- by
Thomas Aiello
she slowly spun her head to see her quiet home as a moral republic, now so
perilously susceptible to the Sulla of her various misguided conquests. Marius was
dead. He had died around the same time as her mother melted away, leaving
proscription lists and other forms of terror strewn about the room. She would sit
there, now grabbing the cushions with all the force her bony white fingers could
provide, and wait for Caesar. She thought about European conquest. She thought
about Shakespeare. She knew that, like the life around her, her metaphor was
breaking down, crushed under its own weight by artificial investment and a need to
draw things started to their necessary conclusions despite the flagrant bankruptcy
of the outcome—no matter how many causal steps prior she knew that it was going
to happen. And her narrator sat there at a desk he should long have abandoned,
working diligently to save both his artificial construction and hers. They both
remained bodily composed, but their emotional reserves were spent through their
blood, emanating their regret that there was an assembly to return to but that it
had lost all of its ability to govern. “My metaphor is breaking down,” they said at the
very same time, both looking off into a distance that was sure to provide nothing
concrete, neither solutions to the mathematical descent of her tenuous
circumstances nor her longing to pull republic from the chiseled arms of defeat. My
metaphor is breaking down. The republic, dear Charlotte, was probably not worth
saving anyway. Our metaphor is breaking down. We are breaking and broken down.
We are leaving smoke where we once were.
§
She was thumbing the leaves of an ill-used notepad without noticing that
she did so. She now stood in the small bedroom of her small home.
There were catcalls from the balcony of imaginary well-dressed strangers
looking down on her from the striped wood and vaulted ceilings, the infinite
curtained opera boxes superimposed on the languid, rather-plain wall above her. The
actual wall showed water marks at the post and lintel, tracing the pipes that she
took on faith to be behind them with brown lines that gave the dual impression of
being sad (their browness surely evoking small miseries by being a color associated
with filth representing an element associated with the act of cleansing; so that
browness presented an oxymoron in its very station on the wall, arguing for and
against itself with every subtle inch) and joyous (their curves surely evoking a liquid
motion that categorically presents itself as hallowed to humans, rugged as they are,
with only two feet and gravity to propel and hinder their actions; so they offered an
unattainable goal, and thus, as it is with all joys, provided a measure of hollowness af
ter the hallowed reverence evaporated). The imaginary onlookers remained engaged
in the foreground, producing an obvious brown disapproval through their liquid
laughter and taunts. “I should be different,” she thought. And the crowd howled its
approval. They all had opera glasses, she imagined, because nasty people usually did.
One woman in front wore a powdered-white wig. Her Victorian dress was yellow, and
her Victorian sensibility clearly thrown to the wind, pushed through the pipes
behind it becoming nothing but the liquid brown residue of its former influence.
§
There was pinball. There was a garden. He had invited her out for her birthday, and
she had agreed from the sense of duty always plied from the dustbins of
compunction when people put themselves out to celebrate something that you don’
t find to be worth celebrating. She agreed reluctantly. She looked reluctantly
around the room at the configuration of exotic plants and children’s games.
And this was, again, for maybe the sixteenth time that she could remember,
and possibly one of many more that went long forgotten after timelines marked by
dirty dishes, regrettable purchases, and thousands of ticks in the continuum of her
motivation, a miracle. It was those big things, she thought, that were the true
miracles. And when people said that miracles were small things that happened every
day they were lying or ignorant or stuffed like a cooked goose with a false
romanticism that welcomed tautology with a wink and a nod because History of
British Literature In the Female Overbody and Homosexual New Domestic Sphere in
their sophomore year made them write their first sonnet. Or possibly not. The
willingness to accept the Doctrine of Small Miracles seemed to fall at the two polar
extremes of the Small Miracles Dividing Line:
Figurine People Who Say
Purchasers “Postcolonial”
She understood neither these people nor their respective obsessions. Well, she
knew the slope and feel, the dour eyes of figurines, but she could not define
“postcolonial” and could not fathom those with an impulse to collect. She suspected
that each, as so often happens, had something significant to do with its polar
opposite. Perhaps people’s desire to gather up as much useless junk as possible was
the result of the continuous cycle of colonial dependency in nations and provinces
and towns and communities and households. Maybe the loss of control—or the
perceived loss of control in a world conditionally and consistently renaming itself—
created the certain synapse fire that bred a need-and-or-desire for ceramic puppy
dogs and youngsters standing in front of a gingerbread house. Either way, she
steered toward the middle of the line, only allowing the most miraculous of miracles
to drive her into the guttural euphoria of I Have Just Experienced Something Not of
This World. And this was it. Again. For maybe the sixteenth time that she could
remember.
His face had been a syllabus of regret. Not just his eyes—the dew and
heather of “acknowledge this pain so we both can leave here feeling it’s valid” as
the brown entered the territorial borders of the black at the center of his eye, the
two blurring their lines of division postcolonially, standing like pedestalled gods of
the twenty-first century while, at the same time, melting into each other in a
confession of schoolyard regret—but their every constituent. He was the one that
was wrong. He was the one that had been wrong for years. It was his eyes that had
been wrong. It was his quivering cheeks. It was his nose that had been wrong. It was
his ears that heard and arranged the words coming into him all wrong, providing
wrong information platforms on which he built all of his wrong impressions. It was his
mouth that was there moving as if speaking but not speaking anything. His lips felt his
teeth. His tongue touched the roof of his mouth and touched the roof of his mouth
a nd rested on the back bottom of his lower gum. It struggled for a moisture that
was absent as it always is when its maker realizes its vulnerability not because of
someone else’s actions but because it’s just vulnerable and there is nothing you can
do about it not even spread moisture around your mouth to sate your tongue
because that wouldn’t help anyway now would it and furthermore every little bit we
can do here to toughen up can only toughen us up. And we need that. Because
toughness can hide the regret so blatantly told by every colony of our forehead’s
empire. It can bring peace to the kingdom. It can bring peace to the kingdom. It can
bring peace to the kingdom.
“It can bring peace to the kingdom,” his motioning mouth finally produced.
And there was, replacing the old regret—or not replaced; attached to the old regret
like a territorial acquisition; a dependent constituent state of the former regret; a
new market exploited by the first regret to exacerbate the effects of the new all
the more—a new regret, arguing with its very existence that, “That isn’t what I
meant to say. My inside became my outside for the slightest moment. There was a
revolution. There was some kind of upheaval that pushed what was hidden into the
open, but it is gone now. And you don’t have to worry anymore and hopefully I don’t
either.”
“It’s all this skin that makes you love me.” This love pushes up from my guts—
up onto the kitchen table—up onto the kitchen table—up onto the medicine cabinet
of my lungs—and lands here on all this skin that stays milkwhite for you. And you are
in my heart. And I love you from my heart and from everything else inside of me.
From my guts. I feel complete only when I remember these things.
§
There was a strongbox in the corner, which, befitting that word [which
itself was the term locked in her mind when she viewed the pre-fab hard-plastic
container whose combination was 624 (which she had no say in) and whose color was
purple, though she rationalized it as pink (which she did have a say in)] served her as
a source of strength and cycled her internal theology back to first principles, back
to the source of creation—or the source of her own creation as she saw it through
the bible of her diaries and the apocrypha of the post-it notes that she could never
bring herself to throw away, even when all the tasks she jotted down on them had
either been completed or ignored. It was a house of documents. It was the ark of
her covenant with herself, and she treated it much as she assumed the high priests
of Jerusalem treated their own holy of holies, only breaching the curtain provided
by the combination dial to add more documents, and otherwise choosing to leave it
alone, letting it stand there, marinating in its own strength. And she would
contemplate its strength as a priest would the written contract between God and all
of his children. “And if, in fact,” she would say, “I am the child of all my mistakes and
misguided or misapplied desires—if my failures, which daytime television seems to be
telling me sotto voce, are truly the functional growth spurts of the heighth of my
constitution—then this strongbox, too, contains the contracts I’ve made with my
parents.”
The crack in the wall rose up from that point, branching into various tributaries as it
launched itself through someone’s former treehouse, someone’s source of shade,
groping finally toward a clock that stood as a monument to various strings of time
that were running out on her—that had been running out on her for years, each
compartmentalized thread beginning from various points upon her personal timeline
(the moment she fell out the old oak in her front yard because she realized the dog
staring up at her from below was not staring kindly, the first time she willed herself
to refuse pleasure grounded solely by a morality she was just beginning to trust, the
October Saturday when she realized her mother was vulnerable, and others, and
others) creating a cat’s cradle of linear developments never touching each other,
but each connected by the larger cope of time, the entire unit still serving as a
barrier to falling objects that might see fit to fall into her hands. The clock w as
round. It was framed by a similar cracked wood that stood starkly against the silver
numbers, a reflexive dialectic of the high east and low west that the clock’s black
hands seemed to reinforce with every revolution. In this aspect, too, she saw the
clock as a fitting stand-in for the Socratic discourse between her better angels and
her worse, the dialogue never reaching any significant terminal point, instead just
propelling her forward without certainty as if the sheer force of the argument itself
created its own perpetual motion, feeding her ability to move through the world on
little sleep, low expectations, and jelly beans—always jelly beans—hoping herself for
a satisfactory terminal point that her angels could never have.
With patient grace, she moved to the edge of a grove. Sunflowers flooded her
imagination and the imaginary field in front of her. It was everything her cramped
apartment was not. “My metaphor is breaking down,” she said to no one, save,
perhaps, her slouching narrator. He ran his fingers over the curves and syntax of her
visage. He tried to see the same sunflowers that made themselves so apparent to his
heroine in her formulaic distresses over relationships and parents long departed.
They said, “I am leaving smoke where I once was.”
And she was.
