Backwards, he kept saying

Backwards, he kept saying,backwards. I thought of the red-haired Australian woman who'd used that word. I thought about her Italian husband and a murder in the non-descript mountains and her newly published novel cover-- how they'd changed the title. You just have no say in a thing like that, she'd said. Its all backwards out there.

And here I am writing in a new pen. And here I am in my new handwriting, my old rooms. I'd been down in their basement, stacking t-shirts.

I'd been down to the river, where was I? I looked up at the city of Richmond. This was all Bob's idea, of course. He didn't trust the water there.

I was driving to Boston and off the highway a tractor trailer caught on fire like a raw animal. The treetops singed and curled under around it. The highway went silent. The fire hoses spritzed and dribbled at the thing, which passed me by clear as a photograph-- real as it could manage.

There was a change, then, and we all had to crawl along on our stomachs for hours. Philadelphia came on full of Christmas tree lights. It looked like a dream. Only later did we see it was a factory. A man was saying "engine" like "injun". All I heard was injun, injun. Nobody saw her coming.

The cats are panting cadillacs. It drives a U-haul around town, pays 50 cents for red feathers and sticks them in its hair. I'm not good at these things, said Bob. And Bob, we can stay in our rooms, I said, we can read all these books! Oh, spine and brain, old whether or not...

This is how it felt underwater: like a tunnel. like its green.

Now keep moving. Take a left, sure but keep driving. The brickman lays his bricks down and you expect arrangements to be made for your shoes, don't you? What makes it so hard to say things straight is the peculiar shape of your pockets? To Ramona, you say, as if this means anything.

Ramona would not notice you on fire in her kitchen, dear. What does anyone mean by sickly, to Ramona? A man waters his plants and dries his kitchen counters with a dish towel. If the sheets had been there when we'd said they were, we'd have remembered. We are forever picking up these glass jars, saying heavy.

The truth was I'd been fired from my waitressing job on Wednesday morning the week before, information I was still guarding from my mother but joking about regularly with the woman who took care of my grandmother, Josephine, and lived on the third floor of our building. Both my Uncle and mother were coming in on a Tuesday to take Josephine to see the neurologist. I was still a bit high when my Uncle arrived and then my mother, who came in and immediately peered through the door into the living room where I was caught standing, waiting for her to walk toward the kitchen. She could see my feet I guess and stood there a moment, saying tersely "Hello Jess, come out and say hello" as if I had been hiding in the room all afternoon and had not come out to greet my Uncle and if not for her instruction would probably have stood silently in the room until they both left with Josephine.

Love's advice

Love's advice, he called it
pithy. He mixed his paints in
empty cardboard tubs
of popcorn. If it wasn't that
it was at least very close
to that. The tubs themselves
were always neon blue and orange
but he didn't mind much, talking
about them. My neurologist
had thought I was attractive,
but we don't see eachother anymore.
Sort of squirrelly, thin...and handsy,
one might say.

Beth sits at home and thinks of
terrible things. She places things
in lead jars and lifts them,
saying, heavy.