True Fiction: A Pseudo Autobiographical Chapbook in Three Parts Read online

Section III: fini

  The Tracks of my Orbit

  I lick my lips to taste the salt and call it kismet. Look at that line between water and sky and hear it calling. Don't be scared just because the world's flat and if you set sail you'll go over the edge like it's a waterfall. Find that razor sharp edge and careen right off it. Ignore that voice that tells you Go back! Dragons and demons lie in wait. Go to them. Listen to the sirens in the fog. Don't think about where fog comes from. Call it firmament. There is only water and sky and all that blue and the edge of something. Sail defiant with a strong headwind, a magnetized compass and old charts to guide you. Read signs written in tea leaves and on loaves of bread. Practice alchemy. Paint your face with the marks of a warrior. Sweat and smell it. This is hard work. Remember you're an animal. Eat a pork chop and cut your teeth on the bones. Look out over the bow and see the edge of the earth calling. Sail toward it. Walk the plank and tease the monsters. Shark tidbits.

  I'm in the hospital again. Went off my medication when the siren called.

  Tie me up. Tie me down. Time for tapioca.

  Squall! Batten the hatches merry men, this is going to be a big one. The waves are coming over the edge of the ship and sucking me into the shark's waiting mouth. So much salt spray sugars our faces.

  Time for medication. This is no drug-free America. I don't want an anchor. I watch the surface tension for monsters and tell myself, if they could, they would lock up the priest for believing in God, Moses for parting the Red Sea. I try to stay away from the topic of religion because they say I'm delusional, but then Oops! I speak in tongues.

  At night, sailing is like a black hole. Can't see a damn thing. Weak of heart faint. Your mind plays tricks on you. The sound of water lapping. The edge all around you. Ghost ships. Pirates. Whales. Dragon breath for an evening breeze. Can't see a thing because the moon is scared and hides behind thick fast moving clouds. Bedroom check. Hi, no I'm not sleeping. I'm having a waking nightmare, close the door. How many days have I been here? Three, four.

  I entertain Dr. Jekyll with stories of my girlhood. If I could I would pull that girl into me and be her forever. I would eat chocolate pudding and watch TV and comfort her but the black is so foreboding, I can't resist it. That wondrous edge that line they tell you not to sail toward so inviting, hair pressed flat against my head from speed of going.

  If you censor your thoughts, they can't hear what you're thinking. I run on hard feelings I already know, float on that sea away from the arm chair, away from the reruns, out the door, down the hall, out the other door, down the other hall, to the outside. It's only been four days since they committed me, and I'm free again. I cross the parking lot, ride the knowing without thinking and the message is "It's time" and the picture is of Moses standing before the pharaoh saying, "Let my people go."

  I float. Hoist the sails. Rig the rigging. Set a course for the end of the earth and this time no stopping. Tie the wheel. Man overboard. I'm going alone. Taste the salt, feel a blessed warm summer breeze. Listen to the lapping. I'm hungry and no one to knock at my door and say breakfast. At dawn, I leave the woods. My feet know the way and they start to travel. I think about the forward motion of feet, the shape of fine quality shoes rounded and padded, the outline of the toes and the smallness of the heel and the feel of the arch stretching, the toes pressing, my shadow, more me than me, beside me moving like my secret giant forward. The muscles you use for walking backward are different. The calf stretches. Forward it's the shins and the sides of your leg--that muscle there on the side of your leg, the long thin one that hurts when pressed. Your body, my body, a rhythm of muscles in continuous movement, the push forward. You never see people walking to the side or backward, but it happens. What I am doing now is a progression. I find a bagel place. A feast of old bagels waits for me.

  I have things on my mind. No amount of cleaning wipes them away.

  I am being watched and I don't like it. There's danger out here; it lurks. Everywhere, there are lurkers lurking. I stand outside the grocery store but go no farther because I don't know where I'm going. I stand here streetcornered like a lightpost or the machine that holds the Apartment Guide, a sitting duck.

  I wait, Blessed Mother Mary and Joseph, for Jesus to find me. Hello, he'll say, and there will be a warmth behind the smile that takes my eyes to the ocean. To the blue. Beware the rocks. Smell the air. He'll glow like a holy man. I'll feel it next to him, the warmth. Come, he'll say, and let all those who have hunger eat. One fish will feed 1,000. Seven loaves of bread multiplied. He'll say warmth with his eyes. He'll say nothing when I stare at him. He'll stare back.

  I stand by the back door of a place I knew once, in the alley with the trash cans and watch through the screen door while the cook is throwing a burger on a grill. He's cooking, all sorts of things. Boiling. Grilling. Frying. He didn't wash his hands, only wiped them on a rag. He hands me a bag, a hand off, and I walk out into the alley and he says to come back again but I know I won’t.

  I haven't had my coming out party and I'm too old to have one now, never had one, unless you count the way I was carried by my feet and shoulders in a straight jacket out of the house the first time they committed me. There is no dating where I'm from. We're given quiet rooms and little green pills that tell our brains to stop wanting, pills that talk to those swirling feelings like tornadoes. We're driven by the wind up and down the halls.

  Childhood: My father in his chair looks past me and yells "Theresa," my mother, Theresa. My mother comes in and tells me to stop bothering my father. She's holding a can of Lysol, her long thin finger still on the button. I sit, press myself into the back of the couch, try to be as quiet as he is. I play statue, a game best played at dusk. Every muscle freezes. He's watching a fishing show. I sit still, can't turn my head to look at the TV or move my eyes. I stare at the fireplace. My father is looking at me, I can feel it. He says, "What are you doing now?" Even when I'm still, he senses movement and this disturbs him. My mother goes upstairs to get ready to go to church. I hear her going up the steps. I sit, a piece of Samsonite luggage on the couch. Go upstairs and put a dress on. I hold my position for the count of ten. "Lucy," my father says.

  I am eating a cheeseburger. To me, the cook transforms, in a phone booth, by the light of the moon, into the c-o-o-k (with attitude). The cook, hard c, o's like took, hard k with spit, slices onions with the spinning blade that looks like it's not moving. He laughs and tells me to stick my hand in there. He tells me "Chop it off." "They have a name for men like you," I say, "cook." It's all very dicey. And I'm not talking about the veg-o-matic. It's all very cut and dried: he dices, he slices, and me just a carrot, now whole, now even round pieces. That's right, what's to be feared is that ax wielding, knife twirling, knife throwing man, his holiness, the c-o-o-k (with attitude), who hacks at pig meat. He busts through the swinging doors spinning his cutlery, tossing it to the ceiling and it twirling back down to his outstretched palm. Eek! And I'm doing cartwheels to keep him guessing where my parts are, so he can't take aim. I cartwheel over the stainless steel counter and into the dining room. I flip over a table and land by the window. Before you can say, "Run for the hills," I'm up and over by the wall and the soda fountain. "Take that," he says, and lands a knife in the plaster.

  Hot days take my will to run away but not my will to squat down and look at the ground between my legs. To raise my ass up in the air and bend at the waist and dangle. I have to let my arms sway and scrape the ground, my palm pressing flat into the rough concrete. Some concrete is full of sand or smooth or sparkles with glass crystals. All of it's hard. I watch men nail in a wood frame. The truck comes up, rotating to avoid hardening in transport, and pours the concrete out in lumps into the wood frame. The men brush the wet gray mix smooth. They brush it even more than it seems like they do. They do it with care. The brush is bristled and l
eaves streaks, the squeegee makes the surface even.

  I bend at the waist and not the knees like when I was a girl (I am a girl still even though I've had pubic hair for fourteen years and have worked half way through my stash of eggs). I press my palms against this hard rock that keeps broken dirt from moving and plants from taking root and me from touching clay. Walking for miles without touching it. I can press the concrete that's already set and smile at the men pouring new and my smile says "See, when you're done it will look like this." They smile back. I seem harmless enough.

  Gray paste disturbs my vision, forms a film over it, smeared. Gray paste sits in the gutters in my head. It's the kind you ate when you weren't supposed to, the kind that gets hard and forms chunks in the container. It makes my joints stiff and it's tightening. This is my madness. I am walking concrete. I rotate to avoid hardening before my time. This requires spinning--slowed down ballet twirls and fast-paced all-out spins. And I don't care what the watchers think when I'm spinning or in a lilt or a round-about twirl. There is no one else but me in a white dress with crinoline that makes it poof out and I wear ballerina slippers that lace up my leg. The laces dig into my leg and I get calluses on the tops of my toes. The rest doesn't matter. The rest is of no account. There is no rest.

  The night is damp. Best to forget. The forgetting is a quiet aloneness that leaves blank spaces for thoughts of curling and hiding. It isn't long till I am talking to myself again like there is no one else. There is no one else. I crawl in a dumpster.

  I imagine the moon. I have pictures memorized of it flat and white and odd. This world looks different from outer space. All that cold blue. To be the moon would be lonely, small time to earth's big time, no one giving much thought to it. I feel its pull and don't know what to make of it, feel myself spinning, tilting my axis, surrendering to gravity.

  About the Author

  Carroll Ann Susco holds a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from the University of Pittsburgh. She has published three essays in The Sun Magazine. She has numerous publications, including Painted Bride Quarterly and the Beloit Fiction Journal. The complete list is available on her Linkedin page. She currently teaches and writes in Alexandria, Virginia.

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