The Frontier Bride's Confession

Of course I loved him at first; when he looked at me, his eyes were full of begging. But later, when he’d roll onto me at night, touching me so companionably, like I was a question already asked and answered — then I began to count the days till winter.

He’d shown me what to do if Indians came for our stores in wintertime; I was to bolt our heavy door in all three places and then, for good measure, slide the iron bar across on the inside. He reached inside my dress and squeezed my breast and said, “You do that, not even I can get in.”

It was almost as though he was telling me to do it – to bide my time until the first real frigid night, to ask him to go out for firewood. And then to bolt the door and slide the bar and huddle by the stove while he banged and banged and pleaded and cursed and banged again, and then, when it was getting on towards morning and he had been quiet a long time, to take his frozen body inside with me and lay it out, and kiss his eyelids shut.

Husband

I loved you the way a woman loves an alien that crashes in her yard. At first the alien is frightening in its unfamiliarity, but soon there comes a period of mystified joy. The woman is amazed that there can exist a body so unlike hers. She can even sleep on top of it, and when she wakes up it is still alien. Later the alien does things for her. She wakes up and it has arranged all the kitchen implements in some sort of symbol on the floor. Is it a symbol of love? Also in the night it sings to her, but only when it thinks she is sleeping. Later still, the woman realizes that the alien was actually a human being, and that the things she did to it were terrible.

Elegy

The day after Raphy’s mother died I took him to the woods behind my house. He followed like a child. We were fourteen; that morning, I had swabbed my mother’s perfume up both sides of my neck, in each armpit, and on the insides of my thighs. Years of longing were coiled in my belly. Months of unspent tenderness were shored up in my heart.

I led him down through the sycamores to the banks of the creek. I sat on a rock.

“I have done nothing but love you all year,” I said in my head.

To him I said, “Come sit by me.”

I had never touched his face before, but now he let me stroke the places on his jaw where the hair was beginning to grow in. His eyes were shut. I was afraid to say the things I had planned to say. I bent my face so that our noses touched. I opened my mouth and put it against his. He didn’t resist. He tasted like water. I unbuttoned my shirt and I put his hand inside it. His fingers found my nipple under my little bra. I thought we should move to flatter ground. I held his hand and I led him to the yellow grass where the creek bent.

We saw the dog when we lay down. It was curled on the margin of the water. Its ears were pointed, its tail fanned; its fur was the color of toast. A fly buzzed near it; it didn’t move.

I stood with Raphy. I tried to lead him to another spot, but he dropped my hand. He didn’t look me in the eye before he ran back up the bank, through the woods, and away. I stood shirtless in the September air. Night was falling and the sky was grey. What could I do? I knelt by the dead dog and stroked its fur. I sang it a little song.

Seawall

My husband and I met working on the first seawall. It wasn’t so much love as you need someone to keep you warm up here, and carry you home when you drink too much. Charlie was hairy and I liked that. He didn’t say much, except sometimes when he couldn’t sleep he’d tell me how he was going to leave the island, move to Japan and have a dairy farm. I don’t know how he put those two things together, Japan and cow-milking. I never asked.

The first seawall held a long time but we started to hear about the ice caps melting. Then it was true, the water was higher every year. Finally it was lapping up over the top of the wall and soaking Janice Brown Bear and Bob Little and the other people stupid enough to live on the beach. They paid $22.50 to work on the second seawall so of course me and Charlie signed up. We were living on government money, and what I could make selling wood carvings on the Internet. We’d been married ten years then. We had sex Saturday nights. Other nights we’d get in bed together and our breaths would start to alternate, like the footsteps of a single person.

The first week on the second seawall was as cold as any I’d ever felt. When it’s really cold out on the water you lose all sense of yourself. Whole days I spread cement and pretended I was somebody else — an angel actually, floating on a warm cloud. I know it’s stupid and later I felt bad about it. But for the first seven days it was sweet.

Charlie stepped off the seawall on the eighth day. I didn’t see him do it; Johnny Brown Bear yelled and then I saw Charlie’s black head bobbing in the water. I jumped in after without even thinking, and then it was white-cold and I couldn’t see. I came to on the construction platform next to the wall with Johnny pushing on my chest. Charlie was already gone.

Of course I missed him. It was like somebody came into my house and moved all the furniture around, and switched it up so much that I couldn’t remember how to put it back. It’s not so bad now, but some cold afternoons in the stormy season I still feel a ripple of regret: when Charlie talked about Japan I just let myself slide into sleep, instead of lifting myself up and taking his face in my hands and telling him not to go.

The favor

I first saw her at the Denny’s in Moss Landing. Your father kept smiling at me over his eggs; I looked past him at the couple in the next booth. She had her hair up in a ponytail and I could see the tiny hairs escaping down the back of her neck. He was eating some kind of steak or chop. He reached over and pressed his hand between her shoulderblades, like there was a button there.

That night she came scratching at the window of our motel room. Lucky I didn’t sleep soundly, even then. Her face through the peephole was brighter than the moon.

Their room was across the parking lot. He was laid out on the bed.

“I can’t lift him by myself,” she said.

I took his feet. They twitched a little as I carried them. I didn’t ask her what was wrong with him. We took him to her car.

“Can you come?” she asked. “I need you for when we get there.”

We rode east through the artichoke fields. She was a good driver; we didn’t speak. When we got to Castroville she turned off the freeway and made a series of lefts. She pulled up in front of a pink bungalow and we both got out. Again I took the feet. Both of us were gentle in the way we handled him. We took him up a path lined with marigolds and we laid him lengthwise on the front steps. She reached up and rang the doorbell. We heard a rustle inside and then I followed her back to the car. As we drove away I looked back and saw a woman kneeling by his head.

“Where do you want me to take you?” she asked me.

I had some friends living nearby then, and I formed my mouth around the name of their town. Then I shut my mouth and opened it again.

“Motel is fine,” I said.

For years I regretted saying that. Then you were born, and now I regret it differently. Now I only wish I could remember what made me change my mind, so I could have a real story for you, instead of whatever thing it is that I just told.

Heaven

We were in the middle of a neverending nosebleed. David’s little sharp head pointed at the kitchen ceiling; I pressed his nostrils with tissues, swiped away the bright blood as it slid out between my fingers. The trash can was a pile of red sodden wads. David was eight and I was thirteen. Our mother was working. Our father was dead.

I blamed the hot wind for David’s bleeding. Since early morning it had been howling, ungodly; when we woke up, our bedroom windows were hot to the touch. We had made a package of pizza bagels and watched the leaves strip off the mulberry tree in the yard. When the bleeding started, the tree was full. Now it was nearly bare.

I smelled the fire coming in the kitchen window. At first I thought someone was barbecuing. Then I saw the wall of fire eat the neighbor’s house.

We both froze, like animals. We saw the flames vault over the cinderblock wall at the edge of the yard. We saw the mulberry tree blaze. We heard the fire chuckling in the hedge outside and we shut our eyes.

It never came, though. The hedge acted as a firebreak, and in ten minutes the flames were dead outside our door. We had been clutching each other. My shirt was stained, but David’s nosebleed had stopped.

“What happened?” he asked me, and I knew it might be the last time it was my job to explain the world to him, and so I told him we were dead, and gone to heaven, and we spent the rest of the afternoon marveling at how beautiful all the mundane objects in our house were, the toaster and the trash can and the crumbs of the pizza bagels, now that we had all eternity to spend with them.

Goat Thief Unrepentant

The sheriff made me apologize, but I wasn’t really sorry. I bowed my head before the farmer’s wife, and I kept my fingers crossed behind my back. As soon as I get the chance, I’ll do it again.

You’ve seen them, slit-eyed in the pasture. You’ve let your children pat and pet their bullet heads, feed them green pellets, chase them when they run. You milk them and spread the cheese on thick bread, thinking about your own good taste. You have no idea what a goat is really for.

But I knew from the time I was six years old, taking the wafer in my mouth at the little old church next to the dry goods store. I tasted the body and the blood, and I knew I served another master.

Why do you think I never married? My club foot? Please — some farmer’s blockhead son would have been glad enough to sire crooked children on me.

No, the truth is I’m waiting for my chance. Every night I walk by the pasture with its new barbed wire fence, my chalk in my pocket, my pentagram close to my heart. Under the bright moon I watch them twitch and chew and jostle, my wedding feast beating in their veins.

The Machine

Deborah F. was the first one to hear it, and since she was crazy we ignored her. The previous week she had accused us of stealing from her dog.

“Machine?” we said, looking at each other sidelong. “We didn’t hear anything.”

Then it woke Terry up in the middle of the night.

“Like a bear eating aluminum foil,” he told us. “Or like a snake.”

“What kind of snake?” we asked.

“I can’t describe it.”

Terry seemed shaken up. We let him come into our apartment for a cup of tea. Then all three of us heard it. It was coming from the basement. To Jessica it sounded like iron hands kneading bone into powder. To me it sounded like tooth grinding on tooth in a tube of steel. We all agreed it was mechanical, unalive. We stayed up all that night, and in the morning we put an “Out of Order” sign on the basement door so that no one would get hurt.

That week we kept talking about calling the landlord.

“It’s his responsibility,” Terry said. “It’s disturbing our sleep.”

“I can’t get my writing done,” said Deborah F. “I’m having panic attacks.”

Jessica and I had both started crying for no reason.

But somehow none of us ever called. We started to look unhealthy, pale in the cheeks and dark around the eyes. We moved like squirrels, twitching and starting, crossing rooms at a dead run. We hunched close to our plates at dinnertime, guarding our food. And yet we kept running into one another at the bottom of the stairs, gazing at the “Out of Order”sign.

Sunday night I woke at 3 a.m. The sound was like biting and chomping, and it was like a call. I was careful not to wake up Jessica. I crept downstairs. Terry and Deborah F. already there. Deborah was chewing the sleeve of her nightgown. Terry was peeling off bits of the “Out of Order” sign and pulverizing them in his hands.

“What are you doing here?” I asked them.

They turned their hooded eyes on me and I saw it was a stupid question. I heard Jessica coming down the stairs.

When we all four stood together, our nervous bodies went quiet. Deborah let the nightgown drop from her mouth. Terry scattered his wisps of paper on the floor. Jessica looked at me as she had on our wedding night, expectant and resigned. I opened the basement door.

The sound filled the room like blood fills a vein. It crashed inside our heads. I was aware of an orange light, the glint of polished steel, but my eyes no longer cared what they saw. We all knew what we had to do. We each stepped forward, one by one, and crawled into the mouth of the machine.

Why I Hate the Name Marvin

He was the father of a childhood friend of mine, or more accurately a girl my age who lived on my street and played with me by default, as I did with her. He wasn’t around all the time; he and the girl’s mother were involved in a circuitous and seemingly endless journey toward divorce. When he was in the house sometimes he was kind to us. Once I remember he brought us two lollipops — grape and cherry. When we argued over the cherry one he went out to the convenience store and bought a third, so we could each have the flavor we wanted.

Other times he was strange. He used to get our names confused, as though he had forgotten which one was his daughter. And once he knelt down and ate kibble out of the dog’s dish while we watched.

Then came my eleventh birthday. In the months leading up to that birthday, I had conceived a love for a black-haired boy in my class, and I lived in daily hope and fear that my love would be returned. Frequently when I was playing quietly at my friend’s house I could feel my heart bashing against my chest. On my birthday the boy gave me a card he had made of folded lined paper. He had drawn a picture of a bird on the front and on the inside he had written, “You are pretty.”

I don’t know why we were looking at this card in the bathroom, but we had it open on the counter, my friend and I, and we were marveling softly at it when her father came in.

“Dad,” my friend said, “Angie’s in love.”

He looked at us for a moment like he was trying to add a column of numbers, and then he said, “Let me show you what I think about love.”

He unzipped his pants and pissed into the toilet. His penis was the color of liverwurst and his urine was orange, as though he had not had anything to drink all day.

After that I did not go to their house any longer, but I remembered him, and every time I hear his name I think of him pissing in the toilet while I held my little card, and how that became, inevitably, what I thought about love too.

The Custom

We keep our dead in caves, and visit them on Tuesdays, carrying rocks. The rocks are not offerings. They are to remind us how heavy it is to be dead, so that we will speak respectfully and not ask for too much. Things it is acceptable to ask for include rain, a good harvest, a child. It is not acceptable to ask for long life — the dead hate those who seem too reluctant to join them.

The caves are on the beach, and sometimes a wave washes the dead far out into the sea. This too is part of our custom. When it happens we mourn the dead a second time. We kneel where their bodies lay, and we tell stories and sing songs. We weep, but also we envy them, traveling across the ocean to begin their new deaths.