conspiracy theories text & image by Kristy Bowen dancing girl press & studio, 2021
_____ of 50
In 7th Grade, the biology teacher teaches us about gingkos. The careful slopes and lobes. Dissect a tree and it will show you where it's been. Toss a single rotting gingko fruit down the hallway of a middle school in middle america and the building will be closed for days for the smell. Hosed down and all the windows open. Cut a pregnant frog down the midsection and a million eggs will spill out onto the black topped table. Cut a high note on a clarinet. Cut class. Trace the slim network of leaf veins and scars pressed in a notebook. One summer, the tadpoles boil to death in their aquarium left in the sun. No one could prove that a fat girl died running the mile in gym class, broke her neck on the uneven bars, but we tried. Cut a girl in half, and she will show you her rings, even the ones grown round the scalpel in her fist.
The books at the back of the library are full of ghosts. Full of roadside witches and alien autopsies. Each week, you gather them in armfuls and take them home. One year, you can't keep earwigs from infesting the house. They linger under dropped towels and live in the couch. The power goes out nightly, driven by storms we don't see coming. A mass of wind and broken lawn furniture swirling past the patio door. I look for patterns and find them everywhere. Your mother's missing earrings. The dog that vanished overnight. Three counties away, the girl hat survived a cyclone by hiding in a bathtub. We lay out the signs on a purple bedspread. Hide in the closet every time it rains. One year, the boxelders bugs were thick on the side of the house. A year later, they were gone. Crickets. Grasshoppers. All swallowed by witches and wind.
One summer, my sister swallows a cricket. It lives inside her throat. Candles flicker and the cakes burn. We take turns trying to pluck it out with elongated objects--bbq tongs, sewing scissors, a straightened wire hanger. But it persists through winter. No one is convinced it's really there but me, how it slipped in surreptitiously as she lay laughing in the front yard. No one could hear its legs sliding against one another, tiny violin strings. All night, it sings from her bed. Through birthday parties and car crashes and the beginning of school. All day, the cricket sleeps with barely a chirp. Survives on graham crackers and cartons of milk we feed it. No one can tell me it isn't real. Isn't really there. Isn't ready to come out one night, crawl out of her out of her mouth, and into mine.
In 1985, perverts prowl the edges of the parks. Linger in the dark back seats of vans along Forest Ave. According to the news, my walk to the bus stop is a gauntlet of poisoned trick-or-treat candy and older kids who’ll offer me drugs if I stop long enough, Will drop acid onto the tip of my tongue before taking me down to the forest preserve to offer up stolen neighborhood pets to the dark lord. The ford truck full of boys who rode off with the neighbor girl and she never came back. Or did, but spent hours staring at railroad tracks and the back of the cereal boxes. In her canopied bed, crying. How she was surely lying when she said the boys put their hands inside her, one by one, and pulled out a rabbit. Delivered her into the yard at dawn the next morning, not a mark on her. But only river in her ears and hollows.
Behind the garage is a giant rusted kettle. We bang on it, and a roar comes out of its great gaping mouth. We sit cross legged and play mary mack. Hide from our mother out of view from the kitchen window. Track the ants that make their way up and into a tiny metal hole. Bury our pets in the garden, marked by rocks. The temperamental pekingese. The guinea pig. The neighbors kitten, dead and tangled in the planter wire next to garage. All rotting slow beneath the ground where we place them in shoeboxes and metal tins, wrap them carefully in tea towels. A neighbor girl teaches us how to french braid our hair. How to give the perfect snakebite. After she dies, I sleep in my grandmother's bed beneath the eyelet coverlet where the monsters cannot get me. Roar into the belly of the kettle until it comes back at me.
The day the neighbors garage burns down in, I am reading a novel about vampires, Face down on the mattress. book balanced in my palm. Sucking cherry candy, sweet and sour in my mouth. A little blood gathering beneath my tongue. Sirens further, then closer, while they save what they can--tire irons and christmas decorations A hatbox full of Barbies. 500 Matchbox cars. By evening, it was ash. Remnants of a hundred backyard bbq's. A thousand unraveled sweaters. January, a bitch every year. A stitch in the side of a girl filled with too many books. Too many hooks in her blood. A flood of static through the clock radio in the Sunday gloom. The room hung with christmas lights. The bright flash of flame as it swallowed the roof and started in on the grass. How it could burn through the whole neighborhood given the right wind. The right kindling.
At seven, I believe that kidney beans are the inner workings of tiny mice, harvested in shiny, white suited labs. Can be convinced of nothing else. Elves in the woodwork, monsters in the shed. How every cut bled out on concrete was a sacrifice. Bad luck, cracked fibula. Ghosts in the wind that swallow us whole. At home, we harbor gerbils in maze-like cages, but they always die. still and stiff amid the wood shavings. The babies tiny and pink, but way too fragile. Few make it, only to succumb to wet-tail and fever. The brokenness of all objects too small to survive. To thrive in houses with shut windows and so much damp the edges. The hedges we bury them under that never seem to grow.
The woods near the house are prowling with coyotes. Crawling with wolf spiders the size of my fist. I make a list of sins in the basement. Broken bone, nimble fingered. Rollerskating through car parks and dark garages. The eggs that fell from the nest were surely too small for any type of bird. For any word that encompassed their tiny beating hearts. We put them back in the tree, but the trees are thick with hawks, every summer without fail. Flailing through twilight filled with screaming rabbits and bloody bits of mice littering the driveway. We could never save any of them, eaten by the dark. Our own hearts rapping the inside of our chests full of branches, mud and thicket.
No one could confirm the bathrooms were haunted, but we tried. The girl in the mirror looks a lot like me. Like you. Hooks through her ears and a dozen innuendos. She blinks twice and the men in parking lots think it's seduction. But really, all along, we were braiding our hair and stuffing tissues in tiny lace bras. Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. We write in pencil on our notebooks, surrounded in hearts and stars. Choke down peanut butter sandwiches in the lunch room. Broken wrist in gym class, where a girl shimmies up the rope then throws herself into the mats. It's a not a pea that breaks her bones, that bruises her hips, but a tiny pill on her tongue. Up the rungs of the ladder to the diving board and into the pool again and again. Shaking the ghosts from the body with a flick of a towel. No one could confirm the monster that lived at the bottom of the deep end, but we tried. Would throw wreaths and tiaras at it until it quieted.
The man in the car behind me is the same man in the picture in the newspaper. The same man in the grocery store checkout line standing too close. Too much, his breath grazing the back of my neck. The check ut lady's fistful one ones and fives. He waits under the car with a scalpel in his hand. A wedding band glinting in the streetlights, but he's good at playing the villain. At filling the gas tank with sugar and plucking out the alternator. You almost didn't see him there, there, at the edge of the woods. But he saw you. The popsicles in your bag melt before you could ever possibly get home, but they are sticky in your mouth as you drive, dripping on the dashboard and between your thighs. There's a road without a house for miles and you just keep driving, headlights dark. In the park, a merry-go-round is made entirely of rust and chipped red paint. You climb to the top of the monkey bars and wait silently for the killer that never comes, tiny wooden stick, sharp in your hands.
Sometimes, the girls don't come back down. light as a feather and stiff as a board, they lift up past the wood paneled basement and into oncoming headlights. Past the shag rug and floral couch and into a kitchen filled with children, black-eyed, banging the lids of pots and pans. Sometimes into white sheeted beds, where they sleep for decades while the princes kiss them, one by one, as they forget their way among the moss-covered ranch homes. We tried to tether them, but they got stuck on the stairs and hung, fell into the river and drowned. So many lost we couldn't keep track of the bodies. In girl scouts, they teach us to tie a square knot, but it never holds. In the tent we pitched in the yard, you could hear them disappearing with a hiss over the neighborhood. Going out like stars.
Down near the river, the lovers quiver in park cars. Huddle in backseats under plaid blankets. The danger not in the hooked fist, the bloody knife, but your date and his ten thousand hands. Up your skirt. Down your blouse. His mother’s house in the clearing, stained with cigarettes. His bad teeth. The way he whispered come on, impatiently in the gas station checkout while you thumbed magazines. Suddenly, all of it rushing toward you like darkness. The car park, the laundry. The slow drip of the coffeepot over squalling infants. HOW TO WOW HIM IN THE BOUDOIR.HOW TO MAKE IT LOOK EASY. 31 BUNDT CAKES TO DIE FOR! You tuck a copy of Good Housekeeping beneath your jacket. Cut out out all the women, scissor out their eyes. Arrange them on the bed like dolls. Near the river, the cops rarely come this far down. Rarely knock against the glass to check that everything is all right.