BRADLEY DAVID / 3 FICTIONS
SOME PEOPLE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS
First line kills. That's when you know it's the crying season. The crying in the garden season. It's smoke and fog season. The missing season. Missing the ink on this endless list unless you're lucky. Nobody has checked on me—I have checked. This has my eyes ink and allium. This has my home facing rain. Facing first frost and peak leaves.
One hundred bales of hay, he said. For the goats, he said, for warmth and winter fodder. In that way I know the hay is for him. I wish it for me, in leaves, I said. Love them till they fall. Then it's the work season. The working till the tines bend season. The give and take season. The must and mold season. Time to muster the will to spring.
So, I wrap my shadow in shade cloth. Warm cider from the last apple of his first frost. And after forever, spring comes and honeybees hover the bog pond, wings spinning the world faster than I can hold on. And it's all I can do to slow grill wild onions till they release their arrogance. Relax winter’s finger traps. Spread thick spring’s sweet jam on the wheat left of anything.
Now summer's first heat teases my toes to strum fibers on this spindled porch chair. Sending shy echoes into this cave of thawing time. What is this wood, faux mango? It's missing the click of grandma's Waltham clock. Irritating like an itch in a cast. A metronome warming me up for a summer trance—in a room smelling of cotton fought polyester. Like a boy's Reese's Pieces pajamas. Looking back on that orange, that's when the dryer told us to stop planting lint. When Labor Days got longer and we stretched pennies on tracks. When we turned earthworms into dollars. Dollars into deadwood. Soot into asthma attacks. A dozen strike food bland pecan pies and canned chopped clams. Yellow cheese, wheatless white bread, and Spam. That's when crates turned into cardboard. Cellars into second freezers. When Ziplocs and Tupperware felt as smooth as the future—decorating the longing in our chests, bursting with Styrofoam secrets. When the guilt of taking too much turned into freezer-burned hearts. They told us only take the leaves you need but we pulled up the roots. They said if you take all that falls we won't have forests for the trees. That's how we learned to live more with less. How we learned first line kills. How spies on the picnic ended up ants in the magnifying glass.
So, here we are at different scented soap in every room. At instant soup and boxed Costco patios. Adding hot water to powdered hummingbird nectar. Don't give me that plastic, I only want pottery. I want this house to shatter when it crashes into itself. Don't give me digital, I need proof that clock glass still comes in crystal. I need a return to that ticking scissored arithmetic. I'm snipped down to a yard. Down to a kitchen. Down to takeout. Down to wine and trash TV and trash talk and the trash stinks and the kitchen stinks and the TV stinks. And first line kills. And you haven’t shown up to the table in ways that matter. For instance, with a knife. Ways to help me put down the knife. Ways to employ these fears. How to send them out to make a dime. We accuse you of being the water that makes the dry ice steam. We expect the balloons of your cheeks to shatter. I expect to host a yard sale of your aftermath. Sticky sippy cups rolling themselves into sweaters from the Volvo-tumbled retriever.
Sure, we're enjoying your silence, but would the noise of good news break the day? Show up to the table with something jellied and frosted. Something midnight purple and star white like the lilacs we stole with flashlights. Something naked and bruisy like the nightcrawlers in a concertina-rimmed coffee can. From when we took to grandma's yard after she sold it for the city and the new man might have a gun. Or a vase. Or a knife. He might slice our sternum to find where we hid his flowers. He might stuff us with clocks and stitch us back open with wool. Chain elastic cuffs to our pale thin wrists.
I try to exercise these tightly fashioned freedoms on my great big plans. A clandestine garden and an underground coop. But the soil is too dry to take rain. And the leaves shear off at the beets. That's when hot vinegar baths never taste so shattered. That's when my skin is too dry to take rain. When more lines have shown up in the watchglass. Wine lines and work lines. Sunspots and liverspots. Days beating down on these Visqueen masks. Wind fraying my blue tarpaulin down to the veins. Down to my kindergarten construction paper. There's a coupon in the trash that could laser it all away. First line kills once you wipe off the beans.
Keepers of Glad-wrapped urgencies, television entranced fondlings, let them flock to cool zeroes. To bald spots on barrens on tundras on nickels' edges. There there—there are the eggs in the nests in the lives of the deaths. Tune into their splendorous hatching. Feel what it's like to balance on edges of egg shells. We, who were far from saints but resisted plastic cutlery, knew a sharp steel knife when we saw one, and needed one, and left one. Like how we left tin cups on wishbone branches at travelers’ springs. We weren’t surprised when someone built us a river ford of fallen fir. That's why, he said, we have to leave twice for the land that we take from it.
This land is not my land, I am not taking it. I may rub a rock face with charcoal and paper, but I promise I’ll be quiet. I'll be the grace of a light wind catching a flowered dress on a gentle calf. Only giving myself away with a sigh at the wonder of kitchen window cherry trees and shelf jars of pickled purple beets. You won’t know the scratch of my dry brush on canvas from the scratch of your creosote bush on sandstone. I’ll be dark sky quiet and take my black tea in red canyon light. I won’t umbrella the sun with missionary tents or dump mattresses under mesas. I’ll only bring the way I walked when I learned the forests are listening. The woods-walk, when I took spring-soft to tag alder thickets, startling bursts of woodcock on edges of blueberry barrens. Licking bicep blood from the hairline clip of a hawthorn hook. When I walked snow-soft among spying black beads of winter-white ermine scampering up scrolling birch ramps.
We were one then. One without a crack or a snap, nimble on our mistakes. I am not a fool for hope, but I am not a front-page wreck. I am a body of work worth a million in seabirds, squawking about a front-page theft. The hole in their sky leaves me wanting and needing in a cold ball beside this struggling freezer. I’m a ball of need. I’m curled in a crying desire. A whirling sparking fire, spinning off my need. Good, find me. Refill this burned up oxygen. This is a crazed matter on a red flag day. Low on humidity and high on heat. Low on good and high on need.
Here’s what it is: A trickle of good is not enough—the pressure’s too low. We need it to hurt when it hits our faces. Blow us over into a cloud of dust. Turn us to mud and carry us to sea. Until then, until we, I am infant. I am useless. Sugar and salt taste like sand. Coffee and wine are as water as gasoline. I need a crow to drop pebbles in this tank. Rise me up and spill me over into a mud river rushing to sea. That I am irrelevant and hopeless and destructive—and that is true and you cannot tell me otherwise—because you are irrelevant and hopeless and destructive—that is a release for us both. But I want to be a brilliant light from that uncaged fire. I want to be a mossy dripping waterwheel. I want to generate some kind of extinguishing, breaching, ravaging good. I need to be clean of all this because I need to be unrecognizable in the dirt I am taking to. I want to be surrounded by nothing around me. I need to need nothing, so that I am nothing, so that I am something, so that I am good. I need to be released and I need it to be good.
So, which drain will take my pale blood to the bleached sea? Which vessel will float this placenta, this circumcision, back to the mother back to me? I am etching ostracons with intentions, tooth and nail, so she'll know where to find me. Potsherds have a habit of holding histories for earthquakes. Ancient vases have a way of holding squash seeds for worker bees. For transplanting suns into timeshadows. For shrugging us off shelves like pesky teenagers. That's the cleaning season. The lint catch cleanout before the house burns down. The squeaking chair legs across Pine-Sol floors. The hanging out season. The hanging scent of good. The clean freedom of terpene absolution. Fresh batteries in paranoid smoke detectors. Oiled weathervanes and porch basket petunias. Taking our temperature with their wilt. That's where I'll catch wildfire sunsets with a winter book in my lap. Where you'll ask me what I'm reading and I'll say pottery. Where I'll wish you'd tell me there is no bad weather, only bad inventions. I could fall for that because I'm still not talking to the snow. I could live with finger grease on plastic book sleeves, but I can't comprehend that flash in the sky that's brighter than the sun. That trip to Mars leaving me simmering in the dust.
Remember how I once planted seeds from a space tomato? How they withered in the frost, how we migrated west? This ship will not return to us with such butterfly purpose. Not with its proboscis nectared or its legs pollened. All of its nots leave me bound and tired. I wake from its flare into an autumn fire. Its leaves today, what a mess, what an honor. They never seem to get enough of us and we can hardly stand for it. Soon we'll have them Glad-wrapped and street stacked. Folds of hot plastic skin where we wanted snow banks where we wanted sand dunes where we wanted glaciers where we wanted beaches. I want it all, caving in around me, mothered to death and wanting for nothing. For that I wonder what I need to deserve. What I need to release. Where I need to start. Where first line kills, trail off, and start again.
This must be what it feels like when the weather ends.
Twelve Hand Hold
I didn’t know I loved him. It wouldn't have been love. Manners of affection running up against vital impossibilities. That's what I would have noticed. Except I didn't notice I was noticing him at all. I was absolutely noticing him.
The third time I knew identical twins was six years later working in a bookstore. They didn't always work matching shifts, but when they did, I grew fond of their tender interactions. Squeezing past one another in an aisle in a rush; one tenderly placing his hand on the small of the other's back. A singular second translated into Hello brother, How's your shift? Does your back ache? I love you.
Once, I stole witness to their embrace. Tall slender frames, one forehead on the other's shoulder. The latter softening the invisible knotted emotion in the other's back. Hands too thin to be called large, too elongate to be less than substantial; rubbing the loose tucked plaid shirt against his brother's back. I bet he could feel spine under those long fingers catching in gathers of cotton. Those shirts, they swam in them, respectively. Glasses thick and faces gaunt. They spoke methodically, walked briskly. If they gossiped it was only among one another. They smiled lightly but did not laugh. What were they not laughing about? I didn't know I'd noticed. I didn't catch on to my intrigue. What, the twin-ness? Or the male-ness? Or the tenderness? The foreignness of male sibling tenderness. Then we all vanished.
The second time I knew twins was concurrent with the first time I knew twins, but there was no overlap in the knowing. There were gulfs between them, all of us. The second time didn't leave memories of hands. In a town too small to have suburbs, they were from the suburbs. Pastor's sons. Or minister's. Or preacher's. All the same to me. Same collars. Same houses. Same streets named after different flowers. Bicycles tracing grids within boundaries like lunch and dinner. Both leaned, gently, beigely, into the thrift store grunge aesthetic. Later apparent, long after I knew them, one was conservative and the other was progressive—bickering about social policies and each other's president as though they'd come from different mothers. As though they were the individuals that they were. As though any of us could be twins to our strangers.
The first twins I knew talked in teenage languages: girls, video games, and angst. No, beyond angst. This was anguish. They didn't talk to me about anguish. How was it that they smiled and laughed the most? We all lived outside of town. So far away from the life we admired we felt like next-door neighbors, though miles apart. There for each other's first dates and first cigarettes. Witness to the worst of families and breakdowns of all ages. Not the teenage breakdowns that disappear with a better phone call. But kitchen knives and shattered coffee tables. No talk beyond the moment of breakage or breakdowns. We shared the leftovers of knowing. They were sweet and tough and sensitive. Handsome and agitated. Accumulating.
I didn’t know I loved him. It wouldn't have been love. So why do I remember his hands? His hands I hold, but barely his face. It's in a yearbook somewhere, but I won't look. I don't know what that would do. Won't. Would. Will. I didn't notice his hands. Did I? Did I notice they needed lotion? Fingers slender and dry and all knuckle. Wondering now if the hands were cold. I remember them in winter gloves. A fireplace heated home. All of ours were. In the country, wood was free or cheap. Scavenged, lugged and stacked by black gloves. Wood stealing moisture from protrusions. Bumpy parts like camel humps—knuckles, knees, elbows. Hot fault lines blacken fissures into curled green bar soap. Rubbed down to a cuttlebone. We washed until we didn't bother.
Theirs could have been piano fingers on those controllers. Dry and nimble on silk. The silk shirts of the day. The silk that didn't act like itself. Wearing them over and over and throwing them on the floor and wearing them again, dousing them with cheap cologne. Boxy limp shirts that made bodies ambiguous. Except that I'd seen them both shirtless. Yes, that must be why I knew they had a wood stove—it was hard to control the heat. They were too hot. Hot and dry and agitated. They might have beat me up if they knew I 'd noticed. But I knew not to notice.
I know they were agitated because their shirts came off and they fought. Wrestled. Smooth chests, conoid nipples, olive skin. Black shorts of sweatshirt fleece crudely stitched in home-ec. Hairless thighs muscled when the action drove the hems into the pale. Right there on the thatched brown carpet of the hot dry living room with the probable wood stove. Sometimes of their own volition, sometimes the father egging them on. Egging, coercing, forcing? I didn't know how far his bands of resistance and temper would have stretched within his directorial traumaturgy. Pounding the matt of the arena, ad ludum gladiatorium, training soldiers in a way I'd someday regret not practicing. Facelock, armlock, headlock, chickenwing, scorpion, anaconda, sleeper. Street Fighter and Punchout. The one that goes too far. The one that breaks glass. Slamming grievances out of each other’s body. Ensnared arena voyeur, my only weapon was disappearing. The art of being the air in the room.
I didn't bother remembering blood or bruises. I remember a bathroom sink chalky with calcium deposits and toothpaste spit and black lava fissured soap. The rust-water-streaked toilet—the one you didn't sit on. The one you aimed for and didn't matter if you missed. Shame was not on display. These were the twins that laughed. Did he laugh? I can't hear it. I must have loved his smile, because I can't see it, because I wasn't looking, because I knew better.
I can hear his voice now. No, it's gone. It used to say my name on the phone. It used to walk miles to see me. Sometimes it wore my cheap cologne on its practical silk. Polite and sweet and sensitive. And it wrestled. I can see fingers stretched tight against a brother. It was called the mercy hold and I was right there when it was invented. I can see the bone of his soft knee. I think it jammed the coffee table. I can see a smooth underarm. All this smooth and soft running up against furniture as heavy as the future. I can see it in their clear skin like a crystal ball. I can see hair descending the forehead, nearly to the eyes. But I can't see the eyes. The eyes will get you in trouble. So I keep my head down, my voice low, and gain entry through the hands.
It's been relayed to me, twenty-five years away, that if he saw me he'd hurt me. Travel two-thousand miles to look me in the eye; aggrieve something about a girl that divergence hasn't made irrelevant. Always an excuse to return to the flesh. I would take that hand as it hit me. Turn it top to bottom to find reasons to remember it better. Render it with a richer emollient. Release it into the hot velocity of time cleaving into one shared memory. Rejoin two ends of one melted rope. He will tie me down and scrub the floor with me. Facelock, armlock, headlock, chickenwing, scorpion, anaconda, sleeper. The mercy hold. The one about disappearing. The one that went too far.
Semiochemonogamy
Erotic, placing trust in a stranger. First voyeur, then cautious cat. Inhaling humid estimates. His invisible anything. His shadow entering mine. Giving bones to my hunched deference secreting the scent of his labor. He doesn't apologize for the odor that could glisten my knuckles with a swipe. Relieving him is the least I could do for shoveling my gravel. Arranging my grid of drip irrigation. Sweating for me, contractually, these deliveries. Conducting dump trucks and the slow rolling cement mixer grinding my neighbor's coffee. Can you poach a perfect egg? Erotic. You know when to let them sweat. Degrees at which water births bodies from basic elements. Erotic. You're all a part of me now. You'll all be taken up by the stone pine that hoards owls and sheds needles in poundage. Pine doesn't apologize for its slough. The stranger. Doesn't mind smelling like pine and sulfur. He and my yard in a conspiracy engineering permanence into departures. Sloughing and drenching molding and drying casting and reeling.
Twelve o'clock peels off the roofline. Pitching and dripping. Offing urethane like an artist's resins and solvents. This torrent lays me belly down dizzy on pebbles delivered for my pathway. Seeing oceans in agates, I must apologize to this harvested river. How will I dare tread the faces of this fake tract? Oh, nimbly I see, now that I've nearly twisted an ankle in a pocket of theft. In the nest of a trout whose eggs lost its lodging. The stranger. Smells like fish, but by way of a grassy creel. Like wind by way of sweet poplar. He tells me how to get discounts on tacos. He smells like a hard-earned lunch. It's erotic to receive advice from a stranger. He'll bring pepper seeds, too hot, but I sink my knees into all his deliveries. Plant his seeds, dry his fruits, rub my eyes. And burn. He warned me of this. He said we could start planning the future. Build a coop and a sturdy wall to hold back shocks of nature. It's erotic to receive his caution. I receive them when he's done for the day and lingers beyond his pay. Erotic, to receive him freely at five o' clock. His free willingness. To lean against the cistern bloated with tannin gutter water. To jut his hip in jeans and raise his arm in gray Hanes. Propping my cool gray stuccoed wall from another danger. That Santa Ana wind that is tamed by his charm. Eddies under his armpit. Makes that invisible erotic move from our youth. The one where we slip like a secret locker note under nervous t-shirt sleeve.
Oh, I see what you're doing here. Who are you working for and how far have you taken me? Every morning you've arrived at eight and never asked permission to be this dangerous. But now that everything's fixed, you'll leave me by way of these fresh slick steps. You ask me to look at your work and all I see is danger. Broken heads and wildfire. You twist the spigot, pleased with your pop-ups hissing at me like Brentwood. But I'm just trying my best to keep this city's country alive. Heads turn and I get drenched. Wipe my knuckles across my chest. Erotic.
I'm satisfied with your self-satisfaction so you're off to pack it all in. Pushing wood and pipe into your truck bed. In the rush before six, you enter me with fish and peppers, pine and urethane, wet cotton and sour flesh. Your beautiful work. Then you elude me again with a grunt of a puff of exhaust.
Back inside, laundry folded and floor swept, it's erotic when you say You're so European to my radish butter baguette.
Bradley David's poetry, fiction, essays, and hybrid works appear in Terrain, Plainsongs, Exacting Clam, Stone of Madness, Bureau of Complaint, Porridge, and others. New work is forthcoming in Allium, Fruit Journal, Simple Machines, and the museum of americana. His work can be found at linktr.ee/bradleydavid. Proof of his poultry rescues and struggle gardening can occasionally be found on Twitter @strangecamera and Instagram @mystrangecamera. He is passionately introverted and probably hiding.