, Hen Hen would think. 
But no. He had resonated with all of it, he told his friend now. And Ari felt a dark relief wash over them : the wind, sultry with the crashing of distant waves. They both said goodnight. 
On the walk home, they smelt a jasmine tree across the road. They had smelt it in the daytime before — but oh, the smell of jasmine at night. They had never noticed. . . Ari stopped for a moment, troubled by the nightchange, to take it in, looking back and above them where insects flew in the light of a fluorescent lamp. It was totally different. Ten times more pungent. It followed them up the steps to the door. What a lulling, yet bitter and mysterious thing. Nightblooming jasmine. They felt something inside them break. They fled the street for the room where they first met true sorrow. Seven years had come and gone. They had crumpled at the voice of a small tree.



It begins as a feeling so intense as to be literally unspeakable : when you read the 4am message from her mother and traipse downstairs, you can’t get past the first syllable, repeating it pointlessly ; your father asks if you’ve hurt yourself, though you’ve never hurt yourself — nor even spoken of any intention to, — you look that damaged. You actually have to write it out : Celia is dead. Oh my god, oh my god : it’s your mother. The sorrow is of such terrible intensity that it deforms you in mirrors : you futz with a face you cannot change that has attached itself to yours like a mask. You play a strange, sad game of peekaboo with yourself. You have never in your life appeared more pitiable.
It lessens, the sorrow. It has to. You have to get to work : go through all the several tasks of being a good mourner. You call her mother and hear the story told back by the wracked voice that found her : whimpering, foamy-mouthed. Dead. The voice is right in your ear, tinny and distorted : it’s a radio wave suffering data-loss yet more real and miserable than any embodied voice you’ve ever heard. You say you’re sorry you’re so sorry and you go to two funerals : one with her body and one without. For the first you fly two states away. In the pews you listen to others, trying to think nothing and only cry : it strikes you as the most pure, guileless thing to do.
But you don’t do that ; you can’t.
There are feelings you will only speak about in hindsight, you imagine, even just to yourself alone, believing, in some tacit way, that a time and place will come whose distance finally exonerates them — you — some measure of dishonor ; and that on this dreamtof day you might, with still-great difficulty, bear the leaden weight of your own soul. Pretend that day will come ( it may or may not ) ; even still, do you really believe you deserve that dishonor ? Please don’t scare, don’t shy away from me my mourning-friend. I ask, Then why wait at all, why not say them now, the hard things, to yourself aloud ? But remember that shame bends to no clear statute of limitation because your soul is not a crime to be confessed. 
You feel it too, don’t you ? ( If you say no, tell me how you hope to name infinite sorrow by noise so quiet and polite. ) Furious trumpets and close, quietfluted moans touch the same theme of soul’s pain of enduring ( oh, the renewing, unending solitude ) ; while abovewithindeepbelow a euphonium, enormousmouthgoldenbell, hovers wide, deephaunting notes, choked by the cone of its own bore, as if a soft but distant voice.
It’s in the restive unfilled quiet that passed in a pause before another one of the more distant family members took the lectern when Ari asking without even mouthing the thought asked When can I be rid the stench of death ? and the piteous black ooze of that enchantment came over them ; and it was through this wet stain they saw fit to wrench the cold coiled fingers that clung their waist, neck, stubborn, clenching, — off ; and some months later spurn by crush of silence their dead’s mother also with smoking eyes of bitterness ; not bearing to call the death in question Celia’s, though it was to her that it and all death now belonged. 
You hug the body twice, keeping pace with her sister, though part of you — all of you — doesn’t want to. It’s like nothing you’ve ever touched, and no art has or could prepare you. Heavy, but somehow empty, like a hollow log. It’s her, but it isn’t.
I’m sorry it was so hard for you. You say it as you embrace for the last time. Laying your face on the coolness of her neck, you say it again to the warm air between her and the slick wooden panelling. You have never felt so certain of anything as this. And you hug her abuela, and her sister, your faces puffy and red with crying. After the service, a burning. It’s summer.
Yesterday, shortly after arriving at the new house, Julie, her younger sister, came through the door. She’d just gotten back from tennis practice covered in sweat, out of breath, and in need of a tall glass of water. She looked you right in the eyes and started : Celia would be glad you’re here. Though you cannot believe it, it somehow feels true.

4

Remember how getting to bed was a much scarier thing when you were young ? I mean it’s still scary once in awhile, don’t get me wrong, like when I get worked up from watching a horror movie, or after that murder-suicide in the townhomes across the street, but somehow, even knowing nill about the world, the fear was more intense back then.
You could know everything or nothing and still be afraid. So where does fear come from, then ? Celia asks.
You know, it used to be routine : every night a fresh ordeal of terror. It’s why I took up praying ; my parents never believed. I pray the lord my soul to keep, I said that one every night. Now though — right now — for example I can look around and I see a desklamp. Well, it’s not really possible to see it but I can sort of imaginatively anticipate that if I turned the lights back on, there would be a lamp there. With some imagination I can turn the pale glass of it to a semblance of a creature or an aunt’s face or a blue-tongued skink or whatever. Yet my immediate impression is that this right here is a desklamp.
Mmn, she mmns beside me.
But when I was a kid it was the other way around. Only after really thinking it through would I be able to summon a lamp. And other times I wouldn’t even be able to do that. So I would just have to shut my eyes and feel anxious while trying to ignore a feeling of impending doom but in any case a vision would come crashing through the window. I think it’s one of the clearest ways that I can tell I’m changing. It used to be automatic. . . So, I can’t imagine as well, as naturally. Something’s missing. Sure, I guess my memory’s better now, but I’d trade it back if I could. I mean even though at times it was scary and everything, it still feels like I’ve lost something important, and I may not ever be able to get it back. Maybe I’m still losing it.
She moved to hold me, her face blank as always. Not always : I recalled a vulpine grin and sharp teeth but it hurt so I dispensed with the image and felt a great silence well up inside me, us. The room, move-out ready, contained only the twin, a whiteboard, and a desk with a computer and a slim volume of Ryōkan I’d lent her with the inpatient label still affixed to its spine and the reading lamp. The faint but heady scent of dew and wet dirt had started to filter in through the open window : that first presage of early morning in the latest hours of night. The only sound was the gentle stirring of toyon. Little by little our bodies grew warm in the cool air. I know, lately I find myself asking, What’s happened to me ? I gather up the facts of the matter, ascertain their shape and weight, but any answer is refused me. It’s like you wake up one day and think, My old gingham dress ! I know what I’d like to do is I’d like to wear that old gingham dress ! But then you go off and look for the thing and it’s nowhere to be found. And then you get this gutsinking realization that you haven’t even worn it in years. Just like that, my dreams — pretty much all of them : professional, personal, even what few spiritual ones there were — up and vanished. And in their place : only the stubborn fact of absence. I guess this is somewhat different than what you were talking about though.
I don’t mind. You can go on.
After some time : H ?
Mm ?
Do you ever just talk to yourself ? not just a few stray words here and there — not just spotty narration or to-do lists — but really talk to yourself ?
I think sometimes. Aloud, you mean, right ?
Yeah. It’s all I can do. Otherwise I hear nothing all day : and my days are empty. Do you ever wonder who you’re talking to when you talk to yourself ?
No, not really.
Oh. 
I know Lucy likened it to prayer once, talking like that. Though she tends to liken everything to prayer. At this, Celia smiled. I went on : If that’s true, maybe you’re talking to god. I mean, god’s supposed to be inside us, right, in our souls and everything like that. So it would make some sense.
Time passed, and with it a still-deeper silence. All things absorbed it and grew a little tremulous. Celia held me more closely, skimming a hand over the question of my body, and I buried my face in the small hollow of her neck. It smelt of jasmine and sweat and I lay still and happy and waited for sleep to retrieve us. But, after several minutes, she continued : It’s strange. I keep thinking, Which one am I, the talking one or the listening one ? But I get confused, because I don’t feel like either, really. I don’t know. God, I just can’t say where my dreams went at all. Or why. Patiently as I wait, each day that passes brings no sign of their return. At this point, I’d settle with just knowing the reason, if there is one. If I just had that, maybe I could get them back. I would be lying to pretend it didn’t give me some comfort when they left, or at least a sort of lightness. But pretty soon you get around to thinking Well, back to the drawing board. So I went to the drawing board, but in the end I could never find it in me to draw much of anything : a sketch here, a doodle there : the meager little symbols that decorate the margins of distracted children : hearts, eyes, clover, and checkbirds. And the chequy in the graphs. But where a main body of notes had been and should’ve been, there was nothing at all. And what could there be anyway ? There is no one inside me to listen to, no teacher to jot down the words of, no hands to do the jotting. Like I said, I feel so empty, I am a deeply empty person and not in a good or enlightened way.

3

The mound they built up from the scraps of Scyther’s big machine he rode out past the length of stormdrain where blacktop turns to yard, sunk in the fog of cool morning and high astride his beast that howled as it passed the day of the Assembly, Mrs. Baker shouted him down in scritchy stockings : Could you stop that so I can think for a second, poor man. And over the PA too. That’s the only time H ever saw him, clerical error, not his fault in the least yet he’s the one to take the brunt of it. The cutter scattered darker layers over the yard he sheared, so the mornings were rich with green scent. All lunch long H and Celi and Rudy skipped about scooping armfuls of the dead plant from across the lawn, stacking them up on themselves in a big heap : until now here it was, the biggest little soft pile you ever did see, towering so high above the three of them they had to toss the last leaping handfuls. Wisely posted over in the corner of the outside wall, good angel of the honeysuckle draped overhead from a neighbor’s yard.

Behind the knoll
Out of the know

In a place so seeming safe. But as knelled the sine of the bell a keen and spirit voice demanded him stay, stay behind and put up some defence, but all that could be done was to pen a paleyellow notecard : Please Do Not Destroy Me !!! And the door creaked and everyone looked and Mrs. G. ( he had once called her mom ) stopped instruction to pull his card to red — second infraction of the day ; first too chatty and laughing with Rudy — in front of everyone and he slunk in his chair to copy letters from the board, awaiting the call to his parents.

Cards for nothing
Cards for naught

And by the time that school got out Grass Tower was no more. 1. Tomorrow : sought the mutant clover that he found but as he made to press it safe between the pages of a book it fell from hand. His wish ! He searched it out among the thousands : emptyhanded end of hands stained with ladybug pee : none believed. He’d never told a lie. Yellow like chalk and crayon and a pencil is yellow ; like the Gatorade the huge tree drunk from its roots spidered in the damp earth, watched by Rachel and H to learn if they might change its color. Could not. 2. Tomorrow’s tomorrow : Celi and Rudy, matchmakers, made an origami ring to tease or not he couldn’t ask. In whispered ritual Celia slid it over his finger ; his lastname — the last name he had left — left too ; and for the redfacing, ridiculous one of Matthew Stupidbeing, who he had admired he felt as a fan, first in full white with the yellowbelt, stranded in tinniticangelvoicedsilence, looking up from his book with fast heart and faint to glance in the evening’s orange light the painted court that swelled with the far sound of sport, dribble, from his mom’s SUV’s rear window, interrupted by the dotted line where the radio antenna might be, which of course a dotted line could not wear any of the cute hats and toppers they had slowly collected anymore. But then the ring broke : a fake ! And when his maiden name was returned him just some minutes later, it was in such a strange, used condition that it no longer seemed to belong, and he felt floaty and light. 3. And tomorrow’s. . . tomorrow’s tomorrow : leprachaun on suspicion of HotWheelstheft sought out under the grate of the drain : eyes back and forth running : just bottle caps, stones, old candywrapper : again and again with empty hands again tomorrow again tomorrow.

2

Old incense and votives on the altar reeking of gunpowder, soft stench of talcum from the vanity drawers. I laid down with you in the net and they flushed you from the heather : sick game. They hid their face in their hands. Shameful. Terrible sport, the hunting of fox. You trusted ; I hanged you at the nape in my jaw, cradled you how I knew, and went off, spilling a plaint of ulcer blood. I am diseased. Peeked through bars : fingers. Yes two struggled there in the net : but one they shot and one set free, merry little gundog. I left them you to take. And for what master have I been your betrayer ? Only my own name. — No, not mine : just a name.
And what did that get you, Ari prostrate on shabby carpet, someone else in silent hate. Baggie full of treats all gone and a stray word on the grillwork of a gate — only to pompous hotels and housing tracts I cannot go. Turned in their naked mattress, eyes in the window : nothing : past the insect-zapping screen, a jumble of sharpcut topiary and grey rooves, pseudodovecote, satellites pulling data from the sky, creeping wire of the cable leech, phonelines and poles with birdspike. They clawed like a dog in sleep the fragrant wake of air she trod but did not whine. A cloud passed by then or maybe only a bitter pall of white smoke from the powerplant just off the One, dragged forth by the huge, mountainhot wind of the Santa Ana.
A pulling south, that nowfamiliar longing. O, to draw closer to nothing, near enough to feel myself enmantled in it, like the iciness of coastal fog. But how ? 
A primal answer filled Ari’s mind’s eye. A call : it called to them. The bridge that straddles the concrete void of River and Trail. All the same dromedary road, yet someplace along the overpass Hamilton gave way to Victoria St and, with it, their town to Celia’s. But where, exactly ? As if Ari were not, in fact, totally catatonic but instead halfway calm, they considered the nothingnowhere of the question, koan-like. They thought next of Celia’s house. ( After she left, they had always pictured it dark and conspicuously unpeopled, an image accompanied by the firm, unknown conviction that it would surely remain that way until further notice ; that the whole world would just let something alone for once, at least until the long, endless work of mourning was done ). They would rattle, they imagined, down the bridge, park at her old house, see what there was to see, then pass on to the ordering window of the 24-h Bakery they used to frequent during sleepovers, and they would carry their spoils to the playground on Arbor, seating themselves on that old blue bench. And once there, they would eat, finally, mouth full of bright sugar and sobbing. They sobbed now without sugar — by some absence of mind, they had not eaten in 24 hours, yet their body felt not hungry, just flickering, hollow —, their head moving of its own wish to smother itself in the carpet, which was littered, they found, by strands of their own hair. It tangled there in their mouth ; they spat and they reached in and pulled, scratching themselves with the furor of the repeated motion on their untrimmed nails, though not quite drawing blood.



I’m sorry, her distraitvoice voiced.
What ? What for ?
I don’t know. Eyes trained low in shame.
. . .
I don’t know, H. The night I slept in bed with you.
Oh ?
I feel creepy. . . I-I hurt you, I’m sorry. She folded into herself and cried without sound ; perhaps that sound was trapped in the same murky dimension that stole her dreams : it struck me as a serious possibility. But all I could do was hold her by the shoulders, barred from a real embrace by the center console.
Hey, it’s okay, I said. I didn’t mind that at all. I fell quiet in imitation of a calm person. After some minutes of troubled breathing, her eyes on the hands on her knees, my face on hers, she seemed to be doing a little better. But there was a heaviness to this moment — she had never shown such bare emotion to me before or since. It follows me around like a hungry kit I have no food to feed.



She left no note : not even a word. Maybe Celia and the letter she gave me were both a manner of fermenting box I was never meant to open or have, only hold to a while and then bury, dig, bury. Could such a thing be “meant to” happen ? The thought turns my stomach, but I can’t be sure it isn’t true.

1

Oil of angel’s trumpet black. In childhood’s room.
Voiceless voice in evening’s fingers through Venetian slats, sing. No matter how I tug ( in the dark ) the strings of the pulley and twist ( indarked ) the tilter’s wand, the space will never fully close. Learn this.
In my lonesome detention cold, ashfaced I wear the blot. Miserere : I wear too many ; am whining now. But know, I beg no cleansing here. Oh, don’t send my shade away, but stand it in thy light that I may know it by thee, — and thou me, by this.
Sprinkle me with god, hyssop.
You are not light who light illumes. Dust on a draft, by you I was befriended. Stale room but warm by you in heaven beam who bend to touch my face along the curve of my face. Faery flecks I claw to hold that ever the swifter elude me — the space between will never fully close — you were not made to be possessed. Breathe this. The bitterness of damp leaves. But you want to be don’t you another’s as much as vainly as me ?
I do. The light I have known is miraculous but inconstant.
Then embolden my weakness without cure and let us be partnered. And if you can answer, then answer me. Many nights I have spent in asking.
As equals. Here some dust was set apart, and I knew where to direct my frantic speech.
Of course. I didn’t mean — I didn’t say answer to.
A space for interpretation remains. Always in the human tongues. Understand, I am not god nor spirit of your dead. The conditions for my existence lie on a narrow band, as visible light lies to the spectrum ; and even then it’s a fragile and tenuous kind : what belief sustains, desperation drives off. Like you I am finicky by nature though I dream I were stronger. Slowly the motes — multicolor like sprinkles, or confetti — adjusted their distance from one another, vacillating between a series of figures pinpoke or connect-the-dots–like, but spare to the point of abstraction. Ears’ timpani beat, passioned with circulating blood. I cried for the miracle of our meeting, and for fear.
Could we go back to the time, the bodies we were before the hour of her spirit fled, and before the bodies heavenly, turned away ashamed, took from us hers the only one I had in loving touched ? The apologies I burned and wished I could take back, they all belong to her. The same as what honor I once gave myself. All you sprinkles dressed in Iris’ coat, if you are able, please accept my incomplete and startled love. Though I suspect the limits of the soul are unknowable, its borders too vast to be surveyed, and that the vanity of all wishes can only be apprized long after the bare fact of life, I’d like to ask what you think of mine, and into yours.

Five Poems

you are spurning worldlythings
you are spurning worldlythings
for an idea about spirituality
but dont you think you should
know spirits ? they covet openly dont
they flesh the world of flesh
in want and open wanton spasm ?
they gambol and lie in puddles of shadow



the more I want the more I don’t have
the more I want the more I don’t have
and the northerly fantasy nonsense :
evening, the clocktower face fingers
contemplating lips in the window

it’s in a book
of law somewhere,
the farglowing word,
enshrined in this : the more
I want the more
I don’t have ( I
feel ) you ; and higher grows
my hoard of not having : willed

through cloud, a magic
vine : watch oncewell
peopled cities before you stretch and heaven’s empty groan :
the toothbrown gates
to every dugout in orange painted
fields once given to friends
come open



Ruins
Neverthoughts alone and pile :
the garbage stink of pitiless years
vanished all in unpitied silence
as vulture breezes swift descend :

Iri iri iri ! iri, iri ! a band of crickets
blow cross the harsh tumble
of blackstones where lightless
ness vassals elate themselves

six times by six she said and she swears by
the moon loved star altars she hurts by
the night and the night
is stretching the night as it lengthens

For what other didst thou have me
to leave, Spirit, what ? And what better
remembrancer apart from pain
of remembering? Past all gradation

the sudden departure. You knew always.
It’s nothing she said well sometimes it’s nothing
but tonight her face was sweeping
across her face silver tresses and now the jetty

spraying dark eruptions. I don’t think —
No I can’t. . . show myself my heart
shoots up in my throat and throbs there alone.
Oh sand crab shells of skulls of the dead :

Pass on ! For if not their eyes, god, they’re pale
of face : of my god there’s something I have need :
you know the wishmurmurs the faults
they traverse : should we forget : time ; ruins ; everything ?

Give no answer : touch ( touch ( touch ) the surface of ) the waters
that once split genetic skies : and if I must go then I’ll go first

The Serpent
Fair peridexion, in hostile fear
Of thee I cower mid shade that manys
As wester, by bid of cetacean bone,
Those aery steeds. Deep dark and deeper
By want of heavenly burning more ardent,
Here twinkly only some Angler’s lures :
Boughfeal lovely blackdoveeyes mocking.



Bottles
With sorrow
Soft sorrow
Fly birdie
My swallow,

I snowploughed
And harrowed
Held lacewings
In late spring

In bottles
But bottles
Can’t keep one
To say no

Thing of all souls, — Why
Bother ? Now I know.

 

About the Author:

Ivy Char was born in 1998 in Orange County, CA and, regretfully, still resides there. She studied Linguistics and Literature. These days she answers telephone calls for a living, but she’s about to quit. Her story “A More Singular Fortitude” is part of a forthcoming work inspired by Digimon. If you wait, you will find it. She has previously been published on her illustrious personal site loneliwish.com.