All That Remains

A broken headlight follows me wherever I go.
My friend follows me steadily past the abandoned fire station
past the dark old house full of
warm tangled sheets, raw pink lips and ash
shines through four white walls layered in
(lies) and heat.
It follows me past the yellow school
where knicked knobby knees peek out
from beneath the frayed hem of an overeager violet skirt
as small secret glances are barely kept by badly bound books
I look in the rear view mirror
(for in your eyes I see my own)
Blinding and broken
it lights my crooked path.

I keep driving, dear,
clear past the river
past the tracks
past the
past

I come to a dark and sly curve
a sinister grin of the Cheshire Cat
and I look in the mirror
(for in your eyes I see my own) and
instead of two lights I see but one,
for the lone white moon is
all that ever was, and
all that remains.

night monster

This morning, I awoke to see this typed in a word document. I’m assuming that I wrote this. My memories of last night are dim at best, thanks to a bit of a spring break “symposium,” if you will. This sounds nothing like me, and I really wish that I hadn’t passed out before I had finished my thought process.

(secretly, I’m horrified that there is another being inside of me that appears only at night)

“The law is a curious thing; the human tear is even curiouser. The law acts as an elastic band, encompassing many things a human may encounter in his or her life experience, but snaps back to place with stern rigidity when its foundation is mangled by a moral err. The human tear, however, is different. Regardless of the side upon which one falls of the broken band, a tear may be shed. The tear, like the law, has a definite shape and form initially. While it resembles a clear bead in the ducts of one’s eye, it loses its shape almost immediately as it descends down the hills and hollows of one’s cheek, expanding and compressing rapidly to adapt to the contours of its fleshy foundation. It is amorphous; there is no moral hierarchy while the tear is in motion, only kinetic energy, only terminal velocity. But once the tear hits the floor with its silent yet deadly impact, it lays flat like a pathetic amoeba, awaiting its turn in the water cycle, only to turn into the tears of a cloud. The tear is broken, the act is done, and all that is left is the salty trail from your toes to your tear ducts, and then the millions of lines from your eye sockets to your synapses and axons and neurons to your brain, from your capillaries to your veins to your arteries to your heart. There is a definite structure and order of the body as there is in the law, but while with law we may discern a definite “because” from a “why,” the reasons behind the trickling of these salty solutions from the well-named lacrimal gland are completely murky.

Why does a mother cry when her child sheds his pacifier for pants? Why does a man cry when he sees another lying dead on the floor in pool of dark red blood, when he himself is holding the smoking gun? Why does a woman look into the mirror on a pale Sunday morning and shed a tear as she sees the dimpled essence of her senescence? If all of these were to follow law, one could easily discern a cause and effect from them, a consequence from an action. The acts of growth and decay are inevitable and natural, and the law’s band does always expand to give reason to them. It does such for death too, especially when terminated by the explosion of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate in one’s body. The effect of giving birth is knowing that the infant will not always be the size of a loaf of bread; the effect of aiming a gun at a man’s stomach and pulling the trigger is his subsequent death; the effect of living is dying. Why then do we, as organisms with the sometimes-burdensome capacity of reasoning, secrete lipids, water, and mucins when we experience certain things?”


And that’s where it stopped.

WWJC? (What Would Jesus Chew?)

Youth Nite at Riverside Baptist Church was the night that made me lose faith in god. I went with my friend KeriAnn Ellison from soccer. She was a forward and had a golden toe (I didn't know what that meant but it sounded fancy), and she was always picked first by the coach. She could knock girls down with her broad and husky shoulders, and used a size 5 ball when everyone else used a size 4. KeriAnn also loved Jesus.

One night, she decided to invite me with her to her youth group’s service. I wasn’t an avid churchgoer; my parents gave up on me after I failed playing the Virgin Mary in the nativity play. I dropped Jesus on the altar and watched helplessly as its plastic head rolled down the aisle. But I decided I would give it a try; after all, her mother Lisa was a nice heavyset woman who had eyes like a cocker spaniel, and I liked the way her mini-van smelled. Her father Danny reminded me of a Nascar driver. I don’t know if he actually was, he was just short, balding, and struck me as slightly stupid. But he was still nice, so I figured I would try.

The room was sparsely decorated, but filled with bracketed and center-parted pre-teens wearing white tennis shoes and Lee Dungarees. We got there late because KeriAnn and I had finished a soccer scrimmage later than expected, and there were only a few seats left in the room.

We sat in the front, greeted by two cold collapsible chairs. KeriAnn paid no mind to me and started talking to some friends who liked Garth Brooks and camouflage. I stared at the linoleum tile for a bit, and then to the tiled ceiling. So much tile, I thought. I wondered if that’s what Jesus would do if he were an interior designer.

The pastor took the stage, and never had I been so happy to hear the words "praise be to Jesus" in my life. He did some standard meet and greets, welcoming us back. He talked about sex for a bit and how people who loved god should wait until they are married to indulge in pleasures, and then he talked about Corinthians. I didn’t know what Corinthians was, but it reminded me of Phoenicians. I only knew who they were because my grandma told me once that I had Phoenician feet. Long and narrow, she said, unlike her plebian feet. My grandma was from West Virginia and had taught elementary school for 40 years. That’s enough to make someone’s feet wide.

All of a sudden I felt a sharp pain at my side. KeriAnn was shoving me with her elbow.

“Savannah,” she said, “aren’t you going to answer his question?” under her breath she added, “don’t embarrass me.”

I looked to the pastor. “Um, what was your question?”

I was thinking about my arches and metatarsals.

Everyone laughed at me. The girl to my left, to whom I had meekly smiled earlier, opened her mouth wide like an alligator, revealing crooked teeth stained Sunkist orange.

The pastor repeated the question. “So way-urr do yew cum frum?”

Sheepishly, I replied “here.”

Gator girl laughed again and nudged at my other side. “He means what church do you come from, stupid.”

Shit.

I didn’t go to church.

And that’s exactly what I said. “I don’t go to church.” I stared intently at the missing button on his yellow oxford, refusing to listen to the laughter that surrounded me.

Everyone was silent.

His eyes narrowed and squinted like a mole over his pulpit, fat fingers squeezing on its sides like overstuffed sausages. He licked his lips and I wished that my foldable chair would collapse and swallow me with it. “Well looks like yer gonna have a tough tihme followin’ tonight.” He laughed skittishly, and it reminded me of the breathing exercises future mothers do while in labor, but I stopped imagining him giving birth when I realized I was supposed to continue the dialogue.

“Following what?”

He grinned. “Bible verse recitations.” All of a sudden, kids behind me began clapping their hands and licking the salt from the sides of their greasy lips. From his pockets, the pastor pulled out the prize: strawberry Mentos.

The pastor pulled the first verse from a hat: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God!”

A fat girl in the corner sprung from her chair, spitting as she shouted “ROMANS 3:23!”

He tossed the pink tube to her, and her eyes followed it as if she were about to catch the holy grail.

People were starting to warm up now. He pulled out another question.

"Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again."

A skinny boy with glasses popped up, but he was knocked back down by a boy named Tommy. He wanted Mentos. “John 3:3,” he grunted.

The pastor threw him Mentos.

Soon enough, everyone was opening the wrappers of these chewy berry delights, smiling and eating them three at a time, because that is what Jesus would do if he got his questions right. They reminded me of puppies in obedience training.

The pastor threw his final package of Mentos to the skinny boy. I looked to KeriAnn, who was opening her third package. I asked her if I could have one. She snarled at me the way she did the defenders on opposing teams. “Maybe if you knew bible verses,” she said, “you’d deserve a Mento.”

My cheeks turned pink. I didn’t even like Mentos; I just wanted to fit in. “But I was just thinking, since you have so many, one wouldn’t be too much of a problem.”

I could feel a sweaty hand on my left shoulder. It was the pastor. “Sorry you couldn’t get any candy tonight, Samantha,” he said. “But KeriAnn here shouldn’t be givin' ya candy if ya don’t deserve it; that’s called ‘dishonesty.’ We don’t do dishonesty in this church.”

In my peripheral vision I could see a heavy object approaching from his side, resting itself on my lap. “But here’s something Jesus would give to someone like yew. Do you know what this is, Samantha?”

I wanted to tell him my name was Savannah and that yes I knew it was a bible, but I hadn’t read it since I was too busy reading "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

“This here’s a bible, and this is where the kids are gettin’ their answers from. If you read it, you can get candy and be happy like them, too.”

Alligator girl was picking her nose and eating Mentos. Tommy was picking a fight with the skinny boy, who had begun curling himself up into a fetal position. KeriAnn was flexing her tanned biceps. I opened the bible, flipped through a few of the pages, and then closed it.

“Just by memorizing," I said, "that makes you happy?”

He laughed. “Well yeah, Samantha. If you don’t memorize it, then none of it matters.”

I handed him back the book, and took one final look at KeriAnn. She was staring at me as if I were stupid and then went back to scarfing down Mentos. In the distance, the skinny boy was running away in panic as Tommy chucked his candy at him. That synthesized strawberry smell made me want to gag, and I couldn’t contain myself any longer.

“Well, Pastor, my name is Savannah and I hate Mentos.”

He looked at me, shocked, as if disliking Mentos was akin to taking a piss on the Shroud of Turin. I got up from my foldable chair and walked outside proudly on my Phoenician feet.

KeriAnn’s mom picked us up later in her mini-van, and I found myself exiled in the back with the dog food and soccer cleats. The ride to my house was a long and silent one until, through the rear view mirror, her sad canine eyes locked with mine.

“Did you have fun, Savannah?” she asked.

I smiled politely and looked back. “Yes, Mrs. Ellison, I had a great time.”

Joule's Last Glimpse

Oh, where do they go? Memories, do they hide themselves beneath our bedtime sheets, and late at night when they sneak into our ears and minds and hearts like a silk ribbon, do they then escape through our mouths as soft and quickly as the flaps of butterflies’ wings each morning when we rise? Do they rest quietly in the bottom of the curved bellies of half notes, revealing themselves only when called upon by a familiar yet fleeting melody? Or are they that bright flash of Joule’s green light before the sunset, brilliant (if only for a moment) and then swallowed whole by the night, traveling deeper into spaces we will never fully understand until we are the ones doing the swallowing?

If only there were a way to capture them: a net, a continuous melody, a day that never dwindles. Organization would be simple; bottle them and place them in racks, label them accordingly, spray them with formaldehyde and detach their wings. Years later, it would be simple to retrieve them for further examination: watching vanilla ice cream melt into a small ivory pool at a noisy playground, the white picket fence indentations you feel on the salty red lips of your first kiss, the initial heaving sound your breath made when you realized you lost someone, the way the hair of your first love waved resignedly in the wind as you said goodbye for the last time, standing paralyzed, trapped and hardened by your wax-like tears. All it would take is a simple dusting off of the containers to find them and feel them, labeled and still lifelike:

INNOCENCE
BEING
DESPAIR
DENOUEMENT

But how difficult it is to catch and keep butterflies, let alone memories. More precious and colorful than a Monarch, the moment our greedy little fingers try to capture them and clip their paper wings, they disintegrate into tiny fragments like ugly balls of mercury, insidiously splitting until nothing remains but a tiny dark morsel of what should have been, not what was. In tireless efforts of holding on to something beautiful and ephemeral, we destroy its wings and render it broken, subjecting it to the warping and weathering power of the elements. Memories are ugly and dull, and in horror we must watch as they undergo a permanent and reverse metamorphosis, transposing from a cerulean beauty to a fat brown slug, confined to mud and filth for the rest of its being.

So, my dear, after much examination of your wings and the way they flutter so delicately in the sky, I simply cannot bear the thought of keeping you forever, wrongly watching as your wings wilt for my own perennial pleasures. I acquiesce; I must let you go now, and suffer as you escape to the places I will never know until I take my own place as a dark stitch in that final, closing curtain. But I will always retain a small, glowing hope that someday before I fade into the sunset, you will dance down my way once more in a slow song or a warm dream, with all of the power and vibrance (if only for a moment) of Joule’s last glimpse.

If only for a moment,
if, only for a moment.