New Saro

short story: Let me introduce you to Saro Kincaid. The inspiration for her tale came from the desire to expand upon a poem by Mina Loy, "Songs to Johannes." The story begins with the heroine and narrator trying to get enough courage to repaint a room t

It’s early. This was your favorite hour: when the sky and sea were indistinguishable. Gray bleeding into gray, no line between them, they extend one into the other. By now you must be having coffee, wherever you are.

Over a year has passed and winter has come to the sea again. One would hope that I’d have the guts to set foot in that room by now, the one at the top of the stairs, where each of the windows faces the sea. But I don’t – not yet.
Only the commercial fishermen who have been out all night are obstructing the peer, now weighing and crating their catch to pimp at the market in an hour, paying their way by selling swordfish and Atlantic salmon to the kind of trendy restaurants tourists frequent. But the fair-weather admirers have abandoned our little town, for with the cold the tourists head south to Arizona or Santa Monica or someplace hotter than the misted and rainy Northwest. Departed, they leave behind their scars upon the landscape (I feel it like it was my own body), sucking and slurping the beauty out of it from familiarity: footprints, a stranger’s voice. Or your voice, I can’t tell the difference.

 My thoughts swirl like surf, slither with the wonderings, the perhapses the maybes: What if you can feel me somehow -- when I paint over your sky? The one you so carefully designed to asphyxiate the ceiling with the colors of midnight heaven, indigoes and deep plums scattered with stars that shone just like your dark eyes.
You said my eyes were like the sea in the winter: gray. Not even steel gray, nothing sharp enough to garner attention. No edges: too soft. Too dull a color to cut through my own apprehensions, which rose and fell at the sight of you. My eyes don’t shine I suppose.

Even you must’ve thought that when you looked into them. I am strangely stunted now that you are gone. I should be hibernating in the earth but the truth is, I dream about birds too much. I need the smell of the sea. In me I feel it rocking, sloshing from hip to hip. I look for a language to compose the wonders I feel and those I let slip away like the tide. I have tried Portuguese, Spanish, German even, nothing feels right on my tongue. I struggle with the current still.

An educated woman knows that there are some things a man can never know the feeling of: the hollowness of a body. How heavy such emptiness is. When that fuse is gone, that spark dissolved into some other marrow, there are little uses for a body such as theirs. I don’t recognize mine in the mirror. Loss can cause amnesia in the oddest of ways.

    Sometimes, I remember things without trying. I can’t help it when I am by myself driving the old truck into town (a messy twenty-two miles in the fog, but the morning is clear enough). How could I forget stirring in the early light to find your side of the bed empty? Knowing instantly that I would find you perched across the room on the windowsill, sketching me as I slept. At one point or another, charcoal smudges would always appear, leaving smoky trails above your left eyebrow, staining the surface of your skin. I always swore I hated it when you did that. But I didn’t. I was fascinated by your secret capturing of me, since I knew I was more beautiful in the darkness than any light, least of all the soft early light. Isn’t that why we never made love in daylight? You must think I never noticed.

In the end I was right; you were the bright one, the Prince, the Bohemian-child with golden hair, an Alan Ginsberg mouth. An Artist. You moved like Marlon Brando in Streetcar, Stella!. You were like the stars you painted in that room. But then, there I was standing beside you -- a thicket of brambles, earthen, coarse, somehow uncivilized, going off in all directions.

I stop into Pier 5, the crab diner. I howl a hello to Julianna in the kitchen when she appears from under the front counter. She bears a pedestal of day old “pattie-cakes:” an oatmeal cookie as big and round as a giant’s hand. Her curly black hair has already been pulled back into its habitual French twist, odd spirals escaping down her neck and disrupting the vision of one eye. Her eyes are deep and brown like wet earth, and she’s tall and solid. She moves easily with the ocean on red boats her great-granddaddies built; she doesn’t have sea legs, she has slender saplings, solid as oaks. You’d think that she’d stood on the deck of some yesteryear trans-Atlantic voyage, never budging or relinquishing to the wind. Juliana knows how not to fight it, but to let it move through her, posing no barrier to its path.

“You’re up so early to make the drive in from the beach…” she begins in accented English. She never asks the questions, just poses a statement like a friendly game of hangman, always confident you’ll fill in the blanks.
I shrug first, making my response inconsequential.
She listens but cuts to the point. “Decided to confront the room.” 
I nod. “I think its time.” My hand shifts unconsciously to span gently across my tummy. Julianna looks me square in the eye, her earth eyes fixing themselves on my winter ones.
“Call me if you need help, alright Saro?”  I promise her I will.

I walk down the pier before heading to the car. The water crashes in lazy breaks against the columns that hold up the dock. Barnacles and snail shells have fused themselves to their circumference, feeding off the holes no longer blackened with creosote. I remember that summer we argued about which one could you smell first, creosote or the sea, when the heat would ripple the air above the pavement. My nose always found the air first, but yours disagreed. I can see way out across the water, even out to where the road hugs the sound. I can almost make out our home, rather my home: that teeny house, rough shingled with wood sitting at the tip, weather gray. By the time I had fallen in love with house, it was too late to understand that it stood unprotected from storms that came in from high currents, the kind of storms that rage through the mind and swirl within doorways, silent and heavy. I can see the rain coming, a deep smudge, like my face on newsprint.


I remember the day well. There was something I had to tell you, something only for you, since out of fear I had mistakenly chosen abortion last time. Fearing your reaction and your irresponsibility… It had killed me, but we had tried this time. Your eyes lit up when I had finished speaking. And you were delicate with me, as if I could be broken by touch. I felt like the cocoon empty after the butterfly had warmed my heart, needing me desperately for transformation.
No wonder they call those first sensations, flutters.

To think, I might have given birth to a butterfly, a monarch or blue devil with spotted wings and your golden hair. For days I woke up not to your sketches but to green sickness and then to you banging on pans, I had to eat something, you said. You composed lullabies on coppery tubs, iron skillets and crepe pans. You talked to my insides until there were no more words, just tongues. I would fall asleep to your mumbled poetry.

Late this November morning Julianna successfully coerced two of her staff out to the lip of land where my house is; all four of us now sit in the kitchen, well past the noon hour. The windows are open for air even though it bites and chases my wind chimes across their hollow-sounding scales. (I think I will take them down tonight, wrap them up for the season, the way I do my flower pots, so the winter rains will not rust or cake them with weather.)

Julianna is careful not to ask why I haven’t taken your paintings, your sketches, your black and white photographs off the walls or your coffee cup off the windowsill above the sink. The other two visitors have no knowledge of my house, for all they know everything in the house is mine, and not even a speck of lint belongs to you. I am grateful for Jules’ silence and their ignorance.

I am laughing at their jokes but I feel immobile and cold inside, and deeper still is this wailing I cannot seem to rid myself of. I can hear it ring in my ears above the conversation, behind my voice when I speak. It’s deep in there; down into the kind of places where you begin to become hollow. I am growing a tumor of gray–matter loneliness; the same malignant substance of color that you could not stand to see in my eyes a moment longer, that night over a year ago.
Julianna snorts her orange juice in laughter. I feel my lips part in a smile, I hand her a clean dishtowel, the ringing, ringing, ringing in my ears.

Miles Browning does his best to fry eggs without charring them. He kids me, calling the eggs Cajun.  After all, he says, I am head chef at the 5.We laugh, but make no comment. We all know that there aren’t too many eggs in that fish house, so we will forgive him the eggs, their yolks broken, bleeding into the iron skillet. I apologize for the old 1970’s stove; he burned himself twice trying to light the belligerent burner with matches and now it’s murdering our lunch.

Julianna whispers in Spanish behind her hand: yo no sé: yo sólo sufro de saber quién eres, and that Miles fancies the color of my eyes. She passes her voice like a note under-hand across desks in homeroom in her predictable penmanship.  A blank feeling spreads inside and a flush appears within my cheeks, shocked and embarrassed, I’m blushing. I look at him again, but can’t help notice Celia, the other accomplice recruited for the day. Her blonde hair is white-pale and falls over her shoulders like seaweed. Her eyes are a sky’s clear uninterrupted blue. She flirts with her breasts while trying not to look at Miles directly. I know her from when I used to work at Pier 5 with Jules, then, you came along. She used to look at you the same way -- breasts shoved up and out in the light, pale-eyed and luscious. Celia’s the kind of girl who appears sugary sweet, but leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. I remember her whispering devoid of sympathy how poor Saro had lost her Hart after you left. How strange to recognize someone else’s jealousy. She wanted you and I never really understood that. I wonder why she is in our house.

I notice that Miles has caught me staring at him and he smiles; he casts his gaze like fishing twine. There is something about him that reminds me of college, the frat boy turned academic: charming and dangerous, possibly tasty. His hair falls in dark Jesus curls, sometimes hiding his black eyes. He has long eyelashes for a man.
I c**k my head to one side. Maybe he is even handsome. He knows his capabilities and wears them in his smile. I know that look. Like Julianna hangs questions, Miles hangs sex. He wears it across his broad shoulders. Phallic turns of phrase. It drips from the corners of his mouth, leaks from his eyelids, pulses at his temples. You can almost smell it.

I can only wonder which pair of eyes you would comment on were you here, or whose breasts. I cannot compare to Celia’s. She curves evenly and goddess-like, with porcelain teapot skin. I am plainer, less presumptuous and could not even fill out the cup of your giant hand, but maybe I just felt small under the weight of your glances, your expectations. Celia would require at least one of your hands, probably the span of your mouth as well.

Wherever you are, you are not thinking about me. You are settling your score with other women. A task I had kept you from. Is that what you call salvation? Do they wake up to you beside them, drawing them too? Do you leave starry ceilings and paintings, cups to haunt their kitchens? Damn your mouth, I am allowed my salvation too.

***

I remember the day you bought the paint, indigoes and deep plums. I lied on my back on my grandmother’s oriental rug; even the silk chafed my delicate skin. You sketched lying above, suspended by temporary scaffolding. You held the brush like some fair-haired Michelangelo. It was early summer then. The windows were all open wide; a warm wind pulsed through to fill the air, making it electric with noises and voices of the ocean. You sang some old thing about planting apple trees in the sea, and I laughed. My hands clutching my three month abdomen, rising in the middle, hard like a piece of un-ripened fruit, still green and tart around the edges; I was so sure it would grow, grow beyond the level of my cool plains, make me rounder, and smooth out my angles. 

How was I to know that the God you so loved, whose death you wore in gold plated crucifixion on a delicate chain, had played some sort of prenatal plagiarism on us? For the way you had smiled, you’d have thought I was carrying the Messiah, although you knew right well you planted it there inside. With your gentle kiss and butterfly touches, spring erupted inside, roses opening their petals to the warmth of your sun.

The sun disappeared with no change in the sky, not even a tangerine glimmer, no violet; only stagnant and claustrophobic gray and then it was instantly dark.
Conversation dies. Julianna takes Celia back to town; she’s reluctant to go when she understands that I have invited Miles to stay. I resign my thoughts to prayer. I am allowed my salvation too, I chant. If in just one bed-ridden monopoly of a moment, I can break the boundaries of flesh, I’ll take it. It is no more sinful than eating a savior in one bite, one lick of my single-night promiscuous lips and I have committed profanity at your precious communion table.
I let him undress me, bare my brittle bones to briny air: This won’t take long.

The cans of paint are still safe in my linen closet under pillows. Safe. Safe. I am numb even to the sticky touch of love, now. You burned it out of me. 
Miles Browning is like a canyon, miles and miles of red walls taller than I, letting wind howl from the valley floor, from the tip of his toes, which curl when he urges in, probing for my wounded soul. The wind moans through his lips and whistles through his teeth. I am so small and he swallows me up.

The inclusive ramble of my inner organs begin to vibrate, the frequency of their inner ringing, ringing, ringing, makes me go deaf in the moment. I get lost in the canyon again I can’t even see the sky, but for a sliver. I can’t hear the ocean or smell anything but him: miles and miles of him, never ending. What have I done?
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to feel out for any deliberate sort of tightening in my body, a response that usually leads to release and a subsequent halting of movement. Instead, there is only nausea, seasickness from being gathered up and rocked in our bed like a rolling tide. We clash together incognito, I feel myself drift far inside and further away. I begin to think I’d rather be watching my own self-distortion than have the sensation of wincing under his sexual weight, feeling the leftovers slap against my skin. I remember it being softer than this. All this shoving: no room for that, no room.

I can only think of you and your sunshine hair.  You moved like a sunset. Your eyelashes were so pale they were almost translucent curtains to your bright eyes. You could look straight at me and time would be set back. Everything about you was bright (too bright I am learning). I think you were like that last sliver of sun before it sinks into an earthen bed for the night, the last flash that bleaches the bones. I swear I felt it burn my skin, singed my nerve endings, burnt through my warm mechanical wiring, nibbled at the knots that wrapped around my spine. Fizzled, Burnt-out: this all you left me with. I fear I’ll never be warm again.

I feel colder as Miles tries to melt me. I grow harder and harder, heavier and more solid when I am supposed to be yielding so he can fill me up, isn’t that was his sex is for? But I am so empty. In truth, I could swallow him and still have room for the ocean.

Saro, he says. All voices break in the margins of passion, even for a man like Miles. My name from his mouth sounds like the sad, depressing word it really is: Saro, sorrow – Why would a mother name her child after sadness?  Even though he moans the word like he’s being purged of some illness, some sickness that feasts on him… like I am healing him with some unknown inner sweetness. What kind of pig-cupid arranged this fracas of limbs? I am emptier than when I began to let him kiss me, emptier than the last kiss you… He finishes. I slide out of from underneath him and walk naked out my door.

***

    I remember the day the bleeding began, early, early in the morning. You drove me to the hospital. Everything was blurry, as I had seen it through tears streaming from my eyes.

They took it out of me… the scraps of hair and bone that was our little girl, and I had lost her… she drowned in my blood. Once upon a time… a starry ceiling vaulted an unimaginable family…. Then your eyes closed and shut me out and the sky clouded over.

I run from my door straight into the sea. I splashed high-kneed until it trips me. I fall forward and let myself sink. The sea is cold and takes my breath away, hastily gobbling up my oxygen and submerging my lungs in cold liquid. The moon is cold. I feel it bleed into my ears; for once the ringing; ringing, ringing wail from my insides is muted. All I can hear is the deafness of the ocean. I’m a shell, hollow and empty, filled only with the echo of some greater vastness, which is easily drained upon upending me. I am one of those crabs not yet boiled. Damaged and cracked at the joints, my meat seeps out, a liquid protein, not enough substance to even chew.

Is it true that I set you apart to the point I can’t even feel anymore? I have seldom gone looking for love, you found me after all, but I have known enough days and eyes and mouths other than yours and at least I could taste them. Of course not all of them could be Gods could they? And I had to be caught in some weak eddy of your insightful driveling humanity… molding me to a point that I would love you most, because I could have sworn you knew I might be the better for it.
But I forget myself.

I unfasten every touch Miles has shoved into me. I bless them so they may be let out, draining and dissolving into the saltiness of the water. I only remember him inside, only the impact of lighted bodies, knocking sparks off each other, because I was hard like flint.
Even during sex I am chaotic.

You ran away to your keep distance from me. I couldn’t have asked you for a better shove off, it was a strong push. You wouldn’t let me understand you. You couldn’t stand to be depersonalized; don’t you know we were never meant to be identical? Did I ever say it would be a perfect intemperate Nirvana, me inside you and you inside me?  Poor Saro lost her Hart…? screw that, I lost a lot more than you: I lost myself.

My skin prickles against the chill, my dark hair spreads out around me, still like Ophelia in the bruised water. I float for a long time.

I am sore. My legs quake as they carry me back up the crest of sand and dead grass to my red front door. When I returned to my house wet and chilled and empty, having released everything liquid back into the sea, Miles was already gone, thankfully. I went immediately to my shower, to put heat back in my blood, to let the steam suffocate me with its density. I still believe I can wash away this intrusion, even though I invited Miles into my room, into me. I feel vacated, violated. I should have known better. Like a cocoon, I am the vessel for transformation, but am stuck in one shape, empty, hollow. Not by being pushed into, banged and rammed until tender and coarse from friction (and this is supposed to be beautiful?) and once the butterfly is born and has flown away, no other creature can grow in it’s shell, they have to create a new one for themselves. Otherwise they are aborted like birds from an egg that expanded too quickly, they are not quick enough to fill the space. Those are the ones that end up burned, tricked into thinking they’re Cajun.

My feet smack the flagstones of the bathroom floor, leaving liquid reflections of my soles. I stand naked before the mirror. I am white again. My eyes are wide and gray again and I have hung myself on the words I was never observant to, because I was frightened by their casual vulgarity. A little pink love can do a lot of damage.

My babies aren’t gone; they never had a chance to exist. They were extracted, each curled up like green un-ripened pears, larger at one end where the heart was. They were just something taking shape, smaller than the palm of my hands. (The doctor said the reason why my body pushed the baby out was because her heart had not developed. Strange that even before she could be born, I broke her heart.)

I see my reflection touch her stomach, flat and hollow, carved out like a Shiva moon, the fingernail of God. I was looking forward to the stretch marks, a map of my scars I would have earned by heaving to push something out into the world. Something that was added to me like my womb was an experiment for blunt objects. I am learning that each season has its death.

I look at my embryonic mouth, which I let you hang your words on, your poetry that made my mouth open like a baby bird’s in hope to devour your soft language, hoping it would fill me up.  Remake me. I found comfort in that while you found comfort in men hung from crosses, hung from your neck, as if death could protect you from living.

I watched you in your practice of hanging words, answers, and prayers, hanging anything out there to be an offering -- Who the hell did you think you were anyway? Did you even know? As an artist you were capable of creating fallacies and calling them truth. Looking back I can see that you painted me as if you could make me real by giving me a new body. What a mistake to rely on you to create me. You do not know a thing about this body. The only bit you have experienced was six inches worth, maybe six and a half on a good day.

I store up nights against you, heavy with nightmares, but for weeks I have dreamt of stairs. They go up forever and they are white. They undulate like a landscape, like my own body from breast to breast, from hip to toe. And the first step is the last and they are only white. (Like my skin is white, like scars from being burned by the eclipse of your rays. I would pursue with intent, impossible eyes, your journey from east to west across the sky and I dumbly thought I could follow, if only I watched hard enough).  I never thought that I was cosmic in my own movements; that even unconsciously I exist worldwide. My language decides the future for the entire world. One lip formed at a time. At first I thought you were the only way to heaven and that I had died but I keep waking up each morning with just myself to recognize and create. And feathers are strewn everywhere across my room. I wake up feeling sweet.

Today, an everlasting passing moment, imperceptible to you, wherever you are, I called Julianna, and asked her to come upstairs with me. She arrives in white jeans, smudged with old indiscernible stains, long settled into the fabric. Her eyes are bright and catch the light.

“You want to do this, mi Corazon…” No question, a suspended statement. I nod. “All right,” she says, “where’s the paint?” I point at their suffocating locale, buried in the closet underneath the stairs. She starts pulling each one out by their curved metal handles, the plastic bags with trays and rollers and trim brushes, and framing tape, tarps. She starts piling them into my arms; I don’t tell her that my knees are shaking against the fabric of my jeans.  She opens the door. I had forgotten that I had never locked it; you had never locked it, but had left it closed off to any light. Then I was standing there in this single ray of light filled with golden particles of dust, floating like teeny feathers, and the stairs were white -- how could I have forgotten that?

I hear Julianna nudge me with her voice. Va, she commands. I bite my tongue; there are no words to get me out of this. I close my eyes, begin to walk and nearly trip twice before arriving at the top. I let everything fall out of my arms with a clang. My hands come to cover my eyes. I can’t do this.

“Saro, Corazon,” Julianna says, “open your eyes.”
“I can’t Julianna. I know it’s just a room, but…” I feel silly hiding behind my hands, like playing hide-and-go-seek in the open.
“Saro. Open your eyes. He’s gone.”
I drop my hands. I open my eyes, blurred vision, my mouth gapes slightly. Julianna stands in front of me. I exhale forever.
“El dejó hace mucho tiempo, Saro.” Yes. He’s gone. It's all gone.
“I know.” I said. She turned, blonde ponytail swinging around, following her motion; she begins to extract color from bags and trays, and unwraps brushes.

I wipe my eyes, rub at them with a knuckle. I had forgotten how many windows, how much light. The stairs behind me are steep along the wall, the only true wall in the whole room (which is why you painted the ceiling). The rest is windows, tall windows, which look out to the sea, a bright green sea in the middle of winter. I look up, and am surprised at myself. Your sky is not beautiful; the colors, plum and midnight are mottled, stretched with a year of heat and neglect. There are stains from some internal weather. Your eyes are not even there to see me… Or perhaps I just can’t see you, now. And I’m okay with all of it.

The room is warm and dust cakes the trim, I feel myself cough. I go to open the windows, and feel the sudden blast from the waves rushing into the tiny room at the top of the stairs. The room is filled with smells of salt and kelp, winter sand and shell, and something scrubbed clean and cool. I inhale and exhale the fresh clean winter air, and the winter sun, warm through the glass. I can see the surf below me, the tide high. Each pass tugging a little farther, climbing a little higher up the bank, a steady rhythm.

“Hey, Saro…” I hear Julianna say.
“Yeah?” I answer her, not turning to face her, my head still stuck out the window with no screen, the wind bites at my cheeks.
“You’re ok.” she says.
“I’m ok,” I say.

You once told me a story about the phoenix that had married a maid with hair like the fire that he had been born in…  but of the two of us, you were the one with the fire, the passion, and the spark that allowed you to create. I truly believe that you were the one that created life in me… and yet, if anything, you remind me of death not of birth. You wore it around your neck, and hung me with every response I could not, in good conscience, give to you and so when I would speak, long gaps of silence followed, only to confuse both us with my lack of language. But I am not like Julianna, who plays hangman so casually, confident in knowing the answer to be revealed before the noose caught.  I know I was of no consolation. I know she was half of you too. I had grown so used to you being gone and blaming you for it, Jonah. I painted the room in one whole afternoon when the sun came out. It has been a month since Miles disappeared from my bedroom after I escaped into the bleached ocean and got my color back.  I have to say in all honesty, there is no sky like your sky, with midnight’s plums and stars that shine like your eyes used to… but you were only a reflection.

It never occurred to me that you left because of something other than my failure to conceive and give life to your attempt to recreate yourself. In the same way that I felt strange trying to be shoved into, being a canister for someone else’s creativity, I wonder if I drained you… the same way I let Miles drain out of me.  We are not phoenixes, being reborn does not consist of water and forgiveness alone, but it’s a start.

The not knowing is what evolves you, makes you stronger, not your trite crucifixion worship. Transformation comes to those who are awake and staring and ready for it. It is there for the ones who go walking blindly with a faith so raw it is impossible to put into words. Faith knows that believing is seeing, feeling is moving and knowledge is forgiveness. As for the ones who give up and walk away, they are simply too lazy and too eagerly prepared to retire themselves to hollow prayer and numb action.  Funny, all this time I believed that you had scorched me beyond the brink of all things colorful and passionate to the point I was void of all feeling, but that was my cocoon. Having wrapped myself up so tightly, I lost feeling in all of my limbs, even the heart is an extension of the soul, and upon stretching even a little bit, pins and needles flooded my awareness with their delicate and unrelenting, uncomfortable obnoxious pain.

It was because I was looking into the mirror and could not recognize what I saw there, thinking I was on fire for some sort of crime, bleached white and paining, smoking from being left under some sort of anti-cosmic macro scope. I was too small to even see.

It was unthinkable that, that white over there was only smoke from your house and not mine at all; that across my brow I wore your ashes. I write everyday about movement. I have become a poet too, but I will never have the rhythms you commanded, and I forgive myself for not being able to follow you, not wanting to. Instead I have learned to welcome the ocean to balance out the heat with its daily tides. I rely on it to rejuvenate the trauma of my sun burnt skin, and I fall away in layers, sheath by sheath.

Reviews

[Brandon York]

I really enjoyed the experience of this one, Lindsay ;) It has a subtle, elegant power.