K. Harvey Fiction & Poetry

The Mermaid of Hellsink Pond

2010-02-01T16:21:00.000-08:00

By: K. Harvey

Old Abe Wakefield died on the night of the first snow in October. His wife, Annabel, sat by his bedside holding his hand, and in her other hand she held a cup of coffee, which she did not drink. Steam rose from the cup, it rested on her knee, and she remembered a draft in the room. She moved to lay another quilt over her husband's long figure on the bed, but he did not release her hand. She held the round handle of the cup with her fingers and for a moment she avoided his eyes. He looked at her as if to say that he was warm enough, or perhaps to say that it did not matter anyway, or to gently say that now, dear, was not the time. She sighed and squeezed his hand. The feel of his hand made hers shake. The cup of coffee began to bounce on her knee and the steam folded down on itself in its ascent. Annabel fought her tears.

Abe saw her expression and turned his face away, squeezing her hand. Perhaps it would be better for you if I was not watching, he seemed to say. She placed the cup on a short table beside the bed and laid her hand on his and cried. Then she stopped. His peaceful breathing, his breathing growing longer and his breaths deeper in a sudden absence of pain, filled her ears and she marveled. She watched his chest move. Had it moved like this before? she thought, and she became afraid.

He was looking out of the window beside the bed, out over the small farm, at the silhouette of the barn and the white electric light in the barnyard like a winking star in the shadow of the winter clouds. He looked farther past the light, over the barn, and into the limitless black of the pine trees on the hills. There they are, he thought, like wealthy men at a secluded table, the pines all brushing their branches like ants touching their whiskers together, no, not whiskers.....

“There's no fooling them,” he sighed, saying it as if to himself. His had an expression as though he had just been beaten at cards. He was almost smiling but, turning back to his wife, he altered his expression. But he could no longer feel the pain and the smile returned, as a flag might drape against a pole when the wind stops blowing. He said, “Do you remember that night in the summer when we slept in the barn?”

“Yes, of course I do.” Annabel whispered.

“Do you remember the warmth in the barn, that we didn't expect, and the sun in the morning through the chinks in the wall?”

“And waking up in the middle of the night to you and the animals snoring together.”

“Yes,” Abe said, “But you can't imagine how my back hurt the next day. Believe me, Annabel, the reverse is true now. I am comfortable now.”

He laughed. Annabel wiped her eyes with her husband's hand.

He said, “It has its dignity. A dignity, maybe, like little children. Who battle all day with imaginary things, but sleep well at night. Everything is a ghost. It can haunt, but it cannot touch. Everything, so... so ineffectual, if you think about it. That's hard to believe. I don't think that I've ever believed it myself. Not even once. Not even for a moment. But maybe it makes sense now. Trust me, dear, I am ready to sleep.”

“Why are you saying that now, that your back hurt?” Annabel said. She moved the cup of coffee to her lap. “As if I didn't know. And I didn't know, Abe. But you could have told me. If only so I could have thought differently about it, perhaps, or so I could have known all the truth, everything, all of who you are. You can tell me now, too. You can tell me, are you comfortable? And what else, what damn else I can do?”

“Annabel, darling girl,” Abe said, before she had even finished speaking, “my memory of it is a perfect one. And you've always known just what I am. You know that I'm comfortable now and there's nothing more you need to do or say. And, my love, you know, you were never very good at swearing.” He smiled.

A change came into Annabel's face, as if the last thing that he said had done it, as though his tease about her swearing had somehow made everything different. “I don't want to talk like this,” she said.

“You also don't want me to die,” Abe said. “I'm sorry, Annabel.”

The change in her eyes disappeared. “But Abe!”

“Be quiet now. I am ready. You know, this little farm never amounted to much, but at times, I have made you smile. And that can make a man.”

“Abe, are you asking me to smile?”

“I am finished with asking.”

They were silent for a moment. Then Annabel said, “You're right, I know. Of course you're right. We have been blessed.”

“Sleep is the best blessing. It's the only one we can seem to enjoy uninhibited. And I will be glad to close my eyes to the sight of you.”

“But wait, don't fall asleep yet. Let me get you your glass of milk, it always helps you sleep.”

But he did not let go of her hand. He looked at her again with an expression which coaxed and said 'Now is not the time for that, there is no more time for that and you need not worry.' She resolved to say nothing more. She flattened her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She repelled her tears and she became like an angel statue over a grave. Her tenderness froze in her eyes. Her arms could not move even to lift his hand.

Annabel poured the cold coffee down the sink drain in the bathroom. The doctor said it was probably the change in the weather, and that the human body is sensitive to all of those things, and old Abe had been sick a long time. He was buried beneath the pines behind the house on a hill overlooking the highway. Because the ground was frozen the funeral home rented a backhoe to dig the grave. It was a big machine and a crowd gathered to watch it work.

Across the highway from the Wakefield's house was a place called Pine Grove Farm. The small hobby farm was only a barn, which was empty, an empty silo and a few outbuildings, two horses, one calf, because the other calf had died, a spacious pasture and a pond, which was called Hellsink Pond. Mr. Adams, a contractor, lived there with his wife and daughter and his son, Caleb. Caleb was nine years old and he was afraid of the dark. He was afraid with an exquisite sort of excitement. It was a kind of fear that would drive him one step further into a dark room, make him stop and ponder at the noises in the quiet, and to blink his eyes to see and see again and again, to test himself until he broke and clawed for the light switch. It was a fear that he both ran from and welcomed, a childish fear.

It was nearly Christmas, and Caleb could not sleep, but it was not for the usual reason. He was disturbed by nightmares. In the middle of the night he would open his eyes wide, make fists around the blankets, and lick the sweat off his upper lip. Then he would bite his lip, not daring to smile, but happy and rushing his thoughts all around the room. At last he would call for his sister in the next room. “Emily!” he would cry. But it was his mother and his mother's hair silhouetted in the light in the hall that appeared in the doorway.

But on the night of December twenty second, Caleb slept soundly in his bed, dreaming of something that would be forgotten in the morning when he looked out of his window at the fresh fallen snow. The snow fell in the night, surprising the blue jay. It fell in the pines and on the path in the flower garden. On the roof of the house and on top of the circle silo. On the red squat shed. It was on the barn roof sliding over the eaves freezing like an ocean wave. Snow fell in the pasture and was still falling in the silence over Hellsink Pond just before dawn.

In the early morning, as the sun rose carefully behind pouting clouds, the thin ice split on the surface of the pond. There was no sound in the pasture, in the dead of winter, except the breaking of the fragile ice. The half-light of dawn graced the edges of the ice as it came apart and overturned and the pieces bobbed on the surface of the water. Her white hand slid silently from the lightless water up, up into the frigid air. Her fingers curled and straightened and bent to touch the ice and drip into the water. Her arm came forward and gripped the frozen mud on the shore. The frozen night had rolled the mud into intricate shapes like a quilt around the pond. Her white fingernails found a place to hold and blood gathered in her knuckles, pink, as she gripped and pulled herself out of the icy water. She raised her head, covered with soaking tangled hair, and she listened to the droplets of water striking like jewelry on a mirror. Little noises in the silence. Behind the dripping veil of her gray hair she yawned like a winter lion. Then she bent forward and crawled through the snow towards the buildings of the farm, dragging her tail in the snow behind her.

Caleb made the first footprints in the snow outside. The drifts of snow, like skin and muscles on the ground, rolled out from underneath the pines beside the house, as though the pines were driven into the ground like stakes, pulling the snow after them deep into the earth. Caleb walked beyond them into the field where the snow was deep. The sun had risen but was far away behind thick clouds. The snowballs he made broke as he threw them and showered on the ground through the pine boughs.

As he was playing he heard a car approaching on the long driveway and it stopped in front of the house, the snow grinding beneath its tires. Emily got out of the car and laughed and said something through the open door. Then the door slammed, sounding different in the snow, and the car made a circle in the lot and drove away. Emily walked towards the house. Her mittens hung halfway out of her coat pocket and she was holding a rose in her bare hand. When she crossed Caleb's haphazard tracks in the snow, she stopped and followed them with her eyes until she was looking at him. Caleb bent down and squeezed snow between his mittens.

“Don't get frostbite!” Emily shouted to her little brother, “You'll lose your nose.”

“Don't get knocked with a snowball in your nose,” Caleb shouted back.

Emily tried to make a snowball with her free hand, holding the rose in the air as if the snow might ruin it. She threw her snowball at him, but it caught in the pine tree and broke apart.

“Where'd you get the flower?” Caleb shouted.

“None of your business.”

“I know where you got it!” He threw a snowball at her and it struck the back of her coat as she ran for the house. She laughed and he heard the screen door swing, sounding different in the snow, as if it were far away. He stayed outside until dinnertime. He went to bed very tired.

In the night he awoke. He was afraid. He could not remember any nightmare, but he stared at the ceiling, looking for things moving in his room, waiting for sounds in the darkness. The moon lingered in the window over the pattern of white outside. The moonlight reflected off the snow and the earth seemed very far away. Caleb's room was bright and colorless, strange, as though under water. He called out hesitantly.

“Emily—”

There was a long silence. He waited, then he called again. He was embarrassed at the sound of his voice, so that he only more than whispered his sister's name and hoped that she would not hear. But he hoped she would come. He heard soft footsteps in the hallway coming up to his door. The light in the hallway had not come on. The door to his room opened. A man's figure stood there. It was not his father. His father was not so tall. His father did not have to stoop to enter the room. The figure came towards to the bed, so close that in the hollow glow of the moon, Caleb could see the figure walked with its eyes closed. It walked to the center of the small bedroom and stood, facing the window. For a moment Caleb imagined that it did not notice him, and he sank into his bed, holding the bedsheets in his fists like a weapon.

“The way up is down,” the figure said, “beneath the ground. We hold the candle upside down, and we sing out of tune.” Afterwards, Caleb could not describe the voice even to himself, except that it sounded as though its breath would make no clouds from its mouth if it spoke in the winter air.

“Mom—” Caleb said, but the word came in a whisper.

The figure turned its head and looked at Caleb's face with closed eyes. It was silent again.

“Go away,” Caleb said. Then he shouted, “Mom!”

“They cannot hear you shouting so. You're still sleeping, don't you know?” The figure said.

“Then you're a dream and you don't exist,” Caleb said.

“The better you sleep, the better you wake,” the figure said. “But ask me who I was.....”

Caleb said nothing.

The figure waited. It said, “Ask me now and then I will not ask again.”

“Who are you?”

“Abraham Wakefield's ghost.”

“Mrs. Wakefield's husband.”

“Annabel, she will not weep. But she cannot sleep.”

“What do you want?”

“Listen.” The ghost held up his hand. “The sea girl is here.”

The ghost stood still in the center of the room. Caleb sat up in his bed. As he sat up, the ghost raised both hands slowly, as if reaching out and pressing against something invisible before him.

The ghost said, “Each night she crawls to my grave, smelling the blood where it is no longer in my veins. She lies on my chest. She is waiting for Annabel, sweet Annabel, my darling, my wife and my bride.” The ghost seemed to press with all his might, but his hands, held close before his face with the palms outward, stretched flat and could not move forward. Caleb felt that they could not reach for him. He saw that the ghost's face was kind, though old and undefined in the shadow over its closed eyes. He had never seen old Abe, but surely this ghost could have lived once on Wakefield Farm, could have kissed Annabel in the morning and tossed straw alone in a spacious barn.

“Who? The sea girl?” Caleb said.

“Mermaid.....” The ghost answered, “Mis-made.....”

“A mermaid? But mermaids live in the ocean. But that's what they are, half fish and half maid.”

“No, not a fish. Half made, it is the truth, but no, no, not a fish at all,” the ghost said, “beware, she swims in the snow. Heavy like the weight of all the snow upon the earth. The sea girl on her treasure chest. She is beautiful like the moon and dangerous like a crippled lion. She will not leave my place of death, and so I cannot leave, though I feel a warmth, as though on the lids of my eyes... it pierces her skeleton. But she knows Annabel.....”

Caleb considered. It was not a man in his room. It was a ghost. So he said, “What can I do?”

“You must wait until she is gone, in the sun, when she must long for the lightless water of Hellsink Pond. Dig beside the old oak, beside the old rock, a place you well know. Dig through the snow. Dig with a heart, dig without mirth, as one digs a grave, until you find the path that leads under the earth. At the end of the passage is a dark little room, open the door and enter my tomb. Bring with you first the fresh bough of a pine, and spread its sharp needles between her face and mine. Her soft woman's belly will find no comfort more, and when you leave, leave open the door. The way up is down, beneath the ground, we hold the candle upside-down..... sing out of tune..... white as the moon.....”

When the ghost finished speaking it stepped forward, closer to Caleb's bed. Caleb shrank away under the covers. The ghost's rhyming, at least, was as he imagined. The ghost came closer, leaning over the bed, taller than the window. It looked at Caleb with its closed eyes. Then it bent its head into the moonlight from the window and dissolved.

Caleb fell asleep and did not dream. It was a strange sleep, strange as the careless gravity of snow and the frigid peace of cold, all of nature unnatural in the heat of the body and the sun extinguished in a few collected hours.

He woke very late in the day. He ate and dressed and went outside. The air was clear and cold, so that the nose runs into it, and he rubbed his nose on his mitten. He walked past the barn and climbed over the fence into the pasture. The snow was deep in the pasture and he was tired when he reached the second fence. He crawled beneath it into the outer field of the pasture and walked towards the pond.

Next to the pond stood an old oak, the oldest tree on Pine Grove Farm. Only with trees is it possible to die standing up, and its roots seemed held by the weight of the smooth gray rock which sat beneath it. The rock rose out of the ground to the height of Caleb's shoulder and sank into the earth heaven knows how far. Caleb stood by the oak tree and the rock, a young boy with red cheeks in the snow, looking at the pond. His wonder at his dream drew his eyes towards Hellsink Pond. He pushed his hands into his pockets to warm them.

There was a shadow near the shore of the frozen pond. He walked cautiously towards it. As he drew near he saw it was a hole, newly frozen over with a fresh and crystal clear pane of ice. He leaned towards it and stepped on solid, matted snow. He looked down at his boot. There was a track there in the snow like those he had made the day before, crawling on his belly through the drifts. He followed it with his gaze up the hill and behind the outbuildings of the farm. At the top of the hill he saw what he thought at first might be a gray grocery bag blown in the wind down behind the hill. He looked up at the sky and the seamless gray clouds.

Caleb ran along the track, stepping heavily in his boots and quickly growing warm in his heavy coat. He reached the top of the hill, at the outer corner of the woodshed, and found nothing. The track continued through the field towards the highway. He took off his hat and mittens and his heavy coat and ran after it.

Standing at the top of a steep hill over the ditch, he watched a car pass on the highway. He listened, but there was no other sound. He saw only the white snow everywhere and the wet black of the highway. Then a movement caught his eye. It was white on the highway, white like the snow, and moving across. She was crawling, sliding, her tail making noise on the wet surface of the tar. He saw her naked back, as white as snow, and her tangled hair tumbling from of it. Her fingernails scratched in the grit of the tar. Her hips and tail were shining like pearls, iridescent and beautiful, covered with flashing scales. Her gray mane rolled on her shoulders and twisted in her fingers and pulled in the movement of her thin arms. She slid over the black of the highway and disappeared into the snow on the opposite side.

Caleb looked up at the Wakefield's house. Like a stage set it stood undimensional behind a row of pines. He fell down the hill and scrambled on his hands and knees up the other side of the ditch. He rushed out onto the highway, then back as a car roared by, then on again in the desperate race.

He knocked loudly on Mrs. Wakefield's back door, frantic and breathing hard. He could feel his heart pounding and warmth in his cheeks and forehead. He knocked again, but when the door opened his panic left him. He felt the blood leave his cheeks, then return again, and he stood embarrassed on Annabel's doorstep.

“You're Caleb Adams. Next door.” Annabel said. She was wearing a thick flannel robe and green slippers on her feet. Annabel's hair, dyed dark brown, was cut short at her jaw and stood out slightly on one side of her head. She was pretty, as though it were just now early morning. She seemed to Caleb like a young girl, not too many years older than he.

“Come in, it's cold.” Annabel said. “Where's your coat?”

Caleb stepped inside. It was hot. He was in her kitchen, but it did not smell like a kitchen. On the counter top in the middle of the room he saw a new ball of yarn and knitting needles. He remembered the pine needles and paled and flushed again, feeling sick. Annabel walked behind the counter and sat on a stool.

He stammered, “I think something might be wrong.” It was all he could think to say.

“What?” Annabel said.

“I don't know. Is someone else here?”

“Is that a joke?” She said.

“No. I didn't mean, but, are you okay?”

“Should I not be okay? What are you doing here, Caleb?”

Before Caleb could answer, the mermaid came into the kitchen from inside the house. She slid on her belly, lifting her torso with thin arms with her hands flat on the wood floor, dragging her tail behind her. But she stopped in the doorway, as though exhausted, and hung her head under her tangled gray hair, to which bits of rotted leaves from the bottom of the pond clung. Caleb saw her shoulder blades move as she breathed.

“Annabel—” Caleb whispered.

“What do you want?” Annabel stood up. The mermaid inched closer, two steps with her bony hands, her fingernails curling and uncurling on the floor.

“Mrs. Wakefield, you have to get out of the house.”

“Out of my house? Did some friend of yours put you up to this?” The mermaid came closer, pulling her long body towards Annabel across the kitchen floor.

“No. Please, Mrs. Wakefield...”

“How do you know who I am? I suppose you've heard somewhere. The neighbor lady all alone now, and no, you know there's no one else here. Am I supposed to get angry? To cry? This is a terrible thing you're doing.” The mermaid moved closer.

Caleb could think of nothing to say. He looked at Annabel's face and frustrated tears came into his eyes.

“Get out of my house,” Annabel said, “I know what you must have heard, and I don't care. I brought this farm, this house, as far as I did and I'll certainly take it further still. And no one stands in my way, and you watch out. Now get out.” Annabel meant to frighten Caleb, narrowing her eyes and almost whispering the last words. She was pleased with her success. The mermaid moved closer. Reaching up with her arms, she laid her hand on the counter, almost touching the ball of yarn, and pulled herself up, sliding onto the kitchen counter.

“Get out!” Annabel said, “Go home. It's a terrible thing you're doing. And I'm calling your mother.”

As Annabel said this, the mermaid was next to her, so close as to smell her breath, her hair, the blood in her veins. But as Annabel said this, the mermaid turned and looked at Caleb. Her eyes were terrible.

Caleb turned and ran out the door. Annabel did not call his mother. He ran to the field behind the pasture of Pine Grove Farm and dug in the snow beneath the old oak tree until the sun fell behind the high heavy clouds. There was no passage, no hole in the snow, no door to the old ghost's tomb. Only the mermaid was real. He heard his mother calling him with a whistle she made by putting her finger and thumb to her lips. He went in to dinner.

Annabel spoke to someone on the telephone. From the pantry in the shadows, the mermaid listened.

“I feel like I'm shrinking,” Annabel said, “I am a shrinking woman. I've always felt like that, but now it's worse. It's so much worse now. And it's not just the Adams boy's prank. I really felt like I had to say something to him, to respond to it somehow. As if something wasn't said and now that it is I want to take it back. I want to take everything back, like a sinking, pulling everything down with me. And I feel like I'm disappearing. I went out today, to do the chores, and my fingers got so cold, like they were wood. I guess you know all about that. But it felt like some performance. Just more grasping at things and I've felt that before but never when there was no one watching. No one to see it. And there is no one to see it, and still there I was, with freezing fingers. And all because of something left unsaid, that now that I've said it, I want it back.”

She paused.

“No, not to him,” she said, “he's a child, he doesn't know anything. But something in what I said to him. As if, as though I said it to myself, or let myself finally say it. That I'm angry, as if...” Annabel began to cry, “...as though I want him to die all over again. And, if he did, maybe then, or the next time, or some time after that I would finally know how to do it. Because he knew how to do it. And in all that I haven't once wished that he was alive again. Only that he had shown me how, or maybe that he would do it terribly, like I did, and not left me with this feeling that I let him down.”

She cried and listened for a long while to the voice on the telephone.

Then she said, “Why is it men can't say 'you poor thing?' It's such a lovely thing to say. I've thought a lot about how lovely a thing it is to say. How sometimes it means everything that we want to hear. 'Poor thing,' just like that. But you can't say it.”

She wasn't crying anymore.

“You don't understand,” she said, “It's not the people who are sick that have to die. It's the ones they leave behind, who have to die and go on living. And what are we supposed to do? It all came and went so easy for him, and he doesn't have to see this place without him. He doesn't have to see me shrinking, this grasping at things. We loved each other so much. I loved him. I was so beautiful. It was all so lovely. It should not have been so easy for him. It should not have been so easy to leave this place. To leave this incredible beauty...”

After a while she hung up the telephone. Reluctantly, the mermaid crawled away. Night was coming.

The ghost of Abe Wakefield returned to Caleb. It breathed as though it could not breathe. And spoke as though it could not speak. In its blue-white fist in the shadows of the moon it held a rose.

“I saw her!” Caleb said, “You have to do something. She's real, I saw her! The mermaid. She was scary and your wife doesn't know, she doesn't know. I couldn't find the passage. So you have to go to her and tell her.”

“Be quiet,” the ghost said, squeezing the air in the bedroom through its throat like snow grinding beneath a wheel.

“What? What?” Caleb pleaded.

“Be quiet.” The ghost repeated. He stretched out his arm, as far as he could in his confinement, and held out the rose.

“Where did you get that flower?” Caleb recognized it.

“The rose...” the ghost said, “...the only way now. To repel what is loved...”

“But I can't. My sister will think I stole it.”

“She will...” the ghost said, offering it in the darkness of the room, “...and you have. But she will let it go.....”

“No, I can't. I didn't steal it. I don't want to take it. I can't. You... I didn't steal it...you did.”

“Be quiet!” The ghost said again, “and do this. Place it on my grave...stand it up in the snow.”

The ghost's fingers extended over the bed and dropped the rose onto the quilt.

“And remember...her scales. Eat one and she will fear you... not as you fear, but with the fear of death.”

When the ghost disappeared, Caleb did not sleep. He lay awake in bed, touching the rose and smelling it beneath the covers. He looked at the clock on his nightstand. It was not even midnight. 'Emily cannot wake up and find that I have it,' he thought. He got out of bed slowly, shivering, and walked out into the hall. For a long time he stood, listening to his family sleeping. He was angry that they were not awake, that they had left him alone to do this thing which he feared to do. But he did not dare to wake them up, because they would not understand.

He went silently out of the house, leaving behind his hat and mittens. The air was icy and his breath covered his face in a rapid cloud of vapor. He caught his breath and held it, keeping the cold out of his mouth and throat. For a while he breathed through his hand. The great black shadows of the pines loomed invisible in the feeble moonlight, like holes in the ground and sky that took nothing in and gave nothing out, but rose on towards heaven as winter tried to huddle near their trunks. He walked like a tiny creature through the snow towards the highway, and glanced terrified at shapes and shadows in the snow. The highway seemed like a black river in the night. He stood looking down into it, clutching the rose in his freezing hand.

“Don't make me do this,” he said aloud, “I'm supposed to be in bed.”

But the moon glowed silently behind winter clouds and the silence moved on in the darkness, untragic, unfierce, and eternal. He stepped down the hill into the ditch, crossed over it, and onto the highway. For a moment he was glad to not walk in the snow. The solid road beneath his feet made him feel brave. Then she appeared, head first from a snowbank on the other side of the highway, coming out of it like ink running on white paper. And she waited for him on the other side.

Caleb ran to one side. But she was there. He thought of leaping over her, but she raised herself up and tossed her hair back over her white shoulder. He looked down at his feet. He was standing in the center of the highway with his heels on the yellow lines. She came forward and he kicked at her with his boot. His foot caught in her hair and he fell on the pavement. He felt her fingernails in the folds of his clothing and he struggled. She crawled on top of him, her tail pinning his legs to the road, and lowered her face to his chest, snapping her teeth like the jaws of a fish. Remembering what the ghost had said, he reached down and pulled at the scales on her hips. One came loose as she twisted and curled her tail around his leg, separating the scales and bending them upward. He tore at the scale with all his strength. She screamed and roared into his face and beat her head against his chest so that he could barely breathe and could not swallow. He choked on saliva and coughed wildly. The scale dropped from between his fingers onto the highway.

Then he saw lights on the highway. He lost control of his fear like a panicked animal and with all his strength he turned over onto his stomach. He crawled desperately towards the other side of the highway, trying to dig into the pavement with numb fingers. The mermaid did not seem to notice the car as it raced towards them in the freedom and vacancy of the highway at night. Caleb felt the mermaid's icy fingers in his hair and he cried out. His face was forced down against the road and suddenly he felt the mermaid's scale against his lips. He stuck out his tongue and licked it up, as a cat might devour a piece of butter. The mermaid turned him over again onto his back. His breath and the smell of the scale dissolving on his tongue rose to her nostrils. She screamed and lept back towards the snowbank. Her tail, wrapped several times around Caleb's leg, carried him with her and left him lying in the ditch in the snow as the car roared by on the highway. Caleb got up and ran back onto the road. He found the rose where he had dropped it, snatched it up, and ran towards Annabel's house.

Annabel was standing at her husband's grave. She alone could frighten Caleb more than the mermaid or the ghost or anything lurking in the northern winter night. He stopped running and stood shivering in the shadow of the pines.

Annabel saw the rose in his hand and smiled. “You came to apologize,” she said.

He stepped towards her.

“Here, bring it here, I'll help you.”

Together they piled the snow into a little peak over Abe Wakefield's grave and pushed the stem of the rose deep into it. In the cold moonlight it looked almost alive, as if it had grown there, as blood seems natural on the green of a leaf, or on brown grass, or in the pure white of snow.

“That is a nice thing for you to do, though it didn't have to be in the middle of the night,” Annabel said, “but I understand. You were probably afraid. Thought I might be asleep. I know you didn't mean to do what you did. And I'm sure you understand my response, don't you? But there is nothing better you could have done to show me that you really do understand...” Annabel would have gone on, but she noticed Caleb's hands, which by now were aching and red with cold.

“But don't you have any mittens?” Annabel exclaimed. “Run along home now, and I will go inside and make you a pair. I'll bring them over tomorrow. Tomorrow's Christmas, you know.”

And Caleb went home to sleep.

Beneath the snow and the frozen ground, in the confinement of Abe Wakefield's grave, the mermaid turned and rolled on his casket. The thorny stem of the rose, sinking deep into the grave, cut the flesh on her white back until it tore into tatters and bled in the darkness of the tomb. At last she crawled away, through the tunnels beneath the snow, between the roots of the pine trees, back to the depths of Hellsink Pond, and Abe opened his eyes.

END

as yet Untitled

2009-07-19T19:01:00.000-07:00

By: K. Harvey

I am sitting at the kitchen table smoking like Steinbeck in the picture on the back cover of the book you read this summer. Your father plays with matches on the floor. It doesn't matter the color of the linoleum. I know you like to think it is green. So it's green. He is making rockets, wrapping the match heads with tin foil on the end of a paperclip and heating them until the match inside the foil bursts and it flies over the floor. He uses two matches for every rocket. Already there is a pile of burnt matches between his knees. The floor needs sweeping. I roll another cigarette and spill some of the tobacco. It is a nuisance, rolling them myself. My hands don't like small things, but I always acquire little hobbies, I always have. I won't smoke the cigarette, but I'll keep it for later. Now it is only something while I watch your father play. Perhaps soon he will bring out his soldiers. Then, perhaps, he will pester me for war stories, of which I have none. I enjoy watching his battles, and his conception and awe of bravery. He is colder than any soldier ever was. He has a great imagination. Maybe I'll roll enough cigarettes for tomorrow too. He doesn't smile enough when one rocket goes farther than all the rest. He's going to get through that whole book of matches.

There are pines on our property. There are also the pines you've seen in the cemetery. There are pines everywhere here. It is not as bad as you imagine, growing up in a tar-paper house. We did not build the house, but we feel a kind of compassion for the pines, as if we had something to do with them.

We love the pines and the river and we love to fish. Sometimes fishing is all we want and all we ever wanted. The straightness of the pines and the fishing line in the running water and the pole wishing to be straight. It is all very lonely. When you spend your day with animals like cows it is good to be lonely in the afternoon. Cow are very stupid. It is difficult to be a woman to your grandpa, and not a cow. It is difficult, but it is something I take pride in. I know it is difficult for you too to not be an animal, like a kitten. But there is no taking pride in things fishing. We are sitting on the bank with our lures in the river and hoping nothing bites. If we do catch a fish we get upset for a moment and your grandpa gets smoke in his eye from his cigarette and he squints in that awful way. Your father is playing and asking us why we don't keep the fish and why we don't fish down stream where they catch the big trout while he chases a frog that he won't catch because he slips on the bank and also because he is too gentle and doesn't want to crush it. What do you want me to say, that I wish I could paint it all? The fishing poles and the lunch and your grandpa's face and our son with the frog?

On the coffee mug in the armoire is my picture with a fish. But your father has told you already that it's a fake. 'Ruth jumps at biggest fish in Jump River,' it says, but we took the picture on a lake. The mug was a present for Mother's Day. I have always enjoyed the newspaper pointilism, my face made up of so many not-so-tiny dots, all gray, as the dots of cities on a map make a state, or as certain dots and where they are make your sky. My hair in the picture is just as you imagine, brown like your sister's, but not like your wife's. Not like your mother's. It is the hair of a fisherwoman, of a farmer's wife, of a woman who is like the sister of the cows. If that explains it.

Your father said today that the word 'loneliness' looks like 'lions.' He had been reading about some mountains in Germany. I am painting another watercolor of bluebirds. He says they don't look like birds at all. I say they don't have to. If two things that are not the same, like lonely and lions, look the same, why can't two things that are the same look different? He says but how will people know that they are bluebirds? I say that I know they are bluebirds, and maybe I'll tell them, but maybe I won't. That seemed to upset him more than I intended. But I understand it all now, after. You are like him, you know. Like loneliness and lions. Like bluebirds.

I have painted a lot of the things we live with. That's how I love them. The painting of the bluebirds is in your bathroom. The first one I made, in which I made them look like bluebirds. I don't like that painting, but it made a good gift. And a portrait of your sister when she was a child. I was a child and she was a child, I painted so childishly then. That was when everything was so round and pink, before we developed corners in our faces and around our eyes. The corners you remember. We went fishing once in the moonlight and I thought how like the moon. How lonely almost as if it were yawning in the night after eating, and its lines were in it. We caught nothing. We had not brought bait, so I drew in my line and took out my earring and baited my hook with one of my pearl earrings. I had your grandpa tie the knot and I cast it back into the running water. We fished for hours until the early morning and when we went home the sun was rising pale purple and yellow and the tar-paper house was so quiet. There was a nibble at the line that night, but nothing else. Before we left your grandpa untied the pearl from the line and dropped it into the grass. We searched together for an hour and could not find it. We had meant to get home before sunrise, but he would not give up, even looking on the bank of the river so that his socks were wet. But to please him and to tease him that week at a picnic I wore the other pearl earring and a fishing lure in my other ear. He took my picture, but we lost that too.

I have always acquired little hobbies. I bought a Nikon camera a few years ago. I was in the barn on the day your father shot a pencil over the barn with a cannon made of metal piping and a firecracker. I had the camera in the barn, taking a picture of the cow I stabbed with the hay fork. The light was good and the four red marks in the thick black and white hide looked good through the lens. In my opinion red is the only color that comes through in black and white. I was trying to take the picture so I wouldn't forget, like you with the pigeon, and how you never wanted to forget. It was just my temper, I hadn't been drinking when I did it, and I wanted to remember that. Then perhaps I wouldn't drink, or go that far, but even for the photograph the god damn cow wouldn't get into the light, so I never got the picture. But when I heard your father shout and the pencil on the barn roof, I took the camera outside. Your father was standing by the barn in the weeds studying the cannon like a scientist, like a little boy, with that seriousness in children you sometimes look at as if it explains the good in the world. I took the picture, but I think I lost it.

We had macaroni and cheese for dinner. Your father cooked. There was a cut up hot dog in it, thank God for small favors. I was exhausted from the office. We are going to sell the farm soon and I don't like the buyers. I think she is planning to cut down our pines. Your father is holding the dog by its tongue and laughing. It looks as if the dog is trying to eat its own tongue. He reminds me of his father when he laughs. Especially when he laughs. Like a lion yawning after a meal, the tongue and the teeth just unwhite enough and the lines in his jaws and the corners of his eyes. These are the things I wish I could paint, but I am so tired. And I don't have the time anymore.

I am wearing a blue scarf over my hair. I am sitting at the picnic table with the other women. Some are standing and meddling with the food. Your father leans over my lap, talking and looking with his hands. Your grandpa is standing in the green grass and everything behind him looks yellow. He is standing like an old man. When he walks and sways the sun washes out the lens and he looks like some sort of golden cactus. It is how I would paint a lion's mane. He is laughing and nothing comes through the camera lens clearer than the lines on his jaw and his red flannel shirt. Not even my bright green eyes that notice and look away, but they are not the round dumb eyes of a cow. I have always smiled like the old great Hollywood women smile. Then I turn away. Your grandpa loves the camera and smiles at it holding the football and he throws the football rolling on the ground and a little girl runs after it. Now that he was older his worries are over. Mine were just beginning.

You saw the video of that picnic at a birthday party. How old is your father's uncle now? Eighty? Does he still fish in his pond in Missouri? You see, time has no sting to us now. We lie just as you imagine us, under the ground with our strong thin hands joined across two separate graves in the lonely part of the cemetery. The American flags over the graves mean nothing to us now, though your grandpa was a soldier, in the way that they mean little to you, because you were not. We were one of the host of German farmer's families settled in the Northern logging towns, in the towns which, at last, you think, will come to you, and yet have ended already before your time. And where did they end? It is not enough to know where we ended. Perhaps it was your father when he became a minister, cultivating hearts instead of fields, and not frustrated by cows but by people. But that is not it either. I will not say that God is a modern painter, but it is like that. It does not look like what it is. Mostly it does not look like anything, and that's where we get fooled. I felt the same when your grandpa died. But we know better now. The fish can tell you what's in the river before you cross it. And the pines can tell you too, when you cut them down. That there is nothing in the river, except that it runs up against the pines and keeps on running past the fish. On the other side is another pole, and another line, and a pearl for a lure. Perhaps that's too vague. I don't mean to say that it's another life just like the one on earth. I mean to say just the opposite. But how can I describe the way the river looks when it stops?

More Lines Inspired by the Fishing Moon

2009-04-07T13:01:00.000-07:00

By: K. Harvey

Is the moon wet when it rains?
How is it dry, rolling between the rain and I?
The horn of the unicorn is the killer of young women.
It is the cruel shepherd.
It is straight and not bowed,
Bowing as the bull bows to its aggressor
Possessing only forward motion and a rolling eye;
This eye is dry and sees nothing.
Wear what the lilac wears.
Have many tiny flowers.
There will be showers of pale glass when it bursts in heaven,
Like a bubble of champagne when the wine has made a rocket
Of its roundness,
So the sky expels the moon to drop it like a penny in a stone fountain
Where it lies with other moons and other desires forgotten.
Do not grow round like the moon;
Its radial spears, its upside-down towers.
Have many tiny flowers.

Father Abraham, papau, put the knife
Here.
(Bleating like a ram), father,
Here.
Not asking for its edge but for its grip.
Its roundness in her hand,
Her tongue behind her lips, between her teeth.
Here.
'Papau' Father Abraham Abra cadabra.
The blood provides. The blood is
Life.
That is the rain on the red stone.
Filling the fountain.
Nothing grows.
The killer of young women froze.
Only the bush shook.
Here.

Venus my lover Venus my sister Venus my wedding dress.
The killer of young women is stress.

She wields the knife.
The fields spreading like a lap
To a center stone where tap tap tap
The horn drones to the rhythm it sees
That is the running of the sap.
The unicorn turns and scratches its flank.
She has the moon where it sank on a string ringing out its syrup,
Amber droplets from its silver well confusing stars
And I am musing shall I lick it up or dip my feet in it?
That is the moon on the water.
The smaller flower showers little scent for even tiny bees.
The killer of young women is knees.
Stand.
Wear what the lilacs wears.
Have many tiny flowers.
Understand. When the horn is in the bush
You need not even push
The knife away,
It is for cutting the line and letting the moon drown.

Lines Inspired By The Fishing Moon

2009-02-18T17:21:00.000-08:00

By: K. Harvey

Moon went fishing on the dimpled snow,
Simple Venus for a lure.
He had cast across the violet sky,
(The black sky was unfrozen)
Over the violent snow melting.

Alas, and for a rocket with four hundred and ninety lights,
To make moon think the sun is on the river and standing still.
The sun is a treader of water.

We dive below the celestial current swinging into a still eternity
Onto the bed where we have not yet slept,
To the overflowing cup collecting memories,
Our memories that have ended and descended into night;
Below the curled water
Which passed in the sun,
That was curling when it wet our ankles,
That was passing...
From the bed where sleep is brushed away by blinking eyes,
Where we dreamed that we were fearing death
And thought that we would live forever.

Eve will never be forgiven for her womb.
At the tomb of Venus there we leave our sleeping breath.

So why is it for me to be expending breath on the melting snow
And wondering could I reach at least the lure
Or one shore or the other?
The sun is a treader of water.
The river is the dream
Where we sleep watching the moon fishing and the snow melting
And moving. passing
Gaping to awaken with our tongue on a sweet hook.

Butternut

2009-02-18T16:31:00.000-08:00

By: K. Harvey

He looked at the blot on the brick wall that resembled a girl with yellow hair. She was smiling, as young girls do, half shyly. Her face was thin, it was almost skeletal like a corpse, like a dead woman, but with the yellow hair of a very young girl and the shy, inviting smile. He looked at the blot on the brick wall as the sky was becoming dark.

His father owned the funeral home in town. He had seen bodies. He had seen them in their coffins at night with the lids propped like traps. He had seen them naked on the prep table. He had seen them with terminal erections, when the blood rushes to the male genitalia after death. He was not afraid of bodies. ‘You got to go sometime,’ the old men said. He believed them. The blot made him think of the girl he wanted. She was a girl he would not be afraid of. He did not know any girls like her, but she was a girl who smiled half-shyly.

He walked away from the brick wall, away from the public library, down Second Street to Main Street. He turned right and walked in and out of the magic circles in orange on the sidewalk squares from intermittent streetlamps above. They had just come on when the sky went dark. He had missed them coming on. He remembered a painting he had seen called ‘The Magic Circle.’ Its was of a dark Spanish girl with black hair. Her feet were bare. She was surrounded by a circle she'd drawn in the sand, standing in it with a cauldron and a fire with a pillar of smoke rising. She was gorgeous and dangerous, but with the same inviting look. He remembered that the circle in the sand was incomplete, that the space between him and the girl in the painting was open. But all around she was protected by the magic circle from the demons she conjured, from the toad and the black crows and Death as a skull half buried in the sand. He did not believe in demons. He had seen bodies. They were kept from decomposing for a little while by chemicals.

He reached the Butternut Diner on Main Street near the center of town and pushed the greasy oak door aside. The door was as old as the building, which was almost as old as the town. It had been a feed store, now it was a diner. The small space was populated every night by men who did not love their wives but were not drunks and did not go to the bars. They went to the Butternut Diner instead. Their farmers’ hands had worn the oak door smooth and left green discoloration on its grain, like the first night the lake freezes in winter. Wake up one morning and it’s out there, in the middle of the lake, beautiful and dangerous. These men went to the diner until it was cold enough to sit in their ice fishing shacks on Big Butternut Lake staring into a circle in the ice.
He pushed the door aside and heard the familiar sound of the silver bell on the fishing line above the door. No one looked up. He did not look around. He went to the small table in the corner and sat with his back to the wall. Except for the white plastic ashtray, the table was empty. He leaned back from it, letting his butt slide forward to the edge of the chair, and pulled a box of Camels from the waistline of his jeans. His parents didn’t know he smoked. He kept the box there because it was invisible under his shirt. Soon she would come with his coffee. He came to the Butternut for the coffee, which masked the smell of tobacco on his breath. He lit a cigarette and felt the rise in his blood.

She came. Her seductive movements were unmanned by the haste of her waitressing. The black name tag was pinned over her left breast and it caught the light from the slow ceiling fan. Carlotta. He read it as she came over to him. She did not take the notebook from her apron.

“Eggs and sausage and hashbrowns?” She asked. Her accent was restrained, or reserved, and her fingernails were blood red as she set a gray porcelain mug on the table and filled it with coffee.

He smoked, and said, “Not tonight. Just hashbrowns tonight. And toast.”

“Wheat?”

He nodded, “Thanks. And some water please.”

She moved to the bar and he watched her shape, marked by the black apron tie and the pale pink skirt and the black everything else except for the skin of her calves. She was not more than twenty. Her eyes were dark, and her lashes were daubed with mascara like a burnt forest. She came with the water. She looked at him with her fingers on the glass on the table. He looked back. He had seen bodies.

They conversed in a friendly way, passing the time which she did not let on that she had. As he answered her he could hear her smiling. The sound came smoothly through her nose, above her lips which turned and stretched and rounded syllables dropped like hailstones on his senses. Her lips wet themselves on her teeth as her accent perverted the air that passed between them. Soberly he was drifting towards panic. The sweat beneath his hairline cooled in the mellow ceiling fans. He was bouncing his cigarette continually on the plastic ashtray, watching it. He wasn't saying much. A shudder took the muscles that surrounded the pounding organs in his chest and he knew she could hear it in his voice. She could hear it with her ears withheld behind black hair, full black hair which smelled when she pushed it away from the tree line of lashes. She leaned against the table, the fingertips of one hand spread on the wood tracing a circle, or a cage with the palm of her slender hand as a roof and the beating of her pulse in her wrist a continuous music. Her hand was like a tiny cathedral with pipe organ fingers. He had seen dead bodies, but hers was living, and he was afraid of this even more than dying because death would not laugh at him.
He had told her that he wrote poetry. “Oh,” she said, “that's nice. And what do you write about?”

“Anything, I guess. Whatever I’m thinking about.”

“About girls, then?” She smiled, a soft sound through her nose. Then she said, “Could you write one about me?”

“A poem?”

“Would you?”

“You mean now?”

“Why not.”

“I could, I guess.”

“Well will you? And then when you’re done you can read it to me. I think I will like that.”

He nodded.

“I am off at eleven. So you have until then. Do you need a pen?” She handed him the pen from her apron. “See you at eleven.”

It was forty minutes away. He lit another cigarette and wrote on a napkin. At first the pen made holes in the napkin.

“No no, not here, not here,” she said when they stood outside the Butternut on the deserted street in the yellow light from the windows of the diner, him with the napkin in his hand and her hand was tightly in her pocket and the other touched the color on her lips. “Let's walk to the lake.”

It was only about a half mile from the diner on the edge of town. On the west shore of Big Butternut, where the main road out of town passed close to the water, were three public docks. Two were simple platforms stretching into the water on either side of the boat landing, resting on a pair of algae coated tires at their ends. The third was new, built by a local church out of redwood planking and floating on buoys that were fixed to the lake floor by chains. This dock extended ten feet past the other two and was in the shape of a cross. It had railings all around it. A light with a green shade was fixed at its end. It would be deserted at this time of night and in this season.

As they walked together they shivered. The first snow had all but melted in the persistent sun of early winter and a breeze carried to their mouths the clarity of the night. The air was empty. He held the napkin in his fist in his pocket as they walked. They reached the dock and their footfall on the empty boards and the swish of water beneath them distracted him. He counted every step to the edge of the dock, to the green light at the end of the dock. They looked together at the lake in the moonlight. He stood near the light. She was in his shadow.

“Now,” she said, and sighed and leaned against the railing of the dock, “now you can read it to me.”

“'Darker than void, she is more black than non-existing.
She is turning back against the movement of the bull.
A foreign crowd is shouting,
Tongues she doesn’t understand,
Sung like chaos ringing in the star-arena.
The bull comes forward in a rush.
No hush moves the crowd,
And she must turn more deeply than The Earth
It seems: to right and left, her chin and breast...'”

His hands turned and wrinkled the napkin, as if to hold it in a better light. He saw the breath of her warm smile drift in frost in the clear air. She waited for him to continue. Her breath was green catching the light. He hated the poem. He hated it as though it were laughing at him, and not her.

“'...Redeem the beauty of theft;
Twists and turns that outmarch rhythm,
Outshine stars with raven bars
As her hair paints black the million crowd
And, blind, they throw their roses at their target
Flirting alone in the dirt of the stadium.
She loves and leaves when the bull is dead.
Loves, carries off its gory head,
Its body pouring red into the dust and roses.'”

She stood with her face bent towards the water, as if she would reach her hands in and splash it over her eyes and cheeks. As if to wash the green off. “I think I understand. The bull is a lover? It is a good poem. But not about me. I think it is not about me. I thought it would be sweeter.”

“It doesn’t mean anything really. Sorry.”

“No, but who is the bull? And the crowd? It is very dark sounding.”

“I don’t know. I guess I think Spain is romantic. That’s what I thought about when I thought about you.”

“No. Not Spain. I was right that the bull is a lover, but there is only one body in the arena, loving itself, right? And they throw roses. You don’t know much about Spain. My mama was born there, but she came here when she was four. She doesn't remember it very much.”

“I just thought it up because it sounded cool, I guess. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Carlotta turned away from him as if she were very angry. She exhaled sharply into the air like she was cursing. “Means nothing,” she said, “’Cool’ means nothing. Only ‘cool’ means nothing.”

“You asked me to write it,” he said, irritated.

“Yes I did, to write a poem about me and to be sweet. But you had to catch me, like a fish. With a little silver hook. You have to be so smart and make your little hole, your little circle in the ice instead of swimming. I see them here, they catch the fish and put them back in. I can be poetic too. Now you know, I am poetic too. But no, it's my own fault. We should go home now. And I'll see you all the time at the Butternut and it won't be bad, okay. It won't be bad like that.”

She was almost crying. Crying at his poetry. 'my witch,’ he thought of her, ‘my little witch.’ He thought it to see what it was like to think it. He moved out away from the green light towards her, leaning out of the circle of light towards his shadow on her. He touched her coat. He heard her feel him touch her.

But at the moment his fingers touched the wool coat, felt the sting of the tiny wool fibers, or at the moment the thought of her dark lips, her dark eyes and tongue, her hips and back and her dark fingernails, was it then that the sound came from the lake like the swish of the water under the dock but it was not under the dock. It was in the water and then on the shore. They turned and saw a figure, curled, balled, dripping green water silhouetted and catching the light from the dock. In the shadows of the shore white fingers were in the freezing mud gripping. A heaving chest blew clouds into the light of the streetlamp and scraped on the back of the man’s dry throat. The dry throat, and every wet sound that it mingled in, stopped his heart, and his hand from pulling Carlotta’s neck to himself. He stopped and forgot about it. Then they walked on the dock back to the shore, tip-toeing, and they walked in and out of the circles from the streetlamps, watching over their shoulders the stranger who had crawled from the freezing lake and now sat huddled in the mud waiting for the warmth to move and save himself. They got back to town and separated. They both heard the noise of the ambulance, but they were far apart by then. Someone had found the man. The man hadn't seen them leave. He had been trying to stay alive.

He ran trembling to the public library, where he knew his parents would not drive by, and lit a cigarette. He felt his body reacting while his mind convinced itself of amazing calm and blamelessness. But the thing he had conjured was in him. She would not forget. She was maybe laughing even now. She might laugh at him later, but without smiling, refilling his coffee in the Butternut Diner. He hated the poem. He finished his cigarette and took a piece of gum from his pocket. He rubbed and sugar and the spearmint smell from the wrapper into his fingers. He remembered how when he was young he threw butternuts and even hours later he could smell their smell on his hands when he tried to sleep and it kept him awake. But then he would throw butternuts until he could not find any more because of the snow.

Sketch 4

2009-02-04T18:14:00.000-08:00

By: K. Harvey

He couldn't tell what lane he was in. It had been an hour since the snow had stopped. It had come down in tiny crystals, the smallest possible snow, but it came down for hours. There were lights ahead and lights behind him, but he was alone on the highway. It was his highway. He could drive in the very center. His neck ached. His feet were cold where the snow melted in the heat in the car and into his socks. He wanted the thrill of a passing car, hoping they wouldn't slide, hoping they wouldn't slam into him, and watching them go. As if they would know what lane he was in. But it was his highway. It was taking him too long to get home. He drove slow and hard, like he felt he had to. He wouldn't remember the songs that played on the radio. He was driving too hard. But he knew what song he would listen to when he was home.

Sketch 3

2009-01-20T11:21:00.000-08:00

By: K. Harvey

The hurricane down in the Gulf of Mexico made a windstorm all the way up here. Seventy thousand people in the city were out of power. People had to make a lot of blocks, because trees were down in the roads. Coffee shops were busy. They stayed home. They got everything they wanted out of the fridge at once. It was a sunny day outside. Outside was very noisy. Shouts and laughter came through the windows. He realized then how many children lived on his street when they all came out at once.

Sketch 2

2008-12-30T18:41:00.000-08:00

By: K. Harvey

There was a spot in the bookstore where four striped chairs faced each other. It was no place to read. No one shared anything but they all read together, telling each other what they read just by holding it in their lap. He wondered what the older people read. Sometimes he sat in the café. An old man, if he could, always sat in the same chair at the same table, facing the same direction and looking down at what he had in front of him on the tiny table. He wore sweatpants and many different plaid shirts. He wore big tinted glasses. His narrow eyes were right there behind the glasses. He must have read so much already. And he wasn't the business type. But he was reading very hard. He never looked up.

Such old men and women made him wonder. It couldn't be that there is always something new to discover. It wasn't that. He sat in one of those four chairs that faced each other and noticed when a very large old man sat down next to him. The old man sat a few books on his knee. The book on top of the stack was big, like an art book, and black. The old man was wearing a suit. But he wasn't the business type, because of the art book. He turned over the cover of the big black book and there wasn't any title. Just the silver embossed Playboy bunny. He started turning the pages one after the other after the other after the other after the other, like that. Like when a woman walks up the stairs on an escalator and its moving beneath her makes a pace that she can't break.

Sketch 1

2008-12-17T19:29:00.000-08:00

By: K. Harvey

She started talking about shoeing horses. She was always at the center of the table, like the saltandpepper, she had something to add to everything. But she didn't talk too much. No one else had much to say around her. What they had to say was all reminiscing, but she made everybody laugh, and everybody wants to laugh. Around her, they wanted to laugh more than they wanted to talk.

The sun came through the smoke in that way it always does in old movies, when there's just one light on the face in the camera, in black and white. The blinds were baby pink. The table was baby pink. I don't remember what color the walls were. It was like a nursery. There are never any walls in a nursery. And the sun came through the blinds on those faces that must have been something once. But I never asked anything about that, because she was not reminiscing. She was making us laugh. And if we laughed then the story had a moral. And if we didn't laugh, then the story wasn't over yet. To hear her talk anyone would think her children were millionares, she was so pleased with herself. But that was pleasing. She laughed at her own stories because she thought they were funny. Just like that I was taken in in the same way a wasp nest looks like a derby hat.

“Well men was always lockin' up their tool boxes. When we's first dating I'd come over an' his father had this box in the garage that'uz always locked up all the time. So when we was married first thing I did I went to that garage and found that box. And when I found it, you know what, it wasn't even locked anymore. It just opened right up.”

Home Town

2008-12-08T15:25:00.000-08:00

By: K. Harvey

Knock with a small sound,
There are things to upturn in this town;
A town of twelve hundred.
Where the hedges will not grow,
Where the trees don't fall,
Where my smaller feet are in the snow
And my hands are on the gate
Holding it shut against the sun
Letting it freeze in the pines
That were a staircase and a fence.

The Dream of the Bull Fight

2008-10-28T18:23:00.001-07:00

By: K. Jan Harvey

Darker than void, she is more black than non-existing.
She is turning back against the movement of the bull.
A foreign crowd is shouting,
Tongues she doesn't understand,
Sung like chaos ringing in the star-arena.

The bull comes forward in a rush.
No hush moves the crowd,
And she must turn more deeply than The Earth
It seems: to right and left, her chin and breast
Redeem the beauty of theft;
Twists and turns that outmarch rhythm,
Outshine stars with raven bars
As her hair paints black the million crowd
And, blind, they throw their roses at their target
Flirting alone in the dirt of the stadium.

She loves and leaves when the bull is dead.
Loves, and carries off its gory head,
Its body pouring red into the dust and roses.

A Youngster in the Laundry

2008-10-28T18:19:00.000-07:00

By: K. Jan Harvey

He has a head on for light people,
Tender-footed biologists
Tip-toeing into the cavity someone left open,
Like the light on the kitchen tile at night
And the smell of cold wafting.
A bold helping in the dark
Where the crowd won't see.
We are hanging by our ears drying.

She was walking in folds,
Stalking distracted in shifting molds
Of pale blue and bloodless red,
And through these wierd uncinched and free balloons
I saw her pretty head.
Her hair was waltzing with the sheets on the line.
I am blind or I blink too slowly,
Close the refridgerator door there's something rotting.
I'll eat the skin of animals
While they still outnumber men.

Driving

2008-10-04T18:18:00.000-07:00

By: K. Jan Harvey

On the road is a man with a sword,
On the skipping line is a skipping heart on the highway.
He's at the wheel holding steady time,
She's holding time in her lap, writhing.
A wasp in the window stinging the helmet
A wasp in the window stinging the armor
A wasp bringing the eyes
Away to clean skies,
Lies to clear days.
I can't lift my foot to look
I won't stop to see until I see
It simply simply simply
As it is, as it is loud and small
As it is crawling and proud,
As it is hidden where the mind cannot retrace it's steps.
Where the tire tracks don't show.
In part time goes, and the mail comes.
The letter is not for me,
The word is not for us,
But about us keeping us down the highway,
Or up, to frown at the sword.

An Eden of Bland Repose

2008-10-04T18:11:00.000-07:00

By: K. Jan Harvey

“Beloved! amid the earnest woes
That crowd around my earthly path—
(Drear path, alas! where grows
Not even one lonely rose)—
My soul at least a solace hath
In dreams of thee, and therein knows
An Eden of bland repose.”
“To F—” E.A. Poe

He saw the old .22 rifle that was old when the man who carried it now carried it as a young boy with it ready at his hip and his eyes thirsty in the tall field grass. Now he was old and a young boy watched him and the rifle. The boy cut his new eyes on the petite black circle at the end of the slender barrel where the oil-rainbow metal turned in to where the bullet would come out invisible. To play with a weapon and to kill with a toy. That was the .22 rifle, in his eyes. But it carried a grizzled and inhuman power that was caught up in its years of use and those who used it. Every bullet had been different, every distance of every shot, every breath of him who squeezed the butt against his shoulder, the barrel in his hand, the stock on his cheek, the trigger... The same gun. It meant that the world had not begun with this boy, and the world would not end with him. He was a bullet. He thought this because of Sunday School and the talks of Heaven and Hell. There was the end of life, and after that another end. But after that, nothing. Or nothing more, and it made him nervous at times. He had felt this anticipation as he followed the old .22 rifle out into the barn yard.

With a feed sack in his hand, he waited for the man to come out of the chicken coop. The feed sack in his hand was empty. It folded against his leg and over one of his shoes.

He came out of the chicken coop with a brown hen under his arm. One of the smaller ones. He held it the way he’d learned to hold them when he was a boy, so they huddled into his side between his rib and his hip and stared and didn’t beat their wings. He carried it out this way. It looked like a small beating heart. It was nervous but it didn’t look around. She just waited for it coming with her eyes open.

He put her on the ground and stepped on her. Now she beat her wings, trying to run with her body, her head pinned down by the edge of the boot and her puffy chest and the two legs that stuck out from it scratching and the wings beating in the dust and on the man’s jeans. The one eye stared at the boot. The black circle came down to it.

He thought ‘an eye for an eye,’ but that was about being fair, and she hadn’t done anything except eat too much, more than the farm could afford. But it was a rule of nature and of animals. ‘An eye for an eye.’ It was a rule about being fair, but people could do more than that. They could be merciful, which was better, or unjust, which was worse. Being fair was in the middle, and the worst of all, he thought. It was the most terrifying. It was getting what one deserved. So he could understand this with the chickens.

The old .22 rifle cracked and it echoed off the barn. She jumped up. The man lifted his boot, but it looked as though she had thrown it off and sprung into the air. She jumped into the clover and the round purple blooms at the bottom of the little hill where the big field began. He looked up into the big field. He saw the intense purple-green plain of crisp alfalfa that cracked under his feet like the sound in your head when you eat cereal, the smell of it as they marched towards the shimmering maples with their coverings of berry bushes and the lightning brightness of the aspen leaves that turned silver-side-up in the wind like winking eyes of fire and the old oak behind it all and greener than the rest. There was the tree fort built back there, but there was the field to cross first. That’s where the talking happened and the wondering about things they didn’t understand like Heaven and Hell and The Quick and The Dead. That was the good part; the getting there and the looking at it. Giving your breath to the vision. But once you were there it was all as it was, and there was only that to do. Going over the field was the real doing, and being distracted by every possible thing. It took a very long time to get there. But they always came to it and sat in the tree fort and tried to see the forest.

More noises were coming from the chicken coop, moving together in circles inside. He came out with another small brown hen. He stepped on her and shot her in the eye the same way. She went down the hill moving like the tiny bubbles in a pot just before it boils. She fell into the deep clover close to the other one. They were concealed by the clover, in little cavities where the purple blooms were not.

He went in again. The boy saw the bright rooster in his arm when he came out the third time. The red on its head and under its beak moved like the parts of him he couldn’t talk about. The rooster struggled, not like the others, not waiting for it coming. The long thin gray and black feathers around its neck puffed out around its twitching head and the yellow eye looked once at each thing and jerked away, so he thought the image in its brain must be like a Picasso painting. It was not as easy for the man to step on the rooster.

His friend, the man’s son, elbowed him and said he thought the rooster would go the farthest. The boy agreed. They waited for it to be shot, and jumped at the crack of the rifle. The rooster sprang up. And it did go the farthest, but only in circles and ended up next to the others in the clover. That was after it sprinted around the yard and turned twice over itself and once came headlong at the boy, but with its head flat and to one side perpendicular to the wet red neck, the head leading it around so it never reached him. The two boys laughed and the man had another one before the rooster had stopped. This one too went into the clover.

The man grew impatient. He was tired. He watched the boys. They laughed and joked, their sacks on the ground, up to their knees in the clover, and their backsides brushing the purple blooms as they pushed the brown and red feathers with sticks. He called them so that they looked up quickly, then trotted back up the hill. He stooped through the door of the chicken coop again.

Then they all cluttered out of the door and the boot came carefully behind them. The man stood with them before him in the yard, brown gray and white too, their eyes jerking in rhythmic staccato and the thin necks bulging and unbulging and fluttering and ceasing to flutter. The heads went up and went down. They moved in a crowd as if giving and taking of each other and receiving and acknowledging and moving on. The man stood in the door pushing bullets into the gun.

The boy lifted his empty sack off the grass. His friend’s eyes were animated and he explained that now they were going to be shot one after another. Willy nilly, he said.

The man aimed the rifle at the first one, with his shoulder and hand and cheek and then the finger of his strong hand squeezing, because he aimed exactly, and the first one fell dead. They didn’t scatter, because the ones on the outside saw open space and turned from it back into the crowd. And the boy could not even see which were killed and which were not; but the man saw down the length of the barrel. The boy was confounded. The man killed them all one after another.

Then it was quiet except for the hens dying and bleeding down into the clover. But the rifle was quiet and he saw a white hen huddled to the earth. Her head didn’t jerk but he saw her eye blink. The white lid caught the sun and was much brighter than the eye. Her wings did not move, but enfolded her body. Her legs were not seen sticking out beneath her. She shivered and sat as she would on an egg. The boy didn’t see the rest of them dying because he saw her alive. He saw her white feathers. He saw her fear, the promise of death in the dying around her. But the empty casings of the .22 bullets lay on the ground. The man let the butt of the old rifle, unpolished and polished again by many hands, drop to the ground and he rested the barrel against his thigh. The boy saw her alive, but she was not. It came to her too, as it had come to the rest. The man’s gun no one escaped. Even as he looked her blinking eye closed more slowly and opened less widely. She leaned forward, to fall, her full breast tilting, towards the grass. As she fell, a surge of blood, purple-red and thick from deep organs, poured from a wound between the feathers covering her breasts, just as spoiled milk is wasted from a pitcher into the grass outside the kitchen door. She rolled once onto her head and spasmed once and then joined completely the others. The boy took his sack as his friend was doing and went about collecting the dead chickens from the clover. The man watched them and felt satisfied. He could see that they saw what was coming with different eyes.

Wisconsin Farm

2008-09-24T14:48:00.000-07:00

By: K. Jan Harvey

Between the black earth and the sky,
Where the eye is fixed by the barbs of pines
Like a cricket chirping, still, upon a pin;
The northern spring is born and dies again,
And whispers to her fields in tones
Of gentle, dreadful, honest moans,
‘I gave you birth in these vicious moans,
Yet ere you cried I clothed my breasts,
For you were born too old,
Too old to see my nakedness.’
The whispers disappear in stalks of corn,
Brown before the kernel shells were born
Upon the wind.
The northern spring, it dies again
In a single sway among the sticky boughs
And the wind brings frost on the window-pane.
The world is opaque.
The world is opaque. like a vein.

In the barn another litter purrs,
In hay, where six or seven bodies lay,
And fertile Taffy, dressed in furs of calico and summer heat,
Reclines to flaunt her naked teats.
But we, with wiser industry,
Knowing the limit of our care,
Killed them all; I was there.
Here is the black earth beneath the nothing sky
Where we shot them; the stiff shots slowly die
On that northern wind.
But where is the blood those kittens spilt?
A thimble full, a glass of milk upset?
We do not know.
It mingles with the calico.
What color is the dingy barn?
‘I come from a Wisconsin farm.
I think our flag is blue, I think, or are there two?
One blue, yes, but also white that winter night,
When it hung below the moon, above our dead.
Blue and white, but nothing here is red.’

We learned a long, long time ago,
What is the meaning of calico.
Our soil rich, our snow a skull,
And autumn orange to rip apart the leaves
And stitch them into something whole, and in between—
Nothing here is really green.
Not even the evergreens.
And the cat, that queen in furs,
The northern dynasty of purrs,
She’s pregnant again, and bleeds upon the hay
In the heat in the barn, where she used to lay
With the large male cat, obscure and gray.
She’ll show you sure, she has no shame,
The blood, the meat, it’s all the same
To a cat, but we are wiser.
We are good.
The world is opaque. like a period.

Here she eats her cereal
With too much milk, the fertile box
Half empties over the chipp’d bowl,
As if she should have been a son.
Her calico distracts the sun from working in the field,
And autumn comes with purrs from where
It started in her hair.
She’s pregnant now, so like the bowl,
So hungry to be something whole.

In the barn another burden lows,
A child of the northern snows,
We had such hopes for this one, though,
It would never be a bull.
What color is the dingy barn?
A red the wind has turned to wool,
Brown, between the blood and flowers
Which are yellow in the summer hours.
What color is the barn? ‘I don’t recall,
I don’t remember spring at all.
We castrated it.’ The world is tall,
Like the legs of the calf that walks like a doll
Into the pasture, out of the stall.

We knew it all, and what it means,
The labor pains, the lusty screams of calico
Cats in heat behind the barn,
I come from a Wisconsin farm.
But what lies in the stall, still warm?
It isn’t red, as we would guess,
But purple,
The color of the dynasty, and white
The color of her skin, which means our flesh
Is something in between—
‘I did not I did not do
What I may easily say was you.
If you were a man, I would be too.
I’m good. I’m good.
And so are you.’
And that is why the northern spring,
Remains obscure but to the eye
That yells, so pinned by evergreens,
Of what it saw, and what it means,
And what it means to say,
Preserved like a casket in the snow
Where feral cats will go to be alone—and doubt.
They lay there in the hay as it walked out
Into the pasture, gray,
Between the black earth and the sky.
And then we followed, you and I,
And took our first breath—
The world is opaque.The world is opaque. like death.

To the Entomologist

2008-09-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

By: K. Jan Harvey

You gave me your peculiarities,
Your ether and jar,
And I see they have gotten you pretty far.
I dreamed of held back tears
And wasted years
And fears confronted to the noise of cheers.
The ethered cotton balls are in my ears.
A spike passed through my back;
But to you it was only a pin put beneath the fingernail
Which claws the limp earth forward through the solar system.
Wisdom says you'll soon forget me,
But it echoes, I'll remember thee
And your peculiarities.

The Precipice

2008-09-16T19:01:00.000-07:00

By: K. Jan Harvey

I stood at the edge of the precipice,
Or what it has become;
Filled with nothing, redeemable, harvested, had.
The stutter of a rushed voice
Corrupted that moment of quiet at the last of a breath.
I held my breath to hear,
It suddenly was clear,
There was laughter, much rejoicing
At a joke.
'We outdid them!' It cascaded,
And it toppled down the hillside with the laugher.
Then together we turned to the cliff
And set about rigging a clever elevator on its face,
But I began digging.

Seven Lines

2008-09-11T15:54:00.000-07:00

By: K. Jan Harvey

She read to me the poetry
Of she-roses who can't refuse their lovers.
But I said, 'I'm not a bee.'
'I'm the animal that supersedes his brothers;
Stung and angry.' She looked away
And at the map of Spain I'd hang upon my wall.
"If this were all, I'd take it all and nothing more."

A Wayward Shot

2008-08-12T15:49:00.000-07:00

By: K. Jan Harvey

The day he bought the rifle he took it into the woods to the stand by the creek between Lester Judie’s land and ours. That’s where the trees were cut when Lester lost his property. But we didn’t cut that oak, or the poplars around it, and there’s some nails left in it where the stand used to be. Iron nails grown into the tree, and still visible and unnatural. But the creek dried up. Like he dried up.

He used to say that the stand had been there a hundred years before any man in Fortune knew about it. I don’t know why he thought that, or how he would have known. He came here long after the town was founded. But we all thought we might as well believe him. He used to say a hunter once shot a minister from that stand, because he wouldn’t tell him it was justified to lust for a woman if he did not touch her. These are the lengths of atheism, he would say. So the hunter shot the minister and every year after that his ghost appeared to him as a giant white doe, a symbol of the purity and promise of a woman I suppose, and never let itself get hit by that hunter’s gun. So the hunter went mad and hung himself from the stand. He used to say the white doe saw it happen. And he said when they found his body, bullets were all around in the snow and metallic in the sun, and that there were thirty of them. Thirty bullets. He used to tell us that, and that no one ever climbed down from the stand afterwards without having killed a deer. But never that white doe. He said the stand was blessed, and that the white doe blessed it, because that white doe was holy.

That’s why he took the new rifle up there, to kill that old white holy deer. I think he felt that white doe staring him down. You see, he wasn’t an atheist, and he believed the story. That’s why he did it. Because he wouldn’t have hung himself. But also I think he wanted the same thing we all do. So he climbed up and waited for the white doe. He was watching out over what was then Lester Judie’s land, Lester Sr., because that’s where the young minister had been killed, on his way to a baptism in the creek, he told us. So he waited the rest of the day and on through the bitter night and the morning came on and his hands were cold on the pretty metal barrel of the brand new rifle and his toes numb inside his stiff frozen leather boots and his stomach empty and growling. He said he ate bark to shut it up, and then he began to think and imagine as he chewed and warmed his mind. He felt that if he killed that white doe, then from that day forward, he would never miss. He believed in that. And he’d bring the frost white ear of that deer to his girl in Fortune, as a sign of his provision, and they’d serve that white doe at their wedding supper and dance as the snow fell just before Christmas. It was all a good joke. That’s how he told it.

And of course he did marry Grandma, his girl in Fortune, but it wasn’t quite that way. As he waited out there it started to snow and then it became really cold. The dawn was coming and it was the coldest time of night because all that heat goes out and gets ready to come up all at once with the sun. In that true northern winter cold he felt his eyelids chill each other as they touched when he blinked and he couldn’t even shiver because he was so tired. So he just blinked to keep his eyeballs warm, they were all he would need until the white doe appeared. He wiggled his toes in his boots and straightened his back and felt like a mountain in that tree, stiff and aching. He inhaled the motionless air, he said like drowning in perfectly still water, and he felt it on the hairs in his nose making a tiny popping noise, and he said that’s what that old white holy doe heard to make her head snap up in the falling snow and her ears tip forward and that’s what he saw through the snow from the stand. Only he said it was not a doe at all, but a young fork buck, white as a lamb and bigger than anything in the woods, even at that distance and in all that falling snow. He could see the long muscled neck and the two forks as clear as the lines you draw with your finger on a frosty car window, and he couldn’t see the shape of a face so he knew it was staring right at him in his stand. Staring at him, as he was staring back. And then as he looked he could see that unnatural curving horizontal line that in the woods is only the body of a deer. He said it looked like a ghost in all that snow. And he said he didn’t remember being cold, but he was shivering all right, and the muscles even in his fingers felt tired and hot and they wouldn’t grip. He always said it’s the deer’s life in your hands that makes you feel that way. The deer’s life in the summer under the sun and bounding through tall grass on hidden hills that no man has ever seen and a heat of life that no man in this place has ever known and you hold that for a moment before you decide. Then it goes out of you. It goes out altogether. And you don’t feel sorry, but just one less thing.

He lifted the rifle as a leaf straightens when a bee flies off. He was a good hunter. He had heard that pastor who was killed preach once when he was a boy, when he went with Lester to church. The pastor had preached on Jeremiah, the twelfth chapter, and about a roaring lion in the forest. Now it seemed to him that words and phrases of that sermon started bounding in his mind as he aimed, and the deer didn’t move, but just stared at him, in that calm and awake way that deer look sometimes, through the snow. He ignored all that in his mind and instead thought of dancing on his wedding day with his stomach full. ‘Let me be a lion. No, I will be a lion. I will be a lion in the forest.’

And that’s when it came down. The whole stand came down. He didn’t hear it break, but he was on the ground in the snow. The whole bough had given way, like it was cut off at once with an axe, and he came down with the stand into the snow and broken sticks and the new rifle came down with him. He didn’t have time to let it go in the air and it fell against his finger and fired into the night with a noise so loud, he said, it made the snow stop altogether and the bullet went far off into the woods, without hitting a tree, and dropped beneath all that snow and nothingness and frozen dead meaninglessness of winter. Then his leg hurt and it was broken and even though they waited until spring, he still couldn’t dance at the wedding and she danced instead with Lester Judie and the others that were there. But on that night when the stand fell, he bit his lip as he used to do in his last days when he’d get up out of a chair, and he stood up on that broken leg out of the shattered branches and saw the buck was still there, like nothing he’d ever seen, white like breath and as warm and calm, like a pearly lily dried and pressed in a book, he used to say. And it stared at him.

So he lifted the rifle and fired again. And he always swore there was dirt in the barrel, or snow, because he never missed. But he saw that bullet break a scar in a tree to the left of that white deer’s simple shape. And then it was gone and no one’s ever seen that white stag again and no one rebuilt the stand because of course it wasn’t blessed anymore.

He never let up on telling that story. It was precious to him, but I think it bothered him too. And he always insisted it was absolutely true. And it is true, because the rifle came down to me. It never shot straight and still never will, but it always shoots just to the left, no matter how careful you aim. Not once has it shot straight, except maybe once, when a wayward shot might have hit what I aimed it at.

Her name was Emily Ulalume Judie. She was Lester’s youngest daughter by his second wife and my mother always said she was simple and the boys at school all said she was stupid. She didn’t go to school, but the boys told stories. Some said they’d seen her in the soybean field taking off her clothes and dancing and that her father ran them off with his World War II machine gun and then started beating her. But that was a lie, because those boys said a lot of things. Also I knew that Mr. Judie loved Emily Ulalume, very dearly.

Of course the boys made fun of her name, but I always thought it was perfect. And Mr. Judie’s second wife, Beth, kept her maiden name with a hyphen, Judie-Azelle. It just made her name ugly. But the girl’s. Emily Ulalume Judie-Azelle. And she was beautiful. Like the young bride of Solomon.

All this occurred to me later. At the time I was just a boy. I was young and very much afraid of what other people said. Of course, you never really grow out of that, but when you’re young you don’t think about hiding it at all. You just try and try not to be small.

It happened on the day before I moved away, so it wouldn’t have mattered if I had been small. But of course it did. Three years before, I had been given the rifle as a present and I had made good use of it since then. The first thing I shot was a possum, which I figured wouldn’t be blasphemy. Of course, I didn’t believe in all that that my grandpa had said, but since I’d heard his story and saw my mother look over her shoulder from the stove as he told it, I thought it would make me feel better about the whole thing to kill a possum and set the rifle right again. And it did.

I killed lots of things with that rifle, and even two deer. I learned to shoot it well, aiming the crosshairs in the old scratched scope just enough to the right, depending on the distance, to put the bullet where I wanted. I was a very good hunter.

There were four of us that evening. Edgar, Frank, Allan, and myself. They all knew about my rifle and they always wanted me to let them shoot it, but I never did. Of course I didn’t. We were hunting rabbits that evening. It was getting near dusk when we should have been going home and Edgar started talking about ghosts. He was the oldest, and he was often cruel. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I think Frank and Allan were getting scared. He told us about the ghost of an old, old man that lived in shadows and in snow and beneath floorboards, because that’s where he’d been buried, not underground, and he bit off the feet of people who stepped on him so they’d fall and then he’d whisper evil things in their ears until they went crazy.

“No way.” Frank said. “What do you know? Ghosts can’t bite they don’t have any teeth.”

“Yes they do too. Teeth is all they have.” Edgar said. He was walking just behind Frank as the sun started down behind the trees. “That’s how they i.d. dead people. By their teeth. My uncle’s a cop and he told me. And if you mean that they can’t bite things that are physical because they aren’t physical, then how come we can see them?”

“I’ve never seen one.” Frank said.

“I have.” Edgar said.

“No way. No you haven’t. You’re making that up.” Frank said.

Then Edgar stumbled and he yelled, a short sudden burst of noise into the dusk. Frank’s body jerked rigid and he jumped a few steps forward quickly, weaving like a rabbit runs. But he stopped and turned around when he heard Edgar laughing on the ground.

“It’s saying something to me.” Edgar said. Laughing. “It’s saying—it’s saying Frank’s mom’s a whore.”

Frank went over to him and kicked him hard. I had to break them up because Allan just stood there quiet, but first I put the rifle on the ground. It took a while to break them up too, because Edgar’s glasses had come off and he was mad about that. They weren’t broken, but he said they were cold from the snow. When I looked up I saw Allan hadn’t even been watching. He was looking out across the field towards where the stand used to be, where the big oak is in a clump of poplars. The sun was just behind the horizon now, and it was that time in the early night when you can watch it getting darker and darker, but you always miss when it goes black.

“Quiet.” Allan said. He pointed. His shoulders shook a little.

We all looked and Edgar pushed his glasses on. Across the field on top of a small rise in the ground and outlined against the black trees was a white shape, moving. It was not moving one way or another, unless it was coming towards us, because it only seemed to sway back and forth slightly. It was small and indistinct. Just a shape, but unnatural against the trees.

“It’s a ghost.” Allan said. I watched the breath come out of his mouth as he whispered. He was really afraid. Not the fear of being embarrassed by someone older than you, but real fear. I’d never seen it before. He started shaking, more than you would from being cold. Then I was afraid because he was, like you would be if a faithful dog curled up under the bed while a robber took your life away.

“It’s not a ghost, jerk, it’s better than that. It’s that old white buck.” Edgar said. He had heard the story. Everybody had. “Look, see, that’s where the stand was. In the oak. Only it’s your land now—” he touched my shoulder with the back of his hand and he said my name, “—you can shoot it.”

“No.” I said. “We can’t even see it.”

“Yes we can. I can.” Edgar said. “C’mon and shoot it. Quick, before it goes.”

“No.” I said.

“Let’s just go back, guys, it’s getting dark.” Frank said.

“No, pussy, we can’t let it go. Shoot it.” Edgar said. His glasses were foggy from his breath. He took them off and wiped them and he said my name again in a loud whisper in my ear.

“My dad says you shouldn’t shoot at something you don’t know what it is.” Frank said.

“Shut up.” Edgar said. He hit the back of Frank’s knit hat. Then he leaned very close to me and he whispered in my ear, so Frank and Allan couldn’t hear him.

“It’s staring,” he said, “isn’t it—” he said my name again, “—staring right at you, just like he said. It’s staring you down. You have to shoot it now. Do it. Don’t be stupid.”

So I knelt down and ran the bolt in the chamber and heard the bullet come up into the rifle. I saw Allan was still shaking, staring. He was still afraid. I tried not to be. Then Frank started to panic.

“No, don’t do it. We’ll get in trouble.” Frank said. “Edgar stop, we have to get back. Please, let’s go. You don’t even know what it is. It could be anything. Let’s go. What if it’s—”

“It’s that deer.” Edgar said. “That white deer.” He whispered. “That buck that no one could kill and it’s staring you down. I’ll tell everyone you couldn’t. That you had the chance and didn’t do it. Or here, why don’t you just let me?” He said.

He touched the rifle and I pulled away. I put it to my shoulder, forcing his hand away with my elbow. I aimed. I put the crosshairs exactly on the white shape. I didn’t want to shoot it, so I aimed right at it. Edgar was kneeling next to me like a father would teach his son how to shoot. Frank was lingering over us making a lot of noise. I put the crosshairs exactly on it.

“Shoot.” He whispered. “Shoot.” I aimed exactly precisely on the shape.

Then Allan sobbed. It was an enormous sound in the silence. A great inhalation of freezing cold air, unnatural and sharp, catching and rasping somewhere in his throat and building towards a hot bubble of tears from his eyes and nose that never came. But the sound just took in all that silence and it was like nothing you’d hear in the woods in winter and in all that snow, and the rifle fired.

I had seen the shape in the crosshairs then. In that moment, I had recognized it. In the heat of my mind I figured it out and knew what it was. It was her. It was Emily Ulalume Judie. A little girl in winter clothes. Emily Ulalume. And I had seen her in the crosshairs of the rifle. She was smiling, like she always smiled because she was simple. Smiling, but not at me. Not at anything. Just smiling, as if from inside.

But when I lowered the rifle from my cheek, feeling it unstick and feeling the extra cold on my cheek where it had been, I couldn’t see the shape anymore. There was no movement, no white shape above the snow, nothing but the black poplars and the big black oak and the black black black northern sky.

I heard Allan stop crying. He probably felt like I did. Deaf and breathless from the noise of the gun and shaking everywhere inside but stiff on the outside and feeling too much cold on our faces. Edgar stood.

“You missed.” Edgar said. “You missed like everyone else. I saw it run back into the trees when you shot. That old white buck got away again.” He turned and started walking away. We all followed him, but my knees felt like they were melting in my snow pants and Edgar got far ahead of us. He kept laughing in the darkness like a ghost might laugh, to scare us. But we just walked like children walk when they’re going to be punished. That’s the length of a person.

But I know I didn’t shoot her. I know now it’s okay. She may have run off behind the rise in the ground or into the trees like Edgar said. I don’t know. I didn’t see. But the rifle always misses and she was exactly in the sight. The rifle always missed, since that day he fell from the stand. I know it missed. Of course I don’t know, because I didn’t see. And I never went back. But some things are unnatural, like heavy weights that somehow don’t sink in the snow. And I think I saw her once, much later, with her father, in Minneapolis.

Adorning

2008-07-16T11:40:00.000-07:00

She drapes the fence flaunting neck and legs in that graceful roundness of muscle. Just as a neurotic would coddle an old, dying habit. It is not an embrace, but a grudging leniency, with the back and ribs showing through, and her head twists backwards and behind the arch of her shape, all arranged by nature and gravity and the right amount of time. I see, but I don’t look closely and I keep the rhythm of my steps, with a purpose to sit and begin the book on the bench in the back of the cemetery. My footsteps, which are muted, or exaggerated, by leaves, reverberate on the headstones near the path and my sound returns to me and I begin to feel that someone follows behind. I find the bench and sit. The book is bent from my pocket and the spine has become a ragged arch where the color chips away into the leaves, showing string and flesh-colored glue. The Old Man and the Sea.

Twice Told Books
8 Pearl St.
Fortune, WI -----
is stamped on the first page. I remember the silly painted sign of the used books store. Someone has already told me how the book ends, but I thought I would read it anyway. She had said I should, even after she told me how it ended. Then she arranged the flowers that I had given her, which she would keep, dried, forever with the others.

The bench is cold in autumn. Marble is colder than concrete. Even when the sun seems to be just behind the clouds like a face is behind make-up. I remember how she is very pretty, though perhaps her eyes are too large for her head, but something in her face makes this okay. She always sees the looks I give her, like when she told me how the story ended.

“Everybody knows how it ends. I can’t believe you didn’t read it in high school.” But by then I was looking at her smile, her laugh, staring back at it, looking it in the face.

“I guess we just read other things.”

“Like what?”

“Nobody really reads anything in high school anyway.”

“We did. We had to. Mr. Aldson was so strict. I did really well in his class, though. Anyway, you’re in my way.” She saw my look. “Don’t get mad, I just have to do this now.”

So I sit on the bench in the back of the cemetery, and she is cleaning under the couch with the couch pushed all the way against the wall and the cushions stacked on the chair in the corner and the dishwasher running in her spotless kitchen. I finish the book and set it beside me on the marble. On Polly Flawson’s grave. In Loving Memory, 18-- to 19--. The dedication on the bench reads the same: In Loving Memory. In cursive. But she must have been Ms. Polly Flawson, because her tombstone rests alone in the back of the graveyard with the little bench beside it, between two cedars. We thought of it as having always been there. It was our bench, just a name and a loving memory, but kept secret for us, and Polly too was keeping the secret for us. She likes it in the graveyard. We walked through it, reading the names and talking about ourselves, until it got too cold, and then we would drive and park the car and kiss. Once we parked the car in the back and I read her Portrait of a Lady. It was my favorite poem. I recited as much as I could, then I had to read the rest from the page.

“I love it! That’s so good. What do you think it means?” And I looked at her eyes before looking back at the page. ...the scene arrange itself, as it will seem to do.

“I don’t know. I think he’s cheating with her, but not really, just in conversation. Like ‘carefully caught regrets,’ like they’re cheating only in mind, but still cheating. But I think he’s not committed, obviously. He doesn’t really try to understand her.” She nodded because she wanted to impress me, to look deep. She saw that I was passionate, saw my look. But she looked dishonest. And every time I read the poem I was impressed. Though I’ve forgotten most of the lines now.

“Oh, and my dad pointed out the opening line to me. The line, or lines I guess, from Marlowe. ‘And besides, the wench is dead.’ So she’s dead. It’s not a real relationship. She’s not a real woman.”

“Yeah. I get it.” Then something true from her, “Does he really love her? Do you think he really loves her?”

I could not have responded. So I said, “Well yeah, I think so. But he loves the cheating more, I think. The unreality, I guess. The exchanged fantasies.”

She nodded again. “Yeah, I think he adorns her—adores her I mean.”

I remember we laughed about that. She was usually so careful to saw what she wanted. But then I thought people can wear each other, to impress the world, or themselves. And people can wear each other out. So it made sense, what she said. She knew exactly what she wanted her grave to look like, exactly what it would say about her. She wants a bench, like Polly, but she hates the prosaic cursive and she doesn’t like marble. She wants a concrete bench and she said I should clean it every week and I think she likes lilies though she claims to hate flowers. I never asked her what tree she wanted next to her. I have an image of her enveloped in the twists of roots, which curve in slow and winding lines with her hair in disarray beneath the soil where gravity will not matter and the dirt rests silent on her face as under her eyes when she swims or when it rains on the blush that still rises just beneath the surface of her cheek and neck. I thought of this as I gazed up at the clouds, just covering the light which rose and fell with their rolling and I think of the sea and forget the old man. I remember watching movies with her. We watched them because we liked the scenery in them. I am not ready to return, but I stand. The Old Man and the Sea looks nice on the little bench, so I leave it and walk slowly, my shoes putting jarring life into the leaves. They shuffle through the cemetery—the leaves—but even in summer never go, like the graves and dates and names that begin to sound like poetry. Poems of the graveyard and of history. Which never was because it always is and never ends. And now someone does follow behind, and I am ready to leave.

There is a man who volunteers to manage the cemetery. He walks through the place, along every path, and once a week he disposes of the dead flowers. That’s his job. It can’t be enough for him, or a family. It’s strange that a man works for his family, but is taken away from them by his work, but he must have his family. Every day he returns, or what is he? Perhaps it is better in the graveyard, where a man can’t leave. Then he learns to live, and not to fish by himself for fish that are too big. Today the grave cleaner will have to dispose of a dead deer, and he will follow me to where she died on the fence. Adorning the fence. I see her again, draping it in a leap arrested by the wrought-iron pyramid prongs. These stand in black and staggered order and precision, half rise half fall in unison around the place where the graves are scattered like leaves along every path. And each leaf, like the deer, finds the fence.

The white on her tail is hidden, but when I approach and lean over the sharp wrought-iron prongs, I see the white blot on her neck. It stretches so the hairs separate and are yellow where the under-fur shows through, and her tongue shoves out through her teeth, as if she would just lick the grass on the other side.

A Critique of the Bat

2008-06-24T13:23:00.000-07:00

The limbs of king crabs bathed in salts
Cannot pretend at the command
Of leather-winged somersaults.
Of twisting from a silouette.
Of squirming in a dirty coat.
They are all so peasant poor in furs
And faults and sins beyond all doubt of conscience.
Wicked and romantic; these are dreams.
They order eyes to follow,
And command the innocent view,
And the tongue to moisten on the hollow of the listening lip.
Supreme of every earthern ghost,
Of every emerald hue,
And putting them to sleep.
Weep for the loss the morning shows
When the husband finds what has been taken--
Or rather finds it not--, when he awakens.

Drown your loves and feed them to the crabs.
They will not touch the salt in water, but in blood.

Untitled

2008-06-11T09:28:00.000-07:00

I am seen once in the light of fire
As the choir of thoughts persists on a note breaking glass,
Shaping conclusions towards the obvious.
Again I am seen to burn away
In bursts of lessening light until I am not understood.

The match strikes on love,
The abrasion of sacrifice; I am more when I burn.

Turn, turn, turn the fist on the bellows,
Pounding down man locked in earth in space.
Give me the grace to live and burn.
I love a girl, a pearl,
But we could not dare to be above ourselves:
Flee once and the earth may fold away,
Breathe once out, and the chest collapses in,
Begin to doubt that we love at all--
Or that we live.

But the match strikes on love, we live!
See the glow as the wind blows.
It knows the will of ancient shells shaped as fine jewelry.
The choir of hidden exhalations burst in squares;
They tear away the smooth of heirloom bark.
It's dark--too dark--but breathe the scent
Of cedars bent and broken in the writhing, rent,
And brightest pattern of intention on a weaker will;
Love shatters to reveal not pearls,
But shells to grow them in.

I will be known to cast gray pearls that shone
Once when I alone existed as a child
Into the brighter noble tender chaos;
That fire without fuel or heat,
But sweet aromas on these stones
That crack and split and moan and sigh
And exhale as they purify.

And that match struck on love.
And the gritty feathers of a shapeless dove.
And what comes from above is higher than we are.

Memoir: Of Things That Never Occurred

2008-06-03T08:40:00.000-07:00

By: K. Jan Harvey

"I recall--Central Park in fall--you tore your dress, what a mess--" somewhat eased or squeezed out from undersized but confident vocal chords under a shampoo mohawk in the shower. It's a vivid memory--Central Park is. That dress, a shade brighter than the morbid leaves, looking like vague examples of German Expressionism on their invisible branches. And the leg made visible at the knee, the fabric torn away on the arm of a wrought-iron bench, still suspended there as if the bench were bleeding. What a mess. We went home to Kentucky and I never saw you again.

I went out tonight to find that song. Ella Fitzgerald sings it. That was evening. Two hours and this is night. I have only a "best of" collection of The Drifters and a compliment on my rare taste.

"Yeah man, you don't see many people our age who are into vintage soul."

Vintage soul. The ability to create from the depth of one's own being; to create something that was not there before, that never was. Or perhaps it's only reconstruction. Are our vintage souls "best of" compilations?

My last stop; one last bookstore open late. Another modern bookstore, in which "classic literature" commands a single shelf, all published by one company. Melville, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Poe, all vintage literature, remotely nostalgic and not without charm, giving rise to expressions that everyone recalls and no one has ever used, except in sophmore year college research papers. No "Donke Schoen" in the Ella section of the Jazz cd's. Only a pear-shape slouching through the open door of a Roadmaster wagon in the parking lot. His white hair looks classic in the humid blue sunset, along with his long white socks and three to four inches of white shin under indiscernable shorts. There are hundreds of these men in the city; they are as numerous as youths. I approach softly, trying my best to appear unthreatening, friendly, and even weak. Still a sort of death-face with bifocals leered from the passenger seat under a wig of powder blue cottonballs. I wonder if he knows it's in the car, waiting for him, to take him under.

He speaks first. He does know it's there. "I know it's there. Waiting, with my name on a parchment or something like that, or maybe just a photograph, or even a number. It's been there for a very long time, so don't worry about me. I'll no doubt make it home tonight. I'll go that way, anyway. We all must. At some point ahead, the light must turn red."

"Yes sir, " I say, leaning my hand on the open car door like in the movies as he exhales heavily down into the driver's seat, "but are you certain, sir? Do you want me to follow you or something? I can, you know, I have time."

"Oh, you will, " he says, "you will, " and closes the door lightly, and not all the way so that a red bead appears on the dashboard when he starts the car.

I remember a friend in college who had a Roadmaster. He called it "the womb," which I laughed at, because it looked like a funeral car. It was over-wide and round on top and it swayed uncertainly but never, never would tip. Like a womb after all. It's quite a joke if you have a sense of humor. But few of us do, that's pride--or fear. Either way, it doesn't know what's coming, and panics. That's nostalgia. That's a vintage soul.

When I start the car, "The Boxer" comes on too loud on the radio. I pay my respects: I turn down the radio and let the Roadmaster pass behind me before I back out. Of course I never approached the man. I barely even saw him. But memory is not collected from experience. That's why it's romantic, attrative like selfishness, and dear.

Driving home, I rolled down the windows for "I Think We're Alone Now." I want people to know I dig Tommy James. We are alone if we're not careful. Creating memories, who needs to make them? But the smell like brats through the open windows briefly. Someone jumps in a white tank-top. I make myself think I'm alone, but even my fish is getting better. The fin rot is clearing up, and every traffic light I see ahead is red, but as I approach, before I can slow down, it blinks green again. Blue-green, like that humid sunset in the city lights, and nothing is morbid.

A Passing Bitterness in the Cafe

2008-04-30T13:46:00.000-07:00

By: K. Jan Harvey

And who was she?
Asking me about my clothes,
She layed the muffins out in rows
And fingered each,
A cotton cloth to teach the counters clean;
She was not hungry, yet she made a scene
About the muffins
In their rows, and me in mine,
Where I could see the counter shine,
And she could dare
To wonder what I wear.
And she could look
To see which one I took.

A Walk Home, When She Must Be Sleeping

2008-04-30T13:41:00.000-07:00

By: K. Jan Harvey

The brown leaves conceal the street
Like hair on a flannel shirt.

The town leaves the cats at night to play,
But I hear the leaves they tantilize
And toy with those thoughts.

The brown leaves smell like she was sleeping
After eating apples;
As the fall follows me home.
Still, there is time for you and I sharing apples
When the cats with hairless eyes
Make footsteps out of caskets
And I pause my walking to let them.