Kneel, Son, If You Can

No one has ever been more divorced.

West Berlin, with an apartment that overlooks the Wall, a job that calls him across that impermeable line, wife and toddler son left to warm the bed at home. Solon is young, so young; impossibly young. Young and slim and alienated, a human hand grenade, fiercely devoted to home and hearth and Sea World. Not that he knows any of those things, except as abstract concepts, but what does it matter? He speaks English, because speaking English means he is still himself, but he hasn’t heard English from anyone except his family in years. His son speaks German. His wife? She greets him at the door to their winding apartment with an accent he doesn’t recognize, an inflection he does not know.

In the subways, her uterus spasms.

The pain is beyond what she can bear, beyond standing. Her knees buckle, the breath thumps out of her lungs with the weight of a sledgehammer driving into her ribs. Quiana screams in blood, in milk, in celery; throws herself against the cool blue tiles of the wall in search of some relief. No one comes, no one hears her, no one bears her witness. She soaks herself, eyes black with rage, all the blood driven to her core by distress. She is haunted by her doubles, a blonde, a German, a Croatian, a Turk. She absconds, from her husband, from her job, from her lover. What do they know of her? What can they know of her? She has been flattened like a sheet of paper, all the moisture pressed from her.

No one has ever been more divorced.

San Remo

He hit me over the head with an oar and dumped me in the bay to drown, which I thought was terribly rude. And after all I’d done for him! Hadn’t I taken him in, shown him the world, introduced him to the right people and the right attitude? He was so wonderfully louche, everyone adored him, the way he’d sweat and stammer when we’d ask him his opinions on art or music or politics or… well, anything, really! He wanted for nothing. I’d have given him the shirt off my back if he hadn’t already started wearing my clothes without asking.

Damned impertinent, really.

Still, so it goes, I suppose, if you’d believe my old father. “Don’t mix outside of your proper circle,” he’d say, “it’ll be the ruin of you yet.” I did think he was worried more about my getting hooked by some cheap piece that he’d have to pay off or send out of state to get the complications taken care off, but murder’s a pretty bad turn of affairs by anyone’s standards. At that he wasn’t far off, either, but I never did aspire to senatorhood, damn him. I could have been an artist, I swear, if I could have just buckled down and focused.

Well, anyway. Some hard feelings, but it’s too late for all that. Best of luck to him, the bastard.

Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender

We would have been so happy together, I know it. That spark of connection, the way my heart leapt to see her, the sound of her laughter when I’d made some particular joke or other: that’s the basis of a real relationship. What could Escamillo offer her? Fleeting, fading. Physical chemistry, cheap economics. I offered love, pure love, and that wasn’t enough. Should I have simply swallowed her insults? Accepted her abuse? Did I not have the right to defend my honor?

We were worried for our lives, the fourteen of us, a wall of fragile human meat surrounding a four thousand pound truck. The look in her eyes when the brake lights went off… there was fury there, and madness. Bloodlust. We had to protect ourselves. Make it home again tonight safe, that’s what they tell us; whatever else happens, make it home safe. Should we have stood there and let ourselves be run over? She thought we weren’t serious and we had to show her.

We have been so kind, so restrained; we have lethal weapons, but we never use them, are not allowed to use them. And what thanks do we get? Rubber bullets may smash the occasional eye, but you can live without an eye. Tear gas may have been banned in war, but this isn’t a war. They say it is, but if it is, we’ll win it. They think we’re a joke, and we have to show them we mean business. There is no hunting like the hunting of men. We didn’t make them come here. We didn’t make them poison the city against us. They did that on their own.

What choice did we have? Were we not within our rights?

Digory and the Seven Gates of Hell

So near, you could touch it: Hylas leans out over the quiet water and stares down into the depths, to where the light fades to blue, then to black. A rock falls from his hand and disappears into the darkness. He bends his lips to drink, and it recedes from him, daggers his hand toward the depths and touches only soft grass. He has thrown himself into these ponds a dozen times or more, and found nothing there but the muted thump of the soft forest floor.

He does not want for food, nor for drink, not physically, anyway, but his cells remember and he yearns. A second on the lips, the needle’s quicksliver dip into the meat of his shoulder, the flesh between his toes; the world spins around and he is lying in the grass, staring up at the sunlight filtering through the branches. He has been here longer than he can remember, but the light does not change, the shadows do not shift, he is neither hot nor cold. He scrubs his hands against the earth and breathes deep, comforts himself with the continued if invisible life of microorganisms.

He hears birds off among the trees, but cannot see them, cannot find them. He has wandered for hours at times and only ever found more shaggy-barked trees, more shallow pools, the occasional sleeping body. He lies down next to them, so near they could touch, if the distance could be crossed, the boundary passed, the old world made new again.

A Pestilence of Volunteerism

There’s an untouched joint sitting in the middle of the road on the way back from the meeting, and Colleen scoops it up, untwists it, runs her fingers through the weed. It’s well-made, no seeds, no stems, tightly rolled and pleasingly tapered. An observation bubbles up from deep in her memory, the sort of emotional shading that she’s long out of the habit of noting: this was made with care. She opens her hand, lets the wind take what remains.

It’s a blistering warm October day, and she steams slightly in the evening air. The meeting had been sparsely attended, two baristas, a teamster, three booksellers, a couple of retail workers, the normal reports on deeds done, actions taken, monies spent. It’s her third meeting this week alone; she’s the recording secretary for five unions, three volunteer committees, seven arts commissions, and fourteen church groups. Everyone needs someone to record names and tally votes, and she’s grown sleek and smug on minutes, motions, seconds, debates. The coffee is universally bad.

She crosses the street against the light, staring down drivers, daring them to hit her. They won’t—each of them blinks and turns their eyes away, uncomfortable as coyotes in a spotlight. She files their faces away, their license plates, the models of their cars, all grist for the mill.