taurus | Kristy Bowen

t a u

r u s

taurus Kristy Bowen

dancing girl press & studio, 2021 ___of 50

At dawn, the butchered bellow their end songs. Undo us with eyes, low and nodding. Plod between the fences, down the final line to the barn. Long before the labyrinth, there were clear mornings. My mother in her apron, the table set precariously with eggs and flowered china. Her hands tucking hair behind my ears. This fear of the fields that stretched beyond the house. Before the labyrinth, we tucked our feet under our covers and dreamed the yard ravaged in clover, The lovers in their rusted cars at the end of the road.

Upstairs, my brother’s breath moving his sheet over his face as I watched, waiting for the world to go dark.

A man builds his wife a maze and inside that maze, a house. Inside that house, another maze. The twisted path to the heart rife with briar patch and thistle. There she waits, hands in her lap, for him to find her. For the children to appear at her knee, miraculous, clean as the day they were born. Waits for love, a fierce whistling through the walls and up into her chest. But it never comes. Only beetles lining the window ledges and cicadas all summer long. Traces of mud and blood in the sink. The path that leads to the center rough weather and nothing to tether.

Say the word story and the tale unwinds like a rope. How we held hope like a box on our knees until the storm had passed. Huddled in the cellar, the heat our bodies steaming over flashlights and empty canning jars. Every spring, god come round to deliver a reckoning. A wreckage of gas stations and street signs bent into Vs. Trees snapped like matchsticks. How the lightning flickered through the crack in the trap door. My father at the top of the steps, his fingers tight around the latch. Who’d have known we were so open raw to rain and wind, the hatch of our mouths birthing worse.

July, and the weeds are thick with field mice. Thick with shadows moving just beyond the perimeter of sight. At night, we gather our blankets and wait at the edge. Wait for fireworks on the east horizon to spark against the dark that swallows everything. The house, the driveway, the rusted ford. For everything to vanish then reappear suddenly and entirely new. Summer shakes itself free every time, and every time, we lose our way back to our beds. The gravel road that leads us there, forked and vanishing beneath bare feet.

My brother is born in a storm. Born in the middle of a field, my mother alone and halfway to Centralia and crowning too soon. A hundred black crows watch from the fence. A hundred yards from the nearest road and mud up to her knees. Birthing hips, the aunts had warned, and true to form, each of us dropped out like calf in the grass. Leggy and skittish as the summer herds. Both of us easy to startle, but hard to move. Our bones rooted to the ground, pulses thumping mad as rabbits. A hundred miles to the nearest town, where on Sundays, once a month, we wind the aisles of the Safeway at her hem. The rim of our lives circumscribed by daylight and deserted gas stations. How she smelled like sweetgrass and Tide, the wide open window we climbed out of each evening, and then back into at dawn.

A man builds himself a house and inside that house, a daughter. A living room fraught with embroidered pillows and velvet curtains.

All the closets stuffed with moths. You’d be certain she was real, if not for her edges—the ragged seam of her thighs How everything was always falling out of her mouth. Cupboard hardware and sets of keys. The tiny dolls made of honey and thread. He’d imagine her dead with every cough, with every summer that came rising up over the fields. Every soft thing ravaged by sharpness. Every sigh filled with feathers.

In school, we scrawl our names across blank white sheets. Take what we can of language, the soft lip of “L”, the bite of “T”. How “K”s are always breaking through our sentences. My brother struggles, the words caught in the drain trap of his throat. The stutter of his “B”s lingering in detention halls scented like pine sol and chalk dust. Yesterday, he broke another boy’s arm beneath the jungle gym. Rocked in rage outside the nurse’s office for hours waiting for our mother, the thin clip of her heels on the tile echoing down the hall. Soon, our bookbags fill with neatly scrawled notes and warnings. I drop them one by one along the driveway, shove the rest into the pillow case. If worse comes to worse, I’ll swallow them without a sound.

A man builds a wife, and inside that wife, a key. At night, he looks for it in all corners and hollows of her body. Every passage a dead end, a damaged lock. The house is there, but the lights are off.

Every window grants only his own reflection. Sometimes, a yawning black. Outside, the cows stir and moan at the back of the pasture. Three just last week lost to vultures. Another to the flooded ravine. At dinner, his wife forks the remains of an enormous bird onto his plate and does not speak. The house inside her creaks and sways, takes on water and clogs with leaves. Every hallway flooding out, every pinion rusted over.

The boy in the center of the field is bleeding from his fist. Is reading the stars by memory, every fever a balm to burn out the bad things. The sting of his mother’s palm still on his cheek, radiating heat. In the spring, the crop rotation moved toward wheat in the lower quarter, corn in the east. But now he finds his way by touch, the stalks cool and the dark inviting. So many ways to get lost in the effort to be found. To gain ground by raging in the barn, tearing his palm on a nail in the fence. The sight of blood an ache that blooms against the white of his t-shirt. Roughly in the place of his heart.

We place our hands against the door, and the door yields. Our hands against the floor, and the moment opens like a mouth. A few hours south, the river empties itself into the gulf. There, my grandmother shakes a pack of cigarettes and slams them onto the table. Daily, we eat lavender candies and die a little each time our mother sighs into the lace of her bedspread. The Mississippi thick and brown with everything not tied down. Everything shaken out of the Midwest each March. We place our hands, our feet, against the ground and it receives us. Makes a sucking noise when we retreat.

A girl builds a hallway in her body lined with ribbons. best of show. best heifer. best 4-H betty crocker brownies. A dresser littered with abandoned barrettes and shiny trophies. After she's elected fair queen, she fucks the football team under the dark of the bleachers.

Hands tied with a silver sash. best kisser. best blow job. Under her sweater, the best heart, best speller in three counties. Dark country, if you can survive there. If you can thrive under the hot lights of the hatchery. The butcher takes only the best cuts, while she smiles in her best bow-collared blouse. A little sad, but the best game in town.

A man builds a son made of bone and wire. All night he labors and by morning, the boy breathes and moves. Almost human, but not quite. In the quiet, he keeps shifting into shadows. The rough material of his spine dissolving into dust. Doctors come and bring more doctors. Women bring casseroles and cakes. The boy waits in the shed to be undone by nightfall. The mother locks herself in her bedroom and cries. The gate falls from its hinges and the crops fall to ruin.

Over the years, the house begins to shed unnecessary things. Doorknobs and smoke detectors. Alarm clocks and my mother's curling iron. You'd be hard pressed to find a spatula. the kitchen drawers filled with broken things we could not save. The collar for the cat struck at the end of the road. A box of wet matches rescued from the yard. By the time a nest of wasps sets of residence beneath the porch, my brother has stopped speaking at all. But I can hear him kicking the wall between us. Once for no, twice for yes.

The mice scurrying through the holes in the baseboard, where I pass cigarettes and hard candies. A tiny plastic Hans Solo.

Offerings to some dark god between the walls.

A woman builds a house inside a house. Sweeps the floors daily and keeps every slip cover neat as a pin. In winter, the others come and go, tracking mud up the stairs and into her bed. Her wedding ring loose and slipping from her fingers in the cold. She births a son, and he falls heavy from her hands like a sack of flour. The hours are limned by distance, by tiny twigs she keeps picking from her daughter's hair. But always more in the bathtub drain, tangled in her sheets. Soon every floor covered in moss and teeming with ivy.

The garden inside lusher and more ferocious than the one outside, roots holding fast to the walls.

A woman builds a wooden cow in her dreams. The dark, sweet heat inside where she kneels. The interior smooth, the color of weak tea. The Trojans got it wrong, after all, the structure not to take, but to be taken. Not to get in, but to get out. She waits in the field for days before the creature approaches, the loneliest of sighs in its throat. Mud in her hair and blood thick with want. Goats frenzy the pasture and she wakes to an empty bed. A yawn of space outside the windows, jet black and the sound of cicadas humming into song.

My brother builds a fort out of particle board and chicken wire. All summer he hoards canned soup and flashlight batteries. Speaks to no one but the occasional crow that perches at the top of a spire made of broken antennae and a stolen traffic cone. I lift lipsticks from the drugstore, a pair of jeans from the mall. But he goes big - stop signs, hubcaps, the steering wheel of an old Chevy. Once drove an idling tractor into a creek where it tipped on its side and burst into flame, the smoke visible two counties away. All summer, he disappears at nightfall and walks slowly to the meadow. His shadow growing every second, until it swallows him whole.

Now, we build a story. A woman is a certain kind of lonely--a lonely that swallows the house. The children. Starts in on the landscape, gnawing until nothing is left but a fence post. A single steer, dumb and lowing, in the pasture. Her husband is away too much, or worse, not enough. She goes to bed and there he is, staring at her in the dark. She wakes up to his sad, but insistent, prodding. She goes about the business of normal--cooking lunch and wrapping her hair, and still his stare fills her with rage. When the farmhand comes, big shouldered and brown-eyed, she meets him behind the barn. The rope of her days trailing behind her like a dog and its leash.

For every daughter, we build a pink bedroom. A yellow flowered coverlet. Silence in the house like a thickness, something you could bite into. In the mornings, she dresses for school in the dark, waits for the bus at the end of a long driveway alone. The house, something to escape from, but each night the pull of the tether back down hallways and stairwells and into her bed. Each morning, waking to quiet cold that wraps a fist around her bare ankle and squeezes slightly.

Once we built the labyrinth, the labyrinth built us. Every morning, manufactured a sunrise, complete with a little house, a little truck. Little cats in the kitchen mewling over milk. My father leaves each morning and we unraveled against the sink. The pink ribbons on my dress singeing on the stove. My mother opens the refrigerator door and closes it.. My brother in the next room sharpening his knife. The life we thought we owned blurry at the edges. Prone to hidden trapdoors and things we thought were only shadows.

A man builds a house and the house fails. Ants trail the windowsills and termites ravage the floors. He builds a wife out of cotton and corn silk, but still she won't come to him at night. Wanders downstairs until dawn. He builds a daughter, but she falters, fades into the horizon. A son, but he won't take, keeps vanishing into the wood trim, the fretwork of the wallpaper. Outside, there is sowing and reaping, but inside every expanse goes fallow with disuse. The animals taking things back one by one. Mice in the bathtub. Squirrels in the pantry.

A teacher builds a house out of popsicle sticks. In front of the boy, she builds a tiny door. A tiny bed out if cotton balls and matchsticks. A tiny doll from a paper clip and strands of yarn. The boy quiets and waits for something to happen in the tiny cabin. Builds cars from bottle caps outside and still nothing stops the rumble in his bones. The desire to smash the tiny children in their tiny bed, the paperclip mother in her kleenex apron. To set fire to the paper that lines the roof, every tidy room.

If you build it, ghosts will come. The longing of each hallway toward dark rooms. We built the labyrinth around the monster and there he lived for years, feeding on the bones of us til we were picked clean. Til we nested in the corners of the rooms like swallows. the shadows that occasionally moved out of the eye and sighed with the curtains. You'd be certain the house was haunted, but the house haunted us. Wanted for blood and the whistling scream of wind as the door slammed open again and again in my brother's mind.

A girl builds a monster in the field. Mud and sticks and old bottlecaps for eyes. She calls him brother and tries to make him speak. But he keeps falling over. Keeps tumbling into the creek when she looks away Before there was a labyrinth, the days were longer and unwinding toward dusk. The musk of stinkbugs clotting the shed, the husks of collected corn.

For every son, we build a series of rooms. One opening into another and in the center, a mother made of skirts. Once the light was wrong and she lost her way. Went down and down in the heart of the monster but found only a blanket, a bloody knife. The only boy the monster had killed was the one that existed before the labyrinth. The boy made of milk and toy trucks, smashed and smashed together. Who howled through dinner, who ripped wet sheets from the bed and hid them in the hamper. The mother went down and down into the monster and emerged days later, holding a single tiny buckled shoe.

The landscape builds a sky. A tiny paddock covered ice. A house, but the house resists staying put. Moves with the shadow and the changing light. The people inside the house shift against each other restlessly. Things catch fire that normally wouldn’t burn. Morning, and they turn over softly in their beds and ignore the change in pressure that plagues the house. The landscape builds the beginnings of a labyrinth, but we lose ourselves inside it before it finishes. Trailing our hands along the walls looking for a foothold, a memorable crack.

At the center of the labyrinth is a door. Is a floor covered in stalks. The edges lined with stick. The center of the labyrinth breathes and aches each winter, expands every summer. By November, the boy lives inside the labyrinth, follows its walls in and out but never gets to the middle. Huddles in the hallways, searching for the treads of his father's boots. The threads of his mother’s nightgown. A lock of his sister's hair.

We build a heart in the labyrinth, but the heart does not hold. The farmhands teach us early how to wring the necks of chickens, to wreck the bloody eggs against the side of the shed. Death the only steady, sure thing-- mice in the traps, the stillborn goat. The ropes that lead the cattle to the slaughtering barn. Our hands worn red from all that carnage. How the ground opened up to conceal the evidence again and again. Until it swallowed everything but the moon.

taurus appeared first as an installment series at Chanillo.com