Short Stories
(Out of Print)
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Available in Season (The Lee Shore)
​Originally published in the Virginia Literary Review
Based on a Painting by Edward Hopper
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Steven Lang was always faithful to his wife during the summer. The rest of the year his hour commute between the small-town cluster of tall brick homes and the riffing skyscraper where he worked threw up a barrier between his two lives. But when, during the weeks of accumulated vacation, they slept in the same full bed instead of two singles and his days never took him farther than a sailboat could carry, then he became fixed in the life she was a part of. “Mr. Lang’s” work became methodical, lacking brilliance and his posture slipped. Monday to Thursday afternoon lost clarity; he was immersed in the white clapboard house, the chilly humid mornings and the long afternoons that poured out like sloe gin. He became a piece of all the small beautiful banalities of summer: harsh green shades in the windows of a house built for curtains, washed out grass braced against a brackish mix of rain and seawater, the thrumming air-conditioner in the tower window, (the window the sun hits in the afternoon). He can’t breath properly until the salty, humid air thaws out his collar starch. (All of this is in the summer.)
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That tower room is the room of the lazy son- his dreams are dark and sometimes bleed out his blue eyes until he finds it difficult to meet his father’s gaze. The son whose summer room is walled in with books that are frightening to dust, that wrench his mind away from the sequences of numbers printed on his eyelids. Always, by July he is free of formulas. Instead of “call me Gerry,” he says, but does not say, “call me Ishmael, call me Svonarolla.” He reads by flashlight until the sun is high enough to read by; then he sleeps, and in the late afternoon his body comes alive and twitches off the sheet. (All of this is in the summer.) Sometimes he walks, falls in love with the feeling of stones smoother than his skin. Once, he laid across them face up and fell asleep. For two weeks bits of integument curled off his chest and fifty-six small round bruises turned colors on his back like mood rings. His body became a nightmare of small, impossible pains that temporarily excused him from other sufferings. For instance, on his father’s sailboat nausea was inevitable, fear sickness. The water pulled his stomach down until it tangled in his intestines and squeezed acid up into his mouth. The year that he was fifteen and everything was wrong, his body was so upside-down that he stood at the wrong time and caught the end of the mainsail as it swung around. Peter Lang said he didn’t know what happened to his boy in the summer. Somehow the clean-cut mathematician, level headed and direct, seemed to stay shut inside the right angles of the tall brick house.
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His sister, who sometimes wonders if she is really Steven’s daughter, moves so fast her name never gets past the tongue-tip, is forgotten by everyone, except the friend to whom she writes half-thought-out, half-hasty letters, to which she always signs her name. (The bits she thinks are from the deck, shadowed by sail and untangled by wind, from the rawboned white paint and sail that migrates with the sun and tide.) On this shifting landscape she becomes sharp and muddled, struck with tunnel vision. The porch sits above a little gravelly strip of dirt then bleeds into the water. It’s possible to sail close enough to hit the railing with a stone, and she does. She is in her element, literally, but not as she pretends to be: elementally perverse. In the hot evenings she walks all the way into town and carries slippery brown bags of groceries down sandy roads and lanes and paths at a startling pace that sometimes outruns rain clouds. (All of this is in the summer.) Being young, there is nothing for her to outrun; therefore, she assumes she is in pursuit. Such problems are not paths, or knots, or battles in her mind; they are, stones across a river: a series of calculated leaps, exigent movement, compulsory confidence. Everything is eventually solved between June and August, or else, eroded out of existence. September breaks hearts and bewilders friends.
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Lovingly, a curl of light lays on the pillar nearest the grassy side of the porch. The whitewash colored house is full of sun and throws back small reflections of warmth. Grey roof, red brick base and chimney, green shades that, altering the light one morning, made Mrs Lang, (nee Ferris) feel her Steven was too strange a color to be loved, and so finally freed her. The dyed fabric let her be “that Ferris girl Elaine,” like her daughter, unattached, what she is: a body stretched on waxed wood or leaping at the rigging to swing with the headsail’s assymetric triangle. Thin, conservative strips of skin roll off her shoulders from a week old burn, so draped in wrinkling linen, she makes for a stoney island or for a little clipper where friends are getting drunk and wallowing in unfamiliar focus. She is freed to take the love out of dinner- after all, she always half-knew that when the body is sticky and the muscles warily grind to a slow halt (like a truck at quick red light) boiled clams or other bottom feeders, rough uneven cuttings of bread and something to dilute the salt that seeps in at every turn, is really all that’s wanted. (All of this is in the summer).
And then, sometimes she sits lazily on the wicker lounge and watches the sailboats from the height of the porch, watches her husband who, temporarily, she does not love, work the sailboat, (which she has a feeling for) smoothly, and so forgives him her lack of love. She tries lazily to catch the stones her daughter pitches not toward her, but in her gemeral direction. And other days, when the quick part of her brain is stilled by fatigue or two or four martinis, and the others are out crabbing, when the afternoon is warm and full and windy in rhythmic gusts, she opens the narrow upstairs window and moves the bed so her heels rest on the sill, lays for hours til she hears the yawls and cutters slashing the water into ribbons.
While Elaine boils blue-crabs and corn, the daughter nosedives through the screen door trying in one motion to remove her soaking boat shoes and untangle her yellow hair from a knotty piece of silk. She drops to the scrubbed board table and pulls a letter in half, and reading it, will not let the words get past her eyes. Later she’ll detangle the information so that in class she’ll know who to speak to, who to ignore. When her brother materializes in the hallway she cannot get him past her eyes either. He comes out of the unlit, ruddy passage- (everything is in-between because of sunset) and all of him is snarled up in words that he cannot get out from between his teeth and tongue. He sits at the table and is in pain; the best of him is upstairs between the pages of Voltaire: duality like sex. For now his brain is deep not sharp.
Steven creeps to the doorway and stands, washed in gelid ache, a voyeur consumed by the line of light along a long calf and the shadowy arch of a bare foot. His expression as he stands, hands in pockets, is being filed, strung, stretched, by the two not in the line of fire, and will be misinterpreted, reinterpreted for years. Later, when the long dusk is dim and very red, and the “children” dissolved into the evening, he interrupts the muddled clang of dishes in the static kitchen, unties her aprong, so that she feels the sweep of cord across her stomach- he is elementally good with his fingers- and by her center pilots her upstairs, to the bed (that is an inch still out of place). And, she is not really there: is not tired, is not awake, is not cold, is not aroused, is not there- but gives an excellent impression, because the reaction is well-known, innate in colder weather: in November it is true for her. (But all of this is in the summer.)
THE ANGEL OF STE. MICHAEL DE CUXA
Originally published in FIFE Zine (University of Virginia)
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Beyond these beautiful walls of rain stained cream, outside the shadow of the tiled roof- old, old red— beyond the half--hearted fountain and grey square of grey sky— away from these men who feed and protect me in their fear-- will, would I still exist? I, least of any, know where I’ve come to— when I tripped over a bramble (aeons ago but only a hundred yards from my blue back--gate at home) and fell through a gorge of what? Years, distance, lives? When I tripped and felt the nothing of my body in a swath of nothing, whenI landed on my back, on dip and crevice paving stones, winded, shocked, feeling every muscle, every bone, I lost sense of myself.
In that twist of an hour I was forgotten by the black earth I had grown up on, or so I suspect, forgotten by a pair of round leaf-colored eyes, I fear. But I remained unacknowledged by this fractured microcosm that has since that monring bourn my weight, and hover now, something in between. My, in-the-common-way, white hair, grown just a little long for a carpenter, was flashed out of context and became a sign of some God that I have never chanted to or laid a plate of milk for. In a circle of shaking men, men with bodies nullified in brown robes and faces scarred by longing, the slow-legged question of dead philosophers and refugees seemed caught up in the cool air I breathed until the only words I knew were: “where are my gods now?”
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When I first saw what I had fallen into, when I knew the worst but had still the scent of coleflower lotion on my skin and a degree of faith that I have lost the taste of now, I made these thinned and bloodless men weep with my chanting. Frightened them from the courtyard to the shelter of the portico with crying into the earth, with storming to my Gods who reign from its burning center. Praying desperation into the rain so that it might drip down through the cracks of the world onto the heads of gods, might cool their burning, propitiate thier anger, save me from this loss.
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The young slight one, (who could not yet still his body at the movement of mine), laid his hands on me in what he claimed was, but was not, a holy fervor. And later, with eyes glazed, in worship of a God he does not claim, poured my offering of milk between my breasts and laid my back upon those first familiar stones beside the fountain. Even this old and ordinary thing, in manner, and in the stench of fear about it, shifted to the unfamiliar. But I have the deft hands of a carpenter that amaze these priests, hands that invent, repair, improve, and, at that time, put him wholly in my power, assured him in quick, violent ways that I was no god or angel. He is in my power, so perhaps I am a deamon (I have heard his dark-hour prayers and know this is what he sometimes thinks) but I did not lay him on his back, although I might have-- having arms that once felled trees.
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Through slight alterations: too few petals on a flower, the backwards keeping of the time, one moon instead of two, I have been dismantled. Sometimes I dream, sometimes in a world so nearly real, set my feet down in the icy morning light, drink tea, lay milk inside the grotto, and kiss my father’s grave. My hands cut wood, shave along the grain, arms moving like water, drawing from expanding cylinders, doors, chairs, and dressers, idols, figureheads, and crooks wound about with snakes and flowers.
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There still draws up the laughing voice of my son’s father (who I had always planned to have a daughter of) who sometimes stops to tease or gossip or commission something for his mill. Such dream-brief pleasures strip me, and worse, the imagined going home to eat and wake my tumbling son. That memory is forbidden past his door (past the animals carved in reddish wood I hewed when I was heavy with him.) I can see in detail manes and tails and skin and teeth, can smell the aging varnish, and the fresher oil on the wood, but beyond it my memory has snapped shut, cuts me off like stingy purse strings. And when I wake I cannot pray down through the thick stone floors, cannot hear the earth beneath me.
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Now in the morning I eat in a cold hewed-stone hall, at a special place, the best food, am begged favors of and given small gifts out of the starkness of these walls. In quiet hours, of which there are many, I roll up a skin about me, smooth it out against this place, these men, pinch together seams, make my active, intractable body quieter than the stone, hear only the oozing of the fountain, and forget my clever hands and twisting feet. Only at night is there some memory of life in the ritual of that slight priest, no longer young, that is like the damnation the wise-woman once spoke of: floating up, lost in the thin atmosphere, nothing to hold to, no way to crawl back towards the dusty sacred ground.
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One misstep, leaning too far into the thicket after berries has lost me my blue gate, my soursap trees, my workbench, forest, temples, city, world, gods, my language and my son. My son whose hair was ice black and who clung to my back and made castles in the sawdust at my feet. In return I have gained a fragile body that haunts my bed dark nights, a carved stone fountain, blue square of sky, and fearful, cowled worshippers. I am, no, Je suis, ”L’angel de Sainte-Michael-de-Cuxa” who has been carved with a passive face, who will be buried and forgotten under purple flowers, who will die in the confines of a temple, purged of vision, shrived of hope.