smallSalon

My mother was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee in her robe. She looked old and devastated, which pleased me.

It was C-boy who first started calling me Goldfinch. God damn, did I want to smack his fat pink mouth every time he said it. What you looking at me like that Goldfinch? Huh—just like a little bird on a wire. But it stuck, and after a time, maybe two or three weeks it didn’t bother me so bad. Maybe that was because of all the pills they had me taking, they made me slow and stupid, but not so white hot mad all the time, and besides, everyone had some stupid nickname that didn’t mean much anyway.

Later, in the dark, it didn’t bother me at all. The opposite, in fact.

C-boy was C-boy for country boy. He couldn’t remember who started it, someone who was gone now. What do you know about the country, anyway? He said to me when I told him he didn’t look like he came from there. You think it’s only for those white boys doing meth and dying in a ditch? His teeth flashed quick in his face. My parents got out of that city as fast as they could. They both grew up walking barefoot in the mud, they wanted to get their hands back in the dirt. Even that dry fucking dirt that wasn’t meant to grow anything anyway. Not like you fucking Americans ask of it. My mother, every time she planted something she poured a little rice wine into that crappy dirt first. To bribe the gods. I asked her once if they came across the ocean with her and she gave me a smack in the mouth and said of course they did, and I better respect them.

That was my first 2520. My grandmother had called the cops and asked them to take me, and she cried when they did. I didn’t blame her. I had smashed the wedding picture of my mom and dad that she had on the table in the front hall and wiped down with Windex every day. I had thrown a dining room chair through the bay window and the neighbors had come out on the street and watched them take me away. Mr. Richmond from two doors down had put his arm around her and taken her back into the house while we pulled away. I knew they were glad I was gone, even the ones who remembered me when I was ten and mowed their lawns, they were all tired of me. But not as tired as I was.

What do they look like? I asked him once. This was later.

You don’t even know. You from the suburbs, he sang the last word but then his voice got low. Seriously though, you have all this beauty, you don’t even see it, you people. That’s your problem. He picked up my hand and curled my fingers into a fist. About this big. Gold, green.

And I could see him then, a skinny boy in a washed-thin cotton t-shirt, walking through a field of tall golden grasses, dropping low to watch a little bird sing on a stand of barbed wire.

He hated himself for being there. Was so ashamed, so guilty. You don’t understand, he said, his tears salty on my lips, We don’t go crazy. Or not like this. Not like you do.

The insides of his arms were a tore-up city street from the screwdrivers and broken glass he had taken to them.

His parents did not come to visit him. They had, he said, the first time, but not anymore.

Garbage he said. I’m garbage.

My grandmother still came, once a week, with my little sister, and it only made me feel worse. She was so clean, so neatly dressed, so pressed together, trying so hard. She thought it was her fault, that she hadn’t raised me right, and I could see how her heart had broken. First her daughter, my mother, and now me.

My little sister just looked at me, and I knew she had it right. She knew it wasn’t my grandmother’s fault. It was mine.

In the mornings he told me all you can hear is their singing, like this… and he had filled the dim dirty sick air with a small series of airy sounds.

You’ll show me sometime I told him. You’ll take me there.

And I wondered if he could see it too, as clearly as I could: the two of us, under the early white, blue sky, walking side by side through the grasses. He would take my arm and we would pause together and listen. As one.

I think I’m the only one who can hear it, real low like one of those old-fashioned radios with the thing on the top like an insect has, antennae, going in and out, scratchy and loud. Frequency that’s what it is, I’m the one that can catch the frequency, but only sometimes and in some places like when I’m lying on the floor with my ear against the wood. Sometimes that’s when I hear it, coming up from underneath the house, just to me.

It drives my sister crazy when I lie on the floor. But it’s so much nicer down here, so much easier not to have to hold myself up, with all the world floating above me, trying so hard, and me just lying here not trying at all. It’s close to floating up against the ceiling, like the house is really tiny and something huge just flipped it upside down.

My sister also tells me that my feet are too huge and also too dirty and to get them off the coffee table, off the rug even.

  I asked her once if she could hear it, that sound, that signal, that voice, those voices…

We interrupt this program to bring you the latest breaking news Even the voice is old-fashioned like it’s coming at me from the fifties. The nineteen-fifties, like it’s some guy with these thick glasses and a suit. She actually stopped moving long enough to listen. “No dumbshit, I don’t hear anything,” she said after a minute.

“Maybe you should listen from down here,” I said, but I knew there was no way she was going to join me on the floor of the cabin, she didn’t even really like to go anymore, said it was too dirty and there were too many bugs.

Because it was making me feel sort of jittery, I crawled all the way under the cabin one day to see if there was anything down there that might be sending me signals. Talk about dirty and bugs. Dirty bugs. Buggy dirt. I had to scootch along on my stomach and I had the flashlight in my teeth. It was fun for a little bit, fun like I was a little kid playing soldier.

There was nothing there, under the house.

  But there was something there, under the dirt. I got the signal there too, the message, from under the earth. And it was so peaceful, lying there in the dark under the house with all that dirt under me, pushing up on my almost like it was pushing down on me, almost like I could see into it, the channels and the veins. It would be nice to just stay there, to eat my meals, to sleep, with those sounds keeping me in one place, keeping me in order.

I got this idea to ride a bike into the town and see if there were any records or anything about the land, or the earth, or anything really. To see what was there, before.

  It was the first time I had gone fast in a while, and it felt, well, fast. With the trees flying by on either side. There was no wi-fi at the cabin, so I couldn’t look it up online.

I wish I could tell my sister that my feet are strange to me too. That they look like a stranger’s feet. That they look a lot like our father’s feet, not my own feet. It’s not my fault that they grew like they did, went from small boy feet to man feet in less than a year.

  They kept slipping off the pedals as I rode the bike, like I was wearing feet shoes that were way too big for me, and real sudden all I wanted to do was stop the bike and take off my huge shoe feet and have small feet underneath them again and feel the dirt underneath them because how is it that dirt feels different when you are a little kid?

I had this idea that the signal I was hearing was trying to tell me something about all of this, that it was connected.

  I knew there was a library in town because mom used to take us when we were little kids, to check out books, and I remembered shelves of old books about the history of the area, and photos and displays.

I had this thought that I was not sure what was holding the bike down onto the dirt road and that maybe it would lose the road and ride me up into the air. Gravity, dumbshit, I told myself, gravity is holding me down. But why should I even believe in gravity? Maybe they were all trying to fool me, the books and the teachers and the parents, maybe I was on a tiny stage and they were all looking down on me. Maybe that was what the signal was trying to warn me about.

  So then going to the library seemed stupid all of a sudden, because of course that was part of the trick, of course that’s what I would do, go to the library and find the material they had planted just for me. A display, get it? So obviously I was going to have to figure it out on my own, but I also thought they would probably have spies at the library to make sure I had taken the bait and I should just keep going there and pretend.

But my sister was standing right outside the library.

She was talking to someone.

A man. Not really a man. A boy, maybe. There isn’t really a word for the thing she was talking to, but he was wearing a man suit.

  And she wasn’t even my sister. I mean she was my sister but I could see in a second that she had changed. That talking to him changed her, that she became another person, one she would not want me to see. And she was wearing a white dress. And it was a sunny day. The library was white behind her too. I had noticed they liked to keep things white in that little town. And pointy. Pointy roofs and pointy steeples.

Is there something in the rushes? Golden, serrated, whispering. The thing that sees you The blue eye.

It’s what you were Before you were this That makes you feel sick. It’s right there in the muck.

The heron does not care. One leg tucked up It must catch its catch To survive, feather white.

If only you could catch Yourself as easily, Small fish. Brackish salty water.

Reach down and pick it up. That thing. But you are revolted. Salt on your lips.

Turns out the monster

In the dark belongs to me My own mind won’t stop

Rain will beat petals Onto concrete this weekend Today they burn bright

There are a few hours When every bud has burst But none have fallen

This year has been shit I have not learned a thing But to fear myself

Fuck making sour dough starter and learning French, Agnes Potter was going big. She would exit the pandemic a new woman. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes. That was a thing— wasn’t it?

It didn’t exactly start big, it started with Zoom, on Zoom. Suddenly Agnes Potter was looking at herself talking to other people all day and she did not like it. She did not like the way her light brown bangs curtained her forehead. She did not like the way she laughed every time Brain Lambert made a stupid joke. She did not like the bookshelf behind her, or any of the books that it held. She watched herself talking and talking and she thought That’s not me. But it was. That was the beginning of the pandemic when everyone was posting about all the things they would accomplish. Agnes Potter had friends, it wasn’t like she was friendless, or even all that lonely, and they all posted the things they planned on doing: writing novels, learning to walk on their hands, learning sign language. And Agnes wanted to do something too. She wanted to make a change. She lay in bed one night, thinking of what could be different. “I want to be a different person,” she heard herself whisper.

She ordered a box of hair dye from Instacart and left it on her porch for twenty-four hours before she touched it. It was blonde, as blonde as it could get, almost white. When it was done, when she had stripped the color from her hair, dyed it, blown it dry and styled it around her face, she looked in her bathroom mirror and hissed back at herself. 

She waited for her co-workers to be surprised during the first Zoom meeting the next day, but no one said anything. She checked to make sure her camera was on. It was. They all made little cooing noises over Mindy Watt’s new puppy though. When Agnes hear herself beginning to laugh at one of Brian’s jokes, she stopped herself.

The next day she saw an article online about how Zoom was leading many people, mostly women, to plastic surgery. She wondered what it would be like to change her face. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the way she looked, she did, but was that a good reason not to change it? She wasn’t sure.

She took a week off of work. She had accrued that and more. The plastic surgeon seemed confused about her request to change her nose, he kept asking her what she did not like about it, but in the end, he acquiesced and also suggested making her lips look fuller. “Why not?” she said. 

While she was recovering in bed, face swathed in bandages, it occurred to her that she did not really need to go back to that job. She had saved up some money. On the day she was scheduled to be back on Zoom, she just didn’t. She ignored the emails and calls. The bandages came off and she spent hours in front of the mirror examining her blond hair and new face.

She considered her body next. It was a fine, serviceable body. Brian had even told her she had a nice ass once at a work party when everyone had drunk too much chardonnay. She started watching fitness videos on YouTube. She did push-ups and sit ups. She did jumping-jacks and had a jump rope and a hula hoop delivered. She felt muscles pushing up on her arms like two continents coming together. 

When she was not working out, she was learning how to make counterfeit identity documents. Once she had figured out how to access the dark web, she was astonished by the number of things that were accessible that she had never known about. One night she ordered cocaine and a young man with dark glasses delivered it to her front door. She spent all night awake. She resisted the urge to clean her house. She danced to music she had never heard of before and at about two in the morning she sprinted naked up and down her street. Her new physique made her fast. 

She made herself a new driver’s license. She had very expensive printing equipment delivered, and she made herself a new passport. Rivka Milliken was her new name. 

She started looking at apartments for rent all over the world. She spent hours looking at all the places she had never been: Rome, Berlin, Hong Kong, New Orleans. 

She began corresponding with a guy from Madrid named Alejandro who bragged he was in the business of stealing fine art. Business was terrible just now, he explained, because of the pandemic obviously all galleries and museums were closed, but he expected things to take off as soon as Europe opened up again, and he thought he could probably use help then. He sent her pictures of the things he was planning on stealing. 

She began brushing up on her high school Spanish and ordered a cat burglar kit. She learned to cut a circle of glass out of a window without making a sound or shattering it. On Alexandro’s advice she went to a gun shop, which inexplicably was still open and bought a handgun. She took it out into the forest and shot at the trees. 

She watched flight prices and flew to Croatia in the spring. She made her way to Madrid by bus and train, and even by foot, sneaking over the border into France when it closed because of the fourth wave. She had already secured an apartment in Madrid, as different as her old condo as possible. A decaying stone gargoyle from the neighboring cathedral looked right into her bedroom window. 

As it turned out, most of the people in the United States who prayed to angels were white women living in the mid-west and in Florida, and as it turned out, most of them refused to believe Angel was an angel because she was black.

“Are you some kind of a crow girl-superhero?” Melissa from Iowa City asked Angel as she approached Melissa on the overpass where she was furiously praying for an angel to come and stop her from diving into the traffic on the interstate below her. “Is there one of those cos…cosplay things down at the convention center?”

“No,” Angel said, “I’m the angel you’ve been praying for.” She stopped herself from adding, you dumb shit.

Melissa looked doubtful. “Your wings are black.”

In response Angel spread them to their full width—nearly ten feet. They were in fact black, and glossy, and unmistakably powerful. She glanced back at them and felt the surge of pride she always felt when seeing them unfurled. From below her a semi honked furiously, maybe the trucker had seen them from high above like shimmering vengeance? “They are, aren’t they,” she said and gave them a little shimmy. “And aren’t they gorgeous?”

Melissa made a face, her pink lips forming a contracted little O. “But angels have white wings.”

“Do they?” Angel asked.

“Don’t they?” Melissa asked. “I mean, in the costume stores the angel wings are always white.”

With a little bit of regret, Angel folded her wings and tucked them back up against her scapula. “I guess they’re black to match the rest of me,” she said, “Now let’s get down to business. You were praying for me to keep you from jumping off this bridge, and that’s why I’m here, so come on, let’s get you off of this thing.”

Melissa looked petulant. “I was praying for real angel, like, from heaven?” Angel switched her halo on, saw it light up above her head, felt the annoying buzzing sensation that always accompanied it. “How’s that? Heavenly enough? Now do you want to tell me about this jackwagon boyfriend of yours? Is he really worth dying for?”

The space between Mellissa’s carefully made up eyebrows contracted. She had an awfully mobile face, Angel observed, very stretchy and twitchy. “How do you know about him?” Melissa asked. “Wait, you aren’t one of those girls from Tinder, are you? The ones he’s been sneaking around with?” “Don’t think those girls have halos now do they?” Angel said and flashed hers on and off a few times. “Sure, didn’t look like angels in those pictures they sent him.”

“You’ve seen those pictures?”

“I can see anything,” Angel said. “From the most miniscule insect on the underside of a leaf to the entire span of the universe and all the stars within it.” “Do you think those girls are prettier than me?”

Angel examined Melissa. She was wearing her bedroom slippers and her eyes were red from crying. “I’m sure you clean up nicely,” Angel said. Melissa looked at her and then gave a shudder and a sob. “Why hasn’t he ever asked me for a picture like that?”

Angel considered telling Melissa the truth: that human beings soon grow tired of one another and want something new, that familiarity acted on them like poison, that her fiancé Gordon Grimmer could not stand the slight sniffle Melissa had that woke him up every morning and at this precise moment he was masturbating to pornography in front of his computer and had not even noticed the perfumed suicide note that Melissa had left for him on the kitchen counter. Instead she patted Melissa gently on the shoulder. “Now, now,” she said. It was one of the phrases suggested in The Angel’s Instruction Manual for Helping Humanity.

Melissa just sobbed louder. She looked at Angel from between her coral pink painted fingernails and blubbered, “Why do I never get the real deal? Like when Jessica got the Barbie that talked for Christmas and I got the one that didn’t. I always get second best, and now I don’t even get a real angel to save me.” “Look, cupcake,” Angel said. “Do you think I’m getting paid to do this? You prayed for me. You don’t want me here, and I’ll just go. Say the word.” Melissa lowered her fingers a bit more, “You’d just leave me here?” Angel sighed. “You want me to save you, honey?”

Melissa pulled the corners of her mouth down, nodding at the same time. “Uh huh.”

“Ok,” Angel said, “let’s stop beating around the bush then.” 

The clouds were heavy; the people all were sleepy—as if the clouds were full of dreams that were being pushed down upon the people gently but relentlessly and with no remorse.

The clouds hung in the sky—heavy with dreams, purple and grey and black straining through white outlines. Full to bursting.

The people yawned and stretched and yawned even wider, remembered how it felt to be exhausted children unable to hold their heads aloft. They shoved their knuckles into their eyes and rubbed. They thought about their beds even though it was the middle of the day.

And just when the clouds could not possibly be any more fecund, fatter or impregnated they became more so: giant billowing pillows in the sky, and if the people could have only let go of gravity and tumbled up they would have and then they would have slept deeply and happily.

And there was one little boy in South Dakota who did. Let go. He had always had a tenuous hold on this world and he just gave it up and fell feet-over-head up into a cloud and slept curled like a cat in an especially puffy feather duvet.

Other folks with feet on the ground drooped like the exhausted tulips in their gardens. They made their way to their kitchens to put the tea kettle on or make coffee but got sidetracked by their couches and their armchairs or even their children’s little beds which still held warmth from the night before.

The dogs looked at their people with lazy eyes and refused to take their walks, lying down on the sidewalk and stretching out their chins, waiting for dreams of rabbits and long beaches to fall upon their furry backs.

The air was almost warm and almost still and almost wet and vibrated on low, a humming, thrumming singing deep down in the ears and in the heart.

And one after another after another the people all stopped their tiny daily battles. They forgot their coffees and they forgot their schedules and calendars. The forgot their clients and their patients and their appointments and even their worries. They closed their computers. They closed up shop. They yawned and stretched and yawned and stretched one last time. They closed their eyes.

And they slept. They slept as if they had no bones. As if they had never had a sore muscle or a strained back. Their ligature gave up its grip and they slept like heaping piles of hot spaghetti.

And they dreamt. The dreams fell down upon them in heaps and heaps.

In Florida an eighty-three-year-old great-grandmother dreamt she wore a gold-spangled skirt and arrived upon the back of an alligator to a cocktail party whose guests were all her many lost loves.

In Ohio a long-haul trucker slept with his mouth pressed against the grimy glass of the window and dreamt he was home in bed with his mouth against the cheek of his wife of thirty years.

In New Mexico a young mother dreamt with her newborn against her heart and their dreams got all tangled up so that the mother dreamt she was hatching from an egg and flying away and the infant dreamt she was standing at the stove and roasting green chilies that filled the room with smoke that stung the eyes.

In California a man who had just turned one-hundred-and-three dreamed that he died and was escorted from his body by four finely-matched white stallions before he did, in fact, die in his sleep and follow his dream from his body.

In Maine two teenage lovers fell asleep in the middle of making love and he slept inside of her and they both dreamt the same dream.

The clouds spent their dreams upon the people who dreamt them and the clouds became lighter and lighter and lost their bruised appearance and lifted to a more reasonable altitude so that the air was less heavy as well, and then the wind came up and blew the clouds away.