e s ede f t l ywr i t t e ns t or i e sr e a ra ndbuc ka ga i ns tt hec on ne soft he t r a di t i ona ls t or yc ol l e c t i on,bur s t i ngouti ni ma g e sa ndr e c i pe s ,ga l l opi ng ba c ka ndf or t hbe t we e nt r a di t i ona lpa r a gr a phsa nda l t e r na t ef or ms .... Ev e nt houghy ou’ r emov i ngf a s te nought ha ty ouc oul de ndupa ny whe r e , Connor ’ st houghta boute v e r ys i ngl ewor d, e v e r yg e s t ur e , a nds hec a nt ur n e a c hs t or yonadi me . i si sama r v e l ousde but .
—BRIAN EVENSON
Tr a c iO Connor ’ ss ubj e c tma t t e ri sne v e re a s y .He rwor kc ut st ot hec or e , e x pos i ngc ul t ur a lt a boosa ndps y c hi ct ur moi l .He rus eoft hef a nt a s t i c e me r ge sor ga ni c a l l yf r om he rma t e r i a l ,c ompe l l i ngt her e a de rt of a c ehe r ownf e a r sa ndpr e j udi c e s , t oe mbr a c et hemons t r ouswi t hi nhe r s e l f , t ol i v e wi t hgr e a t e rc ur i os i t ya ndc ompa s s i on.
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T S PRESS
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TARPAULIN SKYPRESS
—MELANIERAETHON
RECIPESFORENDANGERED SPECIES
Ady i ngl ov e rpl a nst obe c omeaz ombi e . Ana nx i ouswoma nc a n’ tde c i dei f s he ’ sa ni ma lorhuma n.AJ e s ust hes i z eofape nc i ll ur ksbe ne a t ht hebe d. Mons t e r s , mons t e r s , e v e r y whe r e . Buta r et he yr e a l ori ma gi ne d? es t or i e s i nRe c i p e sf o rEnd a ng e r e dSp e c i e shi ng eont hi sunc e r t a i nt y .Ly r i c a l ,da r kl y f unny , s ome t i me sdi s t ur bi ng , t hi sc ol l e c t i one x pl or e st hes e c r e tde s i r e st ha t r e nde rpe opl enotonl yi mpe r f e c ta ndda ng e r ous ,buta l s oa ut he nt i c a l l y huma n. Suc ha mbi gui t yl i e sa tt hehe a r tofRe c i p e sf o rEnd a ng e r e dSp e c i e s , r e s ul t i ngi ns t r a ng e l ybe a ut i f uls t or i e sobs e s s e dwi t ht heunr e a s ona bl e , t he mons t r ous , a ndt hee x t r a or di na r yl i v i nga mong—a ndwi t hi n—us .
TRACIO CONNOR
FI CTI ON
Re c i p e s f o r
En d a n g e r e d
Sp e c i e s
Tr a c i O Co n n o r
RECIPES FOR ENDANGERED SPECIES traci o connor
PRESS
Tarpaulin Sky Press
T S
2010
Grafton, Vermont
Recipes for Endangered Species © 2010 Traci O Connor First edition, May 2010 ISBN: 9780982541623 Printed and bound in the USA Library of Congress Control Number: 2009943309 Frontispiece photo by Clare Gillen. “Broken Sky, Broken Water,” by Melanie Rae Thon, appears on page 182. The image on page 162 is from the Dover Pictorial Archive Series. All other photos are the author’s. Text and titles: Caslon and 1913 Typewriter Carbon. Book and cover design: Christian Peet, who thanks Debbie Franks for access to her collection of rare books—two of which were appropriated for this cover. Tarpaulin Sky Press PO Box 189 Grafton, Vermont 05146 www.tarpaulinsky.com For more information on Tarpaulin Sky Press perfect-bound and hand-bound editions, as well as information regarding distribution, personal orders, and catalogue requests, please visit our website at www.tarpaulinsky.com. Reproduction of selections from this book, for non-commercial personal or educational purposes, is permitted and encouraged, provided the Author and Publisher are acknowledged in the reproduction. Reproduction for sale, rent, or other use involving financial transaction is prohibited except by permission of the Author and Publisher.
for all of us beautiful monsters
CONTENTS The Flying Codona
1
15
How
to
Make
a
Ghost
The Fat Man’s Daughter
17
29
How
to
Make
a
Howling Wolf
Starla and June
31
45
How
to
Make
a
Sweet Jesus
Zombie
47
57
How
to
Make
an
Apparition
Cat
59
69
How
to
Make
a
Psychopath
Van Gogh Dreams
71
83
How
to
Make
a
Devil
Goat
85
95
How
to
Make
a
Magician
Little Animals
97
111
How
to
Make
a
Monster
Love Like That
113
123
How
to
Make
a
Cannibal
Mrs. Rotham Has a Bun in the Oven and Plans to Eat It with Butter and Jam 125
How
to
Make
a
Southern Suicide
137
Pleasure
139
151
How
to
Make
an
Angel
Monkey Teeth
153
189
How
to
Make
an
Epitaph
Acknowledgements About the Author
191 193
STARLA AND JUNE The stars came up one by one, chattering, tinkling. It was a fairy tale, more or less, and then Starla gave me a hand. It was heavy, a strange shade of fleshtone pink. The fingers curled in towards the palm as if beckoning. And then I was bouncing the hand in my lap, soothing it, making it quiet. She said, “I’m not giving it back.” I asked, of course, where it came from. “I stole it from the second-hand store,” she said, but she was crying and smoothing her shirt over the peak of her breasts and her fingers were like plastic parts, like pieces screwed in at the ends of her arms. I cradled the prosthetic hand. It poked me in the ribs. “I couldn’t help it,” she said. “Get me another beer?” I set the prosthetic hand on the rail and turned towards the kitchen. “Broken vases, and chipped plates, and coffee makers missing parts—” The drive was paved with crushed seashells from the Gulf. In the moonlight, they swelled pink and fleshy, waiting, listening, like so many little ears. But there was no real revelation. She got drunk. I got drunk. I rubbed her breasts with my palms. She left the hand on the porch rail. It was midnight, or thereabouts. 31
* In the morning, for a penance of sorts, I dug around the roots of a rhododendron crawling with ants and moved, piece by piece, a log pile infested with mice. The hand watched as I shoveled up the armadillo our neighbor’s dog had killed during the night. I was guilty all the time. The carcass was beginning to stink. I thought of Edgar Allen Poe. His women half dead. Or half alive, it doesn’t matter. Me. A half woman, digging a half hole. The hand was God, I thought. And who was the monster? Starla has only eight and a half fingers. One is not afraid of them so much as confused. Think of a tree growing from a rock. And those roots? How calloused? How bruised? What it might take to chew through them as a dog might a rope? The prosthetic hand moved. No longer beckoning—its fingers vaguely in the shape of a hand holding a grapefruit—I felt it ghosting. I waited for it to speak. I waited for it to point at me, the accused. I waited to feel bad for the armadillo. Starla pulled up the drive, stopped short. The car rocked forward over the tires and a nacreous dust billowed from the pinkish shells. She said it was time for the poison. That the goddamn dog had killed enough already. I told her I didn’t think it was right to snuff our neighbor’s dog. Our neighbor, once, brought lemon cookies on a hand-painted plate. And my, how the men loved her. I could see it in her walk—the glide of her feet, the swoop, the insoles cheek to cheek. It’s humiliating, the neighbor said. You girls just wouldn’t understand. She ran a nail over the lines of her face. The cookies were delicious. So never mind if the dog is a killer. Because, I can’t help thinking, who isn’t? Roar, I think. Roar, I think. 32
Oh, it’s not true. The armadillo was a pest. It ate through the garden and left the carnage on the lawn. But Starla is holding the lid of the trash can in her hand like a shield. She is staring into the can, willing the armadillo to rise from the egg shells and live. She’s always been upset by ignominious endings. And tonight? She’ll yell that eating eggs is inhumane. That we’re giving birth to Teflon babies. Fuck reality television, she’ll say, a little drunk—the three and a half fingers on her right hand wrapped around the can—the wolf is the real survivor. The prosthetic hand clings to the rail, rocks closer to the edge. Sorry for all the bother, it whispers, then topples into the hedge, floating for a second on a sea of green, sinking without a fight. * Starla is not my first lover. Dare I say she is my best? My favorite? My one and only? In the moonlight, the garbage can gleams. I take the dead armadillo by the tail and put it in a bag. I carry it before me like a carrot on a string. I follow it to the river, toss it into the current and watch it bob, gather speed, disappear. I run home, my hands open. How Starla sleeps! A rattler in the toe of a boot, a blade in the flesh of an apple. She grunts and rolls onto her side. I lie down next to her and stare through the window for a long time. The prosthetic hand is not my first lover either. Good God, it murmurs, what big eyes you have. All the better, I think, floating beneath the moon like a soiled napkin. And now there are pieces of me falling off. Pieces I could crack like the shell of a peanut; pieces I could snap like the rib of a Cornish hen. Hey, the hand says with a bit of a swagger, I’ve had worse, Pet. It bows 33
at the wrist, springs to the floor, scampers beneath the bed. I hear it shuffling—turning round a couple of times—and its knuckles on the floor as it settles in. The armadillo inhabits my sleep, whinnying, nibbling away at the edges until all that’s left in my field of vision is the armadillo’s segmented tail, and I keep pulling on it but it breaks off piece by piece and I wake with nothing but the remnants of a nightmare: a dull Buffalo nickel and a Vaudevillian soundtrack. The night is long and hot and the moon won’t leave me alone, and alone is what I want, but only if Starla’s there, too, so I nudge her with my foot and she kicks me away. I stare at the back of her head, counting the seconds between her breaths, and then I whisper NRA propaganda into her ear, recipes for endangered species stews, anything that might wheedle itself into her dreams and force her uncompromisingly awake, her eyes made gold by the moonlight, her lips still damp from the tip of her tongue. But Starla doesn’t emerge from sleep—deep and toothy, those dangerous badlands—and I find myself thinking of my childhood; the moon listening and me drinking in its light as if draught made of honey. In the earliest part of morning, I kiss Starla on the down just below her hairline, touch each of the three and a half fingers on her right hand, and take my coffee and the prosthetic hand to the back porch. I prop the hand on the chair next to me so that it appears to be waving a hearty hello to the back yard, and it does not surprise me at all that the now tail-less armadillo is rooting around in the compost heap looking for all the world like the beat-up helmet of a medieval knight. I don’t even think to be frightened. Perhaps this is the first mistake: I love her like hell. 34
The way she sets her teeth on her bottom lip. The way she wiggles an apple from its skin and holds it naked in the palm of her hand. Her earnest breath in my face. The diffidence of her fingers. So what’s to be afraid of ? Well, says the prosthetic hand from arm’s length, where I am holding it, staring at the disconcertedly lineless palm. I mean, Pet, the armadillo is dead, right? Am I wrong? I think, Pet, by the smell, the grayish tint of the forelegs, the awkward angle of the neck bones, we can be sure that the armadillo is dead. Our neighbor’s dog starts in with its seven a.m. barkfest, not a minute too late, and our neighbor—more gruffly than one might expect from an uncommonly beautiful woman—yells, Shut The Fuck Up. Her voice breaks like a stick. Our neighbor’s dog keeps barking. I have never asked after the dog’s name. Starla won’t hear of it. An enemy, she says, should remain a stranger. You get too close, she says, you make mistakes. “Jesus Christ,” she says behind me. “I hate that fucking dog.” BarkBarkBarkBark. “Kill anything else overnight?” “Nothing,” I say, thinking how peaceful she appears when awake. “Coffee?” “What’s wrong with that dog?” She’s squinting, shading her eyes with three and a half fingers, “And why is it looking at me? Which reminds me,” she says, “we need to bury the armadillo.” She shakes her head. “Not in the garbage can. Nothing deserves that—” I don’t answer because I’ve taken her fingers into my mouth. And then I lick the length of them—one by one by one by one-half. Starla rarely talks about losing her fingers and when she does, she’s drunk and the story changes. I do know, though she doesn’t know it, about the shoebox at the back of her closet: half of a shriveled pinkie— 35
nail bitten to the quick, the rip of skin at the knuckle, the peek of grayish bone—suspended in a fluid-filled jar like the last pickle no one wants to eat. Armadillos, I think, are not beautiful. Dead things, I think, are not beautiful. Our neighbor is watering begonias in a silky robe, one hand on her hip. “I’m off to the shower,” Starla says, and as usual, my heart licks against my ribs and then she grimaces at the hand and says, “You’re right, that hand is so goddamn morbid. What in the name of God was I thinking?” But three and a half fingers are hiding behind her back where none of us can see them all at once. * At two a.m., or thereabouts, I creep to the back door, and then I’m barefoot on the grass and thinking of scorpions. The sky has broken open, a drench of stars. The armadillo follows as I touch the maple, the pin oak, the rhododendron with its bony arms. “Shoo,” I say. It whinnies, rustling in the shadows. “Go away.” The moon thumping, the rabbit cries when I pluck it from the garden. A whimper. A squeak. The crack of bone. One last breath and I hold it, a sleeping child, in my arms. “Leave,” I say, but the armadillo is unconcerned, nibbling a fineveined leaf of watercress. * 36
In the early light, I watch the ants circle my wrist, turning my hand this way and that like a woman admiring a bracelet of pearls. Righto, the prosthetic hand says from its pocket in my backpack. The garden is at the other side of the yard, but the smell of the armadillo is circling the wagons, closing in. I can feel the whoop and holler of it deep in my nostrils. You know you should bury the rabbit, the hand says. It taps its ring finger against my back, a nervous twitch, and then cocks its thumb and says, It will, Pet, come back to bite you in the ass. Our neighbor’s dog stares at me from its yard, hackles raised. The most beautiful woman in the world passes behind an open window. Her robe is the color of melons. “Roar,” I say, and show the dog my teeth. And then it’s seven a.m. BarkBarkBarkBark. Starla emerges on the deck. She squints and shakes all eight and a half fingers above her head. “Goddammit!” she yells and stamps her bare feet so that she appears to be marching in place. “Stupid stupid dog,” she says and then she sees me kneeling before the rhododendron. “Oh,” she says, turning away as if ashamed. * When Starla gets home, we lie in the hammock and kiss. The breeze shakes hysterically in the trees, and I rock her and run my finger over the bridge of her nose. “God I hate winter,” she says. “It’s only August,” I say. “Well it’s coming, goddammit. I feel it breathing down my neck.” She tenses, makes a fist with her left hand. Fidgety, on edge. She turns her face away and then props herself up on her elbows and breathes hard through her nose. “Okay,” she says. “Enough is enough.” She takes her beer by the neck 37
and points it in the direction of our neighbor’s house. “That dog is a killer,” she says, “a cold-blooded murderer. And besides, I don’t like it. It gives me the creeps, always looking at me.” She takes a long swallow and then lies back into the hammock, staring at the sky as if blind. “I didn’t want to say anything, but there’s a dead rabbit at the edge of the yard.” “I’ll take care of it, baby,” I say. “Thank you,” she says and touches my cheek, “you really are a good woman.” And for a moment, until the sun turns cold behind a cloud brewing rain, both of us believe it. At 7:00, Starla puts on gloves and a pink, polka-dotted scarf and leaves for dinner and a movie with Ruby from work. I have never met Ruby before. I would, I am sure, remember her smell: sweet tea and curdled milk. Other dainty things. The sound of Starla’s heels on the driveway is that of striking flint, and I long for a cigarette. The two of them get into the car, laughing, and it backs out of the drive, kicking up dust. At the road, Ruby grinds the transmission a couple of times before she gets it into gear, and then they’re gone and I’m left holding the prosthetic hand, our fingers interlaced. Our neighbor waves at me from her chaise lounge on the deck. She’s drinking something pink, her lips the color of geraniums. Our neighbor’s dog, of course, is keeping watch. Like some kind of challenge, it shows me its teeth. You goddamn dog, I think. It’s time for you to go. Elementary, says the hand. In the garden, the dead armadillo rises on its haunches and laughs like a hyena. Oh, Pet, she’ll be back. What’s all this worry? The prosthetic hand caresses my neck, smoothes my hair behind my ear. Its fingers whisper into my blood, coursing through me like hunger. And anyway, the hand says, I’ll never leave you. In the trees, the lightening bugs make a concerted, late-season effort and I realize that the finish is just moments away. 38
* So how does one murder a beautiful neighbor’s dog? You’re on your own, Pet, the prosthetic hand says, settling like a cat into a pile of winter scarves on the dresser. At midnight, Starla makes a racket coming in. She clatters through the kitchen, and then stumbles across the hall and falls hard into bed. She smells of whiskey and smoke and Ruby. I watch her fidget in her sleep, her face contorted. For hours I watch. Sometimes she seems bewildered, as if she can’t get her bearings. Sometimes she trembles as if cornered. Sometimes she’s so far in, she can’t claw her way out. Near three a.m., she screams an obscenity and flails at the sheet. When she wakes, she cannot understand why she’s crying. “Oh God,” she says. “I was dreaming.” She touches her face with her fingers. “It was the dog,” she says, and even though I know she doesn’t mean our neighbor’s, I take her three and a half fingers in my hand and whisper, “shhhh,” not so much to comfort her but because I’m sure our neighbor’s dog is listening. I’m sure, if I looked through the window, he’d be staring back at me—bigger than life, as if in a mirror. My code cracked. The plot foiled. “Do you want to tell me about it?” I say. Starla sits up and pulls her hair back from her face. “The moon,” she says, “Look at it. It’s almost full. And so big.” She reaches out with her other hand as if to touch it. “God it’s beautiful.” The moon peers through the window as if through a keyhole. It wobbles through my blood, bumping against my bones. My breath laps against the back of my throat. “Tell me about the dream,” I say. I cup her hand between mine in the same way as a bird I once rescued after it had fallen from the nest. The bird, in a box on the kitchen table, choked on a piece of my hair and died. 39
“It was the first one,” she says, pulling her hand away from me. “I haven’t dreamed of it for a long time.” “The porch?” I say. Starla nods and stares at her hand, looking at it from every angle, emotionless, like a doctor with terminal news. I know the dreams so well that I dream them, sometimes, myself. I’m not sure if it’s a sympathetic gesture or a real manifestation of love, but always, I am the one left wounded. Because it is me beneath the porch. The light spins through the cracks and knotholes above my head. Starla says, “Hey there, doggy.” Her face appears in the dark, so big and round and close to mine I can see the pores in her skin, the scar at the corner of her mouth, the hair in her nose bending with the intake of her breath. She extends her hand, palm up and it seems to me like an offering or a threat—what, really, is the difference? I lunge, break her fingers off between my teeth, hold them in my mouth without chewing, and then spit them out. The fingers scamper off into the shadows and I howl myself awake. But there’s no absolution. I’m in too deep. “It’s alright,” she says. “I’m not hurt anymore.” “Baby,” I whisper. I stroke her shoulder and kiss her above the elbow. She flinches and pulls away. “God, June.” Her lips close around the next words and she turns them over and over on her tongue. I wait for her to say something, to mean that she loves me, but, finally, she swallows and rolls onto her side, punching up her pillow. Eventually she falls asleep. The moon lifts as if on a string. I take the prosthetic hand and stumble into the night. I feel like I should be wearing a glove, the hand says. Or a ring. Some kind of disguise. The hand’s mirth irritates me and I shove it, wrist first, into my back pocket At least paint my nails, the hand says. I mean, I’m not stupid, Pet. You’re up to something. 40
The dead armadillo lies curled up on the mat outside the door. It follows me to the edge of the yard, rises up tall, hissing, and there’s nothing left of it—this night or another—and somehow I find myself bolting across the grass with a rock the size of my fist. The prosthetic hand slips from my pocket and thunks against the ground. Behind me, the dead armadillo makes a sound like a highpitched giggle, and our neighbor’s dog doesn’t see me coming. * I take the trowel to the dirt around the roots of the rhododendron. Carefully, I turn the earth, sifting through ants and bits of shell. It’s seven a.m., I think, and Starla’s still asleep. And then I’m hacking at the roots of the rhododendron, taking out chunks with the edge of the trowel until it weeps from the wounds. God, I say. I fling the trowel across the yard, startling the dead armadillo. This is it: there’s something the matter with me. Something inside me, hiding, poking around in my blood as if going through the trash, lurking in the shadows of my bones. Oh don’t be silly, Pet. You’re perfectly normal. You just did what needed to be done. Really? Is that what you think? I take off my sandal and show the prosthetic hand the webbing of skin between my second and third toe. Inconsequential. On my back, a mole rides the back of another mole like two flies fucking mid-flight. Oh please, the hand says. My breasts are sprouting hair. Is that the best you can do? But the bad things, I say, that I do in the night. 41
What you do behind closed doors, Pet, is your business. My beautiful neighbor is running toward me, one hand holding her robe together, the other clutching the phone as if to stop it from getting away. The prosthetic hand rolls over onto its thumb and whispers, Watch out, Pet. Here it comes. “June,” she yells. “June!” I kick the hand beneath the rhododendron and stand, wiping my hands on my thighs. “Oh,” she says, “Oh my god,” she says, and collapses in front of me, cross-legged. Her robe falls open and I see her bare breast, the nipple like a late summer berry. * After midnight, I set the prosthetic hand on the windowsill and, breathing against the glass, watch my beautiful neighbor on her couch, clicking through the channels. The light from her t.v. hangs from the trees like moss. Every now and again, her hand reaches for a glass on the coffee table and then sets it back in its place. The hand glows, smooth and delicate as milk. In the yard between us, the dead armadillo meanders as if lost and the dead rabbit, its head twisted and missing an ear, hops drunkenly to the edge of the garden. The prosthetic hand sighs and knocks its pinkie against the glass. I told you to bury it, Pet, it says. I remember, I say, but then I present the yard to the prosthetic hand with a grand gesture. Just imagine, I say, this entire place alive with dead things… My beautiful neighbor rises from the couch and her shadow casts across the yard, filling the dips and hollows of puddled moonlight. Her shape grows bigger and bigger, swallowing everything whole, until it feels as if there’s nothing left. Starla’s going to leave, I say. Really, Pet, it’s none of it your fault. 42
But what if it’s an ugly end? Honestly, dear? I just don’t see that happening. But what if I am the wolf beneath the sheets? Oh my, the hand says, what big ideas you have. In the garden, the dead rabbit crouches on its haunches, its forefeet clutching the warty skin of a squash. Tick tick, the clock ticks and in the dark guts of the house, Starla—laid bare to the night—runs from the beast in her dreams.
43
MONKEY TEETH I would sing as birds do, loudly and without care for who hears. But for now this nightingale sound. That buzz of the bee. I am, after all, only rumor--clinging to the back of the throat as rain to the silken iris. What is love without flesh? A pool of sweat in the bare navel. The lip of hip. Oh the drama of a July sky! I have handled skin between my fingers, sliding loose as the sun across the hills of my palm. It is no less violet.
153
I haven’t eaten for three days, nor slept, not really. The dreams wake me. My nose bleeds and I swallow my own blood. My compass, that trace of iron lodged in the bone between my eyes sends me in wrong directions. It doesn’t hurt, but there’s no doubt it’s broken. I am rotting from the inside, and my breath stinks of meat. “I know you’re here,” the man yells. He wears the tweed sport coat, though it fit the hanger better than the slopes and valleys of his body. It’s something to drive highway through the palouse of eastern Washington, through wheat fields that don’t end so much as fade away into sky the color of a dirty hem, no alpha or omega to anything. Turn up the radio and forget you’re still alive. The slopes and valleys of those fields. An ocean of wheat rolling on and on. The man’s feet tangle in the woodmoss growing over the path and he trips, falls to his palms. His breath comes heavy, grinding out between his lips. He lacks fluidity. That monotonal, nauseating kind of grace. A sparrow disturbs the dry leaves beneath a dogwood bush. The man turns his head this way, that way. “Hello?” he says. He rises to his knees and wipes his hands across the front of his shirt, faltering beneath the weight of air burdened with morning rain that fell long after dawn. “That you?” He stands and looks into the underbelly of the woods. He is not afraid. In his closet: three pair of dress pants. A stack of cardigan sweaters. Belts on a hook. A galvanized safe. A rifle in a vinyl case, six dress shirts, a ball of yarn, three pair of loafers, the sport coat rankling in the darkest corner. It smelled of oily sweat, stale bread, olives. It smelled of Italy. “Fine, then,” he says, getting closer, raking through the branches in his way. The trees dizzy him, so far away into the sky, touching the sun. Darkest indigo heavy on his back, pushing him down down until he feels what it is to drown. This was my mother’s song: A monkey’s teeth for your heart. shoo shoo. Come back down. Come back down. 154
“Listen,” he yells, “I just need to talk to you.” He reaches out with his hands for balance, and the woods clear space around him. A wind whistles through the path and carries his smell to me. My god how he stinks! Grease poured off hot from the pan. Bits of gristle floating like fish at the top of the mug. I shift my weight on the branch.
155
i.
When exposed to the cold, fat cracks like the mud basin of a dried up river. It is the color of tapioca pudding. It holds the impression of a thumb.
159
160
Two hands between the chest and the navel. The diaphragm is more like a punching bag than a balloon.
161
Figure 1 162
The femur 163
is stronger than cement. When flexed, it hums like a tuning fork struck against the chords of a piano
.
164
A forty gallon drum Sulfuric acid Twenty-eight pounds of human fat Bone fragments Two dental fillings A beaded purse A gallstone
165
The man says, “Do you even remember what she looked like?” I think of my mother in the bathtub. The island of skin at her waist floating above the water. Her breasts shrunken and bobbing at the surface. The light changes. A breeze brings the smell of cattle and clover. Oh like the wide-open sky, how lonely I am! The empty blue, bottomless, falling away and away. My language flies from me, dark and diseased. My voice curdles in my mouth, makes maggots in the sockets of my teeth. The man kicks the head from a woodbell with the toe of his shoe. The white blossom settles into the dirt. His eyes follow motes of dust and pollen and insect wing floating as beams of sun. “Please,” he says. The white blossom fades to gray. He falls with his hands open, his eyes directed towards the sun, looking for my words. I would rip them out. I would hold them in my hand and rattle them against each other like pebbles. Take them between my fingers and move the world around. Stones veined with ferrous and copper and the blue fire of earth. Ivory. Rock. Africa. The heat trapped beneath the trees feels like bodies in a crowded room. Protruding from his sleeves, the man’s hands dimple as if overstuffed with down feathers. A tub of pork and beer, I should despise him. “Please,” the man says. The cicadas clinging to the cottonwoods cast his words back to his face. “What do you want? I’ll give you anything you ask.” He holds his hands like bowls as if to catch me raining from the sky.
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ii.
October 1, 2001 Burley, Idaho The yellow sun spreads across the horizon. Schools of black birds twist and turn in the air. Dirifts of fallen leaves fly up from the tires in yellow clousd. The smell of apple wood burning. The girl on the seat next to me. Her yellow hair blows in the wind. Her mouth open wide, laughing. The sound of sun through stained glass. (her laughter riffles the stand of cypress, the Russian Olive at the edge of the meadow littered with bones-whole skeletons shimmering in the sun like river-turned bottles.) With one hand on the wheel, i reach across the seat and pull her sweater around her shoulders. She feels the warmth of my hand on her arm. She feels it deep into her skin, through to the bone. She feels it sink into the pit of her stomach and it doesn’t end, heavy between her hips, down through her thighs. The girl feels the pulse of the motor through the red vinyl seatas.she hears the sun shatter in her ear and the music on the radio. She feels herself fall away and the earth rise up to meet her. (her laughter peppers my tongue.) Her mouth drops open. A chain around her neck catcjhes the falling light. Her hand washes over the curve of her ear. Her hair flutters in the wind. Her skin a soft river. Sweet jesus.
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May 08, 2002 Salt Lake City, Utah
The girl stands in a sla nt of warm light through the bakery window. She wears an apron tied once around her neck and again around her waist. A hairnet holds her hairin a bundle as of autumn leaves. she is too thin to be trusted. Bored. Gazing out the window, fingering the ruffle at the hem of her apron. In the bakery: croissants and Parker House rolls, Danishes laced with cream cheese and red glaze, doughnuts frosted with whipped butter, all laid out in the case like little bodies. Cakes turn round and round on a revolving tray, an endless procession of beauty queens. The girl’s skin plumps with sun, reflects the pink of lit stone. She twists ther earring at the top of her ear. SHe hates this job, though no more than going home. Hates school This city.
She slumps against the counter with the weight of her anger, like rattlesnakes just born, knotting themselves together in one writhing ball, and looks through the window, staring past traffic and a pair of fire king maples planted in the median.
I feel her crawling through my veins.
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June 8, 2002 Steamboat Springs Colorado The girl jumps from the trestle into the green water of the Roaring Fork River. I watch her kick beneath the surface. A cloud passes through aspens. Round leaves blinking blinking like so many eyes. She is a long time beneath the water, holding it to her chest as if dancing. Her hair breathes in and out. Sje emerges dripping, mouth open, and pushes her hair away from the line of her nose, her chin, her brow. She climbs the bank on hands and knees, her shirt translucent, her legs thin and winter white.
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I take a fistful of mud. It smells of rotted leaves and cocoa. I hold a lick of it to the top of my mouth with my tongue and drop what’s left to the ground. The girlturns her face to me and I fall through the back of her throat and into her belly. The sun glances off her forehead, and I see myself peering out from her eyes. A trickle of mud spills onto my chin. The girl stands, her knees dirty, her shirt clinging to her chest and then she runs, barefoot, over rocks and lupine not yet in bloom. she climbs to the trestle and balances on the edge of the tracks, swaying over the river with her arms at hre sides. I hold my breath. She takes a step. The girl is running, flying,, dancing when I dip my fingers into water cold enough to print bone with the blue of the sky, the pearl sun, the aspens
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July 02 2002 New Orleans, Louisiana The sun grows weaker in a colorless sky. On the stoop of a market wedged between two taller buildings, leggy marigolds in galvanized tubs.A pigeon follows the curb in the shadow of an ivy tower. A leftover winds bends tipf os grass, flutters itn the crepe paper buds of azaleas just busting out, and at the back of my throat, the taste of oiled wood and black exhaust, the smell fo the streetcars. Outside the market, an old man smokes at a table ebneath a leafless tree blowsy wiht mardi gras bead.s he looks at me with eyes the faint blue of salt.
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The door is heavier than I had thought it to be, on oiled hinges, the light inside the market dimly orange. Refrigerated cases hum, spill faint haloes of light onto the floor. A woman considers tomatoes, touches them with her palms. The girl nods and holds her bag in front of her chest. A streetcar passes, and I am consumed by the metal noise, the rumble of earth. I vanish inside the commotion. The girl counts coins from her purse and pushes them across the counter with her index finger. She stares into her magazine. Mostes of dust fall into her hair. the woman looks at the coins, at the girl. She hesistates as if looking for words, touches her neck, leaves. The girl leans against the counter where the sun casts prisms of light and color through a leaded window. The part of ehr hair is elegant, exact. she is careful with her body, its fragile geometry. Her fingers, nails painted translucent pink, rest delicately on the pages of the magazine. The tip of her tongues slips to her bottom lip. She breathes and I hear the tinkle of glass. The girl is pale, her hair dark as Chinese ink, that trace of indigo, cold-blood. All angles, the world shifts, snapping against the girl’s hips, the girl’s elbows. It spins from her and i imagine myself a magician’s assistant, the slice of the blade
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July 28, 2002 Lake Placid, Texas The girl runs loose-limbed, laughing, over a field of clover shorn close. The sun is unfamiliar, swinging loose and sightless in a vacant sky. Cattle huddle in the crook of a split-rail fence. The smell of green and raw dirt. At the edge of the black top road too narrow for cars, seedlings push through making it bulge up and crumble. a bucket swings from her handher hair flies out, nearly white, behind her. Thin legs, strong, tanned dark, the girl runs closer. closer I step behind a post. Nothing but the high pitch dis-temper of my body as she moves silently thourhg clover drizzled with heat, her bucket full of bream, their white silver flesh dying velvety slow, as sculpture dies one nick at t time.
What is this sun drip dripping through the clouds, sinuous and naked? The girl’s smile clattering inside of me?
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The sound of insects makes way for the girl, turning away from her body as birds twist from the sky. The world rushes from her mouth on ashy wings. The feel of the girl? The honey of the girl’s hair? My heart cannons. No angel. No. Her shorts slip up her thighs. The skin is paler there. Hers. Mine. Count the steps. One two. The
girl is here.
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My genealogy is nothing like this sun, this nothing of sky and cloud. My swollen mother in a rose stained dress. “Go away from here,” I whisper to the man kneeling at my feet. (The girl runs through the forest. Her peppery laugh. Girling about, churlish and childish and chafing at my skin.) “She was my daughter,” the man says. Spit twines through his fingers. Does he not understand? Of course not. No. The man stinks of sweat and honor. Shoo shoo, go away, shoo. (The girl listens.) Curled around the branch, my feet itch from the inside. The wings sprouting from my spine sting bitterly. “Fuck off,” I tell him. A crow caws from the branch of a flowering pear hidden in the darkest part of the forest, a pearl in the muck. The air scatters. “Oh God,” the man yells, his hands in the air. A katydid sweeps up broken bits of sky. The crow caws. The man shakes his hands into fists as if God will make any difference. The crow caws. The man shudders and falls. “Fuck off,” I spit, betrayed. I tapped in the center of her forehead, and the hammer fell, touching nothing, through the center of the earth. The girl. You. I. Gone. Unrecognizable. Charged particles popping in and out of a frenzied existence. Charlie Chaplin kicking his feet on the bar. Stars reflected in a fine-cut round of glass. Mozart, shit sweet as honey on his lips, fumbling with flaxen chords. (The girl approaches, winding through the roots of the tallest elm.) Wake up. Look. Listen. Come close. Let me whisper: A monkey’s teeth for your heart shoo shoo.
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iii.
I used to think I was born for big things. I would be well-known, ad-mired. Change the world. Fame is for the dead. Van Gogh, Jesus, me. Once, Francesca Cuzzoni refused to sing the first aria in Handel’s opera. Madame, he said, I know you are a veritable devil, but I would have you know that I am Beelzebub, chief of them all. Handel was either a musical genius or if sir Isaac Newton can be trusted with anythign, unremarkable save for the elasticity of his fingers. But handel took the soprano by the waist and swore that he would throw her from the window.. Ella Fitzgerald was not a beautiful woman either. There are things worth dying for. Pebbles worth polishing into diamonds.
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July 15, 1962 6:04 a.m. Tennessee before the hurricane, far enough away from the Gulf for the wind to cause serious trouble but close enough to shake the sky of rain, trees dancing. In a squat hospital in the bad section of town, where the artists make and sell by the river and paintings smell like growing things, and your mother, your mama, that woman with the thick skin—like a tree, every year the girl took on another layer, and deep down in the middle of her, blood trickling like sap. A sound like words, a language you almost knew running through her veins— so close to familiar— There was a nurse, yes, with a pointy hat because it was that long ago, back and forth across the open doorway, looking in now and again when your mama cursed out loud. And the doctor, finally, with a mask on his face to protect himself from your mama’s body and you—the baby—an infection even he was afraid of.
Picture michelango in a windowless room late at night. Picture him by candlelight, workign tendon from bone, muscle from muscle as if untwingin lengths of braided hair. Or Professor von Hagen in a black fedora exchanging fluids forplastic in the most splendind parts of the human body: lungs laced with purple veins, translucent sheets of flesh Watch bones bend in his hands. Watch him fashion, form, sculpt, create: A man, flayed of skin, contemplates a game of chess
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The wind slapped against the glass and the walls shook and the doctor’s hands shook because of the sickness just starting to rattle his bones—little whispers late in the night that woke him as if from a bad dream—and though he hadn’t expected its arrival, it was, nonetheless, no more surprising than bumping into an old friend in the bus terminal. See, he had always feared death—why else would he spend his life wrestling it to the ground?— but when it fit him like an old coat, its weight on his shoulders, the musty smell of well-worn leather, he put it on and wore it and mostly forgot about it except at idle moments when it slugged him in the face and made him cry out. The doctor held you in his palms, too small to be born but there you were anyway, wriggling in your own blood, blowing soapy bubbles from your lips. The air from your lungs thrashed louder in his ears than the wind, and he didn’t think it, exactly, but the man inside the doctor felt shame for his hate, for dying so quietly and so alone.
A pregnant woman poses for the camera, It’d be like this. People tradhand on ing fear of you for hatred. herhip like a centerfold, fetus reclin- Even your mama, though she ing in the curve of her open womb. loved you, too. Loved you like the wind, she said. And how A child split in two parts swims you rushed into the world on through the air on gossamer cables blond hair cascading from the remaining half of its breath. She told it so often it became a part of your skin. her head. What she didn’t tell was that she bled clots the size of lemons, and that the nurse took them up into a blue rag, held them as gently as she would a sack of eggs. What is art if And how the nurse stood lit not tender up in the doorway, the sack in revelation? one hand and you in the other What is art if while the doctor stitched your not dedicated to mama closed with a needle love? curved like a fishing hook. Or that a person—man or woman she couldn’t say— hovered outside the window, Look to the body floating it seemed, undaunted by the wind; you, that bloody Touch it. RUn your fingers over the little mouse in the nurse’s shapes of it. Taste it. Smell it. The ecstasy of an ear drove Van Gogh to madness, hand, and—even with the doctor tugging at the ripped forg etting hunger and thirst in the sun skin between her legs, her with his canvas empty before him blood a rivulet through the When I conncect the freckles on the back of wrinkled sheets—it was, at my left shoulder i have a Chagall. Aqueouas once, the most beautiful and sky. An anchorless range of mountains. A the most frightening thing the tilty, four-layer, rum chocolate cake. she’d ever seen: the bluest eyes, the palest skin, lips flushed and full as an early apricot. 183
September 1966 You hid in the black belly of the shrub hedge and mama watched you from the kitchen, her pickles in a clay tub on the counter, vinegar and spice. She was always looking, Shoo Shoo, swishing at the counters with a big gray rag. She gave you pickles for breakfast, two of them on the edge of the plate, and the sun outside winked and nudged the trees. “Wind’s blowing,” she said, looking closer as if she could see inside you. And it was hot, even in the morning, and the pickles tasted spicy and good even though you knew they were for poison, for the blood going sour way down inside. April, 1969 Rock Candy Mountain. Sulfur veins and black pines. The road through sinuous, narrow, newly tarred. You in the back seat of the car in your pajamas, your mother wearing knitted slippers and a quilted 184
Equations. Definitions. Pins on a map. Faith is for little girls and old men. so why come to this church of trees? I am no priest, for godsake, but what we’re after i not so different. it’s like dreaming water dreams. I wake believing i no longer need air. I mena, I wake believing sometign. I need to hold pebbles in my hands. To taste the black juice of a nippled berry tooheavy for the stem. I need muscadine grapes rotting on the vine. Magpie clatterign in the branches overhead. This scent off lavender still lingering int eh oil of my skin. Faith is for the dead and buried. What can I say? That everything is different. Everything is the same. Like a record player catching on a speck of dust, turning round and round the same groove--or the wind turning the pages of an open book. Isn’t everything, then, just a pretty word for nothing?
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housecoat, humming then singing aloud. Shoo fly. Shoo. Sometimes Mama brought an afghan she’d knitted, but mostly, you were barefooted and cold from sleep. She liked the rain. The way lightening lit the sky green and crackled in the tops of trees. But it was the wind that called her. You sat with your knees against your chest, your cheek on red vinyl. The smell of cigarette ash and lemony sweat. Your mama sang until her voice grew thin and whispery and the wind rocked against the car, her head pushed forward closer to the windshield as if she couldn’t wait to get to somewhere else. She drove for hours and you never slept— looking through the windows for night creatures, for monsters bigger than stars. You dreamed them awake. You wrote stories in your head. But you didn’t look in the right places. Pole pines swaying at the waist deceived you.
It’s all bullshit. Something to believe in, a religion to keep from flying off the earth when it inevitably quits spinning.. There are no new stories. Just the same one we play over and over until we have to believe in consequence. Cause and effect. A butterfly on the other side of the world. a blade of grass. Everything. nothing Everything. Nothing.
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You pulled air deep into your nostrils until it filled your head: taffy and caramel and marshmallow cream. The air was burnt, the mountains bruised in the moonlight. You floated free of your skin. Shoo shoo. Your mother beautiful in the yellow glow of the speedometer. Her words a spill of white stones. Blue copper and fool’s gold. Brittle mica, iridescent wings. A mountain goat. A great-horned owl low across the ridge. A black cougar in the shadow of scrub oak. Your mother’s lips in the rear view mirror shaped words like dough in her hands, pushing, pulling. The car stopped hard in a ditch by the side of the road, where the river turned away from the abandoned tracks and the barbed-wire fence twisted from its rail, knotted with tumbleweed and torn bits of
garbage. Your mother’s head fell back against her seat. A stream of blood fell from her brow, around the curve of her nose, and into her open mouth. Her eyes wide, looking at you. It was a bitter kind of magic. What is it you do not understand? Textbook, really. Your mother was beautiful, detached, a pillow of flesh. If you only you could remember the apple harvest. How you lay in the bed of the truck, the smell of fallen apples, of rot, of wet wood and dark mud. The leaves in the top of trees were cupped hands waving hello hello hello. The fingers of dappled sun, sh sh hush now baby. And your mother peeking through the clouds. And when it rained, you knew what that meant too: how much she missed you, how you were the best part, how wrong she was. You clapped your hands and the raindrops scattered. Apples floated in the ruts on the ground. The trees swelled as if sucking in air and grew taller than the night. Oh the white of sky! Voices from other rows murmuring in the tops of trees. The firing of an engine. You lay flat in the truck, arms spread wide. You waited for your mother to come. You waited, the rain striking your forehead, needling against your skin. Let me in! Let me in! Not by the hair by the hair by the hair by the
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“My God,” he says. “You’re just a man.” I stretch my wings. His girl emerges from the trees wearing a honeysuckle robe. “Look,” I say. Shoo shoo, the girl says, her arms open wide. “Please. Can’t you understand?” “There,” I say with one hand outstretched. “There there.” The girl smiles, kneeling before him. “Show me,” he says. “Please.” The man begins to cry. “Please,” he pulls at his hair, “I have to know.” “Jesus,” I whisper, embarrassed. “This is the end.”
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To Jackson—first and always—my best reader, teacher, and friend. And to Zac, Sam, Naomi, and Leah Blaise, such brilliant, beautiful, compassionate souls. And also to Kristen, who always gets it. Sincere thanks to the extraordinary professors, writers, and mentors at the University of Utah. Karen Brennan, Francois Camoin, Melanie Rae Thon, Meg Brady, Matt Potolsky: you all showed me where and how to begin. And my amazing and talented Salt Lake City pals who read and read and read my words: Derek Pollard, Jeff Chapman, Steve Tuttle, Jenny Colville, Matt Batt, Margot Singer, Nicole Walker, Pam Balluck, Peter Covino, Rae Meadows, David McGlynn, Rogelio Garcia, Paul Ketzle, Lynn Kilpatrick, Derek Henderson, Brian Kubarycz, Rebecca Lindenberg, Brendan Vayo, Erin Tolman, Jennilyn Merten, Cami Nelson, Annie Schmutz Seifullah, Antonia Horne, Sam Ruckman, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Mark Nielson, Erin Sweeney, Kate Rosenberg, Kelly Jones, Rachel Marston, Kathryn Cowles— many of these stories are equally yours. And Christian Peet, for vision, for patience, and for loving this book. Thank you, my students, for helping me to see the world less blindly. And finally, my support and gratitude for all of those journals and magazines who have previously published these stories: “Zombie” first appeared as “How to Make a Zombie” in LIT Magazine (Spring 2010); “The Fat Man’s Daughter” in The Pinch (Spring 2010); “Starla and June” in Gargoyle 53 (2009);
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“The Flying Codona” in The Mid-American Review XXVIII Number 2 (Fall 2008); “Van Gogh Dreams” in H_NGM_N 6 (2007); “Goat” in The Portland Review; “Pleasure” in Southern Gothic Online (2006). “Cat” first appeared in Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review (Summer/Fall 2003), and was later anthologized in New Standards: The First Decade of Fiction at Fourteen Hills (2005). “Love Like That” appeared in The Madison Review, (Spring 2005); and a portion of “Monkey Teeth” was published as “Horror” in Margie 6 (Fall 2007).
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR In addition to Recipes for Endangered Species, Traci has published fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in many journals including MidAmerican Review, Gargoyle, Barrow Street, Margie, and DIAGRAM. She holds an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. A writer and assistant professor at Guilford College, she lives with her family in Greensboro, North Carolina.
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