The Lazarus Effect

Chapter 6: The View from Halfway Down

I run my hand under the cool water and years fall off in the cascade. I tack a decade on when I run it through the golden holographic apples. She is a child of the earth. I see and respect that.

 "Had she been drinking?" 

He raised his eyebrows, "She could turn saltwater into wine."  

I pushed Ma's ashes under the door crack. His room was off-limits when he was in the land of the living. I tried once, to pick the two locks. He never got his hands on me, but his shadow got close enough to mine to chase it towards the light.

 Do you have room for your heart? 

In the same way, your closet space makes room for all of your skeletons. Even when both of them had died, my sight remained, although reduced mostly in my peripheral. 

Ma refused to release a single bird from their cage. Pa guarded his door as if it were the gates of the gods. Who could blame me for choosing the room without a window? How many eyes passed over my family home? How many stopped to stare? He would steer us away from the iceberg as if we were not in between Scylla and Charybdis. 

Everyone always tried to read my lips, gave up, and mouthed, 'Oh how big her ears were, all the better to listen.' If only one of my classmates hadn't weaved a rape joke into every creative writing assignment and two others deconstructed their rape as an all-white Rubix cube. Maybe, then I wouldn't have spent the remainder of class arguing to play Coup. Maybe, the English teacher who petitioned Creative Writing as an elective wouldn't have let me. Though she always gave us a choice.  She was half the reason I was searching for the middle ground between being a prison guard and an inmate.

I hoped to spot someone else raising their hand as high as mine.

Teachers always call on those whose eyes are firmly set upon their desks. No matter where I sat, I made my seat into a pseudo-throne. The last time I had laid eyes on the white rabbit, it was barreling over the edge of the world. Then all at once, down the man and the bunny went. I had an imaginary bird that followed my family around, casting over us, a single shadow of wings. I was a student at a Meister's door... The Lily in the Valley that was best returned to the swamps.

He could not kill me; that was his price. I gladly accepted the severance package as he knew I always would. The thing that haunted us had no true shape, it was only a handle that stuck easily. 

None of us learn...why else would we still be here? I was more of an in-between go-between. A monkey in the middle. He took her to the maze to duck the hedges and beheaded her. Luckily, there was another serial killer chopping women's heads off in the area. But God forbid we have one potential, Lizzie Borden.  Between the weeds or sunflowers, which invasive species would break ground first? I cut my wrists for you, he said. He also told me he had never loved me more while I was suspended by handcuffs, and he had the key. When he unlocked me, he retreated to his side of the bed. Would he put me down easier than his prey?  I hoped.

I could not stomach my grandma checking for a wolf at her door. Or Houdini dying on stage while performing a parlor trick. 

Or the tower that fell and took the princess with the crumbling brick.

You guys really do watch everything. What else are eyes for?

I usually skip the first episode of a series; everyone is still trying to figure out the plot. He rode my bus; his house was less than a mile down the road. We both sat in the back. He had a backpack for a seat partner. I had already taken the bait; it was better to save your thrashing for when they go to pick you apart on the deck. I was a zombie, tearing at the object of compulsion. I started wearing all-white dresses. Walking infestations of the abominable contradictions that is the beginnings of love and its end. 

- I finished all my work early and would stare blankly at the door, chanting under my breath, "Abracadabra, or open sesame."

As if I could invite myself back in., we are mixing shadows.  Astonishingly, you can love someone with hazy details. I was a bay host, and he was a food runner. I could not help but think that this was no accident. I woke up in a neon jersey, with all questions and no answers. I rotated through a state of drunkenness and a sick fog of reality for years. How many tears had I dried while plugging up my own dry well?

Where can I draw a line in the sand that won't be erased by the tides? I grew tired of the ocean's wishy-washy nature as it drowns you. I don't appreciate any screen that stares back at me. What did you expect, for me to go screaming into the night?

"How is the water?"

She looked skyward as if checking for rain by the beginnings of its pour. 

The sea reunited us. We drug our feet through the mud to feel for the shells. I'd never seen her livelier than when wading in the ocean's give and take. She waved, not at me, but at the tiny fiddler crab crawling towards her toes. When it went to climb up her legs, she did not heed it with a warning shoo. She punted the poor thing back into the oceans depth.

I fell ill in the bushes at the sight of my poor bike torn into pieces. I would hear the neighbor kids hiss whenever I grew nauseous at the sight of handlebars. "What a dramatic little girl, can't hold her stomach in, can she?" I'd grow into it; I was sure I was halfway there. Tasha asked about the mess she had seen me leave. I told her what she wanted to hear. Who else besides me mourned the glass they broke? The shatter that bled them? The man who watched my own body bleed me out.

The birds perched on a power line, playing chicken with electrocution. We floated two to a tube looped around the wine coolers back to the four of us. Belle Isle was the town's resident midnight spot, split by the peaks of boulders.

I was grateful for my famine; he was hungry at a feast. We both belong here.

The kids dealt cards. Spoons, BlackJack, and then Euchre. A family of four splashed about the bits of water teasing the stone seats. How would the bonds of flesh break the double-sided chain? What hunter could track everything except their father's scent? How often did the camera pan back to me, and I was just sitting there in waiting? 

I recite lines from the Romans. Stealing kisses in between, "If you declare it with your mouth," and "Jesus..."

All I could manage was mimicry. The orange cat came toward me. I ran the midnight oil into a scorch of fiery mist. If someone asked me my favorite color, I would say any shade except gray. They might laugh, or they might not. They probably won't ask me another question after that.  I do know not what wire goes to what circuit board. What rats were in the walls, and which were underneath the floorboard?

Spiders nest in my car, leaving silk homes in my engine. I had two moms, I told them. There was no shame then. Quite the opposite, all that love for an orphan. They used to separate us into our opinions, by which corner we chose. I would always pick B when I didn't know the answer. 

Or the one with the least amount of people. Rarely did I go with my gut. I could only hit my mark if a hard target was drawn. You sic your older sibling on your playground bullies. I wouldn't know. I fought all of my own battles. No matter how I style my hair out of my face I realigned the strands into pigtails a boy would yank.

You put a lion on a leash.

I could not change my name or cross many bridges of my attachment with a piece missing in the middle. Go around, rappel down, or fall to your death. Either way, you're almost there. Thank God the game had a winner and a loser. From a bee sting on, I was fated to live with a festering wound. Ever since I was carried from the car to my bed, I acted as a dead man.

Who needs the person when you have their office cubicle? Are you the bat hanging from the ceiling of my family's attic?

No one breaks more rules than the rich and powerful.