Dissecting a Frog

Michael Kim’s head was shaved except for two bleached orange bangs that hung in his eyes. “Die, pericardium,” Michael Kim said, hacking through a snotty-yellow membrane. I opened and closed my mouth, then checked off “Pericardium” on our chart. “Die, ventricle,” said Michael Kim. I said, “Um.” Michael Kim turned. His bangs were strangely feminine compared to his leather jacket and toughguy glare. “Wanna buy some Ritilin?” he asked. I gave him $20, which he pocketed before returning to the frog. “Die, Eustacian tubes,” he said, jamming his finger into the gummy throat. I made another check on the form.

ESL classes via skype

“In this future, we have no need for interpersonal interactions. All such communication now takes place over Skype. Once a simple telephone replacement application, Skype now offers one or more parties to interact visually, using off-the-shelf webcams to create video phones that once cost thousands of dollars. Educators may collaborate by sharing slides and data with students.”
“Wait, what about ESL students?”
“What do you mean? They communicate the same way, via the audio/video interface in the Skype application. Distance education couldn’t be simpler!”
“What if they are afraid to speak? What if their culture demands they hide their face?”

seeing your parents be affectionate

My mother was unfolding the sofa bed, it was late and my visiting grandparents had already retired to my parent’s room. My father was walking up the little staircase into the living room when it happened. This larger than life man, who would catch and hug me when I jumped off those three little stairs, slowly fell behind a recliner like a towel sliding off the rack. My mother rushed to him then left to call an ambulance. I wanted to go as well, to do something important, but he begged me to stay. We sat saying nothing, holding hands.

dissecting a frog

When our science teacher asks for volunteers to dissect the frog, of course you raise your hand. Knives don’t scare you, you explain, and you want to see exactly how things work. Exactly how. You’re the girl all the boys want to kiss. Maybe you’ve kissed them, too. You have the purple backpack I’ve wanted since September, and maroon chucks that manage to stay both on and untied There’s blue pen marking up your leg in swirls and sea creatures. You walk like you’re not scared of anything, and I want to open you up to see how you work.

San Francisco

Creative Writing 101:
Show don’t tell. Paint the barn. I make a list of the places I’ve lived since you have known me: a tiny white-walled room, the floor covered with books and clothes; an empty house where I watched you watch me come back from my run as the sun was setting over the abalone bay. Now: nowhere; everywhere.

Make a start of the particulars. But suppose the usual particular doesn’t matter?
San Francisco. Brooklyn. Homer. Provincetown. Seattle. Kansas.
Even the verbs aren’t singular: Taste. Claw. Love. Speak. Call.
The specific comes in how we use the words.

dissecting a frog

“Get that scalpel away from me!” The frog wailed.
“Shush, you. Don’t talk to me, please I need to concentrate.” The student replied.
“Don’t I at least get a last request?” The frog implored.
“No! Now quiet, I can’t hear the instructor.”
“Gently remove the amigdala. This part should be retrieved in one piece, it is important to study it separately, whole.” The teacher instructed.
“Hey, no, don’t take that thingy, don’t I need that?” The frog asked.
“Well, yeah probably.”
“Well, what does it do?” The frog said, full of questions.
“Don’t know.”
“Away with it then! Good bye.”

San Francisco

I watched you sleep in the car that night, traveling from Madison to Oshkosh. I know you want to leave Wisconsin and hell, I don’t want to be here either. Unfortunately, here is the only place we will be together so I make the most of it, studying your face as it lay slack jawed against the headrest of my red Chevy Cavalier. I have longed to hear the sounds of sleep bubble out of you. Now they fill the small cabin as we terrorize the freeway. Wherever you move is where I won’t be, you’ll make sure of that.

building a house

It’s raining again. Because we’re in Seattle. And that is what it does here. It’s not like rain back East which drenches, or in Wyoming where it blows in with the wind and spurts down from mountains. Here the rain comes with a cloud cover. “What’s wrong?” you ask, and I think you almost really want to know. But I say, “I’m fine,” because it’s easier to lie, easier to build a carapace against despair than to let you in. Then you get up to close the window because the rain is blowing in and the bed is getting wet.

Afterimage

Say no. But my body just shrugged. My fingers just unbuttoned my jeans. You were there but I missed you. Under the rippling chemical surface maybe you are still there. I should go I said and went. But still there are the parts of you my hands remember, still there are the parts of me that remember your hands. Still there are ways my body has of reminding itself of itself. There are these remains. These bodiless bones. I remember the feeling, still my body remembers, still remembers my body still remembers your body remembers my body in the dark.

chicanery

The little girl with the red shoes pulled back the curtain and told the man behind it, “It’s time to go home!”
“But!” said the man. “But!” He was unaccustomed to having people see his face. And this was not how the story was supposed to go.
“It’s time to go home!” the girl said again. She was a sturdy thing of about ten or eleven, with bright blue eyes and hair that looked like it would never stay in a ponytail. “You look silly back there, and no one believes that thing about the wizard.”

Chicanery

Years after the SATs, we found some old vocabulary flashcards and brought them with us on a long drive. The cards were ruffled and bent, a few even torn in half; the definition of diaphanous was arrested at transpare. We took turns quizzing each other, applied our knowledge to the road: I execrate traffic, she said, knuckles white on the wheel. It was perhaps our last drive; weeks later we looked at each other sadly, said nothing—said, There’s nothing left to say. But the remembering is full of words, plangent and fractious; a thousand names for that last saturnine night.

chicanery

After it was over, he looked down to study his hands. They were wrinkled, the way an old man’s are; strange, that. He felt an ocean of depth beneath him, and his careful movements seemed to be all that kept him afloat. His gait was unsteady as he moved to his victim. He moved noisily across the forest floor, there was no reason to remain silent now. He crouched over his prey, staring into her eyes.

“Ouch, you hurt me you jerk face! I want to use the tire swing too!” He smiled, and shook the water from his ears.

afterimage

We sit by the beach, quietlike, listening to the waves lapping and watching the sky. “It looks like a painting,” you whisper. And I can see what you mean. The way the ends of the purple sunset blur into the sepiaed black of the night sky, and then the darker water, as if someone dragged their brush down as it was running out of paint. Lightning hits somewhere behind the cloud and for a second, the sky is lit up. And again. And again. A coherent rubato. We both know but don’t say, thunder follows lightning, and after thunder, rain.

afterimage

I woke up, and you were there, looming over me. Part of me wished you were there, the same part that knew I was awake and that your image was a holdover from a dream I had just before I woke. I roll over and imagine you here with me; your touch and your smell. Groggy and sleep-ridden as I am I fall asleep thinking of you, and dream of you again. When I wake this time you are there across the bed and I reach out to you, feeling your long limbs curl around me, strangling me to death.

coast-to-coast road trip

“Joe,” Amanda whispers almost tenderly. “Are you awake?”
“Mmrhmm.”
Joe is sleeping with a sleeping bag over his head, the way he always ends up by morning when he camps. He snakes a hairy arm over Amanda and nestles his face into her neck.
“Joe!” Amanda whispers again, not tenderly at all. She lies stiff, staring at the tent ceiling. She has been staring at the tent ceiling for, in her estimation, two hours and twenty minutes.
“Baby, it’s still dark. Close your eyes,” Joe mumbles into Amanda’s hair.
Amanda resolves to count to 600 silently, and then try again.

building a house

“Crack, crack.” said the hammer to the nail, who dutifully bowed under the pressure. Hundreds of times this scene was repeated, until the nail learned to bow at the waist instead. The hammer, suitably upset, uprooted the nail with his clawed end and sent it spiraling down to the ground below. The nail, bent as he was in a gesture that spoke both of deference and defiance, didn’t realize at first that he was now useless. Pinging against the ground as he bumped around, animated, he felt at once free and displaced. He yearned for wood to swallow him up.

coast-to-coast road trip

Where we’re going, we don’t need maps.
Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
We don’t need you.
We don’t need each other.
This is a road trip of the stars, as traveled on the buckling hull of a too-small sailboat driving hard into ocean swells.
I’ll win this race.
I’ll win because I have something you don’t, a soul; that ineffable indescribable indelible insolent mediocrity which is completely beyond your reach.
I’ll win because I’ve already won, because I was winning before we left on this journey across land and sea.
I was destined to win.
I miss you.

Wolves

At the end of the dock, the wolves
are howling for meat
so I throw them my heart.

Mornings, it’s just me and the dogs
on the dock in the new light,
waiting for the ferry.

The dogs will eat almost
anything, but steer clear of
the pile of dead fish that appear
on Sunday evening. The next day, there
is a mound of delicate bones,
vertebral carnage without the flesh,
but the stench is unmistakable.

You picked fish cartilage out of your
teeth, vainly trying to avoid the thin shards
that would scratch the inner lining
of your throat.

Wolves

Amanda wants to tattoo her forearms with wolves. I say, Cool. I remember a book I read as a kid, about a girl who goes to live with wolves, but I can’t remember the reason the girl does this, so I don’t tell Amanda about it. I’ve struggled to train myself not to tell stories when I can’t remember how they end; ellipses are tempting but kind of a cop out. Don’t you think? I ask Amanda. What are you talking about, ellipses, she says. Those three dots—I know, she interrupts, but what do they have to do with wolves?

Transcription

Ron, the ranger with the gray mustache, says Jesse James didn’t die how they said he did. How’d he die, Ron? comes the cameraman’s voice. Ron says That’s why I’m digging this hole. The rangers map a grid onto the brown Kansan plain, to keep track of where the underground tunnel might be, and then Ron scans through the prairie to the layers of rock beneath it, hunting disruptions in stratification. For a treasure map, a series of petroglyphs carved in sandstone: turkey track, anchor, double-J for Jesse James. Lucky we’re here now, Ron tells the camera, These won’t last.

Martha's Vineyard

In your father’s office there is a picture of you and your sister, salty-tangled and sun-browned, trying to out-grin each other, your small bodies draped in matching blue sweatshirts that say Martha’s Vineyard. Yours has fallen off one of your freckled shoulders; the sleeves hang almost to your feet, your hands invisible. That you will grow up and put your teeth on my neck, your famished tongue in the cave of my mouth—it’s too much; I can’t look at the picture. That you were a child, that you didn’t know me, that we couldn’t have known what we didn’t know.

Fingernails

In the desert we slept between two blankets that smelled like turmeric and were the color of turmeric. Sometime later I woke up cold. Our guides were still sprawled around the fire, passing a joint and singing Bollywood songs in warbly falsetto. Then I dreamed I was lost in a field of sheep, so many sheep that you couldn’t see the field. In the morning the sand shifted like a kalaediscope: there were beetles everywhere, skittering like spilled coffee beans. I forced myself to touch one on its hard brown wings. It felt like my fingernails, those small armored places.

Wolves

When I was Little Red Ridinghood I feared the wolves. Then the wolf took me in, and stripped of my crimson robes I felt a strange comfort. Naked in the forest I knew I would never again be trapped by the trappings of modern man. Never would I work in climate controlled, empty, square boxes; smooth walls the antithesis of nature, their cool faces fighting it. The wolves, curled as they were in their tiny den, looked so comfortable, and when I laid down with them I soon felt the warm feelings of sleep. I woke to myself being devoured.

Transcription

The noble monk, cloistered, sat hunched over a stack of thick papers. His pen, dipped in the tables ink well without looking, took up the perfect amount of ink. Reading from the page on his left, transcribing to the page on his right, beads of sweat suddenly bubbled up from the beneath the stoic, precise exterior. For there, emblazoned beneath his right hand where the word of god should be, had appeared an abomination. He must have written it, yet it seemed to have come out of nowhere. “You will stop writing this garbage, it is not my will.”

Transcription

Over the summer, my grandmother’s skin began to drape off her limbs, and in the fall, I stopped hugging her because I didn’t want to break her. I had a tape recorder back then, and for six Saturdays in a row, my grandmother answered my questions into the tape. My dad never commented, but on Saturday nights, he would sit in the kitchen with me while I scarfed down food (there had long since stopped being food at my grandmother’s house; she could no longer taste anything) and listen ravenously as I recounted the stories my grandmother had told me.

Martha's Vineyard

We heard the news that a woman had been murdered when we were in the car, coming back from a late night ice cream run. The radio barely worked on those back roads, but Papa liked to listen to it for the next day’s weather report. I heard the phrases strangled, no forced entry, and physical evidence in between miles of static. My boysenberry ice cream dripped down my pinkie, but licking it off, the sweetness nauseated me. The next morning, the shoreline was littered with starfish, as well as starfish parts – arms with no bodies and bodies missing arms.

Stained Glass

My sister made a stain glass shape at camp one summer. I call it a shape because there’s no other noun that could describe the connected geometric plates of different colors. My parents hung it on our kitchen window, along with the gods-eye I made when I was six, and the porcelain harlequin who was missing his pants. Years later, the stained glass must have broken because I found it in four separate pieces on the table in the living room. I could no longer remember how it looked when it was whole, or how the light shone through it.

SCHEDULE

7/10: fingernail/stained glass
7/11: martha’s vinyard
7/12: transcription
7/13: wolves
7/14: coast-to-coast road trip
7/15: building a house
7/16: afterimage
7/17: chicanery
7/18: palmolive antibacterial soap
7/19: reanimate
7/20: San Francisco
7/21: dissecting a frog
7/22: bedtime stories
7/23: seeing your parents be affectionate
7/24: ESL classes via skype
7/25: stained glass/ fingernail