Inheritance

The Watching

It was her job, she knew to watch the boy, her brother, her twin. And she did. But the afternoon came when she forgot. They were at the beach. It was not especially pretty, but it was close to the city and the ocean breeze brought some relief from the August heat.

They had learned to swim young, but like all things, she was better at it than he. Watch your brother, the mother said, then went to the concession stand for a drink. The mother returned a half hour later while the lifeguard was pulling him out of the water. Driving back into the city, the son curled into a ball like a small animal. The daughter, cried, said she was sorry. The mother said nothing.

Later the mother stopped drinking, but the son inherited both the desire and the disease. When he drank himself into terminal illness, the daughter flew across the country to stay with him. The other chair in the hospital room was empty; the mother could not be reached. That day at the beach, he said, I was only trying to catch up with you. She could feel him dying and a part of her dying too. It was me, she said, I forgot that we are one and the same.



Karma

Everyone has at least two, she said. She said a lot of things. I believed some of them, none of them. The last time she was just as beautiful, but more naïve. Like you, she said meaning whomever she was speaking to. When he left her for the blue expanse of ocean, she had thrown herself over the balustrade. Can you believe it, she said, I shattered and he simply sailed away.

She told me she had learned her lesson. She swore off men, romance, any elevated surface. That’s where I came in. Petite, I was catlike, ermine. She called me ocelot, then kissed me. Her lips were soft but my tongue got caught on the rail of broken teeth.



Narrative

She had a story that ran like an ant trail in her head. Sometimes, if she shook her head long enough, she was able to temporarily disperse the ants. Usually they just marched diligently on. She didn’t know the beginning of it; it was as if the ants had always been there and she had simply woken up to them midway in their journey.

Others had their own stories. She talked about them with friends from time to time. Their stories disoriented her, as if she was walking an unknown street in the dark. Her own were unwanted but familiar, like the constellation of moles on her back, the scar below her left eye.

One day she shook herself so hard that the story splintered; the ants moved outward as if marking the spokes on a wheel. At the center of it was a black hole, a vast emptiness in which she was finally free.



Resentment

To let go of it, she offered her palms to the sky, as if sky wanted such things: resentment, grief, the myriad of human attachments. Later the sky made its own offering, freezing rain that fell in perfectly round pellets of ice. She put a glass bowl down outside her front door to gather it. In the morning, she found a black dog peeing into the frozen, mush filled bowl.



Attachment to Form

He shit blood at the end, his head dropping into the red and brown mess of fluid. She was surprised at the violence of it, of life’s departure. And while it was his life, his boundless pleasure in it, that she loved, it was his body, in the end, that she had to attend to. First there was the matter of wrapping and moving it out of the sun into the dark storage shed. Then ice was required to keep it cool long enough for a postponed burial. Worried about mice, or other opportunistic creatures, she stayed up that night and through the day that followed, held a kind of private wake, keeping watch over the body until her ex would return and they could bury him. The afternoon the ex returned, they unwrapped his body, kissed his stiffened head. He was no longer there, she knew, and yet it was a hard idea to hold onto. The ex cooed his name, stroked the pattern of spotted fur. It took another day for the ex to agree to bury him, but by then she no longer believed the dead should be separated from the living, interned in the dark weight of earth.



Passing

When she was young she developed a cough that wouldn’t go away, some kind of lung thing which limited her mobility. Or at least that is the story her parents used to explain why she never really left the house until she was far too old to learn how to live among others. When she asked about the physical differences—the soft fur on her ears, the way her chin drew out rather than down—they waved their hands as if her concerns were flies bothering the air.

Now she is older and her parents are dead but she is still home, sitting in the window, looking out longingly at the open field and the road that winds like a river beyond. One day she packs a bag; she leaves, walking the curves of the asphalt bank until she reaches town. Entering the first open door she finds, she is surprised by the room of welcoming faces that greet her. Either she is passing as something they might love, or she was one of them all along.



Envy

Every day comes a new thing to covet. When you were younger, it was always things that money brought. Later, you began to covet things you once had, beauty, youth, boundless enthusiasm. It is easy to get lost in the yearning, running back and forth, caught in a juniper hedged path of longing. One day you stop, part the dense foliage and peer through. On the other side is another pathway, another person racing from one end to the other. But it is clear from the way she moves that she is nothing like you. Her strides are shorter, her hands claw the air.



The Waiting

We have all done it, spent our time someplace we did not choose for a duration that we could not stand. We share this, even in the moments of it, when our awareness of another’s frustration makes our own dislike of them, their presence, their need that prolongs the satiation of our own, impossible to bear. For this moment occurs precisely when we are already burdened with it, our own discomfort.

This is one of those times, when to wait is to die a little, as all time, the passing of it, is a movement toward and away. That we are someplace filled with dying, as all places are, and yet also with living, makes both seem without consequence and yet it is here, waiting, that we are most fully aware of their significance.

And so it is morning, in this year of war and disease, in this hallway of this office, in a country that is and is not our home, that we share something, an orange, taking it apart slowly, one wedge at a time. It is here, so many years after we decided what it means to be of and from, that we find ourselves marveling at the sweet juice beneath the skin. The parting of lips, the glistening of saliva, the shocking pink of tongue.



Love

She had been known by other names, but Love was the one that stuck. It may have been as simple as the shape of her face, which most closely resembled a silphium seed, a vulva, the flesh of her own buttocks. Such are the possible sources of the symbolic image of the heart. As metaphor, the heart has been home to the divine and she was, or so her lover said, until the day when she was not. The name, however, remained.



The Oldest One At the Pig Roast

It is hard to know for sure the age of anyone in the dark. The pig, fully grown and fattened with hormones, could not be more than 10 months old. The others, the ones drinking around the fire pit, are probably closer to twenty-five. This would make her the chaperone, but she is drinking too, heavily like they are, drinking vodka and whatever mixture of juice was on the table next to it. She can smell the pig cooking, the scent of it roasting in its own juices, and she knows that she will not be able to remain quietly among them. It is not just age, or the generations of wealth they wear as if a second skin. It is that she finally understands that without her, without the exception of her presence, the series of accessible achievements that mark their lives would seem privilege. But she is here, a member of the not-disappeared, presencing a people who were not counted as individuals in the national census until 1930. And so, their success can be narrated differently. It is a meritocracy after all. The rest is just history. She drinks two more drinks, says a blessing for the slaughtered pig, and begins the dance that centuries ago someone mistook for a welcome. It is not. It is what her people danced when it is was time for the gichi-mookomaanag to sail back home.