You have to suffer a little, she tells herself. That’s the thing about life, it gets you when you least expect it and before you know it, you’re suffering. All the artists know this, and the smart ones do something. They weave poems that whisper into the cracks of hardened hearts, or form hand-molded sculptures with elegant lines, or pound out songs that get you where you live. Those kinds of things.

The ones who aren’t smart, they suffer, and they don’t have a damned thing to show for it besides ruined eyes and shriveled guts. Years go by and they look up to realize that their children are grown and their sensitivities have frozen, their salad days have iced up in the harsh light of disenchantment and the chill of regret.

Come on, she tells herself, be brave. Remember that anxieties are aroused by these inner beliefs: bad follows good; if you get too excited/happy/relieved, God will punish you; to be negative is to be realistic; only fools indulge themselves in optimism.

Her intention is to trust the good coming her way, to ask the gift to settle in and stay a while. He hasn’t religion, but she has enough for the both of them: she’ll go down on her knees to laud God for putting him in her path and she won’t fear affection. Not everything is on a trajectory to harm you, she reminds herself. Some things can’t work out, it’s true.

But then, some can. That’s true, too.
###

Alright, alright. Reads books, asks questions. Check and check. Demanding.

She’s developed a type, she realizes. “Well, good,” she thinks. “”Now look, be smart about this. Smart means smart.”

###

Pan Pan Pan

Cancel that.
All stations All stations All stations

Mayday Mayday Mayday Upgrade to Mayday
This is Mike Juliet Bravo, Mike Juliet Bravo, repeat Mike Juliet Bravo
Mayday
My position is 38.1032, negative 122.6299
I am on fire and sinking
I require immediate assistance, repeat immediate assistance
I have one person, self, on board
Condition is failing, not responding to resuscitation measures
Abandoning to life raft
Over

Do you copy that? Do you — (cut off)
Roger Roger Roger Roger?
(unintelligible–sounds like, “God! Please Wilco”) Do you copy? Out.

###

My brother. My brother. My brother.

My heart is burst. My brother. Chip. My brother.

A call, at work. “I have horrible news.” My brother. My chest burst, the ceiling fell in.

I tremble in fear. My brother.
###

She wrote a letter and she wondered if it might be printed, folded, placed into a khaki pocket, and discovered years from now, when she and the person she addressed it to were both entombed, no longer alive except in whatever meager legacies they were able to make while they’d had hearts and limbs and functioning bodies.

She imagined the reader discovering the letter and peeling the paper back from it’s folded state, the fibers crushed and crumbling, like so much lint. Would the words hold up over time? Would heartfelt sentiments translate well, or would the reader chuckle? These romantics, circa 2010, the reader would say, voice in digital monotone. How desperately they wanted to feel alive.

###

Tess knows he thinks of her because she thinks of him, and there’s such a thing as string theory…vibrations of higher energy transfixed in the ether, the power of Celestine Prophecies, etc., etc. And she spends enough time in front of a crucifix, on her knees, praying for an answer and God will deliver it often in the form of prose unfolding in her head, or in the tap tap tap of her fingers against a table (an imaginary piano, that table). So many songs have been gifted to her, so many songs have been forever ruined for her.

To wit: “I will go down with this ship. I won’t put my hands up and surrender. There will be no white flag above my door. I’m in love. And always will be. And when we meet, which I’m sure we will, all that was there, will be there still. I’ll let it pass, and hold my tongue, and you will think that I’ve moved on.” That’s Dido, of course. And here’s Tess: “You coward. Was a time you’d never have let it pass. You’d never have wanted me to hold my tongue.” This ship hit sand, and moored. She’d rather have gone down into the deep–that would have been fitting, romantic. Instead she’s wrecked against some small island, the end coming through base starvation. And there are no pieces of cloth, white or red or any color at all, to wave at him now.
###

I lay my arm out as instructed, palm up. My skin is so vulnerable-looking, like a baby’s. I look at it, blinking, not thinking.

“Uncross your legs, dear. When you are asleep, we don’t want your limbs going numb. You’ll only be under a short while, but still. Now relax. Is it easy to get a vein in your right arm?”

I nodded, squeezed my eyes shut, waited for the pinch, the feel of my vein giving itself up to the surgical needle, the slow spreading of icicles through my arm that would signal sleep floating down on me. Feathers in a breeze, caught mid-air, somewhere between wakefulness and the unfurling of heavy velvet curtains. A hand moved to untie the gold silk braids that kept the stage in sight, and —

When I came to, the nurse’s voice slapped at my ear. “You did beautifully. You’re fine, fine.” The surgery was done. I was fine. A week to recover. Feathers in a breeze.

###

You.

You.

No, not you. You…the one in the looking glass. You, there, little woman. Take a good look at yourself. You are divided and pieced into something different than you were a year ago, but you still exist somewhere beneath that image in the mirror, beneath skin and bone structure, flucuations in weight caused by stress or comfort eating, hair in a refined french twist or left to drift, abandoned, about your shoulders. You are still you.

God’s gonna give you something, believe it. Some kind of sign beyond a face awash in salt water, the sudden flood of tears that confronts you during your morning commute when you lose focus on the road and allow yourself to drift, where you imagine your phantom spectre waiting for you at your office doors. The phantom stands, cigarette dangling from a frown, leaning against the wall, arms crossed (rebel-style), and a helmut at his feet. You’ll get a sign beyond the punch in the gut you get every time you remember, bone-level, that the person you loved was not a person, never, not at all.

Nobody will ever be like the phantom spectre, it’s true. But take solace in knowing that, too, nobody will ever be like

You.

###

She was driving, and the vehicle was familiar–a longtime companion, slightly in need of some bodywork. But reliable. Through very bad weather and roads that weren’t roads once she viewed them through her rearview mirror (they’d become muddy troughs when her vehicle’s rubber tires ate through them), through coughing engine problems and aeration pumps that failed, the car had somehow delivered her around the bend in the road.

It’s pretty here, she thought, one hand in her lap. One hand on the wheel.

A fledgling smile played with her mouth, and if there were a passenger with her, that rider would have heard the sound of humming.

###

It was exactly the word to describe it.

Taking glee in someone else’s misfortune, a prior person’s hurt, gossiping like sneering girls, mocking words that are written (and the history behind words), playing the workaday sleuth…all this, all caramel-candied Schadenfreude.

###