The Foundationalist, Vol. VII, Issue I (Spring 2022)

VOLUME VII | ISSUE I

THE FOUNDATIONALIST

SPRING 2022

The Foundationalist is a literary journal edited by undergraduate students at Bowdoin College, University of Iowa, and Yale University. This issue is made possible by support from the Bowdoin College English Department and is published semiannually in the Spring and Fall.

Copyright © 2022 by The Foundationalist All Rights Reserved.

Our digital edition is made complimentary on our website, thefoundationalist.com Public use print copies are available at each respective branch as well as Gulf of Maine in Brunswick, ME. Fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and literary analyses are accepted twice a year in October and March. There are no page limits, word counts, or specific themes. Visit our website for full submission guidelines and deadlines. All contributors must be current undergraduate students.

A N N A K A L A BU K H OVA BAILEY A. MOSKOWITZ CAMPBELL SHARPE CLEMENTINE WILLIAMS DYLAN RICHMOND ELISE NASS EMMA SCHICK E S T H E R E U N S U H PA R K HANNA S. KLASING ISABELLE EDGAR KELSIE BENNETT

KINSALE DRAKE M A X L E E FA N G M E G H A N FA R B R I D G E MICHELLE CHEN N O R A S U L L I VA N H O R N E R SAMMY AIKO SHADE SHELBY RICE S U R YA H E N D R Y ZHUAN (ELIZABETH) ZHU

TABLE OF CONTENTS

F IC T I O N

PO ET RY

Crickets EMMA SCHICK

14

| 68

I Don't Want To Work No Mo' CLEMENTINE WILLIAMS

In God's Image NORA HORNER SULLIVAN

21

| 70

Wormhood SURYA HENDRY

Open Mouth, Open Wound KELSIE BENNETT

36

| 72

Anthropology SAMMY AIKO

patron saint of feral women SHELBY RICE

54

| 74

White Hair Don't Care ZHUAN (ELIZABETH) ZHU

Warmth ELISE NASS

56

| 77

Evan MICHELLE CHEN

79

Ouroboros DYLAN RICHMOND

82

DINÉ GIRL DETONATES LOCAL UNIVERSITY GALLERY KINSALE DRAKE

84

Magnetism CAMPBELL SHARPE

85

Lewinsky as Allegory ESTHER EUNUSH PARK

87

Secondhand Addict HANNA S. KLASING

89

The Host SHADE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

E SSAY

N ON F ICT I O N

She Has Brought 92 | 118 Fantastic Bodies: Feminist, Post-HumanThem to Her Senses istic Embodiment in ISABELLE EDGAR

the Poetry of Marianne Moore and H.D MEGHAN FARBRIDGE

a complete guide in 100| 138 Art as Balm and Malady how to go to heaven BAILEY A. MOSKOWITZ ANNA KALABUKHOVA

Words of a Wordless Boy MAX LEE FANG

106

STAFF EDITOR-IN- CHIEF KYUBIN KIM, Bowdoin College LILY POPPEN, Bowdoin College RACHEL YANG, Bowdoin College AZZURRA SARTINI-RIDEOUT, University of Iowa ANYA RAZMI, Yale University

A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R CLAYTON WACKERMAN, Bowdoin College JACK WELLSCHLAGER, Bowdoin College BRETT ZACH, University of Iowa HANWEN ZANG, Yale University

WEB EDITOR & DEVELOPMENT DIREC TOR BEN NORWOOD, Bowdoin College EMMA SIMPSON, Bowdoin College

E D I TO R I A L B OA R D Bryant Blackburn Film Bussabun Hanna Cha Andreea Ciobanu Madeline DeCoste Mia Diaz Cara Dulin Cathy Duong Owen Gramley Shoshi Gordon

Melina Hegelheimer Christina Howell Abbey Kim Hannah Kim Shandiin Largo Madelyn Lemons Callum Lingenfelter James Lu Malcolm MacDougall Shayley Martin Will McDonough Jessica Meiwen Amelia Meyers Austria Morehouse Annalisa Nehmer John Nguyen Emerson Peters Grace Pignolo Dex Provido Rachel Reyes Andrea Rodríguez Kieran Ruder Nora Sullivan Horner Elena Unger Angela Wallace Jack Wellschlager Campbell Zeigler DESIGN

•

Logo KATARINA SILVERMAN Cover Art RACHEL YANG

EDITOR'S LETTER "How do you deal with it? The grief of seven billion?"

This question was recently posed by a friend following an unfathomable act of violence at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas United States. Historians and anthropologists, even biologists, have pointed to a cycle of violence that existed since the inception of human-life and our so easily assumed 'modernity.' In some ways, they point us to concrete events and eras to learn from it, to cope, and in other ways, normalize acts of violence, naturalize it.

Every country is distinct in its identity: in which boundless beauty emerges but simultaneously, the uncertainty and paralysis of what comes next for their community. These experiences do not know or abide by human norms, the geo-political borders, the journalists talking about hundreds of policies proposed, passed, or rejected.

Our day to day is interwoven with everything from wonder of the earthworm to the strength of poetry that can probe self to the memories that leave us lost and sometimes wordless. "How do we deal with it? The overwhelming stimulation of the uncontrollable?"

We do not have the answers, nor make any claim that we ever did. We do not claim to have the authority to bring about the critiques or questions that are elicited

from our lived experiences and may concern us, but not others. There are things that are unimaginable, no matter how hard we try.

Writers are not only a product of the times but producers of imagination. To carry even the smallest kernel of how one navigates feelings of loneliness, shame, redemption, defiance in a story is to let us look at humanity not in a different light, but in one of fragmentation; a world bound in glass-like fragility.

As Adrienne Rich wrote in "What Kind of Times are These" (1995): I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods...

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.//And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you /anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these/ to have you listen at all, it's necessary/to talk about trees.

Turning to words is what we do but to turn the page of this issue is a starting point, not a panacea to escape a world we cannot tolerate. Even the simple conversations about trees and about what we see reflect the ways in which we imagine how to deal with it. Even broken glass refracts light through a plethora of mediums. We hope that the piercing voices of our authors hold the light and share it with you.

The Editorial Board 14. June 2022

❦

F I C T I O N

14

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Crickets Emma Schick University of Colorado Boulder

M

aisie comes back home, unexpected, on a Tuesday afternoon. One minute, you’re about to be carsick in the back of Mom’s beat up, sour smelling minivan. The next, there’s a girl on the front porch you don’t recognize. She’s smoking a cigarette and grins around it when she sees you, putting up her hand to wave.

“Birdie!” She calls, and you rush through the grass, excited even though you don’t understand who this young woman is. She stubs out her cigarette against Grandma’s blue glass ashtray and tosses her arms open for a hug.

“Remember me?” Her voice swims through your tangled brown hair. You shake your head no against her bony shoulder, and she pulls back. “Maisie. Your big sister? You’ve only got the one, kid.”

“Sorry,” you say, because you are. It’s one thing not to remember one of Mom’s old friends when they pinch your cheek and call you a big girl all syrupy sweet, but your own sister? You know you ought to remember your own sister. It’s not like no one ever talks about her.

“Maisie, we didn’t think you’d be in this early.”

Maisie wraps an arm around your shoulder and sits you next to her, her other arm coming up to block the sun as she squints at Mom. “Caught an earlier bus. Hope that’s alright.”

“Well.”

Mom’s standing out in the yard with her hands on her hips.

She’s mad, you’re old enough to know what mad looks like, all

C R I C K E T S

puckered lips like a little asshole as Grandma would say.

“Birdie’s getting real big, isn’t she?” Maisie squishes you into her side. “She’s gotta be four now, right?”

“Five,” you correct her, holding up the fingers.

“Five, sorry about that.”

“Well,” Mom repeats, “No use sitting out here in the sun all day. Get up, up.”

Mom and Maisie move from the front room to the living room, into the kitchen and back again, Maisie trailing behind Mom like a sad puppy. You join the lineup behind Maisie, then you get tired and settle down in front of the TV for afternoon cartoons.

Tom and Jerry is your favorite. Every episode, no matter how bad the cat or mouse gets it, they’re going right back at each other again. They run in circles, explode heads, hollering in a way that makes you laugh and laugh until you fall back against the itchy carpet.

You see Mom and Maisie’s feet on the floor, looking like they’re walking upside down on the ceiling from the angle you crane your head at. That’d be funny, if people could walk on the ceiling. You’d have to hop around the ceiling fan in the summer or the blades would bruise your shins. Above the fan, Mom and Maisie’s feet almost touch toe to toe.

“—planning to stay?”

“Like I said over the phone, I just need to get back on my feet.”

“So a couple weeks? Months? A year?”

“Yeah, Mom, I’m really itching to stick around here for a whole year. I’m doing the best I can…”

Mom sighs and you tuck your chin to your chest. Jerry just snapped a mouse trap over Tom’s tail—he’s screaming now, eyes all crazy. Laughter peels up out of you helplessly.

They migrate back to the kitchen and soon after the pan is sizzling. You close your eyes, trying to smell what’s for dinner.

Meat for sure, maybe pork. The sun goes out of the living room, sneaking back behind the mountains. Grandma’s cigarette

15

16

C R I C K E T S

smoke reappears in the house a few seconds before she does; Mom sighs and puts her hand on her hip as Grandma walks by, cigarette folded under her thin lip.

“Maisie-girl!”

Maisie dodges the glowing stump of Grandma’s cigarette as she’s wrapped in a hug. Mom mouths something to Grandma, making her lips big and exaggerated around the words. It looks to you like gibberish, but Grandma seems to get it.

“Let’s eat outside tonight, hm? Good night to use the porch.”

Grandma’s word is law around here, so outside dinner it is.

Mom hands you some paper plates and says to go set the porch table and come back for the silverware when you’re done. You count out four paper plates, digging your thumbnail around where they’re stuck to get them separate. There’s only three chairs, which leaves you standing around with one plate.

“What’s taking you so long, Birdie?”

Grandma comes out and stubs her cigarette in the clay ashtray. She’s squinting at you because she’s not wearing her glasses and then she shakes her head and starts coming over.

“This is no good,” Grandma shakes her head again, puts a hand on your shoulder, “You wouldn’t know of any other chairs around here, would you?”

“Nope.”

“Then move two of these chairs over here.” Grandma points to a spot across from the porch swing. “We’ll eat off our laps.”

You move the chairs and Grandma moves the plates roughly to where everyone will be sitting. That only leaves the silverware, because Mom and Grandma don’t like you handling the glasses yet on account of how you’ve broken two in the set of eight. You open the screen door and march back inside, planning on how you’ll get one of the spots on the swing.

Surely everyone’s going to want a swing seat.

Mom and Maisie are in the kitchen still, but they’re both silent now. Mom’s standing over the shredded pork like she’s going to tell it what’s what. Maisie’s at the kitchen table, elbows

C R I C K E T S

up on top even though that isn’t allowed, and her head is in her hands. Silverware forgotten, you approach Maisie. People that old don’t usually cry.

“Are you okay?”

You try and put one of your hands on top of hers, but Maisie moves her hands and sweeps you up on her lap instead.

There’s sticky wet marks down her cheeks where tears have been gathering. You wrap your arms around her shoulders, putting your face to her chest. Underneath the smoke, she smells kind of salty, like she’s been running around outside.

“Aw, I’m alright, Birdie. Thank you so much for asking.”

She smiles down at you and you realize that she’s the prettiest girl in the world. Her puffy red cheeks make her eyes look that much bigger, like Disney princess eyes. You remember Grandma talking once about how she was pretty, and then Mom said yeah, pretty—and then Grandma smacked her hands over your ears like pillows.

Maisie sniffs and wipes at her eyes; her hands are still kind of wet when she brushes her palm against your cheek. Mom turns around, her left eyebrow halfway up her forehead. Maisie leans in kind of close and whispers in your ear.

“How would you like to have an older sister back home?”

“Really?” You ask. Gemma Brown has a big sister who sounds kind of awful, but Annabeth and Natalie both love their older sisters.

“Yeah,” Maisie’s talking at normal volume now, looking between you and Mom, “We can go for ice cream, and play games, and I can even bring you fun lunches at school.”

“Really?” You tilt back a little and almost fall off of the chair, but Maisie sticks and arm out and saves you.

“Maisie,” Mom says, voice and eyes all sharp, “Knock. It. Off.” “If she has a big sister, then she should see her big sister, right, Birdie?”

“Mom, please.” You drag out the please, hands together at your chest. Mom looks so angry with her face all twisted up that you almost excuse yourself to go outside with Grandma.

17

18

C R I C K E T S

Maisie’s arms come around your stomach, trapping you. Her hands copy the gesture you’re making.

“See? She’s so excited. Doesn’t she deserve to have a big sister around? You used to love that idea, Mom, that I’d be around for Birdie.”

“Pleasepleaseplease,” you whisper, screwing your eyes shut like you’re making a wish. If only it was nighttime, and then you could wish on the first star.

You hear the screen door slide open and the sound of Grandma’s slippers padding against the yellow tiles in the kitchen.

“Maisie, I need your help outside. And bring the silverware if you’d please.”

Maisie lets you up and follows Grandma out without any complaint. Mom watches the two of them leave, only turning back to the stove when Grandma closes the big door behind them.

“Birdie,” she sighs, “Let’s see how these next few nights go, hm? Maisie might not want to stay. She doesn’t always say what she means.”

Mom unwraps the plastic on a new bag of buns, handing them down to you. You stick your thumb in the middle and rip them apart, relishing the snap as the soft pieces separate and the yeast smell that wafts up after. When you start putting them back up on the counter, Mom clicks her tongue.

“Put them outside on the plates, girl. What do you think you’re doing?”

Normally Mom and Grandma ask you that when you’re being silly, and you giggle and they giggle and the world feels like summer. But the way Mom says it now is kind of like someone hurt her feelings. You don’t know why. The best you can do is wrap your arms around her hips for a second and then take the buns outside like you were told.

Grandma and Maisie are hanging out by the end of the porch, passing a cigarette back and forth even though Grandma told you last week she was cutting down. Mom

C R I C K E T S

doesn’t like it when Grandma lets you get close when she’s smoking, so you hang back by the swing and watch them. It takes you a minute to realize that they don’t know you’re there.

“So, they let you smoke in those places?”

“At mine they did, yeah.” Smoke swirls up into the air and then Maisie’s tone turns sour. “It’s not like I’m not taking this seriously. Nicotine’s allowed.”

“I know you’re doing better, darlin’,” Grandma pauses to cough. Maisie gets the cigarette. “You just need to give her a little time.”

“I’ve given her my whole life. How much more time does she need?”

“Hey now, you shouldn’t talk about your mother like that.

All she ever does is worry about you.”

Maisie’s shoulders slink in like a cat trying to avoid being touched. She stubs out her cigarette on the ashtray between them and turns around, finally noticing you.

“Hey, girlie,” she sighs, gesturing to the buns, “Dinner ready?”

Grandma goes in to bring out the potato chips while Mom brings out the pan, her hand tucked away in a potholder shaped like a chicken head. Maisie tears little strips into the edge of her paper plate, thumbing at them while Mom spoons out the meat onto everyone’s plates.

“Thanks,” Maisie says the second the wooden spoon pulls away.

“You’re welcome.” Mom’s voice could freeze over Grandma’s glass of iced tea.

Grandma comes around shaking out potato chips onto everyone’s plate. She puts yours directly on the sandwich and you put the top bun on gentle, careful not to squish your chips.

Mom sighs again when Grandma does it with her own meal, but it’s like she’s said before there’s only so many arguments I can have in a day, Birdie, and half of them aren’t worth having.

Juice drips down your chin when you bite into your sandwich, making crystals of potato chip stick to your skin. You wipe

19

20

C R I C K E T S

them off with the back of your hand and lick the paste it makes. Maisie laughs and you do it again, giggling with her.

She kicks off the ground and the porch swing rocks beneath the both of you.

“Birdie, you’re so silly,” Grandma says. You do it a third time and Mom raises her eyebrows all the way up and reminds you about table manners.

“We’re not at a table, are we?” Maisie asks.

“Lord, it’s a nice night to be out,” Grandma says, loud, before Mom can get mad. “The crickets are coming out.

Listen.”

Everyone goes quiet and sure enough, crickets are chirping in the grass. You wonder what they’re saying to each other, if you’re all sitting and listening to the crickets argue. You complained to Mom once that Gemma Brown’s family never fights, and Mom said every living creature that isn’t alone, fights, even the crickets.

Maisie leans back and closes her eyes.

“Haven’t heard this in a while.”

“It’s nice,” Mom says, “Peaceful, I guess.”

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

In God's Image Nora Sullivan Horner Bowdoin College

I do not trust a story if I am not able to tell it myself.

The warped lens of millennia has a way of distorting the truth, sometimes cracking it in half entirely. I do not remember being born. But I remember the things that happened after that. And if I close my eyes for long enough, I am brought back to those first days in that first place.

Would you like to hear something true? ❦

The first thing I felt was the sun’s golden warmth playing across my skin. I pulled air into my lungs that smelled of rain and grass and the color blue. I opened my eyes. The white light shifted easily through the air, honeyed and soft, as if through water. Everywhere was green. I was lying on a carpet of soft, lush moss. A nearby stream winked and sparkled brilliantly. Towering pine trees fanned around me like the columns of a temple, holding up the arching vault of the sky. The silence then was like religion and has stayed with me all my days. I curled my fingers into the soft, brown earth and I felt fire in me.

The second thing I felt was delight. To have a body, to be a being, separate and thinking — oh, what a gift,

21

22

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

what a treasure! I sat up and saw my skin gently shifting colors like the blushing of a sunset. Rich umber.

Sweet honey. Warm alabaster. My hair was a lustrous, unyielding black. I held up my hands and loved their delicate sturdiness, my long fingers and pearlescent nails. My hands were like promises and I cherished them. I touched my arms and my neck, felt the edges of my collarbone. I admired my body: my breasts that were like love, my hips like strength, my thighs like forgiveness. I traced my legs; I flexed and I felt power, felt like liquid thunder and endless ocean. I held myself close, then, wrapping my arms around my body. I was mine, mine. I smiled and was alive. ❦ A wind blew and I heard movement behind me.

“Lilith.”

I turned around. And there, standing before me was a man. His skin changed like mine, his hair was black like mine, his body made of the same clay as mine. But he was not like me. He was tall and looked down on me. His eyes were curiously dark.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Adam,” he replied and then was silent. Adam. I eyed him carefully. I noticed how he stood. He was not just tall, but also proud, his arms folded firmly across his solid chest, his weight spread evenly on his sturdy legs.

I observed his face. There was something harsh to his beauty. I saw it in the sharpness of his brow, the defined edge of his jaw, the lines of his cheekbones. There was a fullness to his lips, a darkness to his eyelashes,

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

and a power that ran through him in the same way his veins snaked down his arms. He was beautiful, yes, but there was something else beneath that.

“Why did you say ‘Lilith’? Is that my name?” He remained quiet, his eyes steady but the corners of his mouth pulled faintly upwards.

“Lilith…” he repeated, slowly, as if tasting the sound of my name. “You’re very, very beautiful,” he added, his smile fading. I shifted uncomfortably under his gaze.

“What are you looking at?” he asked suddenly. “Nev er mind,” he mumbled. He looked around awkwardly and scratched his left elbow. “I think we should walk around. Maybe we’ll be able to get a better sense of where we are.” I nodded slowly and rose to my feet.

He had already turned and started to walk away from the clearing.

When we reached the tree line he stepped right through, letting the branches swing sharply back at me.

I paused and shielded my face.

“Could you hold the branches? I can’t walk.”

“Oh,” he paused. “Sorry.” He began walking more slowly, but only slightly. After a moment he asked, “What do you think this place is?” I wasn’t sure what he meant by this. How do you describe a miracle? The Garden was everything; it was wonderful, it was life.

“I think it’s beautiful,” I finally decided. I saw his head tilt back, as if amused.

“That’s not what I meant. I meant, what do you think this place is?” His repetition of the question made it no clearer to me. “Do you know what I think?” he quickly

23

24

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

asked. He didn’t wait for my reply. “I think it’s a kind of gift.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, as you said yourself, it’s exceedingly rich. I have a theory,” he continued, “I think, for a place to be this wonderful, there has to be someone behind it.

Someone like me, but… greater. I want to try and find Him.” Him. He turned back momentarily. If I didn’t see the unchanging coolness in his eyes, I wouldn’t have believed he was serious.

“Why do you think that this being is like you?” I asked sharply.

“Don’t get upset. I just didn’t think He would be a She. I guess He could be.”

We walked on until we came across a large pool where the stream joined up with a river. Here the flow of water slowed, deepened. The pool was piercingly clear and I could easily see the multicolored bed of pebbles at its bottom. At its center, it was so deep that I could only see a rich, opaque turquoise. There were smooth shadows that glided fluidly through it. “I wonder what they are,” Adam wondered next to me. I thought for a moment, admiring their graceful shape.

“Fish,” I decided simply.

I crouched down at its shore and dipped my hand in.

The water was sweetly cool but not cold. I got up and began to wade in, the water slowly rising and wrapping around my body. I closed my eyes as I went deeper, as the water rose up over my head, continued until I could no longer touch the bottom and began to swim. I

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

surfaced and turned over onto my back and floated, the sun’s warmth still kissing my skin, the cool water holding me gently.

Suddenly, a loud noise split the silence and water splashed onto my face. My eyes shot open and I quickly looked around. Adam had thrown in a stone not far from me. I looked at him and frowned. “I wanted to see if I could hit one.” I tread water a moment more, then made my way back to the shore. As I was wringing the water from my hair, I noticed he was staring at me.

We continued moving. ❦

As he walked, he held out his hand and caught branches, roughly stripping them of their leaves. He did this over and over until I asked him to stop.

“You know, I’ve added to my theory,” he declared, after throwing a handful of crumpled leaves to the ground. He reached for another branch. “After a lot of thought, I’m left with two questions. From whom is this gift and why are we here? Do you know why we’re here?” Slowly, I began to feel like I was being tested.

And that I was failing. “To find an answer to those questions. I think this place is also a mystery and that I’m simply supposed to solve it. I think it’s a kind of challenge, a test of intelligence.

“How will you solve it? What will happen then?” And why are you the one to do so?

“By listening to the same being who put us here, who must have created this place. I’ll only be able to succeed by listening to Him, following His command

25

26

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

absolutely.”

“You think it will speak with you?”

“Of course. This whole time, I feel I’ve been guided

by Him.” “Why not me?”

He shrugged carelessly.

“I don’t know,” he said, casually and with a tinge of pride. “I was born before you. I found you while you were still waking up.”

“And if it’s solved?” I returned to the second question he left unanswered.

“Of course, He will reward me.”

“Of course?” I repeated, struggling to keep my voice even. “Why do you care about him so much? You don’t even know if he exists.”

His back straightened.

“Don’t talk like that.” He stopped short and turned around abruptly. His eyes glinted like ice.

“I’ll say what I think. I don’t know if there is a being and I don’t know if it’s like you. Neither do you, not really. You don’t know anything more than me, do you.”

I was not asking a question.

Something in his face shifted, something like a shadow settled over his features. His eyes narrowed.

“No, I think I do,” he said slowly, finally. A long pause stretched out between us. Something hot and sharp sparked and flared in my chest. I shot fire from my eyes as I stared at him and held my ground.

“I think we’re just here to be. To explore. And I don’t think it matters if anyone created all this or not.”

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

“Really? You think all of this happened by chance?”

A smile spread over his face, but one that only made his face colder.

“Who’s to say that it didn’t? Doesn’t that make it all the more precious?”

He was silent.

“You say this place is a gift. Tell me, then. Who is it for?”

Something behind his eyes flashed and his smile seemed to deepen.

Then he closed his eyes and his brows furrowed slightly as if listening to a very faint sound. He opened his eyes with a bright determination that startled me and said, “He’s calling me.” And when I had nothing to say, he added, with that same soft smile, “You don’t hear it?” He nodded silently, turned and began to walk on. I stood still, staring, for a moment but quickly rushed to follow him and together we pushed deeper into the garden.

In those early moments, I did not hear any voice.

But, after much reflection, I have come to think that neither did he. ❦

The world was like a blossom, opening further and further with every step I took, sweetly inviting me in.

The air was heavy with the scent of flowers nestled in verdant leaves like brilliant jewels. The sky was immensely blue and clear. I could still hear the sound of the river running along its bed, rushing more loudly.

I looked down to see some pristinely white flowers

27

28

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

gracefully unfurling their long petals to greet me. They were elegant little marvels all their own. I paused, closed my eyes, and leaned in, taking in their rich aroma. “These are beautiful,” I breathed quietly. Adam didn’t say anything. “I think… I think I’ll call these lilies.”

I heard a faint snicker. “You’re naming them after yourself?” He spotted a mushroom and promptly kicked it over. He stood over its broken cap for a moment and then irritably muttered, “I want to name things, too.”

“Then what did you name me after?” The question hung in the air like an overripe fruit, so swollen it bent the branch to which it still clung. Sickening, its stench unavoidable.

He started walking again and began looking hungrily around at his surroundings. I noticed that was the first time he paid any real attention to the garden.

“That! That I will call a zympher! And that, a tantarig! And that, a krimpabsis!” I followed his finger, unimpressed with his names. Their edges were sharp in my mouth and tasted bitter. As I walked behind him, I spoke my names: “I will call that an oak. That an elm. And that a willow.” He glared back at me but his eyes were quickly caught by movement up in a tree.

He tracked a small bundle of fur as it scurried among the branches. “Look at that strange thing. I bet I could catch it.” It was no bigger than my hands, ash gray and light brown, with two shiny black eyes, and a large bushy tail that twitched and swept behind it. “You are a

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

tetzaris.” He was smiling at the thing when he said this, but he looked at it with greed and spoke as if it was his.

“You’re a funny little creature,” I called up to it. “No, I think squirrel fits you better.”

Suddenly, my head snapped to the left and a sharp pain shot through me. I saw a black like midnight and then a painful flash of white like lightning as I opened my eyes. I gingerly touched my cheek. When I pulled my fingers away, they were the same red as the flowers around us. I gaped at him.

“Why —” “No, you don’t get to speak first.” His eyes were hard and glittered like the rocks at the bottom of a fatally high cliff. My shock flamed into a hot rage that coiled leadenly in my chest. His stare was biting, a chilling wind that stripped me bare. I wanted to say more, but I saw how his muscles moved cruelly beneath his skin and knew I should not. I turned silently away from him and left him to his namings.

I picked my way through a thick stand of trees. The sunlight threaded delicately through the canopy, ribbons of light falling like silk to the leaf-carpeted forest floor. The air was cool and smelled of sweet grass and moist rocks. I found myself before a small glade. The clearing was grassy and soft; trees and small rocks were sewn all around it, creating a border that separated itself from the rest of the garden. I stepped into it.

Suddenly the air became taut. I felt warm and I moved little. My heartbeat quickened and my breath caught in my chest. But I was not afraid. “Hello, my

29

30

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

daughter,” I heard from somewhere deeply among the trees. The voice was liquid, thick, intoxicating. It pierced me and held me fast where I stood. I looked up and searched for the source of the voice in the leaves.

“I saw that. How he treats you.” I heard branches bending and snapping, the sounds closer this time. Suddenly, I spied two golden eyes peering back at me, two black slits running down their middles. Holding my gaze, She slowly slipped out from the shadows, emerging, lengthening, uncoiling until all Her entirety was before me. She was as dark as midnight but sparkled like sunlight on water. She was a giant snake, many times longer than me, in places thicker than both my thighs, and, rearing up, much taller even than Adam.

In her presence I felt I was treading water. Looking at Her was like staring down into the depths of the ocean, catching the faintest glimpse of the unknowable abyss.

I could scarcely breathe. She seemed to make the very air around us, now remarkably heavy, constrict and move in the same way the moon plays with the tides.

The trees, the ground, the sky—everything around me fell away as I fell deeper into those two golden eyes.

She was exhilarating. She was suffocating. Yet still, I was not afraid; She called me daughter and, though She looked like no mother of mine, I sensed She was fiercely protective of me. “You bow to him. You should not.” I suddenly found my voice, though it came out small before Her: “I don’t want to, but he is much bigger than me.”

“Yes, but you are far, far stronger.” I paused and

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

wondered at this. “I will always be here. For you.” From behind me I heard him crashing loudly through the brush, calling my name. He sounded enraged. I looked over my shoulder and back at the snake. She stared strongly and calmly down at me. I nodded faintly and quickly stepped out of the circle. ❦

When I rejoined Adam on the path he was red, whether from exerting himself or his anger I couldn’t tell.

“Don’t do that again.” ❦

We found a lone tree in a grassy field and sat down.

Adam set to making a fire. He said that this was another gift that the being he called “God” had given him. By the time it was blazing comfortably before us, the sun had sunk lower and lower until it gently collapsed onto the horizon, and began to slowly fall through it. The sky was dyed brilliant reds and oranges, deep purples and blues. It’s evening, I thought. We sat silently for a while.

“But you know what’s funny?” He asked this as if we’d been talking earlier, but we hadn’t. He turned to look at me. The fire played in his eyes and made it look like they glowed red from within. That same curious darkness crept into his gaze. I looked nervously at him. “That, even with all the plants and animals and beautiful things I’ve seen here, there’s still something missing. Do you see?” I slowly shook my head. He leaned closer to me and placed a hand on my thigh.

31

32

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

It was heavy and wet with sweat. He breathed hotly in my ear, “Us. There’s not more of us. And…” he paused, slowly sliding his hand up and down, “I think that’s what He’d want. For us to complete his gift. To… give something up to Him, in return.” He smiled that same smile, curved like a blade, as his grip tightened. My eyes widened and soon his face was all I saw, the blacks of his eyes two circles that seemed to have swallowed up all the light, deep and hollow and so empty.

“What did your God tell you to do?” I whispered. “...love you.”

I turned my head away. ❦

The darkness had swallowed up the sky, leaving only cold pinpricks of light sparkling above me like tiny shards of the sun, as if it had shattered on the solid night, full of something heavy and sublime and wicked.

I ran to Her, breathlessly, bleeding. I fell before Her tree. I did not see Her, but I felt Her presence everywhere around me, permeating the clearing like the stench of rot and sweetness of flowers. I blinked and my tears fell into the dust. My body violently shook with sobs but I was quiet.

“Oh, my child,” She whispered. Her voice was soft to my ear. I slowly shook my head. My face was distorted, thick with pain, anguish, and rage. I heard rustling above me and when I looked up, I saw She’d laid down two half shells full of liquid before me. My breathing slowed as I cautiously eyed them. “These are the fruits of my fangs. First, a black venom to put him into a deep

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

sleep. He will not resist you when you bind him but will wake upon your first cut.”

“The first cut?” I stammered.

“Second, a scarlet venom to heal his wound. He will not be blessed with death.” I felt Her smile.

“The first cut?” I asked again.

“You are to cut him open and take one of his ribs.

Bury it where you were born and the womb of the earth will bear another woman. She will be Adam’s mate in your stead. You will be your own once more.” I was silent. “Does this not please you?”

I felt paralyzed and struggled to take in all She’d said. After a time, I slowly asked, “would she suffer as I have suffered?”

“Yes, she would.” Her words lingered in the air and made the silence that followed heavy and potent. I imagined another woman waking up on that same bed of moss, stretching her limbs for the very first time. I imagined another woman opening her hands and eyes to the world, taking it in, holding it close, losing herself among the fields and flowers and forests. I imagined another woman, in love with her body and her life and her freedom. I imagined a woman like me. And then I imagined the same Adam striding up to her, standing over her, looking down on her. I imagined the same Adam holding her wrist so tightly it bruised, striking her face so harshly it bled. I imagined the same Adam pinning her to the ground, taking from her what he took from me. The minutes stretched out; I remained quiet.

33

34

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

“But,” I whispered slowly, “would she make him suffer as I have suffered?”

“Yes, she would.” I was silent once more but for not as long.

“Then bring me his binds. Bring me my blade.”

I picked my way back to where he was sleeping. He was peaceful, the soft grass cradling him. I stood over his body and looked down on him then. He glowed in the fresh moonlight. The blue curve of my shadow warping as it laid on his form. I came closer, parted his lips, and slipped the first venom into his mouth, tilting the shell until all of the sparkling black venom slipped away. I waited. His breathing slowed and deepened. I labored around him, tying his feet and hands together. I crouched down beside him. In one hand, I gently cupped his face; in the other, I gripped the handle.

In that moment, I felt my blood coursing wickedly through my veins, hot like electricity, cruel like a wildfire. I plunged the blade into his chest, parted his flesh and fat and muscle. My hands grew wet with a reddish warmth, but they did not shake. His eyes flew open, wildly white, searching my face. He struggled fiercely against his binds. Yes, his screams were terrible. But they were not like mine. I paused and peered into his eyes. They were full of fear but flat and dull, like the crusted surface of an icebound lake. I do not remember if a smile spread on my lips then.

I raised the knife again and drove it down, down until I heard the crack of bone. Again. Again. I sunk a hand inside him and felt the gentle curve of his rib. I

I N

G O D ' S

I M A G E

tore it free. By then he was unconscious, his face empty and inscrutable in the absence of pain. I picked up the second bowl and poured the scarlet fluid into his wounds. It fell heavily into the cavernous hollow of his chest, settled. A faint crackling emanated from his wound as his flesh began to knit itself together again.

I held the bone in my hands, held it tightly. I slowly rose and made my way back to the clearing where I was born.

The snake was already waiting when I arrived. I silently fell to my knees and, holding the bloodied bone in my mouth, with both hands began to tear up the moss and claw a hole in the fertile earth. I laid down the rib and covered it again in soil. The snake watched me silently, Her eyes flashed dangerously and She smiled. She moved closer. “Now you go. She’ll be here soon.” I hesitated and something unspeakable passed between us. She waited for me to speak.

“I name her Eve, for that moment when the sun hung low and I was destroyed.”

“Good,” She lilted. “Now go. She’ll be here.”

“Before I do, may I ask…what is your name?”

The night was cloudless. The moon stared down on us, bright and harsh. As I turned to go I heard Her begin to speak Her words of power. I wavered.

“Mother,” I called. She fell silent. “Do not let him live happy in this paradise. He does not deserve it. Make him love her as he never loved me. And make her weak as I never was. Tempt her. Drive them out. They cannot stay.” The Garden was a gift. And it was mine.

35

36

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Open Mouth, Open Wound Kelsie Bennett New York University

H

ey there sugar, you’ve reached the hottest hotline in New York. Before we can continue, you need to confirm your date of birth.”

Candy closes her eyes against the reality of her cold, steel desk in the basement and pictures herself in leather lingerie. Her dark hair is shining and free of flyaways.

There’s not a smear of lipstick on her teeth. With her fantasy, the voice comes easily, sliding off her tongue like a lynx’s purr.

The man on the other end of the line exhales sharply, like asking for his birthday was a joke. “I’m over eighteen.”

Candy opens one eye and impatiently taps the space bar on her keyboard. She has to enter every customer’s date of birth for her boss’ records. “I believe you, sweetheart, but could I get the specifics?”

“January twelfth, thirteen-eighty-one,” the man says.

His accent pulls some of the letters of his words together, either Scottish or Irish. Candy can’t remember the last time she had a customer who didn’t sound like FiDi or Jersey. “And that’s B.C.” “I like funny guys,” Candy says as she rolls her eyes.

She types in, January 12, 1981, instead of asking again.

The sooner this call is over, the better. “What can I do for you tonight?”

“I was looking for some company.” The man’s voice is unusually stable. Normally, guys are either so nervous their voices shake, or they’re halfway through jacking it by

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

the time they dial the phone so every word is cut up with pathetic huffs and groans.

In a job where Candy is so used to the filthy, anything less feels somehow more perverse. She pictures acrylic nails sharpened to a point. A spiked choker that gleams on her throat.

“I’d love to keep you company,” Candy says. “You sound handsome. A handsome man like you shouldn’t be all alone.”

The way into a man’s pants is through his ego. Mom taught her that, when Candy was thirteen and being bullied in middle school for the gap between her front teeth.

If she were a boy, or had a daddy to teach her, maybe she would have learned to fight. But Mom still armed her. No middle school boy cared about the gap between her teeth once she’d complimented his snapback, and his tongue was in her mouth.

“What’s your name?” the man asks.

“You’re on with Candy, sweetheart.”

“What’s your real name? I can’t get off without knowing who I’m really talking to.”

Candy rubs her thumb against the frown crease on her forehead. “I’d think you’d be more interested in what I’m wearing.” Which is a holey t-shirt from sophomore prom committee and a pair of granny panties.

The man doesn’t say anything more, not even a complaint, like he’s trying to punish Candy’s refusal to give her name with the silent treatment. Or maybe the nerves finally hit and his throat’s dried up.

If he was really tired of her, though, he’d hang up. So it’s time to get to work. “If I tell you what I’m wearing, will you tell me how you want to touch me?”

There’s a wet noise, the familiar sound of a man spitting in his hand. No zipper. This man was already naked, ready, waiting. His timbre may have disguised it, but bodies never lie.

“I’ll make you mine,” he says gruffly.

“Will you choke me? Spank me?” Candy asks.

37

38

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

The sound of slapping skin barely registers in Candy’s ear, she’s so used to it. The man says, “I’ll leave marks on you. I’ll possess you.”

No one will ever cage in Candy again. But she lets this man believe he can until he comes, then encourages him to leave a five-star review and hangs up. ❦

Mom floats out of her bedroom on the above-ground floor when Candy comes up the basement stairs. She settles in at the kitchen table and does the crossword while Candy starts dinner, only lifting a finger when she has a clue to fill in. This is their trade. Candy gets to occupy the basement, and Mom treats Candy like the live-in help.

Mom demands Candy cook something special. Spinach lasagna takes about an hour of prep and baking. Half the spinach in their fridge has turned limp, so Candy puts those pieces in Mom’s side of the dish. Mom won’t notice.

Candy’s been cooking for Mom since she was thirteen, and she never has before.

Once dinner is ready, Mom pushes her crossword to the side. She gets up, pulls a bottle of St. Regis Sparkling Nonalcoholic out of the fridge, and sets it on the table.

“Do you know what we’re celebrating?” Mom asks. She cuts into the lasagna before it’s cooled. It oozes.

When Candy doesn’t respond, Mom repeats herself.

She calls Candy by that birth name Candy hates, a pinpricked incision each time. That’s not Candy’s name anymore. She left behind the name Mom gave her at nineteen, when her only option was to start over and the one thing she could control was who she told people she was.

They’re celebrating something, supposedly. It’s not a major holiday, and it’s not the anniversary of Mom’s divorce. Candy says, “I don’t know, that you crawled out of bed?”

“Don’t be a pain,” Mom says. “It’s been four years since you got out.”

“You shouldn’t mark that kind of thing on the calendar.

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

I don’t.”

“Organizing my life helps me.” Mom lifts her nose in the air. “Maybe you should try it.”

Her crossword is half under her plate and half under her elbow. Candy stares at it upside down, and the letters of Mom’s blocky handwriting swim. She and Mom are two wings on one faerie, built the same, but Mom acts like that’s not the case since she went through the twelve-step program and found God. While Candy was away, a cross appeared around Mom’s neck that was never there in Candy’s childhood. And Candy would have noticed, what with all the low-cut tops Mom wore back then.

Mom says, “I spoke to him.”

Candy’s hand clenches around the serving knife she’s holding. The dishes rattle as she sets it down. “I’m not actually hungry. I’ll heat this up later.”

Mom doesn’t look surprised, and that’s worse, that she knew how Candy would react and she said it anyway.

Nothing’s changed since Candy was a kid. Mom needs to keep Candy on her toes. She’d show up for elementary school Parent day, then not come home for a week. Buy Candy a new dress only to say it looked ugly on her. Read her bedtime stories about how much parents love their children, then ship Candy away the second she became too inconvenient.

Mom’s mouth curls wryly. “What, no dessert?”

With her gut now churning, Candy shudders at the thought of anything sweet. She takes her plate over to the counter and pulls tin foil from the cabinet. Yanking foil out and pressing the roll into the counter at the same time, the serrated edge almost cuts her. She wishes it had.

Part of her always wants to bleed around Mom, like that will prove her hurt is real, an injury and not something she made up in her head.

Candy mutters, “You know we shouldn’t use sugar like that. We’ll get pixies.” Those bastards are mosquito-like, slipping between window cracks and nesting anywhere they fit. There have been more around the house the past

39

40

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

few days than usual. Candy’s seen faerie droppings in the grass when she’s gone to get the mail.

“You used to be sweet,” Mom says to the wall. “Before it all happened.”

“I used to be easy,” Candy says. “That’s what you mean.” ❦

The man with the Celtic accent who claimed to be born in the thirteen hundreds calls back two days later.

Candy swerves his demand for her real name and makes him come in twenty minutes.

A zipper pulls as the man puts himself back together. “I have a question,” he says.

Candy keeps the clock running, making sure he pays for this telephonic pillow talk, too. “Go ahead, sugar.”

“Why do you do this?”

“I like making you feel good.”

“You can lie to me about your name, but don’t lie to me about this,” he says.

Candy closes her eyes, pictures herself in fishnets and a forest green corset. “Wouldn’t it be a shame if I wasted my talent?”

“This is the waste of your talent,” he says. “Saying things to strangers every night that you should only say to me.”

Candy grits her teeth. “Handsome, when I’m with you, it’s always just you and me.”

“What is it, daddy issues? Some man treat you wrong in the past?”

In Candy’s head flashes a ball gag and handcuffs, plus her manic grin as she attaches them to someone. When men insult Candy, it’s them overcompensating for the slip-sliding in the pit of their stomach they’re not used to: that they want Candy more than she wants them. “You should know you’re still being charged by the minute.”

“Money is no object.”

Fine. Candy won’t talk. She’ll let the timer tick until

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

the man hangs up or is able to get hard again.

A minute into the silence, the man says, “The best way to forget a bad experience is to replace it with a better one. You need something new to help you move on. Let me give you that.”

It’s a lucky guess or the talk of someone who took an introduction to psychology course, but it’s like the man’s lunged through the phone to stare straight at her. She shakes herself. He doesn’t know her.

“Call back another time, and we’ll see,” Candy says.

The line clicks, finally dead. Candy falls back in her desk chair and breathes out a sigh. ❦

Four years. Candy told Mom she didn’t remember, but she did.

The few inches where the basement peeks aboveground, the sun rises pinkly out the window. Candy closes her eyes in her office chair, tries to imagine her fantasy, but his face comes up instead.

He always wanted to have sex. She was eighteen, and he was twenty-four. She still had misgivings about what romance was supposed to be, which worked twofold—she never enjoyed the sex, but if he said he wanted fuck her to show her how much he loved her, Candy rolled over and let him.

“I want you to know you’re mine,” he said, teeth on her earlobe as he fucked her from behind. The bite that followed made Candy gasp in pain, not pleasure. “My boss today—he tried humiliating me in front of a client.

Fuck, baby, arch your back. Yeah, you know I’m in charge, though? Fuck him. I’m the man.”

He thrust too deep and Candy’s stomach curdled. She clutched his bedsheets to try to stay present, to keep her consciousness from leaving her body. He hated it when she didn’t pay attention.

He pulled out, slammed in again. “Aren’t you gonna agree, whore?”

41

42

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to speak unless—” “You’re not. Shut up.” He grasped her jaw, pulling the skin down, trying to force her mouth open. He liked her to suck on the dry, tough flesh of his fingers. She didn’t want to; keeping her mouth closed was what kept her from screaming.

“Come on,” he said, index finger on her bottom lip. He pinched the flesh. She opened up.

He shoved his finger in deep, and she gagged. His knuckle hit the back of her throat. She gagged again, her stomach rolling with the force of it.

She couldn’t breathe. She tugged on his wrist. It didn’t give.

“You deserve this,” he said. “You weren’t supposed to speak. You need to listen to me.”

It wasn’t obvious until then, but they were about the same height, his five-eight to her five-six. His strength was in bluster, not muscle.

With his finger still in her mouth, she bit down.

He howled, jerking his arm back and pulling out of her.

His cock landed on her thigh, a red, angry thing attached to a man who wasn’t much different. She turned over and rose up. She pushed his chest. He furrowed his eyebrows and said, “You don’t get to do that.”

She slapped him across the face.

Head forced to the side, his mouth agape like some ugly flounder, Candy finally saw an image of him she liked. Heat built low in her stomach as she got turned on for the first time all night.

“I think,” she said, and shoved him against his metal bedpost, “It’s my turn to be in charge.”

She grabbed him by his cropped brown hair, wrenched his head back, and slammed him into the bedpost. Before he could recover from the shock, she did it again. And again. The skin next to his ear split, and blood slid down the side of his face.

He moaned pathetically. Touching a drop of blood on his jawline, she did the same, but from pleasure.

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

After a few more slams into the bedpost, she got off the mattress. He didn’t follow. His head hung, limp, eyes half-shut.

She left with her blood in her underwear and his blood between her fingers.

The bruises and seven stitches he required were damning enough that the authorities got involved. The court ruled Candy’s actions a mental break caused by the extended stress of her abusive relationship. She spent three months in the Dews Hospital psychiatric unit until she was accused of seducing and tying up another patient.

Then she was transferred to Cruces Forensic. At Dews, she was allowed to sit across the table from visitors, and guards would monitor her one allotted full-body hug.

Cruces was not the same case.

She spent the remaining six months of her sentence eating soggy scrambled eggs and not even being allowed to hold a pen to write home, since she might have used it to harm herself or others. ❦

The next time Candy finishes getting the man with the Celtic accent off, part of her doesn’t want to hang up. The man’s proposition from their last call lurks in the back of her mind—that he could give her something new. She’s been stagnant for three years. No GED, no social circle, and so many men on the phone she can’t fathom speaking to one for free, she knows she won’t find something better on her own.

No. She shakes her head at herself. She’ll handle her own needs. Her finger hovers over the end call button.

A whisper of the man’s voice comes through, indistinct.

“Hm?” Candy brings the receiver back to her ear.

“I said, can I send you a gift?”

She’s gotten this ask before. Men don’t want to send gifts, they want to find out her address and trap her in her own home. “You can’t, handsome. It’s against compa-

43

44

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

ny policy.”

“They won’t know if you don’t tell them. And from what you’ve shown me, you can keep a secret. Let me give you something. You mean that much to me.”

This devotion, mixed with its undercurrent of threat, makes Candy a little warm between the legs. A gift from this man could be something new. He’s compelling in a way she isn’t used to. But that’s not enough to risk losing her job and privacy.

She says, “Your company is gift enough, handsome. If you enjoyed our time together, make sure to leave a fivestar review.” ❦

“What are you doing?”

Mom stops on her way to the back door and sets the garbage bag in her hands down on the floor. She doesn’t loosen her grip on it, though. She holds onto it like it might run away. Which means the contents of the bag are alcohol.

“I’m taking out the trash,” Mom says.

Candy steps toward her. She’d just woken up, come upstairs for a two p.m. breakfast, but now the blurry feeling of sleep has left her entirely. “You haven’t taken out the trash since 1999.”

Mom straightens her posture. “I told you, I’m organizing my life.”

More like drinking herself to sleep in her bedroom.

Candy makes a swipe for the bag. She expects Mom to pull away, but she doesn’t. She lets Candy take it. From that alone, Candy should have known better.

It doesn’t clink the way glass or metal should. Inside, covered in orange peel and instant ramen crumbles, is a nearly full bag of Lavazza instant espresso. Only one person in their lives demands specific coffee just for him.

If Mom bought his coffee, she knew he was coming.

“He was here,” Candy says.

Mom flaps her mouth open and shut, like she can’t

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

believe Candy is bringing this up. “I told you I spoke to him.”

“You didn’t tell me you invited him over.”

While Candy was asleep, or working, or otherwise living downstairs. He was here, in this familiar but always unwelcoming above-ground floor. He sat at the table with Mom, or the couch, it didn’t fucking matter, and drank the same coffee that Candy always made for him because he said it tasted better when she did, as if he wasn’t just too lazy to put on pants and go to the kitchen. And Mom wanted him here. They had the same crusade: Candy fucked up their lives, burdened them with her presence and her problems.

“You always forget you’re not the only one with feelings,” Mom says. “It’s hard around the anniversary.”

“Stop calling it an anniversary.”

“That’s what it is!”

Candy drops the trash bag on the ground and grinds her heel into it. The espresso bag crunches like hollow bones.

Mom says, “Don’t act like I’m the villain. You’re so self-centered. Before you went away—” Candy’s birth name is the next word out of Mom’s mouth. All these euphemisms. Went away instead of hospitalized. Anniversary instead of another year stuck in place. Candy misses the rest of what Mom says. She can barely hear over the blood roaring in her ears.

Mom looks at her, straight-on, the wildness of her grey eyes like staring in a mirror. “You don’t care what you did to him, and it makes me ashamed to be your mother. You need to make amends. It’s not that hard.”

When Mom got to step nine in AA and had to make amends, she didn’t have a damn word for Candy.

“I don’t want you to see him again. I don’t want to hear from him.” A hole rips in the trash bag from the dragging pressure of Candy’s foot. “I don’t want to know if he gets married, I don’t want to go to his funeral. I don’t want to see any more fucking Lavazza in this house.”

45

46

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

“He’s still processing what happened as much as you are,” Mom says, like spitting at Candy’s feet.

Candy abandons her attempt at breakfast. She’ll come back up later, if Mom ever leaves. Loose dark powder spills out of the hole in the garbage bag as Mom picks it up. As Candy disappears into the basement stairway, Mom calls after her, “Could you at least take out the trash?” ❦

A package arrives at Candy’s door. A brown box as long as her forearm. There’s no return label, and it’s only addressed to her chosen first name.

Candy didn’t order anything. Only one person wants to send her something.

If she retreats from it, he wins. She brings the package inside quickly and bolts the door behind herself. Pressing her face against the side window, she peers as far down the street as the angle will let her. No suspicious cars lingering. No glowing lights to suggest cameras. Just a few moth-winged pixies perched on the other side of the window sill, staring at her with their beady eyes. She smacks her palm against the glass until they flee.

The package sits on her kitchen table as she makes an omelet. When nothing crawls out of it or beeps like a bomb, she picks a kitchen knife and guts it. Buried in packing peanuts and encased in plastic is a device that’s palm-sized, pink, and split into two prongs at the end. A rabbit vibrator. She’s eyed these on sex shops’ websites before, trying to imagine pleasure on the inside and outside at the same time. They were always too expensive for her to order and try.

He knew where to find her and what she desired. She takes a chair from the kitchen and hooks it under the front door knob as an extra measure.

Then she pries the vibrator out of its plastic and hits the button on the end. It comes to life, batteries already inside. ❦

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

“They told me you were the one, um, if I wanted. . .”

Most men want to hurt Candy. But the few who want a struggle, they see the photo of her in leather on the website, talk to the company’s call director, and end up connected with her. The timing couldn’t be better. She’s got an itch to flex those muscles.

“You’re in the right place,” Candy says, dropping her voice an octave from what she’d use on more self-possessed men.

“I’d normally ask what I could do for you, but I think I’d like you to do something for me.”

“Anything,” the man says, nearly a whine.

“Beg for me.” Candy leans forward in her desk chair.

“I know I’m the best you’ll ever have. Beg me to give you even a second of my attention.”

Candy closes her eyes, pictures teeth piercing flesh, and braces herself for what inevitably comes next. This man will say, Fuck you, slut, I’m paying for your time, and she’ll get to put him in his place. An earned victory to make her feet feel more solid on the ground.

The man inhales sharply and says, “Please, Candy.

You’re a goddess. I don’t deserve to talk to you. But, please, I’ll be good.”

The twist of anticipation building low in Candy’s gut abruptly drops off. Before she can stop herself, she says, “That’s it?”

She clamps her mouth shut. She hadn’t broken form with a customer in years. In the back of her mind, a man with a Celtic accent laughs.

“What. . .” The man on the phone clears his throat, but it’s more of a squeak. “Sorry, did I mess up?”

After Candy got out of Cruces, an animal need radiated off her, making her spark at the edges. There were drug dealers, truck drivers, an ex-con, a football player she knew from high school. Men who didn’t know they wanted to be beaten down until Candy showed them. What is intimacy but a fight without spectators?

“You’re fine.” Candy injects silk into her voice. This is a

47

48

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

job. She shouldn’t hold expectations. This man is a disappointment. That makes him the same as all the rest. “You did good. You’re being good.”

He sighs. Candy tries to picture dark red rose petals and a black lace thong, but the images flicker in her mind’s eye, unable to materialize.

She gets the meek man off by repeating standard phrases she’s learned from three years of practice. Once they hang up, she throws the receiver against the wall.

The plastic splinters at a seam. She stares at the crack— barely scratching the surface of what she needs, but a reminder of her two hands’ ability to destroy.

Candy decides to get off mid-day before she’s taken any calls. She’ll handle her own needs now so they won’t get in the way while she’s working.

Mom dragged the chair out from under the front door and put it back in the kitchen, so Candy barricades the basement entrance instead. She needs to come back to herself. One stalker customer should mean nothing in the face of all the men she’s dominated before.

She sprawls out on her back on the bed opposite her desk in the basement. A hand down the front of her sweatpants and underwear, she moves her finger in slow circles. Indistinct images flit across her mind’s eye: the way lips curl to reveal canine teeth, slapping a man across the face, the dusky bruise it leaves behind. Like a hickey, but more satisfying. Harder to heal.

He’d been bruised when Candy saw him last. Her breath hitches, and she speeds up her hand.

Three weeks after her transfer to Cruces, Mom came to visit. It took her that long. She sat down on the other side of the glass and picked up the phone. Psychiatrists kept telling Candy she wasn’t in prison, just a higher-security section of the hospital for patients with violent tendencies, but the glass booth looked like prison. And like prison, Candy walked out of Cruces with a mark on her that she could only sublimate by starting over.

Candy picked up the phone on her side. “You’re finally

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

here.”

Mom trembled, not with emotion, but from detoxing.

Having Candy out of the picture was the perfect time to turn her life around, apparently. She called Candy by her birth name. Said some sentimental lies to look sympathetic to a handsome guard nearby.

After maybe ten minutes, Mom stood up. For a second, Candy saw her own reflection in the glass, her white uniform, face hollow like a doll’s. Into view came the only person Candy wanted to see less than herself.

The left side of her ex’s face was purple and maroon.

His stitches were removed, and the scar was ghostly.

Where she’d fractured his cheekbone, blood had traveled to the valley of the socket above, making it look like she’d tried to gouge his eye out. Maybe she had.

“Hi, Justin,” she said.

“Hi,” he said, distant, like they’d never spoken before in their lives.

The silence dragged. Mom glared at Candy.

To avoid her gaze, Candy looked down at herself, where the stiff fabric of her shirt made her breasts look pointier than they were. She held the phone closer to her ear. She said to him, “Don’t I look sexy in white?”

“What?” he said, head jerking back. Like Candy hit him again.

“I said, don’t you want me? Don’t you just want to crash through this glass and touch me? I know you remember what I look like under here, baby, I know how much I turned you on.”

“Are you psychotic?” He glanced around, maybe for help, maybe finally taking in where they were. That Candy was here. Being held in a Forensic Hospital. It was like his normal domineering masculinity never existed.

“You’re psychotic. I don’t want you.”

“You can tell yourself that.” Candy pressed her hand to the glass, scratched the nail of her index finger against it. “I know I could still get you hard. I bet you’ve already touched yourself thinking about how I beat you.”

49

50

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

The memory of the look on his face, teeth bared and cheeks flushed, still does it for Candy. She reaches blindly in her nightstand drawer for her vibrator. Only when it folds into her palm does she realize she wants something else.

The rabbit vibrator was sent to scare her. The man found her address to tell her that she can’t hide, that he will get what he wants anyway. Candy isn’t going to hide.

This man cannot control her with fear. He doesn’t know what Candy can do to a man. He didn’t send a threat. He sent a challenge.

The rabbit vibrator is in its box at the bottom of the basement stairs, right where Candy left it. She takes it to bed. As it touches her, she sighs. She jerks her hips up, pushing it in as it buzzes, unwilling to be gentle even with herself.

On the desk, her work phone rings.

It’s still light out. Her boss hasn’t connected her line yet. The phone should be useless, essentially unplugged from the wall.

It rings again, shrill.

She’s close to orgasm. She’s not going to pick it up.

Another ring, and a familiar Celtic voice comes through the speakerphone: “I’m glad you like my gift.” ❦

Candy hunches over the desk, still wet between her legs, and switches the phone off speaker. “Why did my boss put you through?” Without any time to restore her fantasy, her voice is weak. She tries to end her sentence with a suggestive lilt, but it shakes.

“Never mind that,” the man says. “You’re enjoying the vibrator? It works well?”

Her spine ices over. “How do you know I used it? Is there a chip in it?”

He hums.

She says, “I told you not to send me anything. I could

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

lose my job.”

“At least,” the man says. Candy’s pulled her sweatpants up, but it’s like she’s naked, vulnerable.

He says, “Look, we should get to it. I gave you a gift, and you accepted it. That means—” “I’m not working right now,” Candy interrupts. “My shift starts in two hours. Call back then.”

“Don’t we know each other better than that?”

Candy hasn’t completely shaken the fog of desire from a minute ago on her bed, and the wires feel crossed in her brain. Their roles have reversed. He wants to scare her. She can’t let him.

“If you call back later, I’ll give you something worth waiting for.”

The man lets out a tough, metallic sound. It takes a moment for Candy to recognize it as a laugh. “I already know you’re going to give me what I want.”

Candy smiles, fake, but Mom always told her men can hear the difference. “Don’t I always?”

“No, never.”

“Excuse me?”

“You accepted my gift. You used it. You owe me,” he says.

“I don’t know who you think you are, but I don’t owe you shit.” The damp between Candy’s legs grows cold and sticky as it dries. She wishes she could crawl out from her skin to escape the itch of it. “If you keep acting up, I might have to punish you.”

He ignores the erotic threat. His accent changes, not into an American drawl, but like his voice has turned in on itself. It’s become a black hole. Made to suck people in.

“Do you know who I am?”

Candy thought she knew. This man was supposed to be a fight she could win.

“I’m Gan Ceanach,” he says. “And now that I’ve told you my name, it’s only polite for you to tell me yours.”

Candy is going to tell him to go fuck himself, and not with her help this time, when she starts to gag. There’s

51

52

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

something at the base of her throat she needs to cough up. She digs her nails into the desk to stop herself from falling forward with the force of it.

“What are you?” she chokes out. She doesn’t realize she said what instead of who until the words are in the air.

“I told you what I am the first time we spoke. I’m the one who’s going to possess you.”

Candy tries to breathe and hiccups painfully instead.

The man says, “No one teaches you humans the rules of faeries anymore. Accepting my gift means I’m entitled to a gift from you. So, again. Your name.”

The faeries in Candy’s life are pesky but harmless pixies. She’s never met a faerie like this, one who can make the air lurch in her lungs. She collapses on the desk as her lips start to form a word. “Jo…” “Almost there,” he says, like they’re edging toward orgasm together.

Candy chokes on a breath and cuts herself off. She coughs with her forehead against the desk. The pressure against her esophagus only builds, and her tongue moves with a life of its own, trying to push out syllables from behind the trembling gate of her teeth.

Men always desire whatever she isn’t willing to give.

No matter how much else she forfeits. No part of her is allowed to be hers.

“Why?” Candy says.

“Why do I want your name? You are your name. When I possess it, you belong to me,” he says. “Or are you asking why I chose you?”

Candy dry heaves, her throat on fire from the effort of not speaking. She is not her birth name. She’s Candy now, and Candy protects her from who she used to be.

She killed the person she used to be, buried that baggage six feet under. In her mind, a corset, fishnets, lipstick, spiked choker— None of it will form. She’s lost her fantasy of a woman in control. No, her delusion of control, the belief that choosing what to do in a cage is the same as not being in

O P E N

M O U T H ,

O P E N

W O U N D

one.

He says, “I chose you because it’s obvious that you want to be commanded. Your picture on the website, it screams overcompensation. I knew I was right the first moment we spoke. All this opposition, when what you really need is a faerie to take that fight out of you. From what I’ve heard, it used to be that way. You were happier when you belonged to a man.”

“I’ll never—” Air rushes up, and Candy gasps. Out with it comes her name, like a wisp of her soul leaving.

She says, “Joyanna.”

“Nice to meet you, Joyanna,” purrs Gan Ceanach. “Why don’t you take a seat?”

Joyanna sits down without any thought of her own.

She looks at each of her limbs. A scream forms at the bottom of her ribcage, but she can’t let it out.

Yet this feeling of her body not belonging to her, it’s not unfamiliar. It’s not new.

53

54

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

patron saint of feral women Shelby Rice Miami University

you’re no longer catholic, but your patron saint sticks around. you’re not sure why. she’s sort of morphed into an imaginary friend you monologue to alone in your apartment, carrying full conversations on with a goddamn specter. maybe she’s your conscience; maybe her spirit adhered to you aged nine and decided that was it, goddamnit. this legs-too-long-torn-tights-ragged-sneakers child dissociating in the pews and a martyr canonized after a little too much wine at the vatican are eternally bound together; two miserable whelps who’ve been through the wringer (one not just figuratively). post-confirmation, you felt her nestle in your fingertips, egging you on light-fingered. once, you swore you saw her slip the cashier a fake ID in a parallel line at the grocery. on days you feel guilty for not attending mass, you sneak inside a sanctuary to light a candle in her name (all saints have to live off something, you figure, even if it’s the paltry fumes of melted wax and wick) but scurry out the side before a priest can ask when you last took communion. she is the one hissing in a funeral procession. there’s something strange and offbeat about her, burrowed somewhere behind your sternum. she curls up next to you on chilly nights and puts cold feet on your back, wakes you up with the smell of breath unbrushed; she never lets

P A T R O N

S A I N T

O F

F E R A L

W O M E N

you be big spoon. she sits next to you on the city bus and deals in dirty looks with anyone who dares approach. and even though you don’t believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church anymore, you don’t dare disbelieve in her, because you could’ve sworn last week you saw, however briefly, a beatific face shining atop an electric scooter as a business-school-salmon-shorts-daddy’s-money-trustfund asshole catcalling you on the way home from work was mowed down on the sidewalk opposite.

55

56

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Warmth Elise Nass New York University

I

n the rotting ribcage of a village long since burned to ash is a half-house, slowly becoming a part of the rolling green hills. Thorns and roses grow over stone.

Through the frosted window a child sits, atop a wooden stool, poking at her pancakes and honey. Even favorite foods lose flavor when eaten too often, she discovers, and it’s been pancakes or carrots for days, taking flour from the burlap sack in the cellar that will run out one day.

Then she’ll be left with what she can fry over the small fire in the center room of the house. Mushrooms wait in jars. They taste strange on her tongue, but eventually, hunger will drive her to eat them anyway. Once, they had dried meat hanging from the rafters, but now deer are scarce. Spooning the last of the pancakes into her mouth, she pads over dirt floors toward the fire now, mindful that she must never, ever, let it go out. Finch will be very angry if he comes back to a cold house.

She remembers how he knelt in front of her to look her in the eye, warm hands on her shoulders. “Do you remember what I told you?”

He was uncharacteristically serious, the gravity of the conversation settling in his furrowed eyebrows and tight jaw. She’d nodded quickly, disliking his expression.

“You said that the fire will keep me warm, and the warmth will keep me alive…” A brief pause. “And if there’s no fire I can’t make pancakes. Do you have to go?”

“Yes. I’ll be back before you know it, I promise. Don’t

W A R T H

forget about the fire. I’ll bring you flowers, if you like.

Take care of the house for me, okay?”

“Okay. Will you look for more honey too?”

“Of course.”

“And strawberries?”

A half smile. “Don’t push it.” He’d ruffled her dark hair, laced up his boots despite the tremor in his hands and left. She’d watched him from the window until his tall frame vanished behind the trees.

Wandering out of the kitchen, she slips through the molding door frame into the small breakfast area, and from there into the fire room. Uneven stacks of cut wood line the round room from the last time Finch went out.

Across from where she stands is another doorway. This one leads into a small bedroom where a pair of beaten mattresses lie, side by side. A circle of sunken earth in the heart of the room, lined with blistered aluminum foil, cradles burning branches and thinner twigs. Soft but erratic firelight casts the room in writhing shadows. She flutters her hands together; a bird forms darkly on the wall. It wavers, then the flames shift and it blurs. Shelves hewn into the walls carry an array of small potted plants, plastic water bottles, and snowglobes. A couple in white smile in a round glass frame, the image discolored and worn. They look inseparable. She peers at them, curious. Turning away, she places a log carefully into the crackling embers of the fire, snatching her hand back at the quick heat. She trails past the ax leaning against the mossy wall. The steel handle is cool to the touch, despite the warm air. Finch always reminds her she is as strong as iron, but each time she tries to lift the ax she fails. For now, patience and careful rationing of the wood supply will have to suffice.

There is the boredom of staring at spiders spinning their webs, and then there is the boredom of pacing between the fire room and the kitchen and the bedroom and back again, and sometimes the garden, but never too

57

58

W A R M T H

far from the house. Past the house is the forest, and she isn’t old enough to go by herself yet. Sometimes she is allowed to go with Finch to collect flowers and berries nearby, but never into the woods. They would walk from house to house at dawn, trailing through their ruined village in search of wild strawberries and abandoned vegetable patches. She used to drag Finch past the turnips towards poisonous horsenettle, deceived each time by its resemblance to cherry tomatoes. He’d shake his head and counsel caution, instead of seeing only what she wanted to see. But soon, surely, she will be old enough to know the difference and old enough to go wherever he goes.

She busies herself, pulling her soiled clothes from a pile beside her bed and depositing them in the metal kitchen sink. The bottom is lined with blue tape to stop the water from bleeding away, and she pours in a bucketful of rainwater, drenching her worn t-shirts. The roof of the house is dotted with holes, most of which are patched up. On stormy days she’ll uncover the few she can reach and let water collect into old cookware, careful not to let the pots overflow and turn the floors to mud. Now that the sink is full, she turns her attention to the silent, dark fridge, reaching inside for the heaps of flowers drying in the dead air. She sniffs at a few — chamomile, a stalk of lavender, some jasmine — and swirls them into the sink.

Pressing her hands together, she scoops water from the sink and drinks. A set of cups and two plates are piled beside the sink from yesterday, or maybe the day before.

Her throat is dry from disuse. The only person who could talk to her is deep in the forest, in search of the deer herds that have proved so elusive of late. She wonders if she will remember how to speak, still, when he returns, whether she will know to answer to the name she hasn’t heard in days, or weeks. In solitude Finch’s name is far more useful to her than her own, but she has no cause to speak either aloud. How many times has she watched the

W A R M T H

stars set, mouthing the words she would say to him? She imagines the luminescent moon waxing with the things left unsaid, each night a little bit fuller, until the perfect silent circle rises before her tonight.

In the gathering twilight there’s light enough still to read, and she returns to the wood stool by the window.

It’s a storybook from times long past, about a princess and a monster she found she could love. Riffling through the worn pages, she watches the illustrations change the fanged beast into a man and the woods into a palace.

Distantly, she remembers a figure reading her the story for the first time. She twists a gold ring she wears from side to side on her thumb, trying to recall the woman who used to wear it. There was a second ring, twin to the one she holds now, but Finch says it was lost long ago.

Memories of warmth linger on her skin, and there’s a flowery fragrance, the same she smells faintly in the pages of the book. Sniffing the ring, she can detect only metal and sweat. She’s worn it long enough that the shape has molded to fit perfectly around her finger, and with a little force it bends slightly between her hands. The inscription on the inner band is smudged and eroded — somewhere, in the edges of her thoughts the words live on, but the answer eludes her.

Forgetting is too easy, and memories are the most malleable of metals. It’s easier still to fall asleep with the thin comfort of a familiar story, lines of dialogue running circles in her thoughts. In the corner of her vision, she can see the amber cast of firelight lapping at the doorway.

The air is warm. Beyond the window, darkness spreads through the clouds as the sun sinks. The tame music of daytime birds shirks from the moon, leaving coyotes and other sharp-toothed things to retake the wilderness.

She dreams, as children often do, of monsters and knights and herself. When she wakes the memories of the night have evaporated like so much morning dew, leaving

59

60

W A R M T H

her reaching to recall who it was in her dreams she slew.

Knights and monsters look alike if you look longer than you should. She yawns fog into the room, a chill creeping through the stiff wood table and into her bones. The sun has risen on an early autumn snowfall, paw prints tracking through her hunted village. Startled, she knocks her stool to the floor as she hurries into the fire room, the sound a thunderclap in the silent dawn. Wisps of smoke curl from the burnt kindling, and her throat constricts as she inhales burnt air. Sweat trails down her spine as she stumbles onto her hands and knees before the fire, frantically fanning the dying embers that remain in the dirt.

Glancing up, she realizes too late that a slat in the roof has shifted and the ground beneath her hands is cold and damp. She shivers and wills her heart to slow as the fire dies soundlessly. Through the window, she notes every falling leaf, every snowflake on the wind with the sharpness only fear can lend. Finch took the lighter with him when he went into the woods.

She knows where to look; Finch always follows the same path into the forest. He won’t stray far from it, for fear of never finding his way back. She’s never gone after him before, and tries to curb her impatience. She could stay here, wait. And yet she can’t stop the thoughts that come, one after another — he should have been back to weed the garden; he should have been back to cook her breakfast; he should have been back to read her stories and make her laugh. Still, she lets a few days pass in anxiety and agitation. The spiderwebs in the corners grow.

She no longer counts constellations at night, or collects fresh flowers for tea. Instead, she wakes up wishing for nightfall, and when it comes, the sweet relief of sleep holds her tight until the disappointment of dawn.

After the fourth night of feeling the temperature drop over the horizon with the sun, she makes up her mind.

The sunlight will only weaken, and the night chills inten-

W A R M T H

sify. The last of the flour is gone. And more than anything, she can’t stomach the thought of another solitary sunrise.

She gathers a few things into a knapsack: a rusted blade from the kitchen, a handful of nuts wrapped in cloth, a blanket. The red sweatshirt with its fur-lined hood is the warmest thing she owns, and she pulls it over her head, the hem falling around her knees. She rubs her ring against the soft fabric, until the smudged and clouded surface clears. Trying to think of it as an adventure, she squares her shoulders and looks into her own eyes through the window’s glass. A thin girl in need of a bath looks back, eyes wide. Her hands are dark with dirt, the brown fading into skin around her elbows. Camouflage, she thinks. Or war paint.

The front door protests loudly, unused to use. What little heat remains escapes into the chilly air as she steps out of the house. The snow melts easily under the soles of her calloused bare feet, just cold enough to sting.

She walks quickly towards the forest, passing a few tree stumps and decaying houses, lines scored deep into their brick chimneys. Moss crawls over the paved paths between the trees, concealing the occasional neighbor’s shoe and scarf left behind, until even the cement recedes into grass and weeds. A memory rises unbidden to the forefront of her mind: a paved walkway covered in orange chalk, burning her tender heels in the summertime sun.

That was so many years ago. Her skin no longer burns so easily. Rubbing her palms together, she can almost feel the dry cling of the colored powder on her hands. But if she remembers that then she must remember other things as well. She shakes the chalk from her skin and walks along where she imagines the path lies beneath the snow and woodland clutter.

Part of her wants to run forward wildly, calling Finch’s name until he answers. Part of her measures her steps slowly in hopes that Finch will emerge from the trees be-

61

62

W A R M T H

fore she has to venture too deeply into the dark. Besides, who knows what might find her before Finch if she isn’t quiet enough. The air sweetens with the cloying fragrance of overripe fruit soft underfoot. Pine needles and thin bones prick at her ankles, but she continues on where others might have retreated. The soles of her feet are weathered and leathered from running over concrete and climbing trees, and if she bleeds she barely feels it. Perhaps she is becoming more forest creature than human.

It is early morning, but the night is loath to leave, and howls still carry over the wind to her young ears. She walks and walks, her focus dulling with time and monotony. Finch told her horrible fairy tales about the things villagers found in the woods, or the things that found villagers in the woods when they weren’t careful. She is cautious still, but small buttercups brighten the landscape, flourishing in melted patches of snow. She promises Finch in her head that she will go back to the house to wait if she finds anything too dangerous. But it can’t hurt to look a little further. She imagines him just behind that cluster of pine trees far ahead: he’ll emerge exactly as she saw him last, surprised so much time has passed. The songbirds return with the sun, and their trilling calls have coaxed rabbits and rats out of their dens. Autumn leaves collect in the eye socket of a deer’s skull. The light snow melts, luring the scent of early spring freshness into the autumn air. A single mouse forages in the grass. She wonders if it’s lonely — things come in pairs, like the couple in white, like the deer that used to wander past her window at night, two by two.

She pauses, trailing off the path to gather some of the wildflowers and colored leaves into her knapsack to show Finch. He loved collecting plants and blue jay’s feathers, scaling oak trees to peer in squirrel’s nests. No matter the height, he was unwavering, steadfast, fearless. Yellow birds that flew from her reach would perch on his shoul-

W A R M T H

ders, singing to him when he whistled their ballads. He would lure rabbits onto his lap, and they would eat from his hands. Whenever she tried to do the same, they would dart away quickly, shying from her touch. She walks for hours more, following the dandelions and violets through the grass. She will ask him to sing for her when she finds him. After all, those stories were only fairy tales, and the woods will be kinder to her, she is sure.

But many a child’s conviction has buckled under the weight of reality, and the girl finds herself tripping on a pair of boots partially hidden under a bush. She scrambles to her feet. Whirls around, realizing the goldfinches are silent and the cardinals, missing. The boots are attached to a male body sprawled on his stomach, face half in the dirt. Creeping vines already thread through his fingers, as if to pull him closer for the earth to swallow. She cannot look away. A swarm of black ants crawl beneath the man’s torn shirt up his torso, and back out through the sleeve. Flies land in his matted hair, buzzing.

Her throat constricts and she backs away. She could turn back the way she came. Return to the cold mornings and colder nights, the days of sleeping and waking and nothing in between. She could go back to waiting for Finch.

Movement in the dense undergrowth pulls her gaze to a dark mass a few yards away. A figure rises from the ground, unfolding to an unnervingly tall height. Its gray, furred legs are oddly bent, in the way that a wolf’s are, in a way that suggests it runs far faster and far longer than anything else in these woods. The fur recedes around its torso, narrowing into a line that runs up its spine and grows over its skull and shoulders. Bones and ribs in its chest strain against ashen skin. Its spindly limbs are too long, and wired too tightly with muscle. A sparrow, high above, feels the weight of its presence all at once and flees soundlessly.

The figure twirls a lighter between spindly fingers that

63

64

W A R M T H

taper into talons. “Hello, little girl. Have you come looking for me?” Her hands are clammy, a tremor running through her legs. Spiders hang from bone-white antlers at its temples, weaving silk and trapping butterflies. It advances, devouring the distance between them, turning buttercups to cold ash and soot underfoot.

She cannot speak, stumbling backwards until she feels tree bark at her back. Her mouth tastes sharply of copper as she looks into its face. It looks almost human — so, so close to being human. But the lips are just a touch too wide, the whites of its cold blue eyes yellowed as if with age. Her heart skips and sprints behind her ribs. Could she outrun it if she had to? And if she ran, what home could she run to?

A light laugh. “We remember you to be more polite than this.”

She stares again at the body amid the floral decay. Finally, she notices the fractured skeletons of wayward deer that are half buried beneath wilted violets and soil and snow, a graveyard of prey lost in the woods. Her stomach churns wildly, and her thumb burns. She looks down at her hands, realizing the pain is the friction created from twisting her ring swiftly around her finger. It’s lopsided now, an uneven oval. Just a little more pressure, and she’s not sure she could call it a ring anymore.

“But then, I suppose memories are often wrong.” The figure pushes the body over onto its back with a quick shove of its muddy foot. The man’s cracked lips are slightly open, and a moth emerges. Damp leaves fall from the hidden half of his face, revealing skin so bloated the flesh has torn open. Pale liquid trickles out. His cheeks and hands have a greenish cast to them, as though the mold on his clothing continues to spread beneath muscle and vein. In the freshly uncovered dirt, shiny beetles dig their own graves in the crook of his arm, his fingernails brittle and bitten. The overripe sweetness has returned to the

W A R M T H

air.

“Are you afraid? Your heartbeat sounds like a rabbit’s when it meets a fox.” It cocks its head to the side, and slowly, the horrible and chilly white noise emanating from it quiets, softens. The antlers shorten and recede.

Fur sheds onto the grass, revealing softer skin, dark pants, and a t-shirt. Its angular face mellows into smooth cheeks and a blunt chin. Ice blue eyes melt into a warm chocolate brown, a familiar brown, and it’s Finch — she’s found him, he’s right here, isn’t he? He will open his mouth and tell her everything is okay, he will sing to her and hold her hand, and she can sleep tonight with the warmth of the fire.

But he doesn’t. Finch stoops down to look her in the eye. “Did you know,” he says contemplatively, “that migrating birds fly over these woods in droves around this time of year?” Her lips tremble. She wants hugs and flowers woven through her hair.

“It’s a curious sight, as they fight north winds and hawks, so sure they go towards kinder skies. Never have I seen one deviate from its set path, except once — the death of one of its own, a rotting corpse in the snow.

Then a few will fall out of line to mourn, but never too long, lest they lose their way. Birds have a long memory, knowing each lake and river as they fly overhead. But how easily they forget the fallen of the flock, even those that stop to witness the blood in the snow. So it is with deer, too. They have memory enough to keep from straying, but forget often enough to keep from staying where they shouldn’t.”

If she goes back, what then? Endless days that bleed into weeks, then months. There are two moth-eaten mattresses in the bedroom, two plates on the kitchen counter, and only one of her. The moon, waxing and filling with everything she cannot say, will grow and brighten and block out the dark. Then even the nights will be no com-

65

66

W A R M T H

fort.

Finch raises a hand to her cheek. A gold band glints on his index finger, catching a ray of light. “Little fawn, you are a long, long way from the path. Nature has its course, and living things as they grow older grow more set in their tracks. But you are young still. If leaves and trees grow only as they please, then iron is made to be cast and shaped.”

Tentatively, she brushes her skeletal hand against his slender fingers. And it’s…warm. In that touch she can feel the fire in the house again, the sweetness of strawberries, the comfort of chamomile tea. She thinks of her laundry, still soaking in the sink amid the fragrance of flowers.

Who will go back and help hang her shirts in the sunshine to dry?

Finch gently closes his hand around hers. “He wouldn’t tell me your name. But I think I’ll call you Nori. Aren’t your feet cold?”

Looking down at her muddy toes in the snow, Nori remembers the heavy handle of the ax. She is no longer the girl whose feet burnt so easily on hot concrete. Avoiding the sight of the boots still lying on the ground, she gathers her courage and gazes back into Finch’s familiar brown eyes. “I’m not a fawn. And I want to go home.”

He smiles, letting the lighter fall into the undergrowth.

Overhead, the moon rises and wanes as dusk settles softly into the soil.

Finch holds Nori’s hand as they walk home, barefoot.

68

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

I Don't Want To Work No Mo' Clementine Williams North Carolina State University I don’t want to work no mo’, and that don’t make me lazy ‘cause I done licked the boot and pulled up my straps for a dolla’ seventy-five, but them rich folk still stomped my head into the slush pile.

I don’t want to work no mo’, and that don’t make me lazy ‘cause the county building got me and my momma splitting my food stamps like some type of lottery winnin’.

My momma lost her benefits, and now the heaviest burden ain’t a book bag on my shoulders.

I don’t want to work no mo’, and that don’t make me lazy ‘cause the healthcare people said they don’t take my insurance.

Bad teeth, bad brain, bad body.

Pick the pain that hurts the most.

I

D O N ' T

W A N T

T O

I don’t want to work no mo’, and that don’t make me lazy ‘cause my ancestors didn’t build the world with hands like Picasso to have America make a minstrel out of me.

I don’t want to work no mo’, and that don’t make me lazy ‘cause surviving ain’t living.

It’s almost like a second death— and lord knows I can’t afford no funeral.

W O R K

N O

M O '

69

70

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Wormhood Surya Hendry Stanford University I. When the sun does not rise, the earthworm does.

Tiptoeing toelessly through root and loam to lick the air, the drops of rain. In all her life this will be her most glorious experience: fresh water caressing her all-tongue body.

She asks not the source of her pleasure.

She has no word for sky.

II. All fishing trips even the unsuccessful ones have at least one casualty.

III. She returns into earth, where she stitches decay and rot into quilts of soft soil. Wriggles her body in joyous work. Earlier battles

W O R M H O O D

have left her tail beak-bitten, but now her days are measured and sweet. Caverns form beneath the roots of grass. Puddles pool under fern leaves. Home has a rhythm.

IV. The worm curls around the fisherman’s finger: a pinky promise.

V. Here is the baited worm. Caught in a palm, sliced by a hook. Swung through bitter air and plunged into endless water.

She knows the cold salt seeping into her many hearts. She knows the crisp fire of the hook in her head. She writhes. Above her, the boat rocks gently.

VI. In the fish’s gullet, a dying worm: nested captives.

71

72

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Anthropology Sammy Aiko University of Chicago We’re in your apartment.

There are clothes and books and pill bottles everywhere— Acetaminophen, fluoxetine, dextroamphetamine.

Sorry about the mess, you say.

I shrug and drop my coat on the floor.

I catch a strong whiff of the bud as you grind it up.

Your hands twist expertly, big and swift and pale.

You have this wild look in your eyes, Your pupils big like spiders.

A tarantula scuttles across your forearm.

Can I touch it? I ask, and you say yes and so I do— It is as soft and hairy as the real thing.

You say something funny and I, mid-pull, Chortle and cough clouds of white (lung-killer).

I wonder if this is how the elephant feels, Tied to the hot-air balloon— Floating, never going anywhere.

A N T H R O P O L O G Y

You’re studying Anthropology.

I’m in love with people who are in love with people.

A million-year-old fossil boy lies near your armpit, The most complete early human ever found.

I touch him and imagine those ancient brittle bones.

His skin, just like your skin, a million years ago.

His skin, a million years ago.

When you kiss me it is warm and bitter.

I am not nearly high enough.

Sucking on your tongue like a spear of rock candy, It strikes me that I do not find you very attractive. And yet— I run my fingertips up and down your broad back.

I feel the rough hair through the fabric of your shirt.

Your heavy hand slides around my neck.

Your hand, like his hand.

His hand, a million years ago.

They never found the bones of his hand— I think because they were too small.

73

74

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

White Hair Don't Care Zhuan (Elizabeth) Zhu University of Hong Kong

This morning, the chap at the barber’s found on me a dozen white hair.

And I said to all his mirrors “See if I care.”

Twenty bloody years two million bloody tears Doing minor roles in Shakespeare.

Now time rears Its green-eyed head and my follicles sneer: “You were never a Hamlet.”

I was young indeed and believed I got genius up my sleeve and they let me in, this trade, and trained me to be second-rate I had what it takes to be a bosting barrister or the head of a banister manufacturer,

making pilasters,

Tiles, fake fireplaces…

W H I T E

H A I R

D O N ' T

C A R E

for interior decorators sermonizing about taste: “Palladian, Corinthian, Doric, Ionic …”

Ironic how I’ve wasted my time with iambic pentameter.

Time flattered me before tossing me into the tempest.

Now it watches coldly as I rage and wave my fist, waging a fictive war.

“Come, white hair,” I say, “See if I care!

I dare you to set my head ablaze I will wear as my crown a silver fire” I will have my own tragedy staged To hell with youth, Christmas productions and Lawrence Olivier.

I will drown my stage with tear and tear all their hearts to pieces.

No more vegetating, Not one more Leonardo Leonato Laertes

75

76

W H I T E

…

But now

LEAR

H A I R

D O N ' T

C A R E

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Evan Michelle Chen University of Chicago It was summer in North Florida, and white men were grilling alligator sausages in the Korean Barbecue restaurant while we slurped on Jell-O from the Asian market, and Evan wrote “BITCOIN” on the wall for fun.

Past the graves of Confederate soldiers, at Evan’s flat, where he was making DMT with his Caltech degree, we breathed in its ghostly fumes — and laid our stomachs down like fish against current. On the FourthofJuly, my girlfriend and I bought fried Oreos next to an NRA truck, and back at Evan’s flat, we watched a Japanese crime show until it was time to see the fireworks.

I remember our faces lit up red, white, and blue … I remember Evan, gently showing us his mirror he did everything so gently: 3D printer buzzing in the dark, mechanical parts for NASA, or selling his nudes,

hung out every day for two weeks it was is important

77

78

E V A N

I don’t know where to begin, but n North Florida, grilling alligator from the Asian market, and “BITCOIN” on the graves of Confederate soldiers. Evan’s flat, fish against current. FourthofJuly, back at Evan’s flat, we watched a fireworks.

T H E

79

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Ouroboros Dylan Richmond Bowdoin College II the ocean, albumen, the land, yolk— unleavened, yet to be bred.

Led. The ape lifts its arms to fall fast on the fish.

Finding he likes the leverage, his knees straighten into spears, and tears of prey fall thousands of years III to a child, who opens the Wailing Wall of her mouth for a drop.

The wind sands her down, Pithom stone, while two suns father war.

Ten scores later, the scent of lamb’s blood-doors

80

O U R O B O R O S

holds the air still as death’s angel breaks through Egypt like IV a train, steered off track. Reichsbahn, its cattle twisted into one another, scarlett chiffon. Prayers lofted upon slivers of light, sliced with silverware and sewn into

coats, becoming something delicate like air.

Children, anecdotes, becoming something lost, like V Smoke. Fires. Scattered people, doubly, and displays of snakes who persist to make hate exist.

Black fists hold lotus, but skin, blown out of proportion, is seen only as loose dirt; earth to lay waste; let no blood congeal; a moat to penetrate, a throat to kneel. Not praying to God but preying on what they can trod, more than once, upon

81

O U R O B O R O S

I a time ago, the biggest act of violence. A burst, like the breaking of a heart. Its own.

Ego, too large— division. Serial nature, reciprocal parasitism, pain recycled: pre serving itself; prevision.

It is everywhere. In everything. Me. You,

82

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

DINÉ GIRL DETONATES LOCAL UNIVERSITY GALLERY Kinsale Hues Yale University After Billy-Ray Belcourt In a Connecticut winter, I walk Through the walls of the YUAG And dream of exploding Every Picasso into a snowstorm.

The Pollocks I shred in the basement, Burying the scraps Beneath Harkness Tower.

How would it feel to haunt them With the remains of their own Masters? Every Zuni basket With an empty plaque In the anthropology collection I fill with corn, beans, And squash—each relative Carried home in the arms Of the three sisters. After A quick trip to UPS, I take The Chiefs blankets home Myself, but not before I scrape Every word I learned to forget In Navajo into the YUAG’s Desiccated walls. I lay The blankets at the mouth Of every hooghan, the feet Of every weeping auntie Until their tears dry In the sudden wind.

The dead come home Again. What a mythology, Snorts White Guy With A Firearm

L O C A L

U N I V E R S I T Y

From his wet New England grave.

The beings and I swell bellies With NDN jubilance, NDN fury. We answer Only to humor. we are home/ we never asked/ don’t give a shit/ what you believed.

G A L L E R Y

83

84

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Magnetism Campbell Sharpe Washington University in St. Louis At the supermarket, I Buy a bruised pomegranate.

A cat stretches and shrinks Along the lip of a dumpster.

We share a phantom meal and The waiter plays the role of absent lover.

Across a valley of flapping limbs and gurgling yowls, Two knights lower their lances.

The first lady holds up, Pearly knuckles locked, their skeleton hands.

In a hallway of mirrors, Warm breath wets the soft crescent of an ear.

Staring at swollen eyes in the glass, I am going to call my mommy.

Tulle snags on Sunday suit pants, but No one notices until the linoleum floor is a van ride and beating bass away.

A child picks two magnets from the hairs of a shag carpet

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Lewinsky as Allegory Esther Eunsuh Park Bowdoin College I. The House catches on fire and the people ash-blind, smoke-dazed, point at a girl, barely woman.

And her once lover: That powerful Man, strides out—bolstered by his pearl-clad wife, poised in yellow.

II. In this land of the free, men lie to protect their jobs, their families, and women lie to protect those same men, only to be thrown like fodder into flame—left utterly alone in public memory.

III. The burning never stopped.

85

86

L E W I N S K Y

A S

A L L E G O R Y

Only after decades of unexpected arsonists hiding in high places would we begin to understand— the Gorgon girl never deserved Athena’s curse; how could it have ever been her fault?

IV. I thought to revisit the ruins, having only read the headlines.

And there, amidst discarded cigars and burnt berets, I saw her.

Not vixen nor virgin, just a woman—unwillingly immortalized in the stars.

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Secondhand Addict Hanna S. Klasing Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin I am made up entirely of almosts; I am almost a vegetarian, Almost a lesbian, Almost a woman, Almost grown-up.

I exist in perpetual limbo.

Somewhere between hiding and lying And I am no longer sure All of these parts Even make up a whole.

Some days I manage to substitute “almost” with “mostly” And those days, I am almost (no! mostly) at ease.

I don’t like going places in silence.

My grandmother’s car does not have a radio And so I sing to myself and I recite poetry To stave off the quiet.

In your absence I’ve been popping mints like medicine, Or maybe it’s the other way around, so now There’s a red box of cinnamon drops Always rattling in my pocket - you know The ones that taste like you, like the inside of your mouth.

You’ve made me a secondhand addict: Sugar from your tongue,

87

88

S E C O N D H A N D

A D D I C T

A whiff of that smell you exude When you’ve had the first drag of your cigarette, The unfocused tenderness in your eyes That comes with a bottle of wine.

You know I know you hate poetry, But if you didn’t — you do — I think you’d enjoy Bukowski.

I never did, but if you liked poems — you don’t. It’s really a shame — I feel like he might be for you.

It’s fitting, somehow, Everyone who likes Bukowski Hates poetry at least a little, I’m sure.

I want to introduce you to it.

Want us to indulge in a Brazilian affair With Elizabeth Bishop, Want us to have a New York threesome With Eileen Myles.

Want to assemble all things beautiful Right here in my bed, The entirety of my passions united at last.

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

The Host Shade University of Virginia Father, if you forgave my parents for infecting me with Hatred during my conception, extend such forgiveness to my soul before I see you — Man’s greatest sin is eating everything but its own memories.

Scenes of forests flicker inside my mind, until I am no longer a viewer and the hands of my father, clutching a pistol, become my own.

White sunlight burns the restless leaves to be seen, and the mob’s impatient silence, muffles each shot.

— I hoped You didn’t bear witness to my disregard for Exodus through the thickness of the flora, but my current suffering suggests You must’ve seen Negro blood on the leaves of the hanging tree.

And, I ask again for you to forgive me.

If not me, forgive my lack of remorse as I am a proud product of the old American South.

89

• N O N F I C T I O N

92

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

She Has Brought Them to Her Senses Isabelle Edgar Stanford University

Enfert Yidden af mine Kashe Vi’z mine brider, v’iz Abrashe your eyes S’gayt ba im der traktor vi a bahn

Now if you look for paradise You’ll see it there before Stop your search and go no further on •

Little Bird Sarnova: the sister who was lost (Minsk, 1941) Bessie Sarnoff: the sister who was looking (Bronx, 1941) Rosalyn Sarnoff Rosenbluth: the daughter who still speaks in their tongue (Westchester, 1965) •

Little Bird: She used to frighten people with her eyebrows. The way they flashed in arcs upwards then disappeared into horizon lines. She knew the color gray like the back of her hand, and he knew the back of her hand like it was the map to leave Minsk. They dreamed of footsteps and scrubbed the corners of the windows with a sponge soaked in olive oil and crumbs.

Bessie: When a jar of honey was empty, she would set it on the counter and fill it with boiling water and let it steep, then

S H E

H A S

B R O U G H T

T H E M

drink it down till it was clean while sitting in the window with a wild iris stem or crumpled receipts that someone told her to save. She sang because when she didn’t her little place in the coops in the Bronx was hollow and she could hear her heels hitting the carpet that used to be soft.

Rosalyn: She isn’t much interested in talking but hell can she dance. With her eyes closed she turns in ellipses, going somewhere -– right now she’s in the east village -– then orbiting back to wink in the direction of anyone who’s smart enough to pay attention. It’s their loss you know, the ones who walk over her. She is burnt apple pie and pitchers of mediocre gazpacho eaten out of beautifully concocted guilt and love.

Little Bird: She remembered making eye contact with her father.

He’d say “get that boy in the neck if he ever talks bad to you, little bird” as he soaked his face in the Río Pitichi until his beard leaked a trail from his chin to his navel and he laid in the sun — as they called it, but it was always clouds — to dry. But now she wakes with that boy, her hand on his neck, brushing over the ridge of his throat, the patch of skin that tells the pulse, and the soft spot under his chin — how easy it is to hurt someone.

She shuffled her head to distance her lips from the frayed edge of the blanket he put there. More for weight than for warmth. His lids fluttered. The baby kicked. She laid with her back arched slightly, as if to control the base of

93

94

S H E

H A S

B R O U G H T

T H E M

her pelvis was to echo the frame of her body before they decided to grow this thing together. She took his hand in hers, the way you hold a child’s as they scratch their name for the first time, and traced the horizon line above her eyes until his body folded into hers. More for weight than for warmth.

Bessie: As soon as they married he bought an ice cream shop.

Something sweet, he said, and she tilted her head to the side with a raised brow, her hipbone a breath away from his hand. And they painted their door red even though they’d have to pay a fine when they moved out, but it didn’t seem like they’d ever move out. Someone told her that mourning only happens with two feet on the ground and they lived seven floors up. She had difficulty writing letters, so she tried to learn how to paint stamps. Save the two pennies and, after all, she needed always to be doing something with her hands.

Rosalyn: She wanted a dark house and he wanted a light house, so they got a house with lots of windows and covered them with curtains. Wykagyl Street is braided in forsythia which is to say it is golden for two and a half weeks a year and the rest of the time it is decorated in unkempt vines — the kind of loom a child imagines worlds inside of. She sits, curtains wrapped around her, in the window, smokes her Pall Malls and drinks her Coca Cola: the kind of ritual that need not be interrupted. It might have been raining but it was probably just cloudy. “You can’t just decide you aren’t playing the game anymore” said a kid outside, to

S H E

H A S

B R O U G H T

T H E M

another kid who she could not see.

Little Bird: And it wasn’t the blood that made her skin crawl, it was boredom. In the white of her left eye was a sort of seam.

A stitch of red thread pulled out from her insides then promptly tucked back away beneath her muddy iris. It wasn’t neat. Made sense because she wasn’t good at sewing anything together, be it fabric or family. Iris ruthenica: ever blooming iris, he’d say and give her the stem of the flower as she stood, aligning her spine with the corner of the rain-stained house. With the stem between her palms she’d rub her hands together, the way one does to pull some kind of warmth from the air, until all the skin-thin petals dismantled and blew away into the gray. And he’d put his forehead to her stomach. Which is to say to the soles of the baby’s feet to find the footsteps he wanted to hear. She traced the base of his gentle hairline. ​​Bessie: And they’d stand, as they always did. He would watch as she aligned the corner creases of his coat and then trace the circumference of each wooden button until she reached his chin, where they’d flutter in the space between obligation and desire for a moment, before he left out the red door. Then she’d brush the bangs off her forehead and open her eyes wide because the air finally felt cold when she was alone. Finally. It would break her heart for any part of another body to be hit by the cold.

But for her, for her it was like mulled wine, spreading to the furthest seams of her skin: to be alone and be unable to help another. Sweet sadistic satisfaction.

95

96

S H E

H A S

B R O U G H T

T H E M

Rosalyn: She was constantly flipping through ripped pages of children’s books — she wrote a few herself — and images from the newest microscope of the myelinated nervous system — his life’s work. It was unfortunate, she’d say as she added another rubber band to her rubber band ball the size of a grapefruit, that someone else didn’t plan her mother’s service. The food would’ve been better. Would’ve had solodukha or kulaga with extra honey. And the pears would’ve been undented and just the right amount of ripe. Instead, when Bessie died, she got a couple of those trays of vegetables with the nondescript dip with green stuff in it to toss out for guests. The kind you can find in the biggest grocery store you know.

Little Bird: And she knew she wasn’t necessarily wrong. She didn’t want the kid but when she screamed like hell she felt hotter than she ever had, her hands singeing swatches into her thighs. He looked into her eyes the whole time, creating geometric patterns with the angles of their gazes. The red seam seemed redder, and he wished to be a body of water and that she would let him kiss her lips.

Something about the screaming made her feel like she was above it all for a moment. Above the gray she was sculpted so precisely into. Hair out of her eyes and eyes wide. Don’t stare, her mother would always say. And then the moment passed, and she knew that it wasn’t anything special. She looked at the window and she couldn’t tell if someone had shut the blinds or not.

Bessie:

S H E

H A S

B R O U G H T

T H E M

When someone asked her about where she came from, she’d turn her head to the right. Because right felt like east and east felt like home and home felt like somewhere in the gray where she wondered if her sister was warm enough. There isn’t much to it. Missing and all. The way her fingernails would skid across the metal pan sending a glorious, shimmering pain to her front teeth. He told her Little Bird was fine. Asleep in the sun somewhere back to the right. A place he’d never been. And he’d brush the base of her lip to the shape of a valley. The box of toothpicks broke, and she didn’t have enough hands to keep them all from rolling off the counter.

Rosalyn: She bends Yiddish phrases up and down between her lips like her cigarettes. Ashtrays are for fools, and she will spend the rest of the day with the magnetic letters on the fridge. She’s never been much good at spelling. Even with the three children with the curls running around and staining the carpet. She never had a problem just being still in it all. Her worry was measured. In longitudinal lines and thermostat ticks. She wrote “ir aun ikh kind” or “you and me kid” on the fridge, and below it she wrote of chutzpah. The kind that lives in your ears and only comes out when someone kisses them then leaves. The sound so loud you see it in everything you do for at least three days after.

Little Bird: One’s life cannot always be steeped in grandeur. Sometimes it just is, and it feels futile to try to sculpt it to be otherwise. They said goodbye. With her fingernail, Bes-

97

98

S H E

H A S

B R O U G H T

T H E M

sie outlined each of the crow’s feet lines by her left eye.

The way one leaves sticks in the shape of an arrow on an unfamiliar trail so that they can more easily find the way back. She didn’t believe in God and all that, even though I guess that’s why they were leaving. But she believed equally in obligation and the resentment that twinged its frayed edges. She imagined the ocean as a river, and she watched the little girl leave singing so that she couldn’t hear herself cry.

Bessie: There was a room in the basement of the Allerton Coops that was used for meetings. The kind with straight backed chairs and men with comically serious faces. But when they all went home to their little lives and let their spines and eyebrows become malleable once again, the hall was empty. And she’d watch Rosalyn, who’d grown to be a whole eleven years old, sneak out the red door and down the flights of stairs hide behind the doors to the hall and watch Shaina and Golde. Because they knew all the good Jewish folk dances and made the old place ring in blush and butter. She’d watch the little girl, watch the girls practice. Her head propped in the “L” shape of her thumb and forefinger, rubbing circles into the tree rings of her temple.

Rosalyn: Worriers not warriors. Or perhaps both. The rubber band ball is molding now, and she loses her set of teeth beneath the bed. She doesn’t remember much and her tongue, more than ever, flutters through her mother’s phrases and maybe her mother’s mother or sister, all

S H E

H A S

B R O U G H T

T H E M

steeped in yellow light. And this man at the corner of Christopher and Waverly walked up to her and said, “I don’t remember your name, but I remember your eyes”.

They figured out they went to the same elementary school. The one with Mr. whatever-his-name-was who never learned how to smile. And she went back home to the house with lots of curtains, to sit with her Pall Malls and Coca Cola and wondered if you could recognize someone you’ve never seen or miss someone you’ve never known. Feel them right there, before your eyes. Her head turned to the right, and she heard something whistling.

The kettle was still on, steam printing a black circle on the ceiling above as everything inside, quite quickly, evaporated.

99

100

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

a complete guide on how to go to heaven Anna Kalabukhova University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

I. It’s dark. Maybe because it’s night, maybe because you’re standing below a behemoth mountain. It rises vertical. A wall. A fence. Teeth biting the land into two. Its sharp ridges carved by millions of years of rain and wind.

Erosion. The neighborhood is quiet in the pocket of this looming giant.

Pray for stealth.

II. Hop a fence, a fence behind a church. There’s some irony to violating the grounds of a holy place, but you’re too focused on keeping your footsteps quiet. Make sure your feet don’t slip on the metal. Let the slow ones go first, your breath catching with every rattle of the fence.

Looking behind at the empty parking lot. The stars weep above, your only witness. Interspersed with darting clouds.

Pray for clear skies.

III. There’s a road in the jungle. Nature creeping in at all sides. Mud below, vines above, trees growing and collapsing above you, around you. Rot and rain water.

H O W

T O

G O

T O

H E A V E N

101

Was that a flashlight?

No, a streetlamp beyond the fence.

Was that a headlight?

No, it’s the moonlight. It’s a full moon tonight, do you remember? Now, be quiet. Turn your flashlights off.

You trudge forward, branches cracking like lightning beneath your feet. Breath exploding in your ears. The eerie shriek of cars shooting down the immense concrete serpent of the H3 above. Get to the bend where the guard usually perches, barring the base of the stairs, Scamander with his river.

Should we send two people to scout ahead? your friend whispers.

After some hesitation and a whispered argument, you step forward into the ominous darkness ahead.

Pray for emptiness.

IV. You crouch down. You suffocate on your heart in your throat. Wait a few minutes. A rustle in the bushes.

Do you hear that?

Take ten steps back. Crouch. Wait. The quivering tension of the seven people not far behind you, holding their breaths, nothing but deer trapped in the eyes of prey.

Wait. Take ten steps forward. Crouch. Wait. A rustle in the bushes.

What the hell?

Take ten steps back. Crouch. Wait. Take ten steps forward. Crouch. Wait. A rustle in the bushes.

Oh my God, is that a baby boar?

You’re laughing softly, but you want to throw up. A dark shadow the size of your terrier skitters across the

102

H O W

T O

G O

T O

H E A V E N

road. You’re still smoldering in the embers of your terror.

The thought of the imminent presence of a sow does not cross your mind until the aftermath.

It’s clear, let’s go.

Nine footsteps, snapping branches.

Where’s the guard?

There is no guard.

What?

Still, be quiet.

Where are the stairs? Are they here?

Shhh. Follow me.

Weave up a dirt trail. Bamboo quivering on both sides.

Snapping behind the curtain of the stalks. You shiver, startle. Don’t say anything, just go. Another fence, rattle rattle rattle.

Then there, out of the dark. Rust and rail. The first step, the soft hum of metal beneath your feet.

Pray for steadiness.

V. The stairs hum with the patter of nine sets of feet, the rusty metal steps groaning and sighing as we hurry, hurry up. Up above, suddenly, you spot them — the three headlamp lights skittering up the stairs further ahead, swinging wildly in fear of chase; the single flashlight up at the very top cleaving through the mist, a beacon. A race up to heaven. Your hands grip the rusted, collapsed rails, your feet slide on the fragmented metal steps, slick with night dew — but remember to look up at the sky, for all the stars feel closer in that moment than they ever will, for the horizon blooms with the burnt-orange and dusty-

H O W

T O

G O

T O

H E A V E N

103

pink sketches of one of the most beautiful sunrises you will ever see. Sweat rolls down your back, your lungs ache with fire, your hands and feet tremble as you cling onto a near-vertical staircase, a ladder really given its angle, trying not to slip, trying to race the sun on its way up into the sky.

Pray for speed.

VI. The darkness grudgingly releases its grip in notches to the rushing dawn. Suddenly you see the ferns spilling from both sides that have been brushing your arms and cheeks all along like rough fingers. The rails reveal their teeth: pockmarks of rust-ringed holes run along, some duct-taped, some not. Good thing you have your tetanus shot. You reach the first platform, and this is something you would have never noticed from the bottom — that the stairs are broken up into three platforms, carrying you farther away from earth-side. For the first time since the bottom you are not looking down, or up, but around.

At the highway shooting past into the tunnel below in one red and one white streak of taillights and headlights, pointillism in motion. At the fragment of the other side of the land just visible in between the dip of the ridgeline wall, a doorway to the west. At the neighborhoods stirring below in the creeping dawn, the little houses and little cars, the little people and their lives.

Pray for clarity.

VII. Usually the sunrise is subtle, creeping up gently, like the tide coming in. From shadow to light in the

104

H O W

T O

G O

T O

H E A V E N

breath of a few minutes blowing by. You don’t notice how the sky erupts in color, how the clouds become chameleons, bleeding from gray to lilac to rose to tangerine to beige to snowy white. You don’t notice the thousands of fleeting shades in between, more colors than you can name. You don’t notice how the horizon tears open at the seams, the molten sun spilling out into the world in one roaring flood, setting everything on fire, everything ablaze and drenched in liquid gold. You don’t notice the stillness, as if the whole world is holding its breath, the trees and the wind and the water and the clouds, waiting, hoping, praying for the miracle of a new day. You feel the tingle of warmth at your back, a tentative brush, an old lover’s caress or a passing friend’s touch. The bent head in front of you washes from dull brown to brilliant copper, like old metal cast in flame. She suddenly stops walking and tilts her face towards you, looking behind you, her skin catching the livid spill of gold.

Look.

You turn, and there’s the warm hand of the sun cupping your face, dazzling your eyes. Beauty that makes your mouth part. Beauty that makes the breath still in your lungs. Beauty that roots you in place, and says look, look, look. Beauty that you will only ever see above the clouds, that transient place between earth and heaven.

Pray for peace.

VIII. Something about the world being illuminated with the clear sunlight makes you breathe easier. All the dark deeds have been left in the night. You’ve risked it all. And now, the reward. The final stretch. Again, a vertical spit

H O W

T O

G O

T O

H E A V E N

105

of staircase, but the rails are stable, the steps steady. You are so close, but so is the empty air, the steep drop of the ridge. Close to death yet closer to life. When you climb up, you cannot see the top — for you are climbing into the sky, to heaven, are you not? Your hands tremble, your feet slip. Your head peeks over the last rung, and there — the top. The ancient, decommissioned radio tower built during the forties looms ahead, weeping graffiti and rust. The beacon, the icon. Feet dangle off the ledge of the squat tower, hands reach down to grasp you up. And there, you stand with them — the angels, the gods, looking down at the spread of the whole world below. Greater than the clouds. Greater than the mountain ridges. Greater than life. The silver serpent of the Stairway to Heaven winds below you, glistening in the sun, suddenly perfect, suddenly alive. A swath of clouds runs across the painful blue, collapses over the teeth of the ridges.

Look.

You turn, and there, etched in the clouds, is your silhouette. Your silhouette haloed with a rainbow. You move, and the shadow moves with you, the rainbow ringing you, following you. You, sketched in the mist and light.

Heaven.

106

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Words of a Wordless Boy Max Lee Fang University of Chicago

L

et me tell you a real story.

It was January 2018. I was on summer break— seasons in the southern hemisphere are reversed— and my mother and I traveled back to China to visit family and friends. I was only fifteen, so my parents didn’t tell me exactly what was going on, but I’m observant, always have been, and I had some idea of why I was sent off to stay with my dad in Suzhou while my mother spent nearly all her time in Beijing. My aunt was sick.

But the cat had to come out of the bag eventually, so I was shipped off to Beijing to visit my aunt in her hospital.

I didn’t know how sick she was. I didn’t know what she was sick with. I could only tell from my mother’s halfveiled anxiety that this was more than just a cold or a lung infection. As my uncle’s black Mercedes SUV navigated the labyrinth of old streets in the Haidian district, I was silent. My mother wasn’t; neither was my uncle.

I guess they were used to making the trip at this point.

They talked about how Beijing has changed over the years and where to go for dinner.

Beijing Cancer Hospital is one of the world’s best hospitals for cancer patients. The lobby was huge, a massive cavern of speckled white tiles, yellowed walls, a thousand anxious somebodies, and impassive hospital workers.

It smelled like too much disinfectant. Beijing is cold in the winter and the first floor didn’t have great heating, so I was shivering a bit as one of the blank-faced, white-

W O R D S

O F

A

W O R D L E S S

B O Y

107

garbed nurses took us to the elevator.

She pressed the button for the thirteenth floor. Thirteen is an unlucky number, but it’s better than fourteen, which the hospital didn’t have. It didn’t have a fourth floor either. Four in Mandarin is ‘四’ sì, which is homonymic with ‘死’ sǐ, or death. The pinyin ‘i’ sounds different from the letter ‘i’. The best way for foreigners to pronounce the character is by mimicking the slow hiss of a snake.

The doors slid open with a tortured groan and a pleasant ding! A bright female voice informed us in perfect, electronic Mandarin that this was, in fact, the thirteenth floor. It was much quieter than the lobby and had better heating, and the floor was pristinely clean and the walls were painted a nice, cool shade of blue. The antiseptic smell was down to an acceptable level.

The nurse left us alone after that. We walked past three rooms and a discolored, hairless man lying on a roller bed in the hallway. His large, beady eyes stared into nothing. Presumably he was getting transferred into one of the rooms soon. We paused in front of 1304. My mother rapped her knuckle on the door and made a harsh noise.

Another pause, and then the hired maid opened the door, and I saw. My aunt had tubes down her nose.

I found it impossible to breathe. The room was suffocating; it smelled like death, like everyone—my aunt, my mother, the maid, me—was expiring one way or another.

Everything was too clean—the walls, the floor, even the little toilet that could be called dingy if it wasn’t so, so disgustingly clean. There was a small flatscreen TV hanging haphazardly on the wall and an extra mattress in the corner where the maid-on-duty slept.

My aunt had tubes down her nose. In fact, she had tubes everywhere, big and small—the ones through her nose to help her breathe, the little needled ones injecting nutrients into her blood, the thick ones that helped her

108

W O R D S

O F

A

W O R D L E S S

B O Y

excrete. She didn’t have any hair left. In my memory she always had thick, black hair down to her shoulders just like my mom.

I stood unmoving at a distance until my mom prodded me. ‘Go on, say hi,’ she encouraged. ‘She remembers you.

She asked about you.’

I forced my legs to work. Slowly, almost tripping over myself, I walked up to the shell that used to be my aunt.

Her eyes were open and trained on me, but I wasn’t sure if she saw me—I’ll never know if she did. One skeletal hand hung limply out of her sterile blue covers and, when I touched it with my fingers, it twitched. Then she grabbed my hand with surprising strength, and a horrible noise labored its way out of her throat—a choked croak, a dying rasp, like her whole body had betrayed her and wouldn’t let her speak.

I think of the character ‘塞’ sè, meaning blocked, clogged, jammed, choked. It’s usually pronounced differently, as sāi, but I think sè is better. It’s distantly onomatopoeic. To pronounce it, hiss slowly like a snake again, except this time, open your mouth as the hiss drags on and produce a long, woeful groan.

I’d love to tell you I reassured my aunt, spoke to her, at least told her some empty platitudes. I’m a writer. Words are my forte. But I didn’t. I was a scared fifteen-year-old boy. I turned away from her emaciated face and looked to my mom, for—I’m not sure. Help, but there was nothing she could do. Courage, except she was as afraid as I was.

So I just let my aunt hold my hand for God knows how long. A minute. Half an hour. An eternity. I let her hold my hand and suffocated in silence.

•

The story I just told you isn’t true. I don’t remember the day nearly as well as I pretend to. I don’t remember whether we took a cab or my uncle’s car. I don’t remember what they talked about during the drive. I don’t re-

W O R D S

O F

A

W O R D L E S S

B O Y

109

member what the hospital looked like or what floor my aunt’s room was on. The walls may or may not have been blue. There may or may not have been a hairless man on a roller bed in the hallway. There are a lot of things I don’t remember.

Let me tell you a true story. My mother and I went back to China to visit friends and family. I stayed in Suzhou with my father until some time later, when I took a train to Beijing. My mom took me to visit my aunt, who had lung cancer. There was an extra mattress in the corner of the room. She did hold my hand. I did not say anything.

After a few weeks we flew back to Melbourne. After a few months my aunt died.

•

Let me tell you about my aunt. My aunt and my mother are from Jilin, a poor province in northwestern China bordering Inner Mongolia. Both of them are remarkable rags-to-riches stories, the kind that would make American economists drool had they occurred in the U.S.: they worked their asses off in school, got offers from decent universities, achieved their degrees at the best graduate school in China, and made a living for themselves—my mother with my father in overseas, my aunt with my uncle in Beijing.

My aunt and my mother completed their undergraduate studies at Chongqing University before transferring.

My mother achieved her engineering doctorate at Tsinghua University in Beijing, one of the two best universities in China. My aunt went to the same school, and although she didn’t get a doctorate, she became an important administrative officer for a company specializing in medical technology. My aunt was buoyant, enthusiastic, full of life and adventure. We didn’t meet often, because my parents moved from Beijing and she stayed, but she loved to dote on me whenever we did see each other and I loved her quippy sense of humor. I remember visiting her two years

110

W O R D S

O F

A

W O R D L E S S

B O Y

before she went in the hospital, back when she still had lush black hair down to her shoulders. The family—my parents and I, my aunt, uncle, and cousin—decided on an expedition to the Great Wall, which I’d never been to. To avoid the crowd, we woke up at three in the morning and set off towards the site in the heavy morning fog.

Because there were a lot of people, we separated into two cars, my uncle’s Mercedes SUV and Toyota Camry.

I sat in the SUV with my dad, who was driving, and my aunt and my cousin. On the highway, my aunt got into an argument with my dad about proper driving etiquette in Beijing.

‘You’re supposed to put on your emergency blinkers,’ she insisted. ‘That way cars who are together can see each other in the fog.’

‘That’s bullshit,’ my dad said. ‘If everyone does it, what’s the point? Look, there are hundreds of cars doing the same thing. How are we supposed to see who’s who?’

‘With eyes, of course!’ my aunt exclaimed indignantly. She always got very sarcastic when trying to prove a point. ‘You should be able to tell which car is with you!

The point of the blinkers is to show that there is a car there. Whether the car is our car or someone else’s car, you have to use your eyes to see!’

My dad shook his head. ‘Absolutely ridiculous.’ He turned briefly to look at me from the driver’s seat. ‘Son, are you hearing this?’

I grinned. I was thirteen and easily amused. ‘It does sound like breaking the law, auntie. Aren’t the emergency blinkers only for emergencies, like when you break down on the road?’

‘Exactly.’ My dad nodded, making my grin widen. ‘My son is very sensible.’

My aunt huffed. ‘Kid, are you telling me you’ve never seen your dad break a rule on the road?’

I shook my head, still grinning. Of course I had. My

W O R D S

O F

A

W O R D L E S S

B O Y

dad is Chinese, after all.

•

I also made a lot of that story up. My aunt did work for a medical company but I’m not sure if she was in tech or administration. I’m not sure whether she went to the same graduate school as my mother. Most of the Great Wall story is true, but I don’t remember whether the other person in the car was my cousin or my uncle or my mom. My aunt and my dad did get into an argument about using the blinkers, but I can’t remember the precise words. I don’t remember my aunt nearly as well as I pretend to.

Let me tell you what I know about my aunt. She and my mother grew up poor in Jilin. They worked hard to get into good universities. At some point she moved to Beijing. She was buoyant, enthusiastic, full of life and adventure. We did go to the Great Wall, but I’m not sure if it was when I was thirteen or earlier. Honestly, we weren’t that close, but she loved to dote on me and I loved her sense of humor. These are the facts.

•

My mother is the strongest person I know.

I don’t mean to be cliché. I only speak the truth. My mother is the strongest person I know by a long shot.

From a childhood spent in abject poverty, to standing for thirty-five hours in a stifling train carriage from Jilin to Chongqing, to moving abroad with my father with nothing valuable except for their hopes for a brighter future, to finally finding a stable job and a steady home in Shanghai, and then abandoning even that so I could get a liberal education in Australia, she has held steadfast to what makes her good—calm confidence, competitiveness, and a cautious but fierce spirit. A good phrase to describe her would be ‘镇定自若’ zhèn dìng zì ruò—calm and composed in the face of adversity.

111

112

W O R D S

O F

A

W O R D L E S S

B O Y

She isn’t perfect. She gets angry sometimes and isn’t that good at cooking and doesn’t like too much excitement. But perfection is boring, and in some ways she is the best other half to my father, whom she met in college, and who is powerful in his own right but mercurial and passionate and rough around the edges. Without my father, my mother probably wouldn’t have gotten to see so much of the world, but without her, my father’s bright star would have burned out too early. They complement each other well.

She didn’t tell me about my aunt’s death until days after it happened, in the soft, somber tone she uses when she wants to tell me something serious. It was during the first quarter of the school year, and at the time I’d been totally preoccupied with trying to survive the two math courses I was taking while maintaining a good standard in the other classes. The visage of my ghoulish aunt had quietly retreated to the back of my mind—a memory I preferred not to think about and had begun fading with time.

It was a plain and unceremonious occasion. I’d just arrived back from school, hot and relieved and the back of my school uniform dress shirt soaked with sweat. I kicked off my shoes, slid my bulging backpack onto the floor beside the shoe rack, threw my tie into the study room couch in a very undignified manner, and marched into the kitchen to grab some snacks and a bottle of chilled apple cider.

My mother sat, as usual, on the small couch next to the dining table, browsing something on her phone. She asked me how my day went. ‘Not bad,’ I said, tearing open a seaweed snack pack. ‘Didn’t totally fail my math test.

Got 19 out of 20 for the Lady Bracknell essay.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Not 20 out of 20?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Mr. Martin doesn’t give full scores, ever.’

W O R D S

O F

A

W O R D L E S S

B O Y

She looked up from her phone. ‘What about your math test?’

I stuck my tongue out. ‘71 percent. It was a hard test.

The class average was 63.’

‘You got 100 on the last test.’

‘Yeah, so did half the cohort.’ I began scrolling through Twitter. ‘I studied more for this one, and you know how much I studied for the last one. Combinatorics is easy.

Circle theorems isn’t. I’m trying, I really am.’

‘I know.’ She gave me a half-smile and shifted her attention back to her phone. ‘Alright. That’s fine.’

She let me munch on my snacks for a few minutes. The house was filled with silence, welcome after a toiling day and only interrupted by the chirps of the birds outside and the taps of fingers on screens. I’d just booted up a game of Virtua Tennis when she called my name. ‘Baby?’

(Baby, I suppose, is the closest translation of ‘宝贝’ bǎo bèi that I can think of, but it doesn’t come close to capturing the word. The Mandarin word contains multitudes. In this case, I think it is best described as a gentle, longing call for someone precious.)

Usually I’d continue with my game, but something in her voice was different. I paused the game, my player mid-swing on the screen, and looked up. ‘Yeah?’

‘Auntie passed away,’ she said simply.

I froze. I’d been shaking my legs under the table but I stopped. I was trying to do so many things at once. Process the news. React appropriately. Find the right words.

But my head was filled with the same blankness that had crippled me and smothered my ability to speak in the hospital room.

My mom was looking at me. I think she said something along the lines of ‘she was so young’ and ‘that’s what cancer does to people’, but I wasn’t listening. Self-loathing rose through my stomach, clogged my chest cavity. For the first time, I felt the woeful inadequacy of my expres-

113

114

W O R D S

O F

A

W O R D L E S S

B O Y

sion. Although I didn’t manage to exactly quantify the feeling at the time, I realized that as good as I was with words, I wasn’t any good with them at all.

So I did the next best thing I could think of. I sat down next to her on the couch and let her take my hand. I’m not very good at being physically affectionate, but it was better than the alternative. Because the alternative was to say something, and I found it impossible.

•

I don’t think I have to tell you that things didn’t play out exactly as I described. But I don’t care.

The sense of inadequacy stayed with me for a long time. It affected my thinking, which affected my writing.

For a while I didn’t write anything for myself. The best way I can characterize its effect on me is with a Mandarin idiomatic phrase, ‘刻骨铭心’ kè gǔ míng xīn. Etched into my bones and carved into my heart. The painful plosiveness of the first two characters tells you all you need to know. But I still couldn’t find the words to describe exactly why it affected me so much.

I found it a while later. It was the break between the second and third quarters of my senior year. I was using the time to take a college course at the University of Chicago called ‘Genre Fundamentals: Fiction’, partly out of interest and partly for my college research. One of the readings we were assigned was All Will Be Well by Yiyun Li, a Chinese-American writer. In the story, she talks about being unable to write a note to her children telling them that everything will be fine in the event of a catastrophic earthquake. ‘All will be well all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well,’ she writes, ‘yet I could not even write a lying note to console my children.’

All will be well all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well, I thought, yet I could not even console my mother or aunt with token platitudes.

And indeed all ended up being well. Life went on as

W O R D S

O F

A

W O R D L E S S

B O Y

115

usual and my mother remained her calm, content self. It wasn’t until months later when my dad told me over a call that she had cried to him while I was asleep.

•

The truth is painful to face, but only for you. It’s stark and unyielding and an eyesore, but only to you. You feel the weight of the moment singularly, and when you try to tell it to someone else, it invariably fails. They are not you.

They can’t possibly know how you felt.

But the truth belongs to you and you alone. You do with it as you please. You can avoid it, but you can also face it, and out of your truth create something real for others.

So here I am, writing this story, facing my truth and making it real. Ask me if the story is real, I’ll tell you yes.

Ask me if the story is true. I will tell you I don’t care. I might have made up some details, or most of them, or all of them. I might remember some things or most things or nothing and I might have filled in the blanks with untruths and inventions. It doesn’t make the story any less real. I am the one with the truth, but I make it real for you.

•

What would make the story about my visit to my aunt’s hospital room unreal?

It would be unreal if I said I cried in the moment out of sorrow. It would be unreal if I said at the end that I grieved long and hard when the news of her death reached me in Melbourne. Because sorrow is not what I felt, and I did not grieve for very long—like I said, we weren’t that close. It’s a story of shock, and regret. Shock at how cancer reduced my vivacious aunt to a ghoul. Regret that my last words to her were said through WeChat text, months before she died.

118

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Fantastic Bodies: Feminist, Post-Humanistic Embodiment in the Poetry of Marianne Moore and H.D. Meghan Farbridge McGill University In a 1961 interview with The Paris Review, modernist poet Marianne Moore famously says of her art that “what I write…could only be called poetry because there is no other category in which to put it” (Moore qtd. Hall).

Moore’s inimitable style indeed surpasses any simple categorization. Her writing engages with experimental patterning and intense imagery in striking new ways; her work, like that of her contemporary Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), counters the proscriptive rules of a predominantly male literary tradition. H.D.’s own idiom forms whirlwind energies tightly woven into vibrant images. The two poets were as resistant to sociocultural traditions as to existing literary conventions. Their unprecedented lexical and poetic structures were, in fact, vital for developing what are now axioms of literary modernism. Rejecting any and all conventions of the early twentieth century, Moore and H.D. embrace a wildness of language to imagine a poetics marked by non-hierarchical kinship systems. And it is this dissolution of a nature/human/creature hierarchy which ultimately allows for living things to exist and resist. This is a feminist and ecological gesture. Through their radical poetics, Moore and H.D. stretch, revision, and redefine subjectivity, both within and beyond the material self. Here, I read their representations of the body by way of posthumanist thought. Moore and H.D.’s poetry demonstrates a generative move towards a new imagination of embodiment — one wherein all beings assume

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

119

equal ontological status.

Donna Haraway asks: “why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? (“Cyborg” 150). Her posthumanist question challenges the notion that a being’s subjectivity must be contained within one singular body. To echo her thought, I suggest that Moore and H.D.’s fluid imagination of embodiment rejects such restrictions of the self. Within their poetry, bodies are reimagined as neither isolated nor static; they do not end at the barrier of skin, species, or matter. Rather, Moore and H.D. fold body into body such that there is no longer a distinction between the poet/ speaker/I and the non-human organism. To trace this, I establish a kind of and-more model of embodiment — that is, the body metamorphizes, absorbs, and transforms with others within the poetry as a defensive strategy against exploitation. These new hybrid beings embody dynamic forms which stretch beyond the delimitations of reality.

Moore and H.D.’s positioning of the poetic subject is elastic — the strategies through which they “beget, selfout-of-self” are not straightforward (H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall” lines 2.44–45). By veiling any clear interpretation of subjectivity, Moore and H.D. develop the self, subject, and I as ever-shifting entities. The situation for women in the early-twentieth century begins to explain the two poets’ impulse towards fluidity. Modernist women writers, as Carolyn Burke rightly suggests, “were [as] preoccupied with the metaphysical implications of…subjectivity…as with the physical limitations placed upon a woman’s existence” (136). And with Victorian paradigms of femininity lingering well into the first half of the century, certainly women were both physically and psychologically bound to a domestic space. Responding to this, Virginia Woolf meditates on her trip to Oxbridge: “I thought how un-

120

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

pleasant it is to be locked out [of tradition]; and…how it is worse perhaps to be locked in” (24). She is not looking for acceptance into such antiquated spaces, but, rather, the ability to freely occupy and explore them– true freedom entails movement. With chiasmic intensity, Woolf concludes that “intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom” (103). As women and artists caught within this tenacious struggle for mobility, Moore and H.D. certainly had a distinct interest in reconstituting the feminine poetic self as unfixed.

H.D.’s “Oread” demonstrates the tumultuous sliding of identity through an onslaught of pronouns. Voices and bodies of nature, sea, creature, speaker, and poet are whirled together here. The entire seven-line poem takes the imperative. “Oread” reads with an urgency that mimics the coursing flow of this ecosystem: Whirl up, sea— whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our rocks, hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir.

This mood, along with the overall use of ‘us,’ ‘your,’ ‘our,’ implies a conversation, one seemingly between the speaker and the sea; as much is suggested in the apostrophe of the first line. The next line, however, quickly undoes that reading. To whom the speaker directs “whirl your pointed pines,” is unclear (line 2; emphasis mine). Certainly the sea is not a bearer of trees. Yet, a realist interpretation of these “great pines” as reflections in the water only presents further complications (line 3). The sea, an embodiment of nature, refracts the image of the trees, effectively doubling those coniferous bodies across land and water.

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

121

A continued use of ‘our’ obfuscates the speaker’s identity as well. This voice presumably belongs to the titular Oread, though she may also be plural. The speaker situates herself as part of collective ‘us,’ yet it is uncertain what other voices constitute this polyphonic being. Extensions of nature’s body outstretch and absorb into that of the speaker(s), transforming the poetic self into one that shifts between different matters and organisms.

In the logic of an and-more model of embodiment, the individual body is not only contiguous with the next; rather “to be one is always to become with many” (Haraway, Species 4). As creators and inhabitants of their own landscapes, Moore and H.D. become thinkers, women, humans and-more — just as the pangolin becomes animal and-more when imagined, for instance, as an “uninjurable / artichoke” (Moore, “The Pangolin” lines 70–71). For Haraway, “species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters” (Species 4). She understands the “flesh of [these] mortal world-making entanglements” as ‘figures’ “where the biological and…artistic come together with all of the force of lived reality” (Haraway, Species 4). But Moore and H.D. are working against the inhibitions of such realities.

Instead, they imagine a synthesis and reconstitution of “meaning-making figures” into beings which are distinctly non-realistic (Haraway, Species 5).

These fantastic bodies, which live in not-realities, are both reimagined and imagined. As always itself and-more, these embodiments are neither human, animal, nor creature — nor, even, are they simply a combination of these. The fantastic body is rather something entirely new.

Perhaps in this model of embodiment, the two poets epitomize that widely-espoused modernist aphorism: make it new. Blurred into a transforming materiality, these poetic bodies are always, to return to Haraway’s wording, in the

122

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

process of becoming with more.

Reimagining embodiment in this way is not to forsake the humanness of Moore and H.D.’s poetry. Nor is the idea of eliding human and nonhuman bodies meant to contribute to the oppressive conception of “nature as female and women as not exactly human” (Alaimo 2). It is, rather, part of the feminist gesture towards a wholeness of self. Ever-flexible, the poetic subject is, paradoxically and all at once, norant, modest and unemotional, and all emotion…

…unig-

(Moore, “The Pangolin” lines 121–24).

Ecofeminist thought points to the importance of “reclaiming the body…since human (male) identity has been equated with the mind alone, and the body has been… seen as inferior” (Gaard and Murphy 9). It is distinctly ecofeminist, then, that Moore and H.D. imbricate the natural world with the body, and the body with the mind, like “scale / lapping scale” (Moore, “The Pangolin” lines 2–3). The two poets reinscribe a holistic female self — a figure comprised of both mind and body, yet constricted by neither.

The hybrid embodiment allows movement beyond the constrictions of reality. It is a defiance to Western scientific understandings of connection, structures based on an ontology of domination. This thought “reduces living beings to the status of objects, thereby dismissing their moral significance and permitting their exploitation, abuse, and destruction” (Donovan 74). Conversely, Moore’s poetry invokes the human in relation, not opposition, to other living beings. Borrowing and reimagining scientific vocabulary, Moore presents both the human and

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

123

pangolin by their shared phylum: …Consistent with the Formula––warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few hairs––that is a mammal

(“The Pangolin” lines 132–35).

Indeed, the animal initially seems near-human. He stands “on hind feet plantigrade, / with certain postures of a / man (lines 99–102). Moore brings the comparison close, yet the pangolin only takes on “certain postures” (line 101); she does not fully fuse the two beings, leaving the hybrid ambiguous and free of constraint. Dissolving the hierarchies of anthropocentric thought, she never imagines human-nonhuman connections entirely through difference.

In what could be read as a distinctly posthumanist gesture, Moore scrutinizes “man, the self, the being / socalled human” (“The Pangolin” lines 114–15) — ‘so-called’ because it extends beyond its own humanness. Developing the characteristics and “strength[s]” of miniature creatures, this human body is now, a paper-maker like the wasp; a tractor of food-stuffs, like the ant; spidering a length of web

(lines 105, 106–9).

The human is implicated not only in the toils of these insects, but also in their literal bodies. This hybrid being is initially only connected to the wasp or ant by simile, but soon becomes able to weave its own web. Likewise “in fighting,” this human and-more turns to the strategies of the pangolin (line 111). Such is to suggest that man — a term which calls to mind both humanist universalism as well as gender — is no longer a being who acts violently

124

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

and exploitatively “in all his vileness” (line 47). Instead, aligned with the miniature nonhuman organism, the (hu) man is like the pangolin: “not aggressive” and “draws / away from / danger unpugnaciously” (lines 75, 29–31). Neither creature is imagined as master of the other.

Virginia Woolf’s reaction to the overwhelming catalogues of the British Museum notes a similar kinship between the animal and human, especially women: “Are you aware that you [women] are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?” (Woolf 27). In facing the “enormous honeycomb” of oppressive patriarchal knowledge, Woolf calls on animals for strength and solidarity (33). It seems that, to her mind, only the fantastic animal has the capacity to decipher patriarchal discourses. “I should need to be a herd of elephants…and a wilderness of spiders,” Woolf says, imagining her individual self as a group of multiples, “to cope with all this” (Room 27).

However, she does not use such metaphors to emphasize the lowliness of women within this patriarchal sociocultural structures. Woolf aligns animal and woman as both oppressed by masculinist discourses, but in doing so, she denigrates neither.

The fantastic hybrid body, in fact, can reject these hierarchical systems which Woolf critiques because it transcends reality entirely. At night, Moore’s titular pangolin “trips through unfamiliar ground” to find himself “stepping / in the moonlight, on the moonlight” (“The Pangolin” lines 23–24). In his ability to touch an intangible glowing, he is made an almost mythical entity, one whom “simpletons thought a / living fable” (lines 71–72). As the pangolin treads in and on this light, animal and planetary bodies mingle. The sea of Moore’s “The Fish” moves in this way as well. In her poem’s cosmology, the flowing oceanic ecosystem is simultaneously a celestial one. It is freckled with stars like,

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

pink rice-grains, inkbespattered jelly fish, crabs like green lilies, and submarine toadstools…

125

(lines 25–30).

That which is supposedly stellar is also animal and vegetal here, occupying land, sea, and galaxy. This “turquoise sea / of bodies” is living and moving, one body of water containing an abundance (lines 20–21). As they “slide each on the other,” bodies of jellyfish and lilies alike become all forms at once (line 30). “Oread”’s watery motions melt beings into one another in a similar fashion. Liquifying the sharp, phallic “pointed pines” into “green… / …pools of fir,” trees become puddles of colour (H.D., “Oread” line 2, 5–6). In a crescendo of energy, these now aqueous “great pines” are splashed across the rocks (line 3). H.D.’s “The Dancer” is even more explicit in this liquid intertwining, where “feet melt into folded wing, / to mer-maid’s tail” (lines 13–14). These environmental bodies melt into and against themselves.

Yet these bodies and ecologies do not always fantastically connect through the organic sense of pulsing tidal waves or the slipping of landscapes. Moore’s line endings are particularly arresting. They fragment the embodied form in such a way that feels “mechanicked” (Moore, “The Pangolin” lines 111–12). In the poem of the same name, the pangolin itself is the oxymoronic mechanized animal.

This pangolin, in fact, could be classified as a distant cousin to the sailboat. The “sailboat / was the first machine” though “[t]he Manis” – this is the pangolin genus – is “made / for moving quietly also” (lines 96–98). The two machines seem phylogenetically linked. The creature of this poem, with its “not un- / chainlike, machine- / like form,” fuses both organic and mechanical matter (lines

126

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

77–78). His tail is a “graceful tool,” literally becoming “prop or hand / or broom or axe” (line 65, 65–66). The pangolin’s body is his own tool, and not a thing which can be extracted and appropriated for human use. This recalls Woolf when, at the British Museum, she describes needing “claws of steel and beak of brass even to penetrate the husk [of the archives]” (27). Clearly the mechanical, natural, animal, and human are enmeshed to strengthen and protect these bodies.

Always new and becoming, the fantastic embodiment elides species and matter. Moore’s pangolin, with his “artichoke-set leg and body plates,” is enclosed in pieces of a botanical body (“The Pangolin” line 54). Likewise, in the last lines of H.D.’s “The Mysteries,” the poetic ‘I’ declares that “I am the vine, / the branches, you / and you (lines 194– 96). This embodied subject spans across the material and the metaphysical planes; here the ‘I’ is not only vegetal matter, but eucharistic ritual: “I am red wine and bread” (line 191). Certain poems from Moore also imagine species as interchangeable. Her description of the cunningly ambiguous bulrush plant in “Like a Bulrush” is particularly striking; the plant does not seem …different from any other inhabitant of the water; it was as if he were a seal in the combined livery of bird plus snake; it was as if he knew that the penguins were not fish and as if in their bat blindness,

they did not realize that he was amphibious

(Moore lines 6–13).

The bulrush is seal, bird, snake, yet simultaneously amphibious. The penguins are not fish, but are bats. In “Black Earth,” two unalike animals, the “hippopotamus or

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

the alligator,” are brought together, though the ‘or’ clearly signals that the species makes no difference; both are marked by their “naturalness” (lines 3, 2). The speaker in this poem, who seems to be both mammal and reptile, is purportedly an elephant as well. But that, too, is unfixed: “This elephant skin / which I inhabit, fibered over like the shell of / the coconut, this piece of black glass” (lines 18–20). Organic and not, living and not — the animal body is the coconut plant and the piece of glass.

It is also worth noting that the speaker ‘inhabits’ the coconut-husk skin of the elephant. That is to say, the speaker does not use the language of being, but rather of transient occupation within an embodied form. Similarly, in “Like a Bulrush” the titular plant is a seal wearing “the combined livery / of bird plus / snake” (Moore lines 8–10).

Whereas, outside of this world, “bodies [must] end at the skin,” within her imaginative ecosystem, Moore constructs the body as a dermal habitat (Haraway, “Cyborg” 150). This poetic self has an autonomous plasticity; it can reshape itself. Certainly its existence is not bound to the same physical limitations placed upon women in Moore and H.D.’s era.

This is consonant with Woolf’s enduring feminist notion of a room of one’s own. Woolf’s phrase initially seems to contradict a posthumanist position that the body, as an individual entity encased in a material or metaphysical skin, is limiting. To be of one’s own, however, is not “an assertion of the primacy of the individual,” but rather “a refusal of…being owned” (Ahmed 74; emphasis mine). I have suggested that Moore and H.D.’s ‘covert feminine spaces’ can be read as worlds of one’s own; so then these newly embodied selves are bodies of one’s own. Moore’s pangolin is one animal who spurns such ownership. When dusk settles, this animal conceals himself within “his / own habitat” of a “nest / of rocks”

127

128

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

(Moore, “The Pangolin” lines 135, 42). He does not search for a pre-existing nook; he covers himself “from inside,” as he builds his own space “which he can thus darken” (line 43). The pangolin wraps his body in the body of the earth.

The pangolin’s nesting recalls the inwardly defensive move of H.D.’s self-enclosed shells in Trilogy. The “house, / temple, fane, shrine” of the mollusk is made of bone, stone, marble hewn from within by that craftsman, the shell-fish: oyster, clam, mollusc is master-mason planning the stone marvel

(H.D., “The Walls […]” lines 4.15–16, 4.5–8).

This shell is an architectural wonder, concealing a tender body within a carapace of the creature’s own labour.

The “flabby, amorphous hermit” brings together materials with disparate connotations (line 4.11). Marble seems to be a distinctly human medium for constructing monuments and statues, while bone suggests a decayed body, and stones are pieces of nature. All, however, are transformed into this shell-house, a covered sanctuary — the mussel lives within a shrine. Alliteration evades any penetrative intrusion with the broken humming of “mollusc / …master-mason…/…marvel,” catching the tongue and forcing a kind of sputtering (lines 4.6–8; emphasis mine). Its sealed enclosure, this shell of image and sound, however, flickers open with the tide. To sustain their life, the oyster, clam, mollusk “unlocks the portals / at stated intervals: / prompted by hunger” (lines 4.17–19). Much like the “crowblue mussel-shells” of “The Fish,” the sea-shells keep

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

129

“opening and shutting [themselves] like / an / injured fan” (Moore lines 3, 6–8). Never keeping still, these creatures elude exploitation.

The hyphen — to continue thinking through the movement “of opening / of closing / of opening” — performs a similar function: it opens, expands, and builds onto words (H.D., “The Dancer” lines 16–18). This punctuation takes objects which exist outside of these poetic ecologies, and then, dividing and rejoining them, twists the known into fantastic unknown shapes. Hyphenation is a standard topos of H.D.’s work. For her, it yokes together ordinary things, reimagining them anew. Splitting seaweed into “sea-weed,” H.D. defamiliarizes this vegetal organism (“The Flowering of the Rod” line 4.19). Broken by a hyphen, the seaweed is no longer itself; it becomes neither seaweed, sea, nor weed, but something new. Seaweed is now an embodied hybrid of sea life and earth plant life. In another part of Trilogy, the speaker feels her “shell-jaws snap shut” (H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall” line 4.24). In this compound word, a shell, like that of a “seashell” or a “shell-fish,” is conjoined with a human body part, the jaw (line 4.2, 4.7). Two stanzas along, however, the shell takes on another meaning again: “egg in egg-shell; / closed in, complete, immortal” (lines 4.27–28). The shell continually metamorphizes, opening and closing to embody new forms and slip between meanings. It is a fish, a jaw, an egg — all the while it maintains its protective enclosure. The hyphen thus exerts a critical impact on linguistic signification, allowing words to stretch beyond themselves.

Moore’s enjambment and hyphens, on the other hand, serve to literally cut up the eponymous pangolin’s body, later reconstituting it with unfamiliar parts.1 His “head For more on the technological aspects of animal prosthesis in Moore, see Dancy Mason’s “‘Another armored animal:’ Modernist Prosthesis and Marianne Moore's Posthumanist Animiles.”

1

130

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

and legs” remain intact, but his “grit-equipped giz- / zard” is spliced across two lines of the poem (Moore, “The Pangolin” lines 6, 6–7); however, the pangolin is not left in a half-named, dissected state. He not only embodies objects, such as the spruce cone or the artichoke, absorbing them into and onto his fantastic form. He also takes on nuanced identities. The pangolin is “artist- / engineer,” though this characterization is split, like his gizzard, along separate lines (lines 7 –8). The line break indicates that these are differing identities, yet here the two are fused by a hyphen. As artist, the pangolin is imaginative, creative, and resourceful; as engineer, he is logical and precise. The dual identity of this “[i]m- / pressive toiler,” resonates with the role of the poet (lines 9–10). Moore, an artist-engineer herself, constructs these bodies out of her art, and so the poet’s own body is linked to this animal as well.2 Stitched together with hyphens as sutures, the pangolin is always becoming more.

It seems, then, that there is no human language that can truly detail the fantastic, fluid body. This gnomic entity can only be described through a not-realistic language. That is to say, this body must be described through writing which is distinct from the “obnoxious” and “pride-producing” language of man (Moore, “The Pangolin” line 118; “An Octopus” line 162). “An Octopus” questions the limits of language to describe nature: “Is tree the word for these strange things, / ‘flat on the Moore and her family felt a strong attachment to The Wind in the Willows, and adopted pet names for one another from the book. Linda Leavell’s biographical resources are of interest for further reading on Moore’s identification with anthropomorphized animals (see: Holding on Upside Down; “Marianne Moore, Her Family, and Their Language”). Similarly, Moore, H.D., and Bryher (a close friend to both), used animal nicknames in correspondences and autobiographical works. In 1920 letter to Bryher, Moore writes of herself that she is known by her family as “a weasel, a coach-dog, a water-rat, a basilisk and an alligator,” before noting that, for Bryher, she “could [also] be an armadillo, a bull-frog or anything that seems suitable to you” (qtd. in McCabe 619). For more on this, see Susan McCabe’s “‘Let’s Be Alone Together’: Bryher’s and Marianne Moore’s Aesthetic-Erotic Collaboration.”

2

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

131

ground like vines’” (Moore, lines 220–21). Luce Irigaray suggests that familiarity “can give the impression of our being the masters of a universe that we have created and dominate,” and that the language used to describe one’s surroundings allows humans to recognize “what we meet as something made, or at least coded, by man, and not as an autonomous living being” (Vegetal 47). New spaces and bodies require a new language – one which reimagines, in a protective way, that which has been destroyed and made unfamiliar.

Man, the “so-called…writing- / master to this world,” weaponizes his words, using the structures of phallogocentric language as a tool to master and dominate nature, woman, animal (Moore, “The Pangolin” lines 114–16).3 It is this language which, as Caroline Rohman points out, “makes the animal irreducibly other” (17). Indeed, Rohman characterizes the animal’s otherness [as] especially acute because [it] does not speak our language. Unlike the racialized and sexualized…subalterns…the animal literally cannot talk back to our objectifying codes (17).

Moore’s words such as ‘unpugnaciously’ and ‘mechanicked’ then allow for more than “our [objectifying] language” (Rohman 17). By hyperextending adjectives with out of place grammatical morphemes, Moore reshapes her language. She adapts her words to the same andmore model. In doing this, she develops a lexicon and a grammar consistent with the fantastic ecosystem that it describes.

The language of these fantastic ecologies exceeds the confines of an unsound anthropocentric meaning-makFor a critique of the oppressive, masculinist understanding of human-animal consciousness, see Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am. 3

132

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

ing system – one which, as Moore says ironically, “writes errror with four / r’s” (“The Pangolin” lines 18–19). Within “an alphabet / of words and animals,” however, the nonhuman is no longer othered (Moore, “Walking-Sticks and Paperweights and Watermarks” lines 86–87). Though its overall speaker is somewhat ambiguous, “The Pangolin” appears to end on the animal’s dialogue. “‘Again the sun!’” says that animal, noted by the use of quotation marks, “‘anew each / day; and new and new and new / that comes into and steadies my soul’” (Moore, “The Pangolin” lines 141–44). Likewise in H.D.’s “The Mysteries,” cantos three and onwards are subtly contained within quotation marks. The voice behind these cantos seems to be that of “one flower” with its “slight voice” (H.D. “The Mysteries” lines 2.31, 2.32). Both Moore and H.D. form systems which imagine the animal and botanical as speaking subjects.

The fantastic creature finds protective strategies not only in its new lexical form, but within the material body itself. The elephant’s hybrid skin, for instance, is “black glass through which no light / can filter” (Moore, “Black Earth” lines 19–20). Similarly, the armoured pangolin, defensively curled, has the “power to defy all effort / to unroll it” (Moore, “The Pangolin” line 37–38). His body is …strongly intailed, neat head for core, on neck not breaking off, with curled-in feet.

Nevertheless he has sting proof scales…

(lines 38–41).

As an inscrutable self, neither entirely material nor metaphysical, it forms a defense against the patriarchal scientific urge to master, dissect, and display nature through a violating “methodology of ‘penetration’” (Alaimo 2). This fantastic body resists complete understanding.

The imagination of a body that is always more is not

F A N T A S T I C

133

B O D I E S

only a reference to corporeal constructions. These forms are also manifestations of a lived reality, with its “unpreventable experience” (Moore, “Black Earth” line 23).

Thus the fantastic subject embodies, with all inflections of that word, struggle and strength. The ability to endure “what makes [one] very gray” is inextricable from one’s self-identity (line 12): …do away with it and I am myself done away with, for the patina of circumstance can but enrich what was there to begin with…

(lines 16–18).

This patina transforms the body’s protective cortex by enriching the skin with an etching of its resilience.

Shaped by difficulty, the fantastic body adapts to its surroundings, developing a beauty such as the “frictionless creep of a thing / made graceful by adversities,” (Moore, “The Pangolin” lines 79–80; emphasis mine). As H.D. says in “Sheltered Garden:” “For this beauty, / beauty without strength, / chokes out life” (lines 40–42). Like the skin of “Black Earth”’s elephant (and-more), the poetic self — comprised of diverse subjectivities, bodies, and voices — thus becomes “full of the history of power” (Moore line 27).

Their embodiments are emblems of their own pasts, and records of their ongoing effort for survival. The critical act is “this – / persistence” (H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall” lines 6.1–3). H.D.’s “Rose, harsh rose, / marred and with stint of petals” seems a “meagre flower,” tossed around (“Sea Rose” lines 1–3); the flower, aligned with woman here, has undergone violent experience. However, like the sea lily with “[r]eed, / slashed and torn,” the feminine flower is made “doubly rich” by difficulty (H.D.

134

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

“Sea Lily” lines 1–3). Like the flower, the “industrious worm” from H.D.’s Trilogy, must work through disaster, but claims that …I profit by every calamity; I eat my way out of it; …………………… …I find nourishment

(“The Walls Do Not Fall” lines 6.23–27).

The worm derives sustenance from its calamitous surroundings to survive. This creature is unbothered by the presumably human “cry[, exclaiming] in disgust”: “a worm on a leaf / …in the dust / …in the ear-of-wheat” (lines 6.28, 6.29–31). In other words, the worm is where it is not supposed to be, and “when you are not supposed to live, as you are, where you are…then survival is a radical action” (Ahmed 237). The language of nourishment also recalls Woolf’s question: “Now what food do we feed women as artists upon?” (52). Embodied as women and artists — or as animals, worms, flowers — these beings find ways to sustain themselves. To exist, in this way, is to be a being that has survived difficulty and oppression, yet “is still / here” (Moore, “Black Earth” lines 65–66). Fantastic embodiments, then, are sites of self-preservation.

These assemblages close the schism between individual bodies, matters, subjectivities — a gap which only foments a superior/inferior hierarchy. Moore is not ignorant that culturally imposed binaries such as “[s]un and moon & day and night & man and beast” enclose nature within a system of oppositions (“The Pangolin” line 44). She quickly disrupts this binaric thought in part through punctuation. Her use of an ampersand is anomalous; Moore does not use it again in “The Pangolin,” and

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

135

it rarely if ever appears in her other poems. Here, the symbol serves two conflicting functions. At first, it distinguishes one set from another; ‘&’ visually divides sun/ moon from day/night, which only re-establishes these deeply ingrained binaries. Moore’s choice of ampersand over a comma or conjunction, however, forms a line which is neither polysyndetic nor asyndetic. Exchanging the mark (&) for what it signifies (and), the phrase reads thus: “sun and moon [and] day and night [and] man and beast” (line 44). The couplings disappear and each entity becomes discrete. ‘Man’ is not against, but with, ‘beast.’

Perhaps her radical language echoes Cixous’s assertion that the feminine text “split[s] open the closure of the binary opposition and revel[s] in the pleasures of open-ended textuality” (Moi 106). Moore’s deliberate, yet near imperceptible, semiotics break down the power imbalances of patriarchal binaries.

Moore’s diversely assorted index marks each entity as distinct while grouping them into a bunch. The monosyllables of that line “[s]un and moon & day and night & man and beast” quicken the pacing (Moore, “The Pangolin” line 44); the tempo sweeps together each item, along with the repeating conjunction, into a cluster. She maintains the distinction that both the human and creature are “each with a splen- / dor” and “each with an excellence!” (lines 45–46, 48; emphasis mine). This collection of bodily forms is not an assimilation into a sameness; indeed, “[t]he I of each is to // the I of each” (Moore, “Black Earth” lines 52–53). Instead, Moore imagines a homogenous ecosystem, while marking each dynamic body within this world.

In the fluid positioning of identity in Moore and H.D.’s work, bodies become enmeshed with one another and their surroundings. In this way, the poetic subject is, to use Moore’s words, “neither a prisoner / nor a god” (“The

136

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

Pangolin” lines 99–100). Rather, the subject and self that is always becoming — the living being and-more — is one which does not allow itself to be circumscribed or controlled. It is always, like the pangolin’s body, “branching out / across the perpendiculars” of self, subjectivity, poem, and environment (line 95–96). These subjectivities are not effaced in plurality, however, but are, as Adrienne Rich says, “we who are not the same. We who are many and do not want to be the same” (225). These subjects, selves, identities, and bodies are both individual and overlapping. Locating these bodies within the text, while understanding the inscrutability of their fluid forms “as… something that [humans] cannot fabricate or master” is to allow these living beings the “power to grow” (Irigaray 50; Moore, “The Pangolin” line 125). Dissolving the interface between bodies is a move towards a kinship which, in fact, appreciates the identity and subjectivity of each symbiont, human or not.

• Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.

Alaimo, Stacey. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space.

Cornell University Press, 2000.

Burke, Carolyn. “Supposed Persons: Modernist Poetry and the Female Subject.” Feminist Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1985, pp. 131–48.

Donovan, Josephine. “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orange.” Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy.

Edited by Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy. University of Illinois Press, 1998, pp. 74–96.

Gaard, Greta Claire, and Patrick D. Murphy (editors). Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy. University of Illinois Press, 1998.

Hall, Donald (interviewer). “Marianne Moore, The Art of Poetry No. 4.” The Paris Review, vol. 26, 1961. theparisreview.org/interviews/4637/the-art-of-poetry-no-4-marianne-moore.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and

F A N T A S T I C

B O D I E S

137

Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–81.

––––––. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Selected Poems. Edited by Louis L. Martz. New Directions, 1988.

Irigaray, Luce and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. Columbia University Press, 2017.

Moore, Marianne. New Collected Poems: Marianne Moore. Edited by Heather Cass White. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2017.

Rich, Adrienne. “Notes toward a Politics of Location.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985. W.W. Norton & Company, 1986, pp. 211–31.

Rohman, Carrie. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. Columbia University Press, 2009.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Grafton Books, 1977. Originally published in 1929.

138

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Art as Balm and Malady Bailey A. Moskowitz University of Virginia Toni Morrison wrote, “Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination” (“Peril” ix). Literature that confronts discrimination includes many instances of victims channeling their feelings into art—auditory and visual, as well as the linguistic undertakings that Morrison suggests. Treatments eventually known as “art therapy” were documented as far back as the eighteenth century, but the field has endured criticism (Hogan). In an article on the medical pedagogy of visual representations of trauma, physician and medical humanities researcher Caroline Wellbery writes, “The tension between revelation and concealment, between connection with others and protection from them is a peculiar function of art” (227). The tension that Wellbery broaches raises the question of whether artistic creation is a more healing or dangerous process. Art can equip a person with the tools to develop a sense of individuality in the face of oppressive forces, but it can also lead that individual so far from the realm of social conventions that they become an outcast. Both of these phenomena occur in the Künstlerromane this paper will examine: Black Boy, My Name is Asher Lev, and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which are by writers of widely diverging backgrounds and from moments spanning the mid-to-late twentieth cen-

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

139

tury. In this paper, I will first illuminate how Morrison’s writing suggests artistic expression as a way for individuals to realize their identities. I will then investigate how other authors depict Morrison’s theory of self-realization, thereby exploring how the production and dissemination of art can serve as both healing means of expression and as forces capable of isolating the artist.

Morrison’s Proposal: Art as Balm In The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973), Toni Morrison positions art as an antidote to the forces that seek to rob African Americans of their identities. The Bluest Eye follows Pecola Breedlove’s tragedy, but along the way Morrison also weaves in the complex character arcs of secondary characters, illustrating that Pecola’s destruction “was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town … the land of the entire country was hostile” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 206). As much as the members of Pecola’s community are responsible for breaking her, so too are there systemic forces which made them capable of it. But The Bluest Eye is not without hope. This novel suggests that an outlet for artistic expression can allow an otherwise oppressed person a means of maintaining their autonomy; conversely, a person deprived of that outlet may bolster the very institutions that stifle them.

Mrs. MacTeer, Claudia’s mother, is the first character in The Bluest Eye who seems to focus her suffering into a form of artistic creation, and this tendency equips her with the resiliency needed to retain her sense of self.

Claudia recollects that her mother “would sing about hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-andleft-me times. But her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty I found myself longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without ‘a thin di-i-ime to my name’” (25). Through her singing, Mrs. MacTeer converts her hardships into something lovely and even enviable

140

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

in her daughter’s eyes. The fact that Claudia is able to discern lessons from her mother’s singing also implies that Mrs. MacTeer has retained a sense of identity strong enough that it can even strengthen its listener.

Pauline Breedlove, on the other hand, represents a mother who is deprived of the freedom to express herself artistically, which prevents her self-actualization. Morrison is explicit about the fact that Pauline “missed—without knowing what she missed—paints and crayons” (111).

The Bluest Eye is a novel of misdirected “missing;” at the crux of the plot is Pecola’s belief that what she needs is different coloring, whereas in reality what should have saved her is a nurturing world. Since the book places such an emphasis on what characters lack and on the consequences of that lack, Morrison directly pointing out Pauline’s absent need is significant. By identifying art supplies as a potential redeeming factor for Pauline—the tragic character’s mother—Morrison positions art as an entity that could have changed the entire course of the story. A mother with an artistic outlet could have countered Pecola’s traumas and prevented her from falling prey to madness; Claudia’s fondly-remembered upbringing in Mrs. MacTeer’s household of music exemplifies that scenario. Without a means of creative expression, Pauline cannot define herself, let alone assist in her daughter’s development.

Eventually, never having been given the option to create something both aesthetically pleasing and representative of her own mind, Pauline loses herself in servitude to a white household. Morrison writes, “Here she could arrange things, clean things, line things up in neat rows”: all actions that she could have taken for her own sake if she had been an artist (127). These actions do imply a certain kind of artistry, but it is not the healing, self-affirming kind; rather, they encourage the narrowing of her identity into a job that serves a group privileged at her expense.

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

Literary critic Charlotte Goodman defines artistes manqués in part as “those whose talents are undermined by … the attitudes of their societies” (57). This term describes Pauline perfectly: given all the materials she needed, Pauline might have used art as a means of spiritual healing, but without them, her creative drive contorts into a tool for furthering her subjugation.

Morrison also suggests that Cholly Breedlove, like his wife, could benefit from an artistic outlet of expression for making sense of his identity. The narrator explains that “The pieces of Cholly’s life could become coherent only in the head of a musician” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 159). Before Cholly even meets Pauline, his mother has left him to die, death has taken his only caregiver, white men have forced him at gunpoint to perform sexually, and his father has rejected him. Morrison claims that a musician “would know how to connect” the events of his past and give their sum “its final and pervading ache of freedom” (159). Cholly possesses a freedom that hurts because it is a freedom from identity; he can undertake any action without fear of discomfort because he has no coherent sense of self for that action to clash with. Thus, without a musician’s opportunity for self-definition, Cholly is unable to heal into a whole and so has no incentive to keep himself from further harm.

If Cholly and Pauline Breedlove are robbed of the ability to create art (and consequently, their identities), then their daughter is left just as bereft, and thus has no way to withstand “[a]ll of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed” (205). No one supplies Pecola with the tools to make her mark on the world. Her mother “neglected her house, her children,” lavishing encouragement on the child of a white family instead (127).

Pecola was “ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike,” and her instructors “tried never to glance at her, and called on her only when everyone was

141

142

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

required to respond” (45-46). Thus, at school and at home, the places where she could have learned to express herself creatively, her mind is neglected. She instead learns to ask God to “Please make me disappear” (45). Her wish to will herself, including her eyes, away is the opposite of the act of an artist. Her individuality is “assassinated” (206).

As opposed to Pecola Breedlove, Claudia MacTeer matures into an ability to express her perspective, making her a Morrison-like figure. Although it is often unwise to conflate author and narrator, Morrison provides evidence that Claudia represents her in the foreword to The Bluest Eye. Morrison recounts that “The origin of the novel lay in a conversation I had with a childhood friend … She said she wanted blue eyes. I looked around to picture her with them and was violently repelled by what I imagined she would look like if she had her wish” (x). This description mirrors the summary that Claudia provides at the end of the book: “A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment” (204). Claudia, as a mouthpiece for Morrison, is capable of both recognizing the “waste” in Pecola’s fate and sharing insights that may prevent others from being complicit in similar stories (92, 205). Like Morrison’s writing, Claudia’s actions physically deconstruct hegemonic, white social structures: Claudia by dismantling white baby dolls, and Morrison by warping a passage from the Dick and Jane books into a proem that fractures into section headings that surface throughout the novel. Claudia’s rebellion against the racialized values forced upon her give her an understanding possessed by few others characters. At the end of the book, Pecola is powerless, but it appears that Claudia is only just beginning to come into her speakerly talents.

Although fewer characters are explicitly affected by

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

143

artistic expression in Sula than in The Bluest Eye, protagonists Sula Peace and Nel Wright find their development shaped by the conspicuous lack of this outlet. One passage about Sula seems to encapsulate almost all of what Morrison had to say about the need for art in The Bluest Eye:

In a way, her strangeness, her naïveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous. (Morrison, Sula 121)

Sula pines for her “other half” because her life is devoid of the means to formulate her own identity. Morrison pans out to offer a truth about what could have eased Sula’s “loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning”: that is, for Sula, it is not even important what art form she could have practiced, only that she needed one (123). The true tragedy of Sula’s character is that she is unable to recognize the self-securing properties of art.

Instead, as critic Maggie Galehouse says in an essay on Sula’s character, “Though exciting, independent, and unpredictable, her character is fundamentally, finally static; Sula’s uncontainability is so well-contained that no one and nothing can get to her” (361). Sula relies on men to help her experience her own feelings and resents Nel because of how badly she desires companionship. Art could have freed Sula to be herself, to be a self, as opposed to the empty eye of the hurricane that is her story.

Nel’s identity relies on her community’s values to give it shape; but like Sula, she has no artistic means of creating one for herself. When Nel is a child, she spends a whole scene declaring, “I’m me. I’m not their daughter.

I’m not Nel. I’m me. Me,” thereby rejecting an identity

144

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

contingent on others and claiming one that is fully her own (Morrison, Sula 28). Then from the time she marries, Nel spends almost the entire rest of the book forsaking the revelation she had when she was young: she defines herself as a (first loved, then abandoned) wife, mother, and respected community member. In other words, she builds a life based entirely on her relation to others.

Given how important self-definition is to her early in her development, Nel’s tragedy is that, as an adult, she has sacrificed her individuality to the unenlightened collective consciousness of the Bottom. Sula, while scorning the kind of person she believes Nel has become, reflects that “the free fall, oh no, that required—demanded—invention … But alive was what they, and now Nel, did not want to be” (120). The word “invention” in this context seems synonymous with creativity and self-realization, without which Nel cannot be fully “alive.” Although Sula never grasps what artistic production can do for her, she sees clearly that something akin to it could benefit Nel. In a brutal instance of irony, Sula’s prescription for enriching Nel’s life is also what could have defined her own.

Without an artistic outlet, she lacks the self-awareness to realize that she knows exactly what she needs.

Morrison proposes that many of her characters might have been able to establish themselves in a more fortifying and authentic way had they been granted the opportunity to find self-definition or healing through art. Thus, Morrison offers the hypothesis that creating art can enable a person to resist forces that would otherwise eradicate individuality. She suggests that characters such as Cholly Breedlove and Sula Peace would not be as “dangerous” to themselves or others if they had been permitted to express themselves creatively (121). The following sections of this paper will survey fiction in which downtrodden individuals actually do become artists, thereby enabling a discussion of the extent to which Morrison’s

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

145

theory of artistic self-realization holds true in other fictional visions, as well as the ways in which this realization of individuality goes so far as to isolate the artists from their communities and from who they most want to be.

Black Boy Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) delves into the complexities of artistic creation as a means of self-actualization. Wright’s autobiographical protagonist Richard drafts his first story as a child in the American South.

The sole character is “an Indian girl,” and Wright says, “not knowing how to develop the story, I resolved that the girl had to die” (120). Like his own story thus far, the one Richard writes is racialized and tragic. It is a plotless piece centered around an objectified image and obliquely describes the “yawning void” that America too often is for people who are not white (120). But to put words to that void is to give substance to his experience within it, validating that experience. And despite Richard knowing that the story was just “atmosphere and longing and death,” he is proud of it because “I had made something … and it was mine” (120). The environment in which Richard grows up discourages him from being anything other than a stereotype, let alone from creating something independently.

When he shares his triumph with a neighbor, he writes, “Her inability to grasp what I had done or was trying to do somehow gratified me” because it means that he is setting himself apart from the identity that his community members expect for him (121).

Once Richard arrives in the North, he achieves such a strong sense of self-definition through his writing that he is able to help clarify the identities of others through his work, as well. As Richard writes for the Communist Party, he determines to “make [one Southern-born migrant’s] life more intelligent to others than it was to himself. I would reclaim his disordered days and cast them into a

146

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

form that people could grasp, see, understand, and accept” (332). Here, Wright introduces a new element: a character using his artistic abilities for the affirmation of another. This indicates that the benefits of producing art are transferable, and also implies that part of art’s healing properties may come from the satisfaction of an altruistic desire to help others; after all, Richard could have continued to use art solely as a means to validate himself, but instead thought it would be a fulfilling endeavor to extend this lens to others. If Richard publishes a biographical sketch, he will be creating something that embodies parts of himself and parts of his subject, but that will also influence others completely independently from either of them following its dissemination. Perhaps one of the highest forms of self-actualization through art is when the artist has developed such a firm sense of self that he can now actualize something completely new.

Soon enough, though, Richard’s production and publication of art condemns him in the eyes of his community for the very expression of individuality that it enables.

He craves acceptance from the party with whose values he aligns, but “Writing had to be done in loneliness and Communism had declared war upon human loneliness” (358). Once he has finally found a social group that he longs to be accepted by, his writing prevents this coveted acceptance. Richard finds that his writing, which freed him from being another black boy trapped by the systems of the South, does not discriminate among the circles from which it sets him apart. Wright’s narrative uncovers the freedoms and constraints that come with realizing oneself through art. And despite the substantial resistance that Richard faces, Black Boy ends on a hopeful note. The final words of the book are “I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside … I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

147

us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human” (384). At this point, Richard stands apart from those whose opinions he valued, but he still believes he can use writing as a “bridge” between himself and others; the difference in his approach now is that he knows he will have to fight for that bridge.

My Name is Asher Lev Published almost thirty years after Black Boy, Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev (1972) confronts similar themes. Potok’s book follows a Hasidic Jewish boy who longs to paint despite the resistance of his community.

Like Black Boy, Asher Lev in some ways parallels the life of its author: in an interview, Potok said that this Künstlerroman is “the darkest novel [I have written] because essentially it is a metaphor for how far a writer can take his material” (“Interview”). In fact, Potok further blurred the boundaries between his protagonist and himself by actually painting one of the crucifixions crucial to the climax of Asher Lev (Homberger). Like Richard, Asher finds that his artistic drive both opens doors into his interiority and wreaks havoc on his social life, and he ultimately must learn to live with both consequences.

When confronted with the hardships of his childhood, Asher responds by ensuring his personal development through art. The horrifying treatment of Jews in Europe consumes the minds of his parents and Orthodox community, so Asher relies on his art to work through his own feelings about the atrocities and his relationship to them. He explains, “I wanted to paint … For a truth I did not know how to put into words” (Potok, Asher Lev 278).

Asher’s father and schoolteachers do not ask him for his responses to world events, they only try to impart theirs.

Asher’s art is a way for him to validate his own truth.

Asher faces extreme resistance and isolation from those around him for expressing himself in a way so

148

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

discordant with the behaviors of his community. Asher’s father continually refers to his son’s art as “foolishness,” a perspective that results in arguments and partial estrangement between Asher, his father, and his mother as Asher grows up (12, 49, 109, 129, 141, 176). Eventually, Asher’s father tells him, “I don’t know what you are. You are my own son, and I don’t know what you are” (Potok, Asher Lev 196). By this point, Asher has succeeded in confirming his individuality, but this physical confirmation pains family members who do not value individuality but rather the greater good. In defining himself through his art, Asher also transforms himself into someone who inadvertently inflicts suffering on the people he loves.

Asher’s dissemination of what he has produced has consequences beyond just the creation of his art itself.

Asher considers just accepting proof of his individuality from the existence of his paintings, and deems that option unacceptable: “No, [having painted the crucifixions] wasn’t enough. They had to be moved into the public arena. You communicate in a public arena; everything else is puerile and cowardly,” (354). For Asher, public communication of one’s work is a final necessity for achieving self-actualization. That is clear in his word choice; one cannot be fully confident in one’s identity if his actions are “cowardly.” The production of his painting alone would not have disconnected him so completely from his community, nor would it have been enough to complete his self-image.

Asher ends his narrative with the conclusion that “The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. Art was demonic and divine. The solitary vision that put new eyes into gouged-out sockets was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.” (367). In order to accept himself as both an artist and a Jew, Asher comes to terms with the paradoxical nature of his exis-

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

149

tence. He has finally given into the pressures of his community that urge him to see the evil in his artistic instinct, but through this perspective, Asher ironically recognizes himself as of God more than he ever has before. Through this greater intimacy, Asher loses the acceptance of his childhood community, but he has perhaps gained a more valuable relationship. Instead of the lukewarm apathy that Asher held toward God during his religious studies, Asher now engages fully with questions of the divine, strengthening his connection to Him. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit The most recent of the narratives considered here, Jeanette Winterson’s self-described “auto-fiction” Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) expands on certain lines of inquiry raised by the other two books (“Author”). Oranges engages with the relationship between religion and artistic creation in different ways, and it also gives voice to Winterson’s take on the communication of one’s art to the public sphere. Like My Name is Asher Lev and Black Boy, Winterson’s story shows how its protagonist grows into her artist abilities with great expense and reward.

Through language both blunt and coded, Winterson’s character Jeanette claims that the artistic act of developing stories is essential for self-definition, which also has dire implications for one’s health. Winterson devotes the chapter “DEUTERONOMY: The last book of the law” to the idea that history is simply the product of the perspectives and imaginations of those who were in a position to write it and refutes the existence of universal truths (Oranges 130). She ends this chapter by recommending that “If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches….” (133). Jeanette has found that every person has a different perception of every story, so the best approach is to develop one’s stories for oneself as opposed to letting others dictate one’s truth for one. The

150

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

language of Jeanette’s statement lends it an air of grave importance. Food is what literally makes up a person, so through her sandwich metaphor Jeanette proposes that the stories a person accepts determines who that person is. By making one’s own sandwiches, one’s own stories, a person is choosing to define oneself. She equates narratives to sustenance, something that is always necessary but can either hurt or harm one’s health, depending on what it consists of. She also clearly lays out the potential of stories to harm the consumer by including the stakes of keeping one’s teeth. Some stories can cause rot in the head, and no dentist or doctor can keep a person from consuming those poisons; that responsibility belongs to the individual.

As the book comes to a close, Jeanette furthers her philosophy of storytelling to include its effect on others: “If a potter has an idea, she makes it into a pot, and it exists beyond her, in its own separate life. She uses a physical substance to display her thoughts. If I use a metaphysical substance to display my thoughts, I might be anywhere at one time, influencing a number of different things, just as the potter and her pottery can exert influence in different places” (222). This passage resonates wonderfully with the considerations of Potok and Wright.

A potter developing an idea into a pot as an independent entity is essentially the same thing that Asher does with his painting and Richard does with his writing: the two protagonists create their own products, but once that process is complete, they cannot control what those creations mean to the people they care about no matter how badly they may want to. Jeanette then gestures beyond the literal product of an artist and toward the underlying ideas that the art embodies with her discussion of “a metaphysical substance.” She contemplates how, by conveying her thoughts, they can go on to influence people and events in novel ways. Here, Oranges slips into metamodernism,

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

a movement characterized in part by reflection on what one can do to affect the future (Baciu et al. 35). Winterson has realized a conception of herself so completely that she has been able to mold that conception into a fictional persona related to but ultimately independent of herself.

That persona then considers that she has such a strong sense of identity that she can send forth its essence, which has the capacity to influence others independently of herself. It is probably hubris to suggest the aesthetic movement of one’s own time as the ultimate mode of an artist, but it does seem that metamodernism allows for the highest form of identity-making through art that this paper has examined.

Jeanette’s quest to make meaning of her internal world meets resistance, and, in the end, she mourns the companionship that she has lost by undertaking this journey.

She is not so fazed by her separation with her community, it seems, as she is by her lack of connection with God. At the end of her story, Jeanette asks, “where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God” (222). Like Asher, Jeanette does not wish to forsake God, but unlike Asher, she does not feel that her development as an artist has brought her closer to Him in any way. Jeanette has found herself through art, but in doing so, she has lost a sense of belonging.

Jeanette’s insistence on the need to develop one’s own stories is one of the only consolations available when she is excommunicated for her products of self-expression.

Art as Balm and Malady Toni Morrison’s writing establishes the premise that engaging in artistic production grants the creator opportunities for self-actualization. The several voices of fictional artists in this study agree that the formal and physical processes of making art, as well as the distanced positionality of the art-maker, lend art self-securing

151

152

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

properties. As seen in the narratives of Richard, Asher, and Jeanette, artistic creation can shore up the fragments of the self, define the self over and against a community or other individuals, and soothe spiritual wounds. These characters extend Morrison’s original proposal into other lines of inquiry, grappling with questions of what happens when an artist chooses to share their art and of the relationship between faith and the artist’s salvific work.

The protagonists also often find the healing properties of artistic endeavors to be compromised when others perceive their work and their desire to undertake it. Each of these texts offers its own perspectives on these questions, and their respective views often add to and enrich one another. So many works of fiction ponder the value and danger of art as a human practice, suggesting that through their own artistic struggles, writers come to see that the potential of art to influence human life is as complex and limitless as humanity’s capacity to create it.

• Works Cited Baciu, Ciprian, et al. “Metamodernism – a Conceptual Foundation.”

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 209, 2015, pp.

33–38., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.11.226.

Galehouse, Maggie. “‘New World Woman’: Toni Morrison’s Sula.”

Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 35, no. 4, 22 Sept. 1999, pp.

339–363.

Goodman, Charlotte. “Portraits of the ‘Artiste Manqué’ by Three Women Novelists.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, 1980, p. 57., https://doiorg/10.2307/33 46517.

Hogan, Susan. Healing Arts: The History of Art Therapy. Jessica Kingsley, 2001.

A R T

A S

B A L M

A N D

M A L A D Y

153

Homberger, Eric. “Obituary: Chaim Potok.” The Guardian, Guard ian News and Media, 31 July 2002, https://www.theguardian. com/news/2002/jul/31/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries.

Morrison, Toni. “Peril.” The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY, 2019, pp. vii-ix.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. First Vintage International ed., Vintage Books, 2004.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. First Vintage International ed.,Vintage Books, 2007.

Potok, Chaim. “An Interview with Chaim Potok.” Contempo rary Literature, vol. 27, no. 3, 1986, pp. 291–317., https:// doi.org/10.2307/1208347.

Potok, Chaim. My Name Is Asher Lev. e-book ed., Anchor, 2009.

Wellbery, Caroline. “Visual Representations of Physical Trauma: A Medical Pedagogy.” Journal of Medical Humanities,vol. 42, no. 2, 2020, pp. 225–233., https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-020-09 623-9.

Winterson, Jeanette. “Author.” Jeanette Winterson, Jeanette Winterson, 2021, https://www.jeanettewinterson.com/author.

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. New York, N.Y: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. Print.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy. First Harper Perennial ModernClassics ed., HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2006.

C O N T R I BU TO R S SAMMY AIKO (she/they) is a third year at the University of Chicago pursuing a B.A. in History and English Language & Literature. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Euphony and Sliced Bread. She collects plush bats, antique books, and black dresses. Keep up with her on Instagram @sammy. aiko and Twitter @vamprebatz.

SHADE (she/her) is an undergraduate student majoring in English Literature. Her poetry has been published by the Academy of American Poets. When she is not writing, she may be working one of her various jobs or making playlists.

KELSIE BENNETT (they/her) is a writer studying at New York University. Their work has been recognized by the National Youngarts Foundation, Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and others. When they’re not writing, they handmake tiaras for their small business, Kiss & Tell.

MICHELLE CHEN (she/her) is an undergraduate student at The University of Chicago studying Computer Science with a minor in Creative Writing. She is a Beijing native and when she is not at school in Chicago, she calls Vancouver, Canada home. She is interested in the poetic potential of machines and enjoys hiking, spending time with loved ones and her cat.

KINSALE DRAKE (she/they) is a Diné writer and narrator whose work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Yale Literary Magazine, TIME, New World Coming (Torrey House Press, 2021), her zine Hummingbird Heart (Abalone Mountain Press,

N O T E S

O N

C O N T R I B U T O R S

2022), and elsewhere. She is an In-Na-Po Fellow, and the winner of the J. Edgar Meeker Prize for Poetry, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Young Native Playwrights Award. Her work is forthcoming in Diode, The Languages of our Love (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022), and elsewhere.

ISABELLE EDGAR (she/her) is a contemporary dancer and student studying English at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in The Westchester Review, Applause Literary Journal, Roanoke Review, Cold Lake Anthology and elsewhere. She calls Woods Hole, MA home.

MAX LEE FANG (he/him/his/他) is a Chinese-American undergraduate student studying Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. Fluent in both English and Mandarin, Max has writing, editing, and translating experience in both languages.

He is deeply interested in the Asian-American identity and specializes in first-person vignettes.

MEGHAN FARBRIDGE (she/her) is a Montreal-based writer completing an honours in English Literature with a concentration in Gender, Feminist, and Sexuality Studies. While her own interests land particularly in women’s modernist poetry and feminist posthumanism, she has also assisted in research work on nineteenth-century literature and ecocritical studies.

She has worked as an editor, and has had several academic works published in The Channel Undergraduate Review, as well as poetry in The Imagist Literary Magazine.

SURYA HENDRY (she/her) is a student at Stanford and an occasional writer. You can find more of her writing at Identity Theory, The Leland Quarterly, and elsewhere.

N O T E S

O N

C O N T R I B U T O R S

ANNA KALABUKHOVA (she/her) grew up in Hawaiʻi in a Russian family and currently attends the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She sails for the university and spends any free time that she has playing around in the ocean doing various wind and water sports or climbing up mountains. She is an English major doing pre-med, and she owes her love of reading and especially writing to her sixth grade English teacher, Mrs. Robinson. Her work appeared in the last issue of The Foundationalist.

HANNA S. KLASING (she/her) is an undergraduate student majoring in history with a minor in economics. She lives, studies and works in Berlin and loves using her writing to explore questions of growing up and existing in modern society, gender and queer identity.

BAILEY A. MOSKOWITZ (she/her) is a 2022 graduate of the University of Virginia with a Bachelor of Arts in biology and English. Her research has been featured in Brain Sciences and The Journal of Neuroscience.

ELISE NASS (she/her) is a second year undergraduate student majoring in English and Psychology. When she’s not agonizing over writing emails and short bios, she can be found frequenting tea shops and lurking in bookstores. Her favorite authors include Kevin Kwan, T. S. Eliot, and Leigh Bardugo.

ESTHER EUNSUH PARK (she/her) is a Sociology and Economics student at Bowdoin College. She writes poetry and non-fiction, and co-hosts the Stripped Bear podcast. Prior to Maine, she has lived in Seoul, Singapore, and Dubai. You can follow her @esther.pk on Instagram.

N O T E S

O N

C O N T R I B U T O R S

SHELBY RICE (they/them) is trying to contact you regarding your car’s extended warranty. they read for Oxford University Press and won the Montaine Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2020. they study at Miami University, and have been published or have work forthcoming in American Literary Review, Rejection Letters, Longleaf Review, Okay Donkey and more. originally from Dayton, Ohio, they recently acquired a cane with a sword inside, and will tell anyone who will listen.

DYLAN RICHMOND (he/him) is a student at Bowdoin College majoring in Dance and English with a concentration in creative writing. Along with being a Mellon Mays fellow, Dylan has received recognition in the state of Connecticut for his grieving and empowering words amidst the Black Lives Matter movement as well as various local accolades for his poetry and essays. In his free time, Dylan loves to pet large dogs, visit museums, and drink lots of juice.

EMMA SCHICK (she/her) is a student of psychology and English Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Boulder. She grew up surrounded by strong crazy women and loves to read stories about strong crazy women. She has previously been published in CU Boulder’s Meridian. Emma spends her free time searching for 2000s inspired clothes, watching Gilmore Girls, and fighting with her sister over their shared car JaneBeth.

CAMPBELL SHARPE (she/her) is Campbell Sharpe is a Creative Writing student at Washington University in St. Louis.

She has too many minors and does too many things. A native Chicagoan, her writing parodies the oddities of her midwest-

N O T E S

O N

C O N T R I B U T O R S

ern life. Her work has been featured in Euphony Journal and Euphonium.

NORA SULLIVAN HORNER (she/her) is a Chinese-American undergraduate student at Bowdoin College studying Government and Legal Studies, specializing in International Relations. She enjoys writing poetry, fiction, and essays and is interested in publishing more of her work. She spends her free time creating, and particularly enjoys making jewelry and knitting/crocheting. That or petting the nearest cat.

CLEMENTINE WILLIAMS (they/them) is a Black, queer undergraduate student hailing from North Carolina. They are working toward a degree in social work with a minor in criminology. They have work published in Stone of Madness Press, Death’s Dormant Daughter, Impostor Lit, and The Gamut Mag. Their forthcoming Chapbook “Remedies for a Cavity” is set to be published July 2022 by Ethel Zine and Press. Find them at their website https://clementinewilliams.weebly.com/ ZHU ZHUAN (ELIZABETH)(she/her) is an undergraduate student majoring in English Studies and Art History at the University of Hong Kong. She won First Place in HKU’s Original Poetry Performance Competition. She also curated the Photograph Exhibition Arrive Where We Started at HKU. Her passion lies in films, creative writing and drawing. She is an amateur singer-songwriter who plans to put songs on her Instagram: @elizabeth_zhuzhuan.

159

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

To all who shared the call for submissions.

To all who responded with enthusiasm.

To all whose works carry the seeds of social justice, self-awareness, vulnerability, and joy.

To our boards that show up consistently and bring a keen eye and a penchant for laughter to the meetings -­ we are so grateful to be in person with you again.

To our readers. May you find works and words in here that bring you all of the aforementioned and more.

The Foundationalist is not operated by Bowdoin College, Yale University, or University of Iowa. The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of the institutions or its official representatives.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE This issue was set in Baskerville & Didot.

Baskerville was designed by printmaker John Baskerville in the 18th century in England, influencing the development of the Didot family in Paris. Didot is favoured for its condensed armature, vertical stress, unbracketed serifs and is considered a Neoclassical typeface. It was also favoured by Voltaire for his publications, becoming a standard in French printing in the late 1700s.