Curse Word, Lark Lasky

112 CURSE WORD Lark Lasky

Once I said, at eight years old in a dress made starched for funeral and wedding “I swear to God I saw the ocean.” We raced, he and I, and the adults further down that stretch of sand likely thought we were siblings. Lucas dared me to do it, and when I stepped forward and felt where the ground was no longer burning at my skin, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything wrong at all. There was the lake. Which one, I don’t know. It was the lake, one of ten thousand, and it didn’t look like a lake at all. Maybe it was really that beautiful; maybe our childish imaginations made the pictures different in our heads. I could see the bottom, as far back as I could look, I could see the daring bottom through water that was turquoise, the way it looked on the pamphlets. The way it was supposed to look far away from here. We weren’t at the lake. We were at the ocean. The ocean, this striking new concept which only existed next to the word vacation or trip out east, never here. But Lucas said it, wading behind me, and then I said it too. Ocean, ocean, ocean! I did not know I was infected, then. I am much older now, and I know that was a lake, and I know what it really means to swear to God. I have picked dirty things and things that were too clean from under my nails, and both had me clawing for hours at soap and hot water so that I could make sure I knew it was gone. I never much learned how to appreciate continuity or moderation. I have seen things that magnetize like car crashes, I have touched scale and skin and slick. I grew taller and the things within me grew sharper, meaner, stronger to hold and easier to carry. I believe they are things from the dawn, that first dawn. Man saw the sunrise and man thought it was beautiful

because he knew something else had made it just for him. Today, we think it beautiful because we know how far away the sun is, and we know how long it took for that stretch of pale pink and gold to creep its way across our breakfast tables, our coffee mugs. I am much older now, and the things that are easier to carry have stirred with each stretching year. My horrors have turned red and vivid now, like some kind of bird of paradise stuck caught in my throat, clawing at the fleshy pulp to try and make me sing the only song it knows how. Some psalm, some hymn. I choke trying to keep it down. My horrors are real and human and strictly made for human grief. Human consumption. Man-made sounds that will never be shaken to nature-noise. We are created in His image and it is in His image that we may scream and thrash and howl like a new kind of beast, exiled from the garden. Beast in exile is constantly searching. It is why I, little girl with blonde curls and white frock, was beast. I with boy who looked like me, streaking toward hot sand and cold waters we thought would be warm and stinging. We got to the church and proudly pronounced, thinking the adults would be happy to hear us say “God,” “we swear to ___ we saw it!” There were murmurs and whispers and nobody was pleased. I looked at him and he nodded to me, and we sat in silence while someone much older and much meaner droned on about death, a metallic, loathsome insect overhead.

On the way back from that drive, the ocean-spot was gone. We just saw lake. Steel-gray waves with choppy performances, cold dark sands that were splattered with too many rocks. God was gone. The garden was gone. We had again been shut away from it.

Lucas leaned in his seat next to mine.

This doppelgänger with my same eyes, with my own hair. This fragmented mirror with the same restless fervor, his ceaseless smile. Uncle Jon always said that I was the lucky one. He was cousin that looked like me, cousin that acted like me, that felt and wanted and knew like me. He would die before the age of twenty, tucking away at pills that we both felt and wanted and knew. I was staring so long in that cursed reflective surface that I had ceased to see a face, and could imagine only disjointed features. Smudged up green and dirty darkened blonde. To remove your face from his face, and her from his rib. To obliterate. Long after the death, this side effect would not go away. I would continue to match my mirror. I would purge the infection that he could not shake.

Back in the car. His suit still damp. Features still my own. Childish voice in a serious whisper that belonged to the dawn said, “i know we saw it. i know we felt it.” When I gave no response, he smiled my smile and he leaned closer still. Shoulder to shoulder. Brother to sister. Voice no longer childish. Two lifetimes in his confession. “I swear to God I saw the ocean.”

Born, Christian Hastad Inkjet Printing and Oil Paint