Tiny Falling Animals (January 20, 2010. Issue 13.)
Today there are clouds in the shapes of tiny animals falling from the sky. Jared, standing in the middle of a quiet street, the kind of street they show in movies, when all the actors have left, looks up, tries to catch them. They are in the form of all kinds of animals, species-- bats, giraffes, squirrels, orangutans-- because the world is a varied place, and today, nobody is feeding them. Today, the sky is tumescent, full. Today, the sky unloads.
*
They are at the Cedar Knolls Reservation, traipsing past the heath of briers, snarling paths overtaken by woody plants, close-knit families of aspens, sumac. It is mid-afternoon, and her name is Sheri. Sometimes he calls her “Cherry-pie” because when they first met at a party, he replayed the words to that song: Everybody wants a piece of my cherry-pie. She’s just so sweet.
The party was at her apartment and after the friends left, they slept together. She offered him some coke and urged him to fuck her in the ass. No, he said, he wasn’t into either. She sighed and lied stiff. He tried missionary, but she fell asleep and he lost whatever urge he had. In the morning, she made him eggs over light with fried slabs of boiled ham, instant coffee. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to see her again, but she kept calling. She works in Payroll for a trucking firm, can multiply digits in her head to the nearest tenth.
He has a college degree in American History and works in a post office, really outside it, stocking trucks with parcels, big rectangular boxes. He drinks coffee with men nearing a pension. Their conversations are bare trees. Jared is twenty-nine. Sheri is twenty-five.
She sits down by a brook, stretches herself out. Be careful, he tells her, you might get sunburned. Stop, she says with a huff. She closes her eyes. Sheri is plump, not in a Rubinesque sense, he thinks, because with her, it is asymmetrical, fat around the hips, bulky thighs, the breasts, small, belonging to someone far away. But the face reminds him of cherry-pies, her flesh, the color of a lightly baked crust.
He feels that here, on this sun-dappled day, how everything breathes with quietude, it’s a moment outside of time. As if watching from some point in the future, he will look back at this moment as something that can both float and remain still, summoned at will.
Today, the animals are happy in their hiding places.
They saunter across hiking paths, then she steps into a thicket, loses her balance, falls inches from a felled tree, skinny, bark yellowed. He rushes to her rescue. “Are you alright?”
She is laughing. “Don’t help me, “ she tells him, “I can get up.” She gently pushes his arms away, brushes her jeans. Her face flushes; her eyes blue-glisten.
“You’re so serious, “ she tells him later as they walk back to her car.
And maybe this is what he likes about her, her giddy armor, her charisma like an arrow, the way she oversimplifies him, makes him feel light.
In a dense part of the reservation, Jared captures a frog. His voice surges with excitement. “Do you know how hard it is to catch one?” he says to her.
He takes this as some kind of sign, perhaps of good luck, because he has never caught one.
“Wait,” she says, shaking her head, smiling a toothy grin, “I have to take a picture of this.”
She steps back and shoots the Polaroid.
Jared looks down at this slimy small thing squirming in his hands. It looks scared, jittery as only a frog can be. He lets it go, watches it for a few seconds. It disappears. He wonders if frogs are capable of thoughts, fragments of them, like his at times.
Back at her apartment, they eat dinner, drink Tequila in shot glasses, have sex afterwards. He comes too quick. She tells him of a dream she had of being overcome by waves, dragged to some unknown beach, miles of it, barren, not one person in sight.
A wave? he says, but I‘m so skinny.
It wasn’t about you, she tells him.
*
They continue to see each other on weekends. She calls him sometimes during the week. On Saturdays, they drive in her car, always hers, go shopping. She picks out Lean Cuisines, tells him she needs to count calories. He wants something fatty and rich. She persuades him that he will acquire a taste. Her father, she says, died `too young, a heart attack.
Mostly they spend the weekends at her apartment, he, sleeping over, his mother back home sometimes questioning whether this is serious. She knows how hard he took it when his last long-time girlfriend of five years stated their relationship was a merry-go-round, that he was somewhat “passive,“ easily bored, and she vanished into her career, into the carillons of a national insurance company. He spent months brooding in a room upstairs he decorated with strobe lights and various posters of old rock stars. He lost himself in music, distanced himself at work.
In her small living room, he is sitting on an old recliner, cushioned seat. She comfortably nestled on the couch, her cat, a stray, takes in everything with her eyes, sometimes a shade of silver at a distance, sometimes a droop, barely a blink. Sheri says she loves animals, that she can understand them, marvels at how they never scream the way humans do when giving birth. He nods. They study each other.
One weekend, she introduces him to her family, the mother, whom Sheri labels as too “scatter-brained,” her brother, whom she loves but pronounces as “too weak.” Her sister’s marriage that after a miscarriage is deteriorating, the brother-in-law growing shabbier in appearance.
In the apartment, she often talks about her job at the office, her dealings with truckers, how some offer her coke in exchange for sex, how she was infatuated with an ex-trucking supervisor, a Vietnam vet, one she accompanied to a motel.
Jared shifts his position in the chair, takes a sip of his Kirsch. He loved any drink with even a hint of sweetness.
“How long ago?”
Her eyes fix upon the sleepy cat.
“A while back. I just loved that man. I’d eat his shit.”
“You still see him?”
Her eyes swerve slowly over to him. She shakes her head, slight, almost undetectable movements.
In turn, he sometimes tells her about his ex, what attracted him to her, her soft skin, her high IQ, her ability to speak French, the times at her dorm, her kindness, (for the most of their relationship), some early good times, those semester breaks.
“What happened,” she asks, taking a sip from her drink.
“It just didn’t come to anything. . . She went cold on me.”
“That sucks. I mean about the college degree.”
“What?”
She flicks her head, pushes some auburn strands from her eyes.
“I work with girls who have one. They get promoted faster. And me. I run circles around them, train them, cover up their mistakes, and the only way I make any money is by working overtime.”
“You work too much.”
“Thank you. But I‘m single. I have bills.”
Sometimes the conversation switches to her father, how she still thought the world of him, what she loved about him, how he’d make her laugh, a gunny bag of practical jokes. She couldn’t stand to be around serious people, she says.
Before the weather grows cold, they drive to a nearby town, browse the old antique shops, knickknacks, typewriters and silver platters, portraits of children wearing large hats with ribbons, sailor dresses. Jared remarks how these knickknacks tell so much about people, who they were, their world, now lost, but maybe not. They watch a baseball game from a bar.
At her place, he peruses her CD collection, marveling at some of the old ones, collections by seventies’ groups--Led Zeppelin, Yes, Stooges, some Stones. She tells him he can borrow them. He promises he will give them back. No rush, she says, when you’re ready. She is very generous, he notes, although at times, she can be unyielding, saying she inherits her backbone from her father. Maybe his heart was weak, but nothing else.
He doesn’t categorize this relationship as love. Maybe a low-grade variant of it, a step-son without a name. Someone to talk to, sleep with. Who knows where this will go. She says she thinks she’s in love, but she can never be sure. The last guy she loved, fucked without condoms, fucked her any which way he could, then, went back to an old girlfriend. She is not Jared’s ideal, if he has one. He wants a girl of fine bone, mysterious as porcelain sculptures, his mother’s glass animals that speak from their stillness.
Or maybe the grass is growing under his feet, he thinks. Maybe he can’t hear or name the sound it makes. Maybe the grass is growing inside him, catching tiny falling animals. On the bed, their chins lodge in the nook of their arms.
She tells him that he will always be the kind of person who needs a crutch, that she can see him working at the post office until retirement. Not that there is anything wrong with that, she adds. She gave up her crutches years ago, she says. He looks at her curiously.
“If you could be an animal, “ he asks her, “which one?”
Her answer is swift, direct.
“A lion. It can do what it wants and get others to do what it wants. And you?”
“A giraffe.”
She rises, lights some incense scented candles strewn around the apartment. She falls back to bed. This time he works hard to make her come, but she doesn’t. On coke, she tells him, she can come easier.
You mean the guy, he says, can make you come easier because he‘s so, you know.
Yeah, she says, that’s what she means. She sits up and presses her lips, slaps his shoulders. No, she says, she had it right the first time.
The smells of cottonwood and Citronella wafts through the bedroom. The smell of a kerosene heater. There is a strange kind of warmth. That tingles.
*
They’re watching the cat give birth to a kitten. It’s so tiny, he says, and when do the eyes open? The cat is lying on her bed. She strokes its back. Isn’t it amazing, she says. Over the weeks, he grows attached to the kitten. But it hardly grows, so blind, funny-awkward in its movements. The vet says the kitten will probably not live. Jared cares for it, feeds it special milk from a bottle. It lives.
*
Jared in his upstairs room. What he likes about her: She’s unpredictable, can grow either way. When she does grow, she is very strong in that direction. But the decision to grow which way must be hers. He, for the most part, is her passenger in the back seat.
Giraffe: So why do you think humans and giraffes are so different?
Jared: Well, for one thing, you can't talk.
Giraffe: I'm talking, right?
Jared: Because I gave you a voice.
Giraffe: Really. I forgot. Are you an only child?
Jared: Does it show? All those hours alone.
Giraffe: You wear it like a coat of dead leaves. And your father?
Jared: He turned into a flying squirrel before I had a chance to give him a stable personality.
Giraffe: Such bad timing.
*
In the restaurant, she tells him not to grow too comfortable with “this,” with anything really. He asks for clarification. She chews her chief salad with slow deliberate motions. She says that things happen when you grow comfortable. Like what, he asks, holding a fork inches from his lips. Like anything, she says.
“Do you feel superior because you have a college degree?” she asks.
He is beginning to lose interest in having sex with her. Their movements there do not coordinate. This decision, he prides himself, is his.
On the phone, he is telling her that he can’t make it this weekend; he has a family obligation. There is a silence yawing over the phone. And plus, he says, I don’t think this is really going anywhere. The weekends he’s not showing up are becoming more frequent.
“Is it me?” she says.
“No.”
“It is. Tell me what you don’t like about me. Be honest.”
He likes this feeling for once of holding something, something both big and small in his hands, this ability to crush it.
“We’re just different. That’s all. We need different people.”
He listens to her breathe on the phone. The breaths are long and deep as seasons.
“Okay,” she says with a low rasp, so uncharacteristic of her voice, “fine.”
She hangs up.
*
Jared is in his room, listening to a Stones CD he borrowed from Shari. He’s watching the snow fall, a flurry of it. It’s not sticking to the streets, but it might if it keeps up. Occasionally, he still sees her, but now it’s different. She barely acknowledges his presence in conversations. One time, when he popped over, she was sleeping. But he had called her first!
At night he masturbates to the thought of her, not because he wants her, but because he wants her when she doesn’t want him. She is now on top of everything. When he comes home from the post office, he must fight lions to keep from reaching for the phone. The lions are winning.
He calls her. She greets him with a comical tone, “Oh, hi. A little busy right now.”
He can hear sex sounds in the background, a guy’s voice. She sounds out of breath.
“Who’s there,” he asks.
There is a low rumble.
“Say hi to Jared,” she says to Mystery Man.
“Hi Jared.”
Jared stares at his sneakers. They’re old, but comfortable as hell.
“Listen, “ she says, “can I call you back? I’m really tied up right now.”
When he does see her, she is verbally abusive, humiliating him over his lack of taste in clothes, even openly insults him in front of her family. He wants to lash out, but the lion is too strong, and knows his handles too well. He feels small as a bird.
At work, he can’t concentrate. He tells a co-worker that his girl is giving him a hard time, throws some details his way. The guy shrugs, tells Jared, you gotta wear the pants or else they’ll wear you.
Three weeks before Christmas. Late morning. He answers the phone. His mother is in her bedroom, folding clothes.
“Jared?”
He feels the wind knocked out of him.
“Sheri?”
She’s giggles. Then, there’s a weird tone to her voice, like she’s high and afraid to come down.
“Listen,” she says, “just want you to know. . . Just know this. . . . It really hurts. It really does. You have no idea.”
He wants to ask her if she’s drunk, but she doesn’t drink this early.
“What hurts? What?”
He can hear her swallow.
“This. Jared, what am I talking about? This.”
He pushes the receiver away from his ear, waits for his mother to pass by.
“What hurts, Shari? What? I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t understand. I know you don’t”
Her words are slurred.
She mentions something about a party at her place that lasted until morning. Another silence. She says something. Faint. Away from the phone. Jared tries to get her back on the line.
“What hurts, Shari?”
“This. The razor. What else would I be talking about, Jared? Don’t play stupid.”
“Razor?”
“Yup. Oh, boy. Look. There goes some blood. It’s forming these uhm streaks. Steaks down to the floor. Shit, now the floor.” Her voice tapers off.
Jared lifts the phone from his ear. His legs tremble somewhat. He’s always a klutz in an emergency. Not that there have been many. Her voice from the phone, mumbled, grows louder.
“Hey, Jared. Don’t pull that old trick. I know that one. Keep me on the phone, while you try to get help. Don’t try it. Don’t try. I know that one. “ She starts to laugh. There’s a whimsical tone to her laugh.
He tells her that he will call her back, that someone is at the door. She asks him if it’s a girl. He hangs up.
Pressing the wrong numbers several times, he finally manages to reach 911, tells the woman the location and nature of the emergency. He wonders if Sheri will die, lock the door to the apartment, not let anyone in. And by the time, the police do break in, it will be too late. All his stupid fault. Didn’t she show the signs of a bipolar over the last couple of months? Or was it something else? Signs of something. Of what happens when you get too comfortable.
*
In the mental health ward of the hospital, he visits her. She is sitting on a bed, greets him with a scowl. He asks her how she is feeling. Her eyes grow smaller. She warns him not to tell her that he told her so. He says he wouldn’t say that, but he wants to.
He is feeling heroic, but stupid. Is there such a thing?
Her roommate enters, smiles at him, a girl with long brown hair and crooked smile. She changes her shoes and quickly leaves, nodding her head at Sheri, saying softly, “Excuse me.”
Sheri explains that the girl used to be a nurse, that the attendants sometimes kick her. Jared doesn’t know whether to believe this.
“How are you feeling,” he says.
She shrugs.
He asks if there is anything she needs. Stupid question. She shakes her head no.
They walk out to the visitors’ lounge, watch some TV. She introduces Jared to an older patient as an “old friend.”
After an exchange of useless words, small talk, neutral subjects, he tells her he has to leave. So soon, she asks. I’ll visit you, he says. He rises. She looks up.
She says in a soft voice, her eyes meeting his head on, that she will get even with him.
“For what,” he says.
“For saving me. Maybe I didn’t want it.”
Jared stands there for a few moments, then bends down, pecks her on the cheek.
He leaves.
*
Months pass. Almost Spring. Whenever Jared calls, the phone either keeps ringing, or Shari makes excuses as to why she can’t see him. Since her release from the hospital, he has slept with her once or twice. The sex was banal. Later, she tells him that the therapy is going well, but is there really a point to it, that she is back with an old boyfriend, and although it isn’t what it use to be, it was nice to see him again. She says she is changing, no longer the girl hiding sad clowns under her bed.
He calls her from home. For once she picks up and stays on the line. Her voice is chirpy, musical. He is looking for any excuse to visit her. The Cds. He tells her he wishes to returns the CDs. What he doesn’t tell her is that he’s returning the photo of him crouching, smiling at the camera, holding that petrified frog. Maybe this will rekindle something in her. What, he doesn’t know.
She opens the door. She is dressed in a robe, although it is early afternoon. She smiles, offers a slight giggle, and takes the CDs and envelope. She doesn’t invite him in. He tells her that he’s giving back that photo she once took of him and that frog.
“Thanks,” she says, “but you could have kept it. Don’t you want it?”
She closes the door.
A month later. He is in a bar. It is night, rainy. After his third beer, he digs into his pocket for change. He has just enough to make this phone call, to make her see how much she has hurt him. If hurt is what you call this. He would call it bleeding in an invisible way. On one occasion, when he did see her, he broke down and cried, for no apparent reason. He might have been crying more for himself. He hated the thought of his masculinity unpeeling, but hoped she would feel sorry for him. He wants people, things, when they are growing out of reach, day by day. It’s one crazy formula he can never apply to word problems.
He dials the number. It keeps ringing. He berates himself for his weakness. But there is a perverse joy in this, submitting to someone who can drive all night, while you have no idea how to get home. The voice sounds sleepy at the other end.
“Hello?”
“Sheri. . . Cherry-pie?”
“Jared?”
“Uh-huh. Look, I just called to see--”
She hangs up.
*
Giraffe: I once had a similar problem. I lost a really sexy female, eloquent, real class, to our aggressive leader. They eloped to a Savannah.
Jared: And?
Giraffe: What comes around goes around. They were shot by white hunters who tried to pass off their meat as quail. Nobody eats giraffe anymore. We got a bad rap.
Jared: What a romantic way to die.
The World From This Tree (April 9, 2009. New Pink Moon. Issue 3)
I spotted the boy the first day at school, then walked up to him after those cocksuckers left him bleeding on gravel. Anyone could cut up a shrimp and expose it as raw and pink. I wiped the blood from his mouth and invited him up to my tree, where on the arm of a hulking elm, we sat for weeks. It was our fortress against the world. No knuckle sandwiches. No shin kicks. From high, we watched the troop of boys with their summer shirts exposing their wannabe selves, and the giddy girls dreaming of cuddling babies. From far off, there was the scent of spruce pine, the rumor of a coulee that could revitalize a horse blinded by thirst. The boy never spoke, just sat still as a photo of sundown, and I was sad to imagine what he could have lost. One day he jumped from the branch, our fortress perhaps too encumbering. And even though his leg broke and his lips bled, he looked up and thanked me with the eloquent speech of his eyes.