photos + short-shorts

Funny thing: finding the soapwart was the hardest part. I found the oils, the candles, the quiet spot, the chalk, the resin, the barkcloth. I found the new vines and the old blood, the tarnished gold and the borrowed time. I found the human finger more easily than I found the love letter, and it was easier to turn it into ashes than it was to find a strand of your hair—and it was easy to find a strand of your hair in her hair brush. Easiest of all, and I owe it all to you, was the rage.

I used to sing to my plants, because that is how you help to nurture them and to help them grow, but I swear the cactus had a bad attitude. I swear the cactus was rolling its eyes and turning its back on me every time I broke into “The Way We Were.” He liked Paul Simon even less, but it was Phil Collins that made him really murderous. Solo Phil Collins, he’s an acquired taste, but Genesis? You’ve got to be a special kind of monster to dislike “Susussudio.”

The cactus is a special kind of monster, and I swear I’m not being prejudiced—it’s not just because it looks mean. I wish I had needles. I wish I were armed against the environment and could protect myself against all comers in a harsh and unforgiving landscape in which I was my only friend. I respect my cactus—how could you not? But I’m tired of being afraid. I’m tired of censoring myself. I’m tired of worrying every time I open up my mouth that I’ll just piss him off again, that one night I’ll wake up to the tip of a needle breaking the delicate skin of my throat, a sliver of blood trickling hot down the side of my neck.

Every night, I worry about my life, and that’s no way to live.

Passive aggressiveness, it’s cowardly. But sometimes, you have to make a decision. Sometimes, you do what you have to do. And that is why I have a cactus in the freezer.

It wasn’t her son—her son didn’t look at her so blankly. Her son would never refuse to breastfeed. Wouldn’t refuse to sleep. Would never make her feel this black-and-red, sharp-edged and larger than everything. They had taken her son, and left this unnatural thing. She dropped him on the stoop as the snow came down and she laid down on the couch and squeezed her eyes closed until the screaming stopped, and then the knock at the door. She didn’t hear what the neighbor was saying, because the thing, it smiled at her like it knew it had won.

My teacher wanted to fail me. I said, “But I created life!” He said, “This is home economics. I asked you to make a pot roast dinner.” He was placid in the face of my indignation. The animated corpse behind me shuffled and grunted, sensitive to the heightened tension in the teacher’s tiny office. He had stayed close to me ever since I had thrown the switch on the oven timer and cranked up the toaster to the highest setting and dropped the electric kettle into the full sink, creating a current that bombarded his previously necrotic flesh and causing neurons in his brain—full of holes and tunnels, but still with plenty of serviceable meat—to start flashing again, waving at each other for attention.

It was lunch period and no one was around to hear the crackle and pop but no one came running, either. He sat up on the kitchen island and knocked a cutting board off with his naked foot and had startled at the noise like a skittish kitten, but I was right there to soothe him. I handed him a clementine and a piece of toast and he looked at them and he looked at me and he hadn’t left my side since. I’m not sure what happened to the toast or the clementine.

After lunch period everyone noticed the shambling corpse behind me and when I told my English teacher that he was my home ec project, she didn’t really understand but she let me go talk to Mr. Romano. I wasn’t sure what to do with him and it didn’t seem right, to make him dead again. It wasn’t right to fail me, either. “Wouldn’t that be murder?” I asked him. “And is that really fair?”

“There’s not much in life that’s fair, Sally Jane,” my home economics teacher said to me. That’s what I said to home economic project on the football field after school, but without the Sally Jane part. I had never gotten around to naming him, and that seemed unfair too. I lifted the gym teacher’s rifle and there was the smell of clementines and I said, “I’m sorry I never knew your name.” I said, “I’m sorry there’s not much in life that’s fair.” There wasn’t much to say after that. I was as good at the end as I was at the beginning.

That is not the ghost of my father, sitting in my father’s chair—it’s my brother, though his hair is the same, too short and silver at the tips. My brother hasn’t looked at any of us since we noticed him sitting at the dining room table. He is writing a letter, concentrating on the sheet of unlined paper. The chandelier swings slowly back and forth. His head makes a shadow across the oak, across the creamy paper, across his left hand resting on the corner of the paper. My brother is not right-handed. My brother does not write letters.

When she cracked open the egg the little man tumbled into the bowl screaming “fucking finally, lady!” Unfortunately, she didn’t stick around to see who he was, or where he had come from, or why he was sitting in a bowl on her kitchen counter screaming “fucking finally!” up at her with his little cheeks all red and puffed out and his bowler hat askew.

She screamed, because that really is a reasonable response, and she bolted out the front door and she kept running through the icy cold blue and white day, eventually leaving bloody footprints behind because she hadn’t stopped for her shoes or her coat or even to decide where she was going, and what she was going to do when she got there.

That’s what the little man in the bowler hat said happened, and we had to let him go because he wasn’t the one who killed her—she died of exposure, for one. And he was still trapped in the bowl when we broke into her house, followed by her anxious neighbor, the one who had called us because she was certain she had heard tiny hoarse profane cries for help ringing out all night.

There were some things we didn’t ask him, that I wish we had—you can think of all the obvious ones—but we just watched him go because even tiny citizens have rights. He tipped his hat to us and over the sound of ringing phones that never stopped in the central room of the precinct, we heard him say, “Sayonara, suckers!” as he disappeared down the heating vent in the floor. “Don’t get trapped in any more eggs,” I wish I had said, wittily, but it seems like it’s always too late for those kinds of rejoinders.

I went and stole fire, which was supposed to be their secret, from the gods. They should have locked it up, but I guess they all said to themselves, “Hey, we’re gods! Who in their right mind’s going to steal anything from us? Particularly something as valuable as fire, which would change the whole dark, cold face of the world as we know it.” The gods are not very bright; the real secret of the gods is that they spend all their time trying to pretend that they aren’t just flat-out stupid, and hoping no one notices. Gods don’t like to be seen through; it makes them downright rageful.

Stealing their fire makes them mad too, and my guess is because they felt kind of stupid. “Why didn’t we lock it up?” they probably all said to themselves. But they would never say that out loud, because they know better than to take the blame. They are old hands at dodging responsibility, which is one of the secrets to their longevity. You’d think we’d be tired of them and their shit right about now, but take it from me—it’s never going to happen.

You’d think it would be hard to hide from a group of pissed-off gods who want to show you exactly how pissed they are, what with their lightning and all, but the secret of hiding from the gods is wanting to be found; they never show up for the people who really need them.

“Dear gods,” I prayed every night. “I have your fire. I wish you would come and take it, because it turns out to be a lot of work and a lot of responsibility that I really can’t handle.” Of course, they never showed. Probably because I really wasn’t making any of that up. I wish I had known half as much as I thought I knew, before I went up there and walked right in and snatched it right up, because it was just sitting there, waiting to be taken. The secret is, you don’t need everything you can take. But that’s not a very good secret at all.