One woman saw a horse in human flesh, descending on a hammock through the air, and as it neared her house it was metamorphosed into a man, and this man approached her door and threw something at her that seemed to be rubber but turned into great bees.
Another was lost in a vast swimming pool where she found she could breathe the water, that it was better than breathing air. Once she finally was able to emerge from the pool, she was transported to a large room filled with sugar. Everything was made from it: the furniture, the light fixtures, the paintings on the wall. The room seemed prepared for a great banquet and there was a long table filled with food. The food was made from either sugar or salt molded into the shapes of fruits and meats. It seemed she was sent there to figure out which was which.
“But is that all you can remember?” the ladies asked. They sat in a row, sequined. They stared at her with their beautiful eyes, blinking flashes of blue and green and purple.
“Every city has a list of the presidents that moves from north to south or east to west,” she said. “It's chilling, this kind of organization.”
Her ladies stared. They were smiling now. They said, “Go on.”
“Between the small house and the big house there was a tall cement wall, and an alleyway with other houses raised like lanterns. I ran along the ledges toward the alleys up to the lantern houses and back down again. There was a brewery, which was like its own city, and the bakery, which was also its own place, and when it rained it was like somewhere foreign, somewhere I had been, but had been gone from a long time.”
“Why, exactly, are you telling us this?” Her ladies were becoming impatient. She could tell, even though they were polite, sitting quietly, occasionally glancing down to examine their nails.
“Because a home is never a home. To leave the countryside, the familiar. I wanted squalor, noise. It took more than my resistance to the soil to prove this. It took more than my displacement of water.”
“Is that when you thought you were drowning?” they asked.
Heat still and the green things. After the move to the place of storms. This was after. And in the world of rattlesnakes there are legends which are coiled and ready to strike. It came down to the valley. (No way out in wading, swept out in a careful wave, all the neighbors waving their hands, trapped too in storming.) How do you learn the concern of trespass. Heat still and green and dying. Everything living and dying. I was there. Willows and wrens and minnows. Cradled in the crook.
It came from far away, as scheduled, and then left in a stream of debris and ice. Most of her life was spent looking forward to when she would see its dark and frozen body. It was the 76
th
year. The year it would come again. She was ready. She was impatient with the loudness of living among a very quiet family. The comet came when she was impatient to leave.
Before, she was content with small tasks. School assignments or treks to the meadow. She would eat lunch there. Vienna sausages, packets of Saltines, hard-boiled eggs with paper squares filled with salt and pepper. After, she would sit and pretend she was a pioneer.
She did not have anything to wait for, but now there was a comet. It was an event she felt she had been preparing for her whole life. She knew about the astronomer, how he first discovered the orbital period of the comet in the 1700s, and that soon she would see the same thing he saw.
She knew comets had been feared. One appeared shortly after the death of Julius Caesar. One was thought to signify the fall of Jerusalem. One appeared around the time Mount Vesuvius erupted, signaling the last days of Pompeii. One appeared when the Black Plague struck London. One was blamed for starting the American Civil War. She did not fear them. She hoped this one would signal some sort of change for her, but she didn't know what that change would be.
The day came. The forecast was clear. She went to the meadow.
The sky was clear and there were hundreds of stars. She stared at them until they blended together making an illuminated swirl that made her so dizzy she had to look away. She felt it, then. The comet, the streak of light across the sky, the trail of dust and ice, had passed. She looked up and saw the remnants of its arc, or she saw the blur of stars she had seen before, or she saw the stars, or the comet, or she saw the comet, or the stars, or she was dizzy with looking, or she was waiting, or she looked again to see the comet, or she looked again to the stars, or she saw something out there that night, or she would have to wait many years to be sure.
Thousands of insects, thousands of wings. They arranged themselves into a grid pattern. They hold themselves there. So many. Everything else is drawn off course by a huge magnet except for the insects and the shadow walking through the house. We see each other but cannot speak.
The first time she sees a ghost she is a child. It is summer and she is riding her bike down the long road. It is hot. The air is unsteady, like a storm is about to begin.
When she saw the ghost it was like seeing a real person except it was like no person she had ever seen. This first ghost was just like anyone else. It wasn't transparent. It didn't float. It wasn't like the ghosts she would make from tissues and hang around the house during Halloween. It wasn't like the ghosts in movies that only come out at night and haunt things. It was the middle of the day in the hot sun and it was a solid man.
He wore a military uniform and carried a gun. His face was shiny from the heat. He looked at her but she could tell that he didn't see her. She stared back at him. Her hands were sweaty on her handlebars. She felt dusty.
She realized, perhaps that very day, that she had not seen a man but a ghost. She thinks about this ghost a lot. It was the first ghost she saw.
She is asleep. It is spring. Open windows and a cool breeze. It's early morning when she thinks she feels a hand on her forehead. She opens her eyes and sees a flash of bright red hair, then nothing. She thinks it is just the end of a dream. She falls again into sleep. Later, she feels a cool hand on her forehead again and wakes. This time she sees three ladies with bare feet and long nightgowns standing in the corner of the room. They sway slightly, like tree boughs. They have beautiful eyes.
If I am here, submerged, I am also there, in the house with my ladies. I am her, wearing a red dress. They are amusing me with their stories of the morning. After shoving a cup of tea into my hand, they stand before me in a line reciting and describing everything they heard and saw on their morning walk. They tell me a man paced the sidewalk outside the post office and screamed over and over, “It's happening right now!” Near the river, the insects buzzed, they say. They say they looked deep into the river and thought they could see a small pair of eyes. They say the mayflies are getting ready to hatch and they say they could see one of them in the midst of her preparations for flight.
The river continues. It is both still and in motion. The bottom of the river is mud. The mud is difficult to stand upon. When it was warm, she bought smoked carp from a smoke shack near the river and ate its greasy, polluted flesh. After, she washed her hands in the muddy river. It was full of hands and legs, bodies swimming, avoiding the currents. Farther downstream it was easy to get caught off-guard and be swept away. There were so many stories of disappearances.
She has a dream where she lives in an apartment building across the street from an ornate mansion. There are several black metal mailboxes affixed near the front door. This place did not exist before this moment but it has been there for years. She finds herself in a kitchen, all white and glass. She is at the edge of the woods and there is a huge smoking cauldron. She crosses the stream near the mansion several times to investigate. Someone is hauling leaves and paper and wood to the cauldron to burn. When she looks inside, there is both water (an ocean) and an empty, black expanse of eternity.
I took my first breath in a room made of metal. Everything echoed and the noise was deafening. I could not believe how loud. When the oxygen hit my lungs it was knife-like. I cried out only once.
I was sifted through various hands and placed on a table. They left me there alone to gather myself slowly. The silence was deafening. I could not believe how quiet. I saw light through a small window and thick gray shapes moved calmly up and down the wall. Occasionally, there was the faint sound of scratching, voices.
I was half in and half out. I was a coin slipping from a pocket. I was enclosed in glass and felt like water. I became aware of the world and hesitated. There was too much.
Later, several sets of eyes were upon me. Beautiful, blinking, all different colors. Flowers were left, stairs descended. I return to this moment over and over. I can still see them and their revolving. I understood their movements, this vortex into which I was pulled.
She sees a ghost in a photograph and realizes it is both a ghost and a dead personâsomeone who used to be alive but who died, and who is possibly a ghost now.
Ghost: a wisp of fog who opens cupboards or rearranges objects on a table, or makes a loud racket upstairs, who makes an appearance in photographs as mist or shrouded figure who hovers about the heads of people who are alive, but now, who are probably dead too. It depends on the year of the photograph and also if the photographer was playing a trick with the film or developing or both. A hoax, they used to call these “spirit photos,” but even when people knew it was a trick they still believed. And why shouldn't they, and why wouldn't it be possible that it was recorded on film, even though they couldn't see the apparition with their own eyes, out in the real world with all of its problems. Who is to say what's a trick and what isn't and that a mist or bright light isn't something.
She once took a picture of an above-ground tomb. When she developed the photograph, she saw an intense light radiating from the tomb even though it was a cloudy day. She didn't know what to think but she understood it was probably a spirit. She liked thinking about the sensitivity of film, of light, of the shutter closing so precisely at the exact moment.
A line of light lingers on the wall and makes a shadow that startles me when I walk into the room. It is there and then gone.
“Who is it? Is it you?”
This happens nearly every day. Every time I am startled.
My ladies hold their fingers to the sides of my head. They try to sneak up on me. It's no use. Until something is right in front of my eyes, I cannot see it.
Pennies and buttons. Alone in the city. Nothing wandered back. Between the no-one-appeared and the what-did-not-fit, she slipped into cracks. She to the door or downtown and still she turned to the bridge and folded. Her palm buzzed. Her nearly glass and nearly worn and hollow. Pennies went on and off, out into the streets. Once: windows. Her key: something.
One afternoon on the first day of winter, I walked out the door. It was spring, I called out to someone. My ladies came running. It was the hottest day on record and I was on the street. I was crossing over.
The bridge traffic was stopped. Red light, green light, winter light, silence. I returned to my vortex, reverent. I was situated on the riverbank, looking at my wristwatch. It felt useful to keep track. My ladies were there, covered in whispers. I could hear bits of conversation: “But I thought you knew⦔
I was pitched forward by a sudden crash, and it was there, on the edge of a gentle submersion, that my mind gave way. It was simple. I looked out over to the other side of the river and was drained of the future.
The river churned its mud below the blue bridge. I was down. It wasn't the motion of flight. There was nothing to get away from. I was there, at the riverbank. I placed my hands in the river.
She has a dream where she is sitting next to someone's sickbed. A lantern lamp twirls pastel light around the room. She cannot see who is lying in the bed. There are too many blankets, all white.
A steady hum persists as she sits. It is almost too loud to bear. It is like metal on metal crossed with electricity. It is like being in a horror movie except there is no blood, no demon, no evil. Everything is white and pure and calm except for the horrible noise. She tries to move the sheets to see who is lying sick in the bed, to see who is going to die soon, but something prevents her from doing so.
She wakes knowing that the person she could not see in the bed was her. She thinks this is a prophecy of her own death and she will probably be dead in the next day or two. This does not happen. It was no prophecy.
A day of sun. There were swallows on the power lines. A kind of warning. Or a good omen. Later, the sky turned green in a sweep of wind. The storm sirens sounded. Terrible wind. She thought she heard the roof crack. She thought she should gather herself and her things.
Everyone walked out to the streets to see what had been strewn. The roof remained intact, but every shingle had been torn off and thrown to the swampy grass. So many people with hands on their heads, so many with hands over their mouths.
After walking through her neighborhood and finding all of the felled trees, she went back to where she lived. There were things to be raked from the lawn. There were things to put away.
The sun shone through the muddy windows, making strange shadows on the walls. She gathered herself slowly, she walked the floor the way a farmer walks his fields. Everything was out of place, as if a smaller wind had come inside. It replaced one thing with another. The plates were where the cups used to be. The shoes were in the bathtub and the soap was on the floor near the door. The books had been double-shelved, a row behind a row. Now the back row lay on the floor, leaving the front row intact. Nothing was missing.
A package tied with twine is thrown off the bridge. A leather satchel full of letters is flung into the river. Shirts, sweaters, hats, gloves are tossed off in fits of joy and fall to the river to be taken away by the current. A handful of paper is sent flying from the bridge walkway. A gold band is taken off and given up to the water below. A woman at night screams down to the water. A man at dawn screams down to the water. The ironwork is formidable in its construction, a barrier of crossmalleams. But the river is there below and voices barely audible call out.