Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Another Alternate Narrative


The Other Glass Menagerie

            It was acquired outside of Barney’s on the Upper East Side during a mild winter as shoppers dipped in and out of stores to gather Christmas gifts. Each tiny, glass animal— costing no more than a few dollars— was wrapped in a Kleenex, and the lot of them were packaged up in the type of box usually reserved for gifting necklaces. The menagerie consisted of both obvious and more unusual specimens: a clear and orange dog; a white and clear monkey (clutching, of course, a yellow banana); a red and clear hedgehog; a blue steer with orange horns; an exceptionally small yellow rooster with an even smaller orange cockscomb; a very scrappy orange and red chicken; and an owl, in shades of purple, yellow, and white, who, who, who measured slightly smaller than a girl’s thumb and was the largest of the bunch. And true to stereotype, he claimed to be the wisest of the collection, although each animal had its occasional moments of deep insight.
            For example, after the journey in a carry-on, after crossing the great expanse of the country in an overhead compartment, and after taking their place on a desk under a lamp set up to pass light through their varying transparencies, the animals began to speculate as to why this woman-child, someone who should so clearly be in a more advanced stage of social development, chose them and placed them in such close proximity to the activities of her life instead of on some distant shelf to collect dust in all their Lilliputian crevices. On one of those days when the rain hastens afternoon into evening, they tried to puzzle it out:
The Monkey waved his banana around and surmised to the group that it must be because each of them represented a joke frozen in that moment just after the eruption of laughter. The owl said, no, I’m not funny-looking. Speak for yourself.
The steer suggested that it was because their woman-child ran away from her shaky childhood, and they all nodded as they recalled how long the flight was between her childhood home and adult home. Yes, that could be it, they said.
The very scrappy chicken said, yes, but lots of girls and women like little, cute things. In fact, a lot of Japanese pop culture fetishizes cute. The group went silent for a moment, and then the rooster said since when did you become an expert on Japanese pop culture? and the group laughed at the chicken who said, but wait… haven’t you noticed that her  boyfriend has anime eyes? And the chicken widened her beady eyes.
No, no, no said the owl. This woman-child is a poet and because of that she loves things that are small and perfect. This made them all swell a little with pride to think they represented exquisiteness. They held on to that answer for a while.
After a while they stopped trying to figure out their woman-child who would select one of them at random and absent-mindedly turn the animal slowly in her warm, dry hands as she sat in front of the computer screen and scattered words across pages. Sometimes you just have to accept the mysteries of life, said the hedgehog in one of his Buddhist moments.
            Whatever the reason, the menagerie came to cherish their person, and they would try to do nice things for her when she wasn’t looking. The dog had heard a story once about how a shoemaker had shoe elves to help him with his cobbling, and she told the group the story one night over hot tea served in millet husks.
We should do something like that, said the rooster, so they thought and thought about what they would do.
The steer said, look, our woman-child doesn’t do a very good job keeping her spaces clean. I mean, she obviously tries to arrange her life, but even after everything is put in its place, dirt builds up in the dark places.
The hedgehog said, is that a metaphor for her mind?
The owl said, hush. I’m supposed to be the wise one. Let’s try to clean up those dirty, dark places, so the group gathered dog hair from the carpet and fashioned it into brooms and dusters. They tore the corners off the tissue peeking out of its box and used them as rags. Every night for a week they worked until exhaustion, just as the morning’s Midas touch turned the desk’s wood to gold. The trouble, they noticed, was twofold: The nature of their size made it hard for them to cover much ground so that by the time they finished cleaning one dark place, the dust began to settle again in another. The second problem was that the very nature of dark places meant the woman-child avoided them, so she never noticed when they seemed cleaner and more light-filled. After several days of disappointment and what would be bone weariness if they had bones, the menagerie gave up on their elven endeavors and decided that maybe they should just focus on what they do best: charm with glassy dinkiness.
            It wasn’t long after this failed attempt at becoming more useful that the woman-child began cleaning everything off her desk. The menagerie became despondent, and they each worried quietly that it was because of their collective failure that they were now being wrapped in tissues with missing corners and placed into the same necklace box that they arrived in a few years’ prior. The animals tried to talk it through with each other, but the tissue just muffled their words, so they all fell silent and became deeply depressed. In the next few days they heard dull, distant sounds like stifled thunder, and they suffered great vertigo as their necklace box was placed sideways in another box. They were in terrible limbo…
            And starved for air and wistful fondling. But sometime after a week or so (Time dragged on with no sense of night or day. It just seemed like a week, says the glass dog who, common to fleshier dogs, doesn't really have a great sense of time anyway.) the menagerie trembled in its box with collective anticipation as it felt the necklace box become righted. It was one of those great, inverted moments of magical irony when the necklace box was opened because instead of a gasp coming from the outside of the box as it usually does when a necklace box is opened with any kind of gasping, in this case the gasp came from inside of the box.
            So once again after much unwrapping of tissues, in a similar kind of anticipation akin to déjà vu, the glass animals were placed on the same desk under the same lamp set up to pass light through their same varying transparencies. Everything was the same except the monkey who lost his banana in transit when it snapped off during some particularly vigorous moving. He didn’t mind though, not much really. Now he felt a little more serious, like maybe he would finally get some respect. Everything was the same except for the view from the sliding glass doors, which, incidentally, were also a new feature for dog, steer, owl, monkey, chicken, rooster, and hedgehog. They spent a great deal of time gazing out of those doors at the woods beyond, watching the seasonal wheel alternately strip or adorn the crowding trees with a kaleidoscope of leaves.  
            By and large, this is how it went. The menagerie would become accustomed to their place on the desk with the view it afforded. The woman-child would turn each of them in her fingers as she transcribed the words of her heart, feeding them into a machine. The dust would begin to build up in the dark corners. The animals would begin to worry, and then the move would happen: Tissues, necklace box inside a bigger box, vertigo, jostling, breathless waiting, same desk, same light, new view. It almost became a joke; it most certainly became the norm. Sometimes it would be city lights through the window; sometimes it would be palm trees through the window, sometimes it would be deserted neighborhood streets greyed out by the soft crayon of rainfall.
            One night the glass animals gathered around the ambient glow cast by the computer monitor’s screen saver, and they pensively sipped their tea from their millet husks. The quiet persisted for a little while until the chicken piped up:
            Why do you suppose we move around so much? He asked the other thoughtful animals.
            I’m not sure, said the dog, but I think our woman-child is kind of rootless like one of those clingy air plants.
            No, said the owl, because sometimes we stay someplace for a long time, so really she’s more like a succulent with a shallow root structure.
            Give me a break, said the monkey, she’s not a plant.
            Personally, I don’t mind the moving, said the chicken. I like the change of scenery.
            Me, too, said the rooster, and besides, we still get our desk and lamp. Nothing really changes for us.
            But what is she running away from? said the steer.
            And the animals fell quiet again for a little while. They blew on their hot tea and sipped it gingerly. After a while of this, the hedgehog, who was really quite soft-spoken, cleared his throat and offered this: Our woman-child keeps moving so that she can cast a golden spell over the memory of place, just as it is for us who achingly look back at every place we’ve been. The only way to appreciate the fulsomeness of the view is to move far enough away from it. I hold those first trees in my mind like a shimmer dying across the lake as the sun dipped down behind those first mountains we ever beheld. One thing I can tell you, though, is that we are a constant comfort for her hands that like to wander. We are like the moon that seems to steady the driver even as she moves forward in space and time. So get a grip, you guys. Don’t overanalyze.
            With that, the animals let out a slow, musical sigh, and they each smiled a small, secret smile. Even the owl, who, who, who was usually egotistical about his intellect, had to acknowledge the monk-like wisdom of the hedgehog.   

Saturday, October 6, 2012

The Other Girl With The Dragon Tattoo


School has forced me to curtail my posting, but here is a short story (my first in a decade) that I wrote for class:


The Other Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

She has two dragons, actually, and they’re nearly identical except for small details in the faces as well as variations in color. The dragons cover the better part of her upper arms with tails that tendril down to her elbows, the bulk of the bodies squat on her shoulders, and the leathery wings, half raised in flight, wrap towards her back. The faces lick at her collar bones. Both dragons are more tribal than Chinese, and the left dragon, turquoise and black, breathes fire towards the center of her chest; the right dragon, red and black, breathes a swirl of ice towards her chest so that her heart seems to be the aim of their elements. A place to erupt with steam. The faces, in all their tribal abstraction, are ciphers.

The other girl with the dragon tattoos passes the parlor where her art was made just as the sun dips down below the Mission, and strumming Bolero badly, a man with a classical guitar disappears into the darkness of the eyeglass storefront. She hears the high-pitched whine of a tattoo gun while smokers cry uncle and pace during their break. Droplets of blood rise where needles are making a castle out of skin. It’s a cover-up, a fixer-up, really. Underneath was art from another life, something like a blackbird with mushy lines, dead and gone, layered over with something solid, like how he feels about his life now. Like it will stand for generations. The stones are only half-wrought, though, and the parapets are just a glimmer in the eye of the artist. The man with the half-built tattoo thinks he’ll finally be the king of his own castle, which will drape with his family’s crest. Maybe the sky will wheel with sooty bats, and the artist will use a little white to catch a few with moonlight.

Across town a koi fish is being wiped clean and wrapped in plastic. It looks as if it’s leaping out of the water and lifting off the man’s thigh. Some trick with shadows the artist learned as an apprentice in Kyoto. So now the man is the man with the koi tattoo, and the fish is as long as a fish story. The man with the koi tattoo greases up his fish every night until the last of the scabbing sloughs off. The scales are layered in twenty shades of gold, and when he catches his leg in the mirror he leaps out of himself and for a moment gasps, breathless. Koi, he learned, represent luck and courage. When you consider sixty days and no other needles, he thought, they’re pretty, slippery symbols. That’s a lot of beauty in an unseen place, the woman who came home with him said. As they slept, her hand rested firmly on his cool flank as if she could keep him from slipping back under the murky water.

In the next week the castle was made complete, and it covered his whole chest. The artist raised the flag and dropped the tapestry with the family crest over the edge with what looked like an everlasting flutter. The man said render the drawbridge open; I don’t want a castle that says keep out. But give me the moat, he said. Every castle needs a moat, so the artist carved a moat into his skin in shades of moss and deep blue. The man’s small right nipple shone like a rose-colored moon through the windows of the tower. The man’s left nipple wanted nothing to do with its role as queen of Scotland, waiting to be hanged, so it hovered above the castle, hung with a ring. The man with the castle tattoo is now the castle’s king.

The man with the castle tattoo leaves the parlor where his art was made just as the sun dips down below the Mission, and strumming Bolero badly, a man with a classical guitar disappears into the darkness of the eyeglass storefront. The king wanders down the sidewalk, a little sore, a little like his chest had been scratched open by a cat, past the cheap sushi joint where a man with a koi tattoo pays his check, thanks the waiter with the Kanji tattoo, and wanders out into a night just getting socked in with fog. And they’re just a block apart now, the men with their fresh tattoos, and they both head to the same apartment building just up by Dolores Park, and they can both hear the subway train’s long, keening stop. And they’re both just jingling their keys against the change in their pockets as they walk towards the same foyer.

Meanwhile, the girl with the dragon tattoos is making her last latte while the diners linger over half-eaten crullers. She wipes the wand and slips it into the milk, which must be cool to rise into froth. And the wand in the milk sends up a column of steam in front of her face as if the dragons finally gave fire- and ice-breathing their all. As if her heart finally blew off its heat. The windows of the café would look out on the park, but condensation and the inside lamps dangling over each table make them wet, black mirrors.

When the last coffee lover leaves, the girl with the dragon tattoos wipes down the espresso machine, puts up the chairs, shuts off the lights. She locks the front door on the way out and walks off to her apartment building under street lights that make the fog green. Down the road she can hear the long keen of the J Church breaks; up the road she can see her foyer littered with yesterday’s circulars for Safeway.

Later that night, the man with the castle tattoo, the man with the koi tattoo, and the girl with the dragon tattoos all slept in the same position in their own unique beds: left sides, left hands slipped under cool pillows, left legs extended toward the ends of the beds, right hands curled under their chins, right knees pulled up at ninety degrees. Each of their unique ceiling fans turning in time. The night slipped over their sleep like a canary’s velvet cover. And in that moment of utter synch, the koi lifted off the man’s thigh, and the dragons churned in the foggy green sky until they found a castle to guard. Until they found a family crest to defend. The koi flopped across the worn wood floors until it found a moat to swim through, and the castle’s habitants looked into the murky water and found a little luck and some courage.