Latchkey

NILS HINT. Cutlery Pieces, 2020. Forged iron, readymade. 19 inches X 23 inches (approximately). Collection: MUDAC - Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland.

I work with iron. It is my medium for expressing things that are hard for me to say or imagine without the presence of the physical material. Often the work, the process, is technically very complex as well as limiting. It is my hope this makes me think twice about what I have to say with my work, and to help me to be more focused.

After this clumsy attempt to understand who I am, I still have to say that it is quite irrelevant for me to define my practice. I prefer not to load my pieces with too many words. I work with movement, movement in space and time, and my ever-evolving relationship to this never-ending motion.

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a er Aimee Mann

I keep checking my garbage disposal to see if it’s broken again or if that was just a dream. This is how I find clarity, how I know

I’m still here. Even when I feel like a ghost I am deeply aware of the space I take up and I think about each breath of air and forget how

to breathe and this almost feels like magic. There’s a joke here somewhere, floating in the wind, tired. But we haven’t spoken in a year and you never

thought I was funny. Still I’m willing to swim in cliché every time I tell you that my body is a catalog of bad news—it’s been too long since I’ve seen

the inside of a hospital and I don’t know how to modulate the things I can’t see, how to sleep through another siren. These debt collectors call

anyway and, despite death, this is the borrowed time I fear the most. And I try to separate you from this, from the woman I’ve become, but there you are,

disappointed. I often think of that Ouija board you got me for Christmas one year. I was fourteen and I hid it in my closet. I already had enough ghosts.

Now I’m just a few photos in your house and with that perspective I create my own body, let the artist ease a moth into my skin, buy clothes that fit,

hide your letters in the back of that one cluttered drawer. There’s weight and there’s anger and they creep up on me even if correlation is not causation.

I’ve learned to translate that look in your eye and I’ll never wear it. Tonight I cut a curled telephone cord in half, and in half again—and again and again until

your chain reaction is my own story. I can hold it in my hands, all these pieces. I can collect everything that shines and build an image in silver to serve

as a map, wash it in the creek—I’ll always know what I saw. What I made. Even when I am a ghost I can turn the lights on and know I’m still here.

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THERE WAS A rumor going around that a monster was picking o kids.

“Come on, guys, there’s no monster in this town,” said Benji.

The rest of us—me, Beth and Richie—looked at Benji dubiously.

“You sure?” asked Richie, eyebrows pulled tight.

“Sounds like something a kid made up to scare other kids,” said Benji.

“Nah,” Beth shook her head. “I heard these two ladies talking at the grocery. They weren’t kids, they were adults.”

Eyes were on Beth. Benji sucked in his cheeks, annoyed.

“What’d they say?” I asked.

Beth looked pleased to be the center of attention. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “I can’t remember exactly.” She said this out of the corner of her mouth, the cigarette dangling from the other corner. “They didn’t say monster. They said something like, ‘there’s an evil taking our kids’ or ‘there’s an evil in this town,’ something like that.”

“An evil?” Benji looked like he was going to laugh.

Beth removed the cigarette from her mouth. “They were church moms, you know. Think the devil gonna come for their precious kids and whatnot.”

“That shit ain’t real,” said Richie.

Beth shrugged and tapped her cigarette. “They were talking about if it’s safe for kids to play outside and stu like that.”

“There ain’t no monster,” said Richie.

“Yeah,” said Beth, “not real flesh and blood, not like Leather Face or anything.”

“Leather Face wasn’t real,” Richie pointed out.

“Before he was based on a real person,” I argued. Though to be honest, I doubted myself as I said this.

“No he wasn’t,” Benji said. He looked at me like I was stupid.

“Honestly,” Beth tapped her cigarette again. “Who gives a shit about Leather Face or this evil or whatever? I mean I live with a goddamn evil monster.”

“There are worse things in the world than your dad,” said Benji.

Beth stared at Benji coolly and smoked her cigarette. “Easy for you to say.”

WHEN I GOT back to my house that night, my mom was standing in front of the kitchen sink. The water was running, but she wasn’t washing any dishes. She was leaning forward, hands planted on the edge of the counter, everything written in the slump of her shoulders, in their delicate trembling. I crept through the kitchen, hoping she wouldn’t turn and look at me. I didn’t want to have to see her face. My tennis shoes made light tapping sounds on the grimy linoleum floor, but my mom didn’t move. She wanted to avoid the interaction as much as I did. I shut myself in my bedroom and stood still for a moment, listening. I could still hear the water running

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in the kitchen. I could also hear the television in the den. I knew my father was sitting in his leather armchair, watching television, swirling bourbon in a thick-bottomed glass. It sounded like he was watching Gunsmoke. One could gauge my father’s mood based on which television show he was watching, how much time he’d had to drink his bourbon. Gunsmoke meant he’d already been sitting there for an hour and a half. That was enough time for anything. That meant I wasn’t leaving my room. My house was either saturated in a still, tepid quiet, where one feared moving too much, or a red maelstrom of anger roiling o my father. One had to be careful of where one stepped. I lay back on my bed and made myself very still. I listened to the faint, distorted sounds of the television bleeding through the walls. I heard the water in the kitchen shut o . The light outside my window had compressed down into a perfect crepuscular indigo.

BY THE TIME I woke the next morning, everyone in my house was gone. My father was at the gun and ammo shop we owned. My mom was at the hospital where she worked as a nurse. My sister was either with her boyfriend or working at the pizza place/bowling alley/arcade. I wandered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The assortment of items inside were uninspiring: a carton of milk, eggs, slices of cheese, a tomato, a jar of pickles. I ate a slice of cheese, then wandered into the bathroom. The counter was littered with my sister’s makeup. I uncapped a lipstick and carefully twisted the color out of the tube. I eyed myself in the mirror as I applied the lipstick. The spread of pink across my mouth was mesmerizing. I made a popping sound with my mouth by pressing my lips tightly together and then blowing out. I tilted my head, watching my reflection. I pursed my lips. I pouted. I turned my body and pushed out my chest. The e ect was disappointing. My girlish body still lacked all sign of curves. I decided that I was not very pretty, not the way my sister was. Strangely, I found myself comforted by this. As I watched my reflection, I got embarrassed. At the sensation of someone watching me, blood rushed into my cheeks. In the mirror, my reflection looked foolish and sticky. I felt sick to my stomach. I took a wad of toilet paper and wiped the lipstick o my mouth. It smeared onto my face and I yanked more toilet paper, frantic to remove all evidence of this moment from my being. I tossed the pieces of toilet paper into the toilet and flushed. My pulse rattled as I watched the pink-stained paper twist away out of sight. I stepped carefully out of the bathroom and looked around, listening to my house. It was still and silent. No one was there.

I HAD LIVED in the same town my whole life, a town that looked faded, had looked faded, as long as I could remember. It was the kind of place that felt coated in dust, or the idea of dust. It settled in the lungs and kept people from being able to

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breathe properly. I couldn’t remember the last time it had rained. Sweat gathered under the straps of my backpack, making my t-shirt wet. Beth was standing outside the gas station, smoking a cigarette. She saw me approaching and waved her hand, smiling. Beth’s soft brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her fingers holding the cigarette were slender and beautiful. She handed the cigarette to me and I inhaled.

“I think they know I steal from them,” said Beth, tilting her head toward the gas station.

“Yeah?” I handed the cigarette back.

Beth nodded. “Yeah, but they let me get away with it. I think they feel bad for me.”

“Bad for you?”

“Yeah,” said Beth, squinting.

I looked through the front window at the man behind the counter. He had been there for as long as I could remember. He had wrinkles pressed into his face.

I held out my hand and Beth passed the cigarette back to me.

A man walking out of the gas station eyed us. I stared back boldly.

“Aren’t you a little young to be smoking?” he asked. We stared at him and shook our heads. We had been smoking for years.

THE CLEARING WAS our spot; it was where we always met. It was among a grove of trees that many referred to as a park but was just an uncultivated and poorly maintained piece of land behind a strip of restaurants and stores. We liked to meet in the grove of trees because we felt like no one could see us there, especially adults, especially our parents. The grove provided the illusion that we were far away from our town, but really, the back parking lot of the local diner was visible through the trees, and when the waitresses brought the trash out to the dumpster, we could hear the trash bags contents rattling from where we sat. In the summer, the grass was long and painful, the dirt parched and chalky. Mosquitoes buzzed around our heads of wild hair. We would lie flat on our backs, squinting into the sun, trying to watch the clouds, sharing whatever we had.

It was Benji who made rules, gave commands. “I want everyone to bring something tomorrow,” he said.

“Like what?” Richie asked.

Benji shrugged. “Something good.”

So, Richie brought cigarettes, stolen from his mom. He stole cigarettes from his mom all the time, just one or two, slipped from packs in her purse. His mom never noticed. She was drunk almost every second of the day and was the kind of drunk that could be convinced of almost anything. She believed she either lost her cigarettes or smoked them all. Today, Richie had taken an entire pack, and produced it now, smiling proudly.

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Benji pulled a half-empty bottle of gin from his backpack. He said gin was his grandmother’s favorite, and she always had several bottles hidden around the house. As a kid, he and his brother had made a game of trying to find all the hidden bottles.

We all knew that if Beth tried to take anything from her house, she’d get caught. Beth had once tried to bring beer to the grove, but her dad had noticed the bottles missing from the refrigerator and beat the living shit out of her and her brother. After that beating, her face had looked like a drawing, something contrived, not real. Today, Beth had brought snacks she stole from the gas station.

I brought my father’s gun.

IT HADN’T BEEN hard to take. My father owned the only gun shop in town, called simply Barrett’s Gun and Ammo, Barrett being our last name. Guns were my father’s favorite thing. He loved them more than anything. He loved them more than me. When I was younger, my father had been sober more, and there had been afternoons when he took my sister and me to a field outside of town and lined up targets for us to shoot. My sister didn’t like doing this. She hated guns, and she hated our father. There were times I hated our father too, but I loved shooting guns. There was energy in a gun, I learned, a sense of power and danger, a vital, visceral thing. When I held one, I felt myself lift out of my skin, remade into something shiny and sturdy. When I pulled the trigger, the jolt of utter strength knocked me silly. It was not di cult for me to sneak o with one of the guns from my father’s store. My father was a good salesman. He was good at talking to people, convincing them they needed things they had never thought about. He had that syrupy kind of charm that made me curl with a kind of pity and hatred for his customers. Despite his talent for selling guns, my father was less talented when it came to keeping inventory of his shop. This made it easy for me to slip away with a small semi-automatic pistol. It was easy to hide it in my red backpack, taken from the back storeroom, using the key I knew my father kept hidden under a cinder block. I liked the feeling this evoked in my gut, a mixture of fear and excitement. I was dangerous, daddy. Of course, I feared what would happen if I were caught, but that fear seemed a necessary and inevitable part of the experience, of my very existence in fact.

WHEN BETH AND I reached the grove, Richie and Benji were already there, leaning back against the trees. They were chewing tobacco and spitting globs into the dry grass. It was clear that neither boy had much experience chewing tobacco but refused to admit it. Richie appeared to have too much in his mouth and struggled as he chewed. Richie o ered some to Beth and me. Beth wrinkled her nose.

“Where’d you get that?” asked Beth.

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“My brother,” said Benji.

“He know you took it?” I asked.

A grin spread slowly over Benji’s face. “Course not.”

“He’ll find out,” said Beth.

Benji shrugged. “I’m not afraid of him.”

We all knew that Benji’s brother beat on Benji regularly. I just assumed that’s what brothers did.

“What’d you bring?” Benji eyed Beth and me.

Beth opened her backpack and pulled out the snacks she had stolen from the gas station. I settled in the shade and set my backpack on the ground in front of me.

“Dana?” Benji looked at me.

I opened my backpack and lifted out the gun. I could feel the energy of the group change.

“You wanna kill some fucking monsters?” I said theatrically. I had thought up this line on my way over and was quite proud of it.

“Shit,” Richie murmured, moving closer.

“Is that real?” asked Beth, her voice quiet.

“Of course.” I felt large and important.

“You know how to use it?” asked Benji.

I nodded.

“Can I hold it?” asked Richie.

I considered, reveling in my moment of power.

“I’ll be careful,” said Richie.

“Fine,” I said. “But don’t shoot it.”

Richie held the gun with reverence, his eyes wide. We were all turned toward Richie, the gun a central point around which we seemed to pivot. Richie aimed the gun at a tree and pretended to fire, making a pow sound with his mouth. I saw Beth flinch.

WE KNEW THE grove was too close to town for it to make a good shooting range.

“I know where we can go,” said Benji. We packed up our pilfered items, zipped them safely into our backpacks, and followed Benji. Benji led us out of the grove, through the diner parking lot, and west, away from town. My house was in the opposite direction, but I knew heading west led toward farmland, flat expanses. As we walked, there were fewer and fewer houses, the neighborhoods dissipating and giving way to swaths of land. We walked single file along the shoulder of the road. Cars rushed past, creating thick eruptions of wind that skirted around us like entities sparing us their wrath. We took turns kicking at the pieces of garbage, tin cans and bottles, that were littered along the roadside. The sun beat down. Beth smoked a cigarette, flicking ash

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into the breezes. Richie continued to spit dark-marbled globs of saliva, leaving wet spots on the asphalt. Eventually Benji led us o the main road and down a gravel drive.

“Where are we going?” Beth sounded nervous.

“This is where I live,” said Benji without turning around.

My curiosity grew. I had never seen Benji’s home. We approached a small house. The exterior was a faded yellow, stained in places with determined brown. Three or four cars sat in various stages of disrepair, rusted and faded. The front porch sagged under the weight of accumulated items that were piled upon each other; a grill, several chairs, a table laden with boxes and lumpy garbage bags, a disassembled plastic playhouse of some kind. A large dog attached to a long rope jumped up from his spot in the shade and barked at us.

“Shut up, Harley!” Benji yelled at the dog. The dog kept barking until Benji walked over to it and gave its head a pat. “He’s friendly,” Benji explained. “He just barks a lot.”

We nodded but kept our distance anyway. People always tended to say this about their dogs, and I just didn’t believe that it could always be true.

“There’s no one here,” said Benji. “There’s a field out back. It’s big enough and we can set up targets to shoot at.”

We collected a variety of items to use as targets. There were plenty of options around Benji’s house; large sheets of plywood, glass bottles, cans, broken toys, chairs, etc. We lined up the items on the far side of the field.

“You got any neighbors?” Richie asked.

Benji shook his head. “Not for a couple miles.”

We lined up twenty yards from our targets. Everyone looked at me expectantly, and I pulled the gun out of my backpack. Part of me, selfishly, wanted to be the only one to shoot the gun, but I handed the gun to Richie, who was holding out his hands with an eager look in his eyes.

“You know how to use that Richie?” asked Benji.

“Sure,” said Richie. Richie spent a moment fiddling with the gun. “I’m just checking everything.”

“There’s only eight rounds in the gun, so we each get two shots,” I said.

“Fine.” Richie stepped forward and held the gun out in front of him. I could tell he had never shot a gun before. Benji, Beth, and I instinctively stepped back away from Richie.

“It’s best if you stand with your feet—” I started to say, but Richie cut me o .

“I got this, Dana.”

I looked at Benji and he shrugged.

Richie pulled back the hammer and readjusted his stance, digging his feet into the dirt like a baseball player at bat. He looked small. He pulled the trigger. I had forgotten the way the sound of a gunshot could move through the air, ripples disrupting the skin and bones of anyone nearby. I felt my heart leap. Beth let out a cry of surprise.

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Richie’s body rocked backward with the force of the discharge, but when he turned to look at us, he was grinning and breathless. As the sound of the gunshot faded, a silence replaced it that felt thick. It settled over us for a moment. Then Benji let out a whoop.

“Holy shit!” Richie cried. “You gotta try.” He held the gun out to Benji.

Benji stepped forward and took the gun from Richie. Benji took a stance that looked like he was copying a character from a Western, stylized and macho. He held the gun before him, arms stretched out and centered. He took a moment to aim and then fired. Benji’s shot hit the sheet of wood we had propped up. The board splintered and slivers of wood bloomed from where the bullet had landed. Benji lowered the gun, trying to act cool, but I could tell he was shivering with excitement.

“Wasn’t it awesome?” Richie was practically jumping up and down.

Benji nodded, grinning, his excitement more contained.

“Beth, wanna try?”

Beth’s arms were crossed over her chest. She looked the least excited.

“Come on,” urged Richie. “You gotta.”

“Fine,” said Beth, marching forward and taking the gun from Benji.

Benji stayed close to Beth as she hefted the gun nervously and pointed it in the general direction of the targets. Benji reached out and gently guided her arms.

“I got it,” said Beth, a touch irritated.

“You sure?”

Beth nodded and Benji stepped back.

“It’s not that hard,” Beth muttered. “I just pull the trigger, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Beth pulled the trigger. She screamed and stumbled backward as the sound of the gunshot blew through us once again. Beth’s shot hit the dirt in front of the targets and a light spray of earth and dust flew into the air. Richie was laughing. Benji was smiling.

“Here,” Beth held out the gun to me. “You take it.”

There was an expression in Beth’s eyes that I had never seen before, a flinty defiance, a dangerous courage.

I took the gun from Beth and stepped up to shoot. It had been years since my father had been sober enough to take me shooting. I aimed at a glass beer bottle and fired. The bullet flew past the bottle and disappeared into the field.

WE EACH TOOK a turn firing a second shot until all the bullets were spent. Benji was the only one to hit any of the targets we had bothered to set up.

“So, if we see a monster, give the gun to Benji,” Richie joked, as we left the field.

“Why?” said Beth. “The gun’s out of ammo anyway.”

Richie rolled his eyes. “I mean if it had ammo.”

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