playing at opposites

My friend Hannah and I have been writing short shorts back and forth via email for a few months now and we are finally ready to share them with the world (or whatever small fraction of the world’s literate inhabitants might stumble upon them here). Neither of us claim to be expert short short-ists, though Hannah does have a degree in English and is a professional collaborate writer with Idea Platforms Inc.

Thematically, these stories “play at opposites” and alternate authors.
So far we’ve tackled “Fixing Things & Breaking Things,” “Losing Things & Finding Things,” and “White & Black”

Fixing Things & Breaking Things

Fixing Things rachel

It was like kids do. He was always smearing things, and when there was nothing to smear or all the smearing had been accomplished, he was cutting already small pieces into shreds. Yeah, for a while he was a shredder, but that was just “place-holding,” some preliminary “acting out,” I think you call it. Place holding was like being in the lunch line at school and really having to pee. Jeremy wasn’t really in line for lunch though, we didn’t really know what we were waiting for with him. There was this wonderful thinness and smoothness to spreading and a cool movement too that went along with it, a real “whoosh!” In primary school, the janitor caught him once during class time with his hands in the compost, reaching up to caress the wall all shepherd’s pie and mustard and yogurt. Humiliated, Jeremy wore mittens all through the next month of April. It wasn’t a compulsion, it was more of a fixation on “fixing things” he once told his mother.

Mom knew that the shredding was a place holder the day Jeremy walked into the laundry room and stood, glazed and stiff as she pulled “brown bunny” from the hot drier and presented it to him, its ears all static and on-end. Pat the bunny was pink. Jeremy, sobbing, cursed the world in his preschool English, cursed everything for coming out wrong in the wash. He cursed the false newness of whites and fancy clothes and the urgency for the purged and the routines of starkness and correctness. He fled with the frayed creature by the ears. Afraid, he squirmed between his fathers legs, past the fitful tie folded, and under the back deck where he earthed, unearthed, and re-eathed the rabbit as many times as he could before the dog betrayed his whereabouts and his mother held his shoulders and sat him down in the car for church.

Breaking Things hannah

You sit in the middle of the room and you record, as precisely as you can, your impression of the sculpture standing upright against one wall. The sculpture is made of iron and some of it is painted red. Its title reads “Touch Me,” but a curator’s note requests that, in fact, you refrain from physical contact. In one corner of the room is a Color Field. Color fields are never as good as the passion with which writers describe them. In another corner someone has arranged a series of milk bottles in a geometric shape.

Earlier, from a narrow hallway, Sam beckoned you into a cold white room. Benches lined the walls. You sat down and pressed your jacket sleeve against his. The room was cold. Its walls were white. Its ceiling was blue. You didn’t understand. Your knuckles rested against Sam’s. You thought, with some sadness, that after you left this building you would never see him again.

Sam has already moved on to the next room. You stand up, you cross the threshold. You look at Sam and you look at the empty walls. A metal sphere, designed to weigh heavily in your hand, rests on the polished floor. Sitting on the bench, Sam let you take your time and then he moved close to your ear and said, “look up.” And you looked up and, suddenly enlightened, observed that in fact the ceiling was not blue. A gust of air blew through. In fact you were looking at the sky.

Now Sam is moving towards the metal sphere discarded in the middle of the room. Can you blame him? When you look through the doorway you can see through into the far room, the bionic sculpture, the blocks of color. Now Sam reaches down and he holds the sphere in his hand. You can feel the cold of its metal in your palm. Through the doorway you can see the glass bottles. Sam winds up and he releases the sphere. Like a bowler he crouches. In the far room there is a shattering of glass.

Losing Things & Finding Things

Losing Things rachel

They say that when you lose your memory you start forgetting things in the opposite order of when you learned or experienced them. It’s not like losing buttons that always fall off in no particularly order that we know about. Systematically, I guess, you forget what you just said and then the thing before that and the image before that until all that’s left is an image of your youthful self picking berries or riding a tricycle or planting watermelon seeds and praying to G-d that they will grow into beanstalks. Terrified of losing the most recent items, sometimes people organize and list their belongings so they’ll notice when a sugar bowl is missing from its place on the countertop or when a particular photo has been removed from an album (with a replacement post-it note promising its speedy return in October of ’83). They do this not just with things, you know, but with which teachers they had in third grade and all that. Seriously. That way you can blame someone or call for back-up when items or memories are reported missing and show up, all gap-toothed and smiling on the milk cartons.

Other people, rather than scramble their eggs, make omelets. They’re always up to a hodge-podge bricolage in their memory’s house, shuffling in a clutter cluster, a compilation that couldn’t be recognizable as anything aside from the complete thing itself. This way, what’s one misplaced cursory fact when simple organization would be child’s play. This is high art. This is much more complex. This is like the flares on the surface of the sun that add dynamism but never detract from the notion that there is a sun, a single constant sun, or that there is a “surface” of the sun.

So, there are the organizers and the diss-organizers and there are the ones who are convinced that losing memories is like buttons and they just go about their business neither tending towards eccentrism or sterility and no one knows whether they, of the third camp, remain most like “themselves” or if we need to change to preserve what is real or what that might mean for the postmodernists.

Finding things hannah

And then one day, sifting through some old photographs and 36-cent postage stamps and letters from her grandfather who had died, still bitter, in 1993, she found it.

They had been looking for it for years.

The search had begun even before they had children. They were practically newlyweds, just a few years into marriage, living in an apartment in Watertown owned by an elderly German woman. (“German!” Her mother said. “I’ll give you money, move somewhere with your own people,” and although she would never take the money, although she resisted her mother’s racism with a stubborn refusal to change, she hated living above that old lady, whose stewed cabbage and pork roasts came up through the vent and stuck in all the corners of the living room, and who never paid to get the faucet fixed, or even the stove when it broke, so for almost a week they had been forced to live on cereal and toast.)

At first they had approached it with enthusiasm. Henry tore the place upside down looking. They pushed out the big desk, a heaving effort, and looked behind it. They dumped the contents of its drawers on the floor. They emptied out old boxes from when they had moved, together, just before they got married. Finally, just a few days after she walked up behind Henry while he was stirring tomato sauce, wrapped her hands around his stomach, and whispered “I’m pregnant,” Natalie threw herself on the couch and said, “We’re never going to find it.”

“Don’t worry,” said Henry, who used to be an optimist. “I’m sure it’ll turn up in the move.”

They bought a little house in Sherburne. Sam was born, and then Aaron, and then, to Natalie’s private dismay, Joseph. The boys grew up. Things fell apart. Everything fell apart, with boys. The hardwood furniture was permanently scuffed. Huge gashes appeared in the floors. Windows shattered, doors rocked on their hinges. Henry was promoted, they were distracted. The foundation started to crumble. They forgot, for years even, that there was something missing, that anything had been lost.

One day the phone rang and they rushed to the hospital. It had been a deer in the road, Sam said later, which looked at him with human eyes. It was only the deer, thank god, that died, but they were never the same after that, never quite able to look at each other closely without seeing that deer, without seeing Sam broken on that huge white expanse of bed. Later Sam fell in love and although marriage wasn’t legal they held a private ceremony, threw a party. And Aaron fell in love, he was straight as a rail, but refused to get married on principal. And Sam adopted. And Aaron’s wife had two miscarriages. Joe moved to Brussels, had French-speaking children. Soon their children were broken too. Soon everyone was scarred.

And then one day, Natalie was rifling through that drawer and she came up triumphant. She had been looking, of all things, for the return address stickers that come in the mail from the NRDC, the ones with little pictures of endangered animals. The paper was stuck and when she pulled it out, when she held it in her hand, she felt something click into place that had been just a little bit off. Like an analog clock just out of whack. Things started to tick inside of her that had not moved in years. She felt a flush come to her cheeks, she felt a great calm.

She hurried down the stairs. She hurried down the stairs with the paper held tightly in her hand and she stood, actually stood frozen, in the vestibule. There was Henry. There was poor, broken Henry, patiently rearranging dishes in the dishwasher. The skin on his forearms was sagging now, both his parents were dead. Tufts of white hair floated around his scalp. She caught her breath, she looked at Henry. She had found it, she saw now. She had found it but it was far too late.

White & Black rachel

White rachel

Waking up, bleary-eyed, I noticed only the jerking of the room back and forth, the whole place trying its best to come into focus one corner at a time. I had, against my own judgment, “avoided the light” like they always say to do in those stories. It had been gut-wrenchingly temptingly, cliché and smooth like a hot beverage and sweet like cardboard canister lemonade, but I had listened to that same song, that song from forever ago, that night that had kept me sane, somehow through it all.

Looking down the bed towards my toes, I saw the rest of my body along the way, wondering how it could possibly have all survived; I had assumed that at least a hand or arm or leg have been lost in the chaos. I recall reminding myself just then, in preparation for my presumed dismemberment, that our bodies are less contained than we like to think, that in an accident, we are more than liable to lose an appendage or bleed internally. We are like clocks; there so many working parts.

Paranoid though, later that morning, still in bed, I shuffled through everything, crazy-like, counting files and slamming doors back there. Pulling at my left ear, just so, I reached back there in that gap where the drawer never touches the back of the desk and felt a bunched, crumpled something which I tugged out, tearing half out. The rest remained jammed in the crack. The paper was blank, white, deleted. It said everything and nothing that I needed to know about where everything had gone and who had taken it in the chaos that night.

Black hannah

You run.

What else can you do? It is dark as midnight here and the beach is flashing like a horror film, like some fast cuts for cinematic effect. You hear the pounding of waves from all sides, you see the moon flashing on the water, a smell of salt water rises from the earth.

At three minutes and thirty seconds you pick up the pace.

Her image appears in front of your blinded eyes, the pink relief of her cheeks, the sleek black of her clothes, the wild coils of her braids. You thought she was stunning when she first appeared, you were seduced by her fluid movements, the strength coiled in her arms, the care with which her hand brushed across her face. Now you can hear each footstep behind you, the horror of each breath. She is not gasping yet, she has hours to go, and surely she is not so close that you can hear her breathing. It’s all in your head.

After fifteen minutes the land begins to rise. The bay veers into darkness towards the south and you force yourself uphill. The sand shifts and slips beneath your feet at first, but soon you are firmer ground, dodging the thin roots of the cedars and pitch pines that hold the land in place. The trees whip at your face, one slashes dangerously close to your closed eyes.

You realize suddenly that your chest aches, that the balls of your feet ache, that you are running on fear alone. You try desperately to remember what you are afraid of, you close your eyes and you try to recall what happened three miles back. You conjure up her image again, you reimagine the flash of anger in her eyes, the violence in that gesture when she brushed her hand across her face. You taste salt, you taste iron, you feel the blood pounding in your head. You are almost there.

And you hear her crashing through the trees behind you and you pick up the pace again. YOu are going faster than you have ever gone before, the trees are flashing by, the moon rising through the trees, the pine trees beneath your feet, and you feel a sudden elation, the sudden thrill of speed and an elevated heartrate and it’s been thirty minutes now so you can turn off the treadmill and you can nod to the woman, the beautiful and athletic woman with wildly coiled braids running on the machine behind you, on your way out.