Still by Liz Rhaney

Sti ll Liz R ha ney

ble of

C ont

ent s Still 8 Why I Wrote 18 Where I Wrote 24 Who I Am 30

“Some people tel l me t h i s s t o r y i s a f a n t a s y. And I ask them: If it is, then what d id I do during my t en d a y s at s e a?” -T h e S t o r y o f a Sh ipw recked Sailor Gabriel García Márquez

Sti ll 8

They’re yelling The ship won’t move. I’ll stand still for a second. Surely, by now, I’ll feel...no. It’s still not moving. I have to get back to the main deck. Everyone is everywhere, running, confused. Everyone except one of the apprentices. I think she said she was 14, maybe 15. What’s her name? Bernice. Her name is Bernice. And something over the rail transfixes her, hypnotizes her. Her lips are moving but I can’t hear her. I can’t tell if she’s talking to herself or the sea. “The water’s all brown and it’s not moving. The water’s all brown and it’s not moving.” Her voice is so deadpan, it would be funny any other time. In this time, though, it’s artic. She’s right. The water is opaque brown, shiny. I can’t see anything through it. And it’s still. Unnervingly still. And so are the sails. The fore and main topgallant sails are rounded and full, holding an imaginary wind. There’s no sun, no clouds. The sky is a blanket of beige. The only movement is that of the crew on board, and it’s frantic. Some ABs climb the shrouds to try to move the sails, but it doesn’t work. 2nd Mate Guineva Fields 10

directs a few ABs to try to get the rowboats of the skids, but they’re frozen too. The rudder, the guns in port, even the wheel. It’s all frozen. Yet everyone keeps trying to do something; as if their movement can somehow breathe life back into the ship, wake it

all her weight. The line between her eyes is shallow now. Her face sinks into her fingers, and her eyes sink into the maps on her desk.

up from this mysterious slumber. Everyone but the apprentice, Bernice, who hasn’t lifted her eyes. She and I are the only immobile ones in this confusion.

where we are, or why we are where we are.” By the time she finishes that sentence, all her energy escapes from her mouth.

I see Captain Juanita Mills on the Quarterdeck, talking with a group of ABs that just climbed down the shrouds. The line between her eyebrows is deep. Her brain runs just like the crew, searching for any kind of mental life raft, but it can’t find one.

“We can’t find an answer, captain.” Fields’ energy is also escaping her mouth. I don’t know how many words she can get out before all her energy is gone. “We were on course, not quite 5 nmi outside London. And then the ship...well ma’am the ship just froze. Like an invisible layer of ice, just...just covered the whole thing. I couldn’t get the wheel to move. Some of the apprentices started shouting about the sea freezing, turning brown. Some of the ABs shouted about the sun just vanishing, the sky turning beige. In a blink, Captain. It feels like we blinked and we were here. That crew is scarred, and...well...I dare say I am too.”

“Captain, if I may. What we’re doing isn’t working. Maybe we should sit down and try to figure out what’s going on, where we are. Right now, we’re running to nowhere.” She’s chewing on my proposal. Her eyes are looking at mine, but they have a far off glaze over them. Her brain finally has a life raft, but the line between her eyes is still deep. “Alright. Get Fields and meet me in the saloon.” Fields is still with the ABs and unable to make any progress with the rowboats. We enter the captain’s saloon. Captain Mills sinks into her chair with 12

“What the devil is going on? I can’t figure out

Captain’s breathing is deep. Her eyes move from the maps to Fields, reading Fields’ face. Her eyes move toward me. “And what about you?” There are no words in my head or my throat. Maybe if I move my mouth, some words will appear.

“I don’t have answer either captain. Fields is right.” The words are coming. “It does feel like it happened faster than we could stop it. I can’t even tell you what “it” is. So…” What can I say? “So maybe we have to wait.” The line between Captain’s eyes gets deep again. “Wait for what?” I don’t want to say the words. “For it to pass ma’am. To get to the other side of it.” Time must be frozen too. I can’t feel time moving between the moment I say those words and this moment when Captain is standing. I can feel her searching for something to tell us, to tell the crew, to tell herself. “If either of you is the praying type,” Captain Mills stands over the maps, her eyes on both me and Fields, “stay here, and do just that. If not…” She pauses. In the pause, her eyes turn from us to look out the window. She turns and walks back toward deck. Her words linger in the air around her desk like cigarette smoke. I feel Fields’ eyes on the side of my face. I look back at her. A deep line is between her eyes now too. I suppose there’s one between mine as well. We don’t want to walk thru the smoke of Captain’s words, but the alternative, praying in the stillness, seems even harder. So Fields 14

goes first, and I follow. The stillness has finally infected the entire crew. They all sit on the floor of the deck, heavy as if their weight pulls them further and further down. And the apprentice, Bernice, is still transfixed over the rail. I doubt her eyes have moved since I first saw her. Time may well be frozen. Captain is now at the center of the ship. Seems like she’s looking at every single person on board. Some of the crew manage to look back at her, lines between their eyes almost as deep as hers. Some of them don’t have the energy. They stare at their hands. The floor. The sails. The sky. All with that far off glaze over their eyes. The captain’s lips fold into each other, and then back out. They slowly part, but there is no sound. So she closes them. Once again, her brain searches for a life raft, but can’t find one. Maybe if you start to speak, the words will appear. I send this raft from my eyes to hers. She inhales. “I found it!” The captain’s lips are still closed. Was that her voice? “I found it! I found the ship!”

That’s not the captain’s voice! She’s not saying that!

A smile spreads across the child’s face. “I found my toy ship. Wanna see?”

“Where was it?” “Over there” Now there’s two?! How are there two? Where’s that coming from? We all jerk our heads any direction we can. Who found us? A shadow crawls over the rail where Bernice stands and across the deck. For the first time, her eyes aren’t on the water. They are straight up, and wide. My eyes follow her line of sight, and they must be as big as hers. A shape covers most of the sky, moving up and down, left and right. It has so many parts, I can’t see them all. Do I know this shape? “Captain. What, what is this?” Shock fills Bernice’s voice. I glance quickly toward the captain and then back at the shape. Then I turn back to the captain because, for the first time, the line between her eyes is gone. Her eyes must be wider than anyone else’s. Her brain finally has a raft, but the raft is full of holes. The words escape her mouth. “It’s a child, Bernice.”

y I Wrot e

When I was a child, I had a ship called the Cutty Sark on my desk. How I got that ship is a story on its own. My mother and I were living in my grandmotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hospital room while she was recovering from surgery. One day my mom took me to the gift shop when she came back from work in the morning and let me get one thing in the store. Of all the shiny and colorful things I saw, the one thing that captivated my eight-year-old mind was the ship. Ropes and sails covered the entire thing. The sails were full like they were holding an imaginary wind. I constantly played with it on the cot I slept on in the hospital and in my own bed when we returned home. I collected more model ships as I got older, some much bigger than the Cutty Sark. I watched the Twilight Zone as a child as well and started watching it again during the quarantine. Each episode challenges the viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sense of perspective. The stories where people turn out to be dolls or mannequins led me to think about the ship again. What if there was a crew on that ship? How would they feel when they realize that they are in two perpendicular realities; that they were on something designed to move but isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t? 20

This COVID Time, which we seem to be either at the beginning or the middle of as I write this, feels like being on a toy ship. The world is meant to move, but we canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t (or at least that movement is restricted and discouraged). As Captain Fields said, it happened in the blink of an eye. We woke up, and the world was different, familiar yet unfamiliar. I realized the metaphor of being on the Cutty Sark fit even more than I thought as I researched the history of the ship. At one point, the ship was one of the fastest on the sea, transporting tea from the eastern part of the British Empire back to Britain. A symbol of speed, commerce, capitalism, and the life we know is now frozen, ineffective. We are feeling a form of this now, the systems we have feel outdated, slowed, ineffective. I wrote that we are at the beginning or the middle of this COVID Time, but there is no way to know for sure right now. This story is about that uncertainty, that inability to find the words to say, that moment of finding a life raft full of holes and having to find a way forward. 22

W he

re I Wrot e

Each place is built of spirits. The architecture, water, land, and air hold the spirits of the people that live/lived there, the people who have passed through, the animals that live on it, and the plants that grow from it. The spirits are entangled through time, forming the unique tapestry of a specific location in space. So I attuned myself to the spirits of the Canterbury Shaker Village by immersing myself in the space. I have swum, slept, worked, played, and sat still in those spirits. Crickets sang me to sleep. Roosters woke me back up. Butterflies danced around me. I flew down hills as Joan Baez sang to La Llorona., waded with fish in clear water, read under an umbrella of trees, and searched for fireballs in the sky among a sea of stars. As someone built on the rhythm of the city, I am learning the rhythm of the rural. The fast pace of the city contrasts with the stillness of the Village, particularly at night. Where in the city, you can hear boomboxes, or sirens, or even very public meltdowns, here you only hear crickets and the wind. Navigating this difference became one of the themes of the story.

The distilled nature of Shaker design influenced how I designed this book, pairing down the text and images to their essential form. I duplicated the expansive space here in the Village in the pages of this book by using negative space as a framing tool, making this piece a reflection of the place where it was made. I am now entwined with the spirits of this place. As my time here nears the end, I thing about how large that web is and how much it will grow. 28

o I Am

Liz Rhaney is a video and sound ar tist who uses her k nowledge of d i f fer ent d i s c ipl i n e s t o c r e at e a mu ltilayered ar tistic practice. Her work is i nspired by her passion a nd ex p er ienc e w it h c om mu n it y a c t ivism. Her first experience with art w a s a s a d r u m m e r, w h i c h s h e h a s b e en doi n g for 3 d e c a d e s. She ob t a i n e d h e r B FA f r o m A r m s t r o n g S t a t e Un iv e r s i t y (n o w A r m s t r o n g Ca mpus of Georg ia Southern Un ivers i t y ) i n 2 016 , f o c u s i n g o n G r a p h i c Desig n. She also minored in writing, t a k i n g c l a s s e s i n fem i n i s t a n d c u lt u r a l s t ud ie s a s wel l a s work i n g for the ca mpus newspaper The I n kwel l. S h e o b t a i n e d h e r M FA f r o m M a i n e C ol le ge of A r t i n 2020. She i s c u r rently researching the use of video a s a mu lt i sen sor y for m of s t or y t el ling and activism.

h t t p s : // l i z a r t 91 2 .w i x s i t e . c o m / l i z a r t @l i _ z _ a _ r_ t 33