O
n the once pearlescent edges of fleshy pink, there was decay, like that
on the teeth of young boys and girls who dread nothing more than the
taste of toothpaste. There was now a numbness where they had been
filled with thought: the edges, consisting of those sensations of falling asleep or
being woken up, now startled but unable to process.
“Are they in pain?” His wife looked at the lined hospital beds, each sectioned
portion a more vibrant and clean white than the last.
“I don’t think so”, the doctor responded, his mask drawn up over his nose and
lips. If anything, they are in the opposite, just numb and euphoric.
She walked home in a purplish haze. Her eyebrows were furrowed with worry;
her husband was left there, that maze of pristine hallways that felt like a clean
pair of dentures — mechanical, pretending to function like nature’s intention.
Someone must come up with a word for that, the opposite of pain. I’ll ask him to
think one up when he comes home. He’s felt it, anyway.
The more you try to filter your thoughts, the less filtered they become, as if it is
the brain’s way to exert its dominance over itself, over its container of a body and
the burdens that came with it. It’s an inconvenient thing, the universe. Why can’t
it leave me to think? I have such endless capacity restricted by the time and place.
“The skies look less blue to people with tinted eyes”, she said, staring upward
at violet clouds, violent delights. Her free hand pushed her black fringe from
her olive-toned face, her other hand held blindly onto the idea of fate governing
those numb minds, fixing the disease so carelessly described as Mother Nature’s
anesthetic for the mind. It will be all right, she resolved.
The clouds in the skies were lightening to a lilac, more white brightening the
gloomy blossoms.
Her mother had planted the seed of anxiety in her daughter when she gave
birth. Could it have happened similarly to her husband? Maybe his father’s mind
had faded at the edges, dead weight with the consistency of a well-used coffee
filter. They had no way of knowing — he barely lived a breath past 30. But young
men and old men are different — their bodies, their frames of mind, how could
this have happened?
The clouds had lightened considerably since she had begun her walk,
brightening the sky along with them. Birds with ravenesque colors and forms
became visible; though they once swooped past her dizzied head unseen, they
now soared in the sky as visibly as the sole light in a dark night. It had been quite
a number, the bustle they moved in, uncomfortably exposed as their camouflage
had been lifted.
She too felt exposed to an open field of spectators. She had heard all the
questions — how did he lose his job, why couldn’t he function in the mechanical
way he once had, why did his language turn so foul and his communication so
weak? She had asked them herself. But now she had an answer, and it would
inevitably circle through the community, who had excitedly watched the dark
situation unfold as she lost her grip.
She wanted the sky to return to a deep and violent violet. She wanted to be
engulfed by the heroic clouds, housing the least refreshing precipitation to grace
the earth. She wanted to be up there, hidden in the wings of the raven birds. She
wanted to be something else.
“I seldom have reason to feel anything but happiness”, she told the doctor, his
mask drawn up to cover his nose and mouth. “Yet lately, I have been praying that
my brain go numb as well. When she arrived back home she shut all the blinds,
afraid of any small beam of light. She sat in a wooden arm chair and stared at
the blankest wall. One of these days”, she thought as she buried herself in the
plumage of a feather cushion, “one of my prayers will be answered.”
we could make beaches of the ashes
we burnt those summers.
ashes to ashes my sister told me
nothing was worth keeping,
don’t hoard memories or places
or people.
ashes to ashes the crematories rose
with white petals and thorny stems,
men with dark beards carrying them
between their teeth.
ashes to ashes my mother caressed
another child’s face. we lost the days we
grew up in, we lost the sock puppets that
covered our scorched fingers.
ashes to ashes piled up under clouds of
smoke with the consistency of milk,
at our feet and plastered to the skin, melted under
the heat of the real sun and our manmade one.
haunted beaches,
but beaches nonetheless.
Wednesday, March 15, 2017 // The Statement
7B
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY HARDIE
Black or Deep
Violet Plumage
Crematory
Blue and Green
Love
BY ZOYA GURM, LSA Freshman
BY ZOYA GURM, LSA Freshman