"The Message"

 

I've had a lot of time to think while I've been in here. Once I was able to come by some paper and a pencil, I finally put the time to use. That's when I started writing her the letters, just to let her know that I was okay.

I don't know how a caterpillar ended up in a prison yard. There's a really heavy metaphor in there somewhere, though. At least it feels like there is. But when I saw the caterpillar the other day, I remembered this story my grandma told me once about a girl who whispered a message to a caterpillar, and when the caterpillar hatched into a butterfly, it had the message written all across its wings. Not sure what put that story back in my head that after all these years. As I said, I've had a lot of time to think.

Today I found my caterpillar in the yard. The flies had found it, or at least the piece of it that was still there on the pavement, before I did. And I hate having this thought now with the picture of that squished little thing so close by in my mind, but the person I've been writing to, she hasn't written back to any of my letters yet. I just hope she's getting them. And I hope she's okay. Because when I write them, even when I finish them, and I fold them up and bring their edges close, I feel free. For a little while, anyway.

"Persuasion"

 

[Random fact learned today, courtesy of Rick Steves and Fred Plotkin: Giuseppe Verdi was not only a master composer of music but also a skilled butcher. Whenever he wanted to encourage someone to fund or support a project or idea of his, he sent them a bit of prosciutto or some other cured meat as a method of persuasion.]

The young man on the other side of the bar from Drew looked like one more element of the restaurant's decor--dark grey dress shirt, black tie and pants, a face so cold and even that it suggested a slab of marble--which made it all the more surprising for Drew to find out that the man was applying for a job in the kitchen. He held himself with posture that appeared to have been calibrated against the edge of a knife and kept his hands folded on top of the lacquered counter while Drew scanned his neatly typed resume. When the young man said, "I'll cook you," Drew almost answered him with, "That sounds about right."

Instead Drew said, "I'm sorry. What did you say?"

"I said I'll cook for you," the man replied. "In your kitchen, right now."

"That won't be necessary. Plus, I'm pretty sure our insurance won't cover you."

But the young man shook his head and said once more, "I'll cook for you," and when he turned on his heels and began walking, Drew simply let him lead. As little as Drew liked the idea of a stranger in the kitchen, he liked the idea of this person walking behind him even less.

"The Need for Measurements"

 

"So you just go around, tagging sewer covers with labels saying how wide they are?" I asked the tunnel gnome.

"Kind of," he answered, removing his goggles. "Well, all right, as a matter of fact, yes." It was odd to watch him work, just because the aerosol can he carried was half as tall as he was. He used both nubby hands to hoist it back into his satchel. "It's a much more useful task than it sounds like when you say it that way," he told me. "Along the busiest travel routes, it's helpful for a gnome to know where he can fit. Almost like your bridges, when you have signs posted to inform everyone how high the underpass is so you know which trolls can go there and which can't."

"Gotcha," I told him. Then I blinked. "Wait, did you say 'trolls' or 'trucks?'" I asked. But he had already lifted the heavy metal lid and slipped away.

"The Bad Little Candle"

 

It listened for a little while when the stove called it lazy and the fireplace said, "If only you would just focus...." It tried to hold a flame as long as it could, but the candle understood after trying for some time that it had been made differently; there was something about it that simply wouldn't allow it to burn. And once the candle let the flickering fire go out for the last time, it felt what it used to feel before it had been removed from its package, before its wax had been made to melt: everything inside of it was still. For a few minutes before it was picked up and tossed in the trash, the candle sat in its spot in the dish on the windowsill and enjoyed watching the fireflies outside drift quietly in the darkness.

"I Won't Forget"

 

"Come on," Mark's mother said to him, "you've got to put it back now." Mark glanced up at his mom, then set the plush elephant down on the shelf. She picked him up; he looked away. 

"You said I could get him next time," Mark whispered, his chin resting so firmly on her shoulder that he felt each word that he spoke as a drop of pressure underneath his jaw. He watched the elephant get farther away as his mom carried him down the aisle, as if he were in the car and watching it through the rear window while she drove.

"I know, honey, but I had to pay the man to fix the washing machine, remember?" she said. "Next time," she told him, "I promise." 

Instead of listening to his mother's promise, though, Mark was staring at the toy elephant, whose head he swore he had seen turn toward him. A slight stretch of his neck forward, and Mark was able to see the elephant raise its trunk and fold its ears back against its body.

"See you later, Mark," the toy elephant said.

Mark looked at his mom; her gaze was locked ahead of her. He looked back at the elephant.

"Please don't forget about me," it said.

"I won't forget," said Mark. His mother looked at him then, just as the plush elephant lifted its trunk higher and waved goodbye behind her.

"Shadows Are Just Ghosts with Really Bad Manners"

 

That was what my niece told me, anyway. Of course, she doesn't like it when anyone gets too close to her; that was what I thought about when she spoke. Hugs have long been an issue between her and her mom.

Just for a laugh, though, I glanced down at my shadow while my niece and I were out walking today and said, "You know, for as long as you've been hanging around, it would be nice if you at least said 'hi.'"

In response, my shadow leaped away. I saw it dart beneath a bush and couldn't find it after that.

The sun kept shining the rest of the afternoon, but I was stuck shadowless beneath it. My niece gave me a hug at one point. That same moment, I saw her shadow shrug. I'd never felt so cold or, despite the absence of the ghost that had followed me my whole life, so haunted.

"How Much?"

 

The troll looked like a ball of mud until, having rolled onto the middle of the wave-swept path, it popped open like a pillbug, in this case revealing short, stubby limbs and a face like squished clay. "Not so fast," it said as it stood. "There's a toll to pay if you want to go forward." The group looked at the troll, then at the path ahead, or at least what they could see of it. "What do you say?" the troll asked them. "Do you want to continue?"

"The Closet"

 

"What was that?" Danielle whispered. She was sure that she had turned the front door's deadbolt before heading upstairs.

"What was what?" Ruth mumbled into her pillow.

"That sound. Like a doorknob turning." Danielle could hear the long creak of old hinges. "Fuck," she said as she got out of bed and reached for the pair of scissors on top of the dresser.

She opened the bedroom door slowly, with her breath matching pace, and reached for the hallway light switch while still standing inside the door frame. Much to her relief, a quick glance down the stairs to her left gave her the answer she needed: the coat closet door had popped open.

Danielle stomped downstairs and shoved all of the puffy down coats, still holding their breaths for winter, toward the back of the closet. She shut the door by turning around and throwing her back against it. When she did that, she saw the skeleton, sitting on the second stair from the bottom.

It had short bones all throughout its body, and tiny hands and feet; its skull was disproportionately large, like a full moon tilted close and curious toward the Earth. "I kept trying and trying to get out," the skeleton said in a child's voice, "but I was stuck for a long time." The radial bone of its lower right arm bore the marble tracings of several hairline fractures. "Hi," the skeleton said, tilting its skull so that Danielle could see all the way back into the hollows that should have held its eyes.

"Waste"

 

Even from where I was standing on the hill, I could see the water rising.  The pier was already submerged beneath waves that moved across the pond and over the shore like people gathered for a summertime festival, spilling out from one small space. A voice traveled among the waves, saying watch, watch, watch.

"Watch what?" I asked, because the voice was very clear.

We take care of the land we belong to. The voice was coming from the pond. We even dispose of our trash, it said. See? A wave leaped up and splashed over the top over the blue metal garbage can that sat stranded on the pier.

Suddenly the pond swelled and surged, and the water climbed the hillside. It covered my feet as if it were swallowing them. The garbage can disappeared. "What are you doing?" I cried as the water began to soak the fibers of my jeans. 

I tried to run. Then I tried to swim. The voice answered, Watch.

"The Giant's New Shoes"

 

Piotr the giant sat in the kitchen in his house, which occupied the tops of ten different mountains and was always hidden from below by a disguise of clouds, and removed the shoes from the box his wife had given him. "Oh," he said carefully, "they're very nice. Very lovely." And they were; the soles had a spring to them, which he felt when he pressed into the heel with his enormous thumb, and the leather for the uppers was soft and thoroughly worked. The hides of at least a hundred cows must have gone into each shoe. He tried the left one on.

"I've seen how you rub your feet after you've been trampling the countyside all day," Galena said with a shrug and a smile. "Perhaps these would be kinder on your feet than those two boulders you carved holes into."

"I'm sure they will be," said Piotr, even as he thought about all the little truths still hidden from her after all those years: that there were times when he didn't want to trample the countryside; that it felt right for him to wear large rocks, so sharp and heavy, on his feet; that he often was glad that it didn't take long for him in his boulder-shoes to pillage and ruin an entire town. Sometimes, it was best if the end came quickly. 

"Thank you," Piotr told Galena as he slipped on the other shoe. It was the one kindness at the moment that he could offer her.

"Nostalgia"

 

I felt like I was drowning in it earlier, when I was sitting on the floor of my closet, going through my box of mix tapes and bawling my eyes out. Lucky for me, my childhood came with (tiny, oat-based) life preservers.

"The Bag Lady"

 

I saw her every day, wearing the same dirt-faded clothes but carrying a different bag each time. On some days the bag was made of linen or some other cloth; on others, plastic, and it obviously had been found alongside the rest of the scraps she carried.

She collected what people in the neighborhood threw out or abandoned. I saw her pick up someone's potential once, right off the curb. It looked like an orange rind. Another time she tried to pick up an old woman's true love from where the woman had dumped him. The bag lady had had trouble fitting him into her sack, for a while.

I went to her once with a cheese sandwich in hand, in case she was hungry. She smiled a refined smile, the kind offered by old ladies who like to work in gardens, and told me thank you, but she was doing quite well with what she had.

"Do you have a place to stay?" I asked her tentatively.

"Oh, I've made a very nice home for myself," she said. "Would you like to see it?" I hesitated before even trying to give her an answer, but it didn't matter: she placed her hand on my shoulder and pushed me into the bag anyway.

"The Cage"

 

After the city fell, Graciele led most of her prisoners into ditches that she and the men had dug by the river, below the level that the water usually reached during the summer floods. There was one prisoner that she kept, though, a girl of maybe twelve who gave her name as Nerri. Nerri she placed in a cage that she made from bones and dry branches, everything dead she could find.

"Set me free," Nerri said one day, grinning at Graciele through low grey eyes as angular as two flints.

"You'd try to kill me if I set you free," was Graciele's simple answer.

"I'll try to kill you if you keep me here." Nerri continued to grin. "As far as I see it, you're already dead."

Graciele regarded Nerri with a tilt of her head; her skin caught the white-hard glimmer of the late spring sun. "I don't think you're fully aware of the accuracy of what you've said," Graciele told her. With two fingers as thin as icicles, Graciele pinched the skin covering her own chin. The pale white skin lifted to reveal pale white bone, and teeth fixed in a jaw that moved with Graciele's laughter. Nerri's eyes dulled.

"I have a secret for you, you green little girl," Graciele whispered, adjusting her skin and coming to stand next to the bars of branches and bone. "You're not the only one trapped in a cage." She thought of the day the curse had landed on her head, and her soul, barely ripe with the onset of adolescence, became bound to the skeleton she now animated and covered in a costume of flesh. She reached inside. "And just like you, I'd like to be free," she said.

She pulled Nerri close and met her with a kiss to the cheek.

"No Special Waste Accepted"

 

"Aw, too bad, guys," Nathan said as he shoved Ed onto the gravel next to the dumpster, "looks like we can't drop him off here after all." The other boys stood around Nathan, flanking him, and watched Ed pick small stones out of the gash on his knee until Nathan shook his head and began walking. "Better get up before someone catches you," Nathan called to Ed over his shoulder, over the boys' laughter, which bounced behind Nathan like an eager pup. "We'll find some place that takes special waste like Ed tomorrow, right?" Ed heard Nathan ask. The boys yipped and howled, hyenas answering the call, while Ed licked the blood from the scrapes on his palm.

"Six Little Trees"

 

[Just being silly today. I had the lovely little song "Ladybugs' Picnic" in my head when I came up with this, to give you an idea.]

Six little trees, all bound in their plastic; 

Six little trees, stacked nice and neat.

Six little trees got out from their package;

Six trees stood up without any feet.

Six little trees, set free on the sidewalk;

Six little trees, dancing on the lawn.

Nobody told the trees to stay put;

Now all the trees are gone, gone, gone.

"Save Yourself"

 

The faerie coughed and spluttered and shook out her wings. She grasped the straw and began pulling herself up, as if she were a victim of a shipwreck, saved from the sea by a rope ladder. The man watched her through the sides of the pint glass while she hoisted herself toward standing. "You saved me," he heard her say from inside the tumbler. "I never could swim. If it hadn't been for you...."

"No one's going to believe this," the man said. 

"What? That faeries are real?"

"That I did something useful," he replied as he dropped his head between his knees, reached for the potted plant in the corner near his table, and expelled from his stomach the Long Island Iced Tea that he had downed only moments before.

"Children Made of Stone"

 

Lars knew as soon as he saw his new neighbor step onto her front porch and close the door behind her that she was coming over to introduce herself, which is to say that she was coming over to complain about his kids. There was a certain stiffness of posture and weakness of smile that preceded questions like Do they run around like that all the time? and Lars had learned to spot it well. What he hadn't learned was how to make someone believe that his children would turn to stone if ever they stopped moving.

"Daddy, I'm hungry!" Bianca called as she and James ran around the ash tree in the corner. Lars shook himself free of his thoughts and reached down to the table for one of the sandwiches he had brought outside for lunch. He thought about telling her to run over and pick it up, but then, even as he was watching their neighbor cross her lawn toward them, he decided otherwise and instead jogged toward the ash tree, sandwich in hand, to join the kids in their game of circles. It was the least he could do for the children he would never be able to hold.

"I Think I Met My Reaper"

 

At one point when I was close to home and almost finished with my walk, I heard the sound of twigs snapping behind me. There was no one else nearby that I could see, so I kept walking. But then I heard a voice, shaky and somewhat distant, say, "Nice night for a walk, isn't it?"

I turned around. A middle-aged man in a t-shirt and shorts was riding a bike in the deepening dark, down the street I had just crossed. He was headed south, traveling from my right to my left, and only tossed me a look as he pedaled.

"It is," I called, even as I imagined walls rising up from the ground to stand between us. "Enjoy it."

The man continued pedaling, so I started to step backwards. Then, once he was almost almost out of sight, I heard him say, "Enjoy it. You never know how long it's going to last." He was gone after that, and I was left to hope that he had been talking about the weather.

"A Hole in My Heart"

 

The tree was sure it knew what the girl was going to do. Through all the years of her climbing on its branches and hiding in its shade, it couldn't help getting to know her a bit. And she had been storing her journals in the hole in its trunk ever since she was six. When she tucked the knife inside one morning, next to all the yellowed notebooks, the tree understood immediately the choice she had made. As soon as she left for school, it began to cry. All that time, it had been so certain that it had kept her safe.

"Plates"

 

The day after Annelise gave birth, two women whom Annelise didn't know came to her hospital room and gave her the plates.

Annelise accepted the box, which also contained four salad bowls to match, and gave the women a long, lean frown. "What are you doing with my mom's dishware?" she asked them.

"Not hers," said one of the women. Her hair was sprayed and pinned into a neat ponytail, and her hands were folded in front of her. "They're actually yours. Your very own set."

"They're affordable, durable, perfect for kids to eat off of," said the other. "My mom used to make me spaghetti all the time. Always with the noodles and sauce separate. I'd mix them together on a plate just like one of those."

"My mother would leave rolls out for me on one of the small plates," the first woman said. "She was usually at work by the time I woke up for school."

"Welcome to the club, Annelise," the second woman said. "Hold on to those plates, and you'll do just fine." The two women exited the room, leaving Annelise to sit back on the hospital bed and think, about cheese and crackers, toaster waffles, all the good things she could remember, and to feel, for the first time since she had seen her daughter's face, a little less afraid.

"Dive In"

 

The drink she poured herself got taller with each night she spent stuck in the long, echoing, after-dinner darkness, until finally she just dived in, and her hair got tangled, and her skin got cold, and she realized despite its depth that the pool she had dug herself to swim in was very small after all.

[Written after reading this amazing poem by James Wright: "In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia Has Been Condemned"]

"Obey All Posted Signs"

 

I stopped the car at the intersection--badly, I know; I felt the seatbelt catch like air in the throat of someone choking--and I looked at my dad, calm in the passenger seat. Again he pointed out the window at the arrow.

"That doesn't look like a real sign," I told him.

He gave a half-smile and let his breath escape slowly, through his nose, a teacher trying to be patient with a bumbling student. "Part of learning how to drive is learning what to look for," he said. "See if this helps." He made a few gestures with his right hand, signs that I had never seen before, and suddenly I saw. I saw everything. Now the air really was caught in my throat. I looked him in the eyes once more, and he nodded. "Same as before, press the gas pedal down, slowly, slowly...." The car's nose lifted, we lurched into the sky in the direction of the arrow, and more than ever before, I felt the enormous weight of moving forward.

"We Now Have Air"

 

You'd think that we all would have run for the store when we saw the sign, but we didn't. We couldn't risk it. Because what if we got there, and there was nothing left on the shelf?

"Bicycle Rider"

 

The other day, a man rode past our house on a bicycle--not an unusual occurrence, except that he was shouting to himself, and waving his hands all around as if trying to shoo away insects. 

This is what I imagine: The man is a mad conductor who views every object in sight as an instrument in his personal orchestra, whose stage--the world--is so large that he needs to travel it on a bicycle to make sure that all the players can see him. "Horns!" he shouts, and car horns blow from a nearby intersection. "Strings!" he yells, and the electrical cables overhead hum lower than a double bass. He loses himself in the music until the song ends in a final tympanic crash that leaves his bicycle a heap of crumpled metallic elements in the middle of the street.

"Clarinet"

 

"Jeez, what is that sound?" she asked from the couch. "It sounds like a clarinet. Or a cat dying. Or a dying cat playing the clarinet."

The man closed the wooden box that kept his song safe and placed the box back on the shelf. "Probably just the neighbor's kid. I think he started taking lessons," he said. "Listen, I'm sorry to have to call it an early night, but I've got this presentation at work tomorrow...." He wiped his hands on the front of his shirt, leaving streaks of dust across the fine-gauge cotton blend, no longer worried about how he looked.

"Where the Wind Takes Me"

 

The would-be traveler had just left her parents' house, ready to go wherever the wind took her, when she glanced up and saw, dangling in the breeze, a pair tennis shoes hanging from an electrical wire.

"Maybe I'll just see where the road takes me to start," she told herself, "at least until I get out of the subdivision." She bent down and double-knotted her shoelaces for good measure before heading off.

"Earthworms"

Poor little worm.

The robin hopped in a circle until it was facing me, stopped, and tilted its head. I tilted mine so that we were mirror-friends and asked, "What are you looking at?"

"Quiet," the robin answered with a snap of its beak. We sat silently for a few seconds. "Ah, they're too far underground," it said afterward. "I was listening to the earthworms."

"You can hear them?"

"You can't?" The robin tilted its head toward the other wing. "Listen," it told me. I heard a lawnmower in action somewhere around the corner. A tree stood nearby with its flowers tumbling down in catkins; I heard them brush against each other in the breeze as if they were bells made of whispers. But I couldn't hear the worms.

"Oh, wow," said the robin. "They're really wriggling down there. I don't know. I think they might be feeding on something. It sounds kinda big." It hopped forward and looked at me, its beak pointing like a finger. "So did you, like, put something down there? Maybe, you know, bury something? Not that it matters to me," the robin said. "I'm just wondering."

I let my jaw drop. "I'm not a killer!" I told it. "And I only moved here a month ago! I don't know anything about this place."

The robin's red breast puffed up as if the bird were drawing in a sharp breath. "Seems there's a lot you don't know," it said, giving its feathers a shake. "You don't know what worms sounds like, you don't know what's going on under your own front yard--just out of curiosity, do you even understand why you're able to talk to me right now?"

I didn't have to answer. The robin saw my frown.

"Okay, let me go speak to a few birds about some things," it said, in a gentler voice than it had been using, closer to its usual song. "Wait here. I'll be right back." I watched it spring into the air, wondering where it thought--given all that I had just heard, and all that I still wasn't able to hear--I would possibly go.

"Just a Trim"

 

More and more people had been walking beneath the spruce tree ever since she got her lower branches cut. It bothered her. Other perennials in the area tried to be encouraging, telling her that the trim simply made her, in a very literal way, much easier to approach. And to be fair, the tree did find herself listening to the people talk as they passed, hearing them speak with delight about how nice it was, now that spring had arrived and homeowners had begun maintaining their landscaping in earnest, to be able to enjoy all the greenery around them. The spruce tree merely wished that she could remind these people that she was the same tree that had been rooted there for people's enjoyment for years, just with a new cut, and that she was as green as she had ever been, which only made sense, as she was an evergreen. But the people continued to walk by and comment on all the lovely things they had never seen before, and the tree, being a tree, said nothing.

"Balls"

 

The two women sat facing each other in the kitchen, surrounded by shards of dishware that had been knocked to the floor. One, the burglar, had been tied to the chair where she was sitting; bungee cords and rags crossed her limbs and her chest. The other, the homeowner, was bouncing a tennis ball on the tile floor.

"Is this bothering you yet?" the homeowner asked as the soft thuds continued.

The burglar remained silent. A bruise was spreading across her jaw like water pooling beneath a leaky roof.

"Bet you wish you had tried to steal these," the homeowner said with a click of her tongue. She caught the tennis ball and put it back into the can with the other two from the set just as red and blue lights appeared, painting the room through the windows.

"Keep Me Warm"

 

We sat on the porch under a red, fading sky, with a blanket drawn over our shoulders. I felt the heat spill out from the cracks that split the pavement like open sores.

"It feels so fucking stupid to be cold right now," she whispered. "Keep me warm. Please."

I pulled the edges of the blanket together, over her arms, over the spots where she no longer had skin to cover her.

"Come Out and Play"

 

I heard what I thought might have been an empty plastic bottle rattling down the street. I thought it seemed odd, as there was no wind blowing to sweep anything along over the blacktop. Because that was the only sound echoing in what felt like an empty chamber of night, I stood and looked out the window. That was when I saw the ghost, a blue flame burning in the image of a boy; on the sidewalk by his feet was a white styrofoam cup. He saw me staring at him from where I stood on the second floor. "It's been a lousy day," he said, as clearly as if he were right next to me. "You want to come out and play?" He kicked the cup with a foot lit by ghostfire. The rattling sound could have been the sound of bones. I didn't offer him an answer, because I knew I had no choice.