Katherine Dunn: Attic

I am in 4 cell. This is the last cell in the tank and it is inhabited by newcomers and overnighters. The people in this cell who are not newcomers or overnighters are still somehow different from the women in the other cells. There are only two of us like that. Blendina and I. Blendina calms everyone. She plays solitaire all day every day. At first newcomers think she’s creepy, then she calms them. I have never heard her speak. I have never seen her sleep. When I fall asleep at night she is playing solitaire. When I wake in the morning she is playing. I have never seen her eat. They tell me that when the rest of us have gone to the kitchen for breakfast the matron brings her a tray. Still, I have never seen it. I have never seen her go to the bathroom. I have never seen her walk. I have never seen Sister Blendina do anything but sit on her bunk in her bra and panties and play solitaire.

I suppose she is old. Her face could be. Her body is lean and brown except that her breasts sag and her belly sticks out a little.

Sister Blendina shuffles her cards and lays them out on the bunk between her legs in 4 cell.

I stay on in 4 cell. It’s a long time since I was a new girl. I’m not sure why.

High Mass in the ladies’ room at the Greyhound Terminal. Wrapped in Eula’s long coat and mourning veil — she beside me giggling faintly. All the worshipers in line before the free booth — hot bladdered bitches mentally clutching their crotches — little old ladies with kidney trouble shifting from one foot to the other — nobody touching anyone else — side glances proposing blackmail — If you’ll pretend that I don’t pee I’ll pretend that you don’t.

There’s always one daring lady with a dime — somehow if you pay for it it’s more respectable — she doesn’t have to flush the toilet at the same time she’s pissing so the line won’t hear and have proof that that’s what she went in there for. The free booth patrons sometimes draw their feet up and prop them on the door so they can’t be seen through the cracks — they enter the confessional and disappear in private conference with the divine — the toilet flushes to hide the sound of their departure and they reappear after a suitable period — glowing — nobody knows for sure what they were doing in there. When the lady who was willing to pay comes out the next in line always grabs the door before it can close — this could go on forever — an endless line — a hand forever reaching for the open door and a free ride — until the attendant lurches in on the freeloaders with the key. She locks the door — the lady can’t get out — the uniform sways — her blackly muscled arm arcs upward — golden key between thumb and forefinger — the head tips back — the maw widens — metallic glint in the air — clink of key on tooth — the watery clunk of the glottis — I can watch the key’s progress down the gullet — almost hear it hitting bottom — she says just wait a few hours dearie — when I dump anybody who want to can fish for the key. And the lady in the stall? her children are crying for her — her husband is getting on the bus — her sister in Keokuk is fixing a special dinner — she croons the ode to the john:

No sorrow goes unsoothed

By the cool chastity of

Thy Whiteness—

From thy Septic depths

Magnate and vagabond are

Indistinguishable.

The thirteenth floor of this building is the Jackson County Jail. It is a submarine in the belly of a whale. The whole floor is a single unit of metal set in stone. Four rooms in the submarine. A, B, C, and D tanks. A and D tanks are men’s tanks. One of them is colored, the other is white. B tank is the colored women’s tank, though there are some white women in there. C tank, our tank, is the white women’s tank. There are no colored women here. I am writing this on the wall in back of my bunk with a pencil stub I found under the toilet. The lead is thin and shiny on the pink steel.

I am now accustomed to not having my glasses. I’ve decided that there is no lucidity of vision, only consistency of distortion.

The first week I spent here I always had a black eye and at least one bloody nose a day. If Marge hadn’t been here then I don’t know what would have happened. She came in the same day I did. She was big and blowzy and good-natured. We fought them together.

There were only four of them and only sometimes were they trying to force us to have their sex. Mostly I think we still smelled of the outside and the scent made them furious.

We’d crouch with our backs in the corner and scratch and kick at them. It was dreadful silent fighting, only heavy breaths coming irregularly and once in a while the sound of a blow. There were times when I couldn’t stop laughing and that made them ferocious. Even when I was very young I giggled when my mother whipped me.

There was once a wonderful dragon who lived on the top of a mountain quite some distance from here. This dragon shit peanut clusters. He pissed lemonade. When he had a cold his nose ran marshmallow cream. His ears had taffy in them instead of wax. Instead of the usual smelly sludge his belly button was full of caramel. He sweat honey, if he heard a sad story he cried pineapple syrup, and if he slept on his tummy at night there might be a big pool of sweet whipped cream between his legs in the morning.

Now this was a very cheerful, quiet kind of stay-at-home dragon who didn’t go around breathing fire or making trouble for anybody but just sat in his cave on the top of the mountain watching the sun rise and set and producing enormous quantities of peanut clusters and whipped cream and all the rest. It happened that the dragon never ate anything at all but once a year — at no particular time but whenever he felt like it — he would take just a thimbleful of pure water and drip it onto his tongue.

Since people had found the dragon so generally amiable and since he rarely said anything at all and there was never anything to argue about, there had over the years come to be quite a village built around the dragon’s cave. The people spent most of their time carting off the sweet things that came from the dragon. This kept the dragon’s yard tidy and what they couldn’t eat themselves they sold to other towns and so became very fat and well-to-do.

After several hundred years had passed with this arrangement very comfortable for all concerned, it happened one day that the dragon looked around for his thimbleful of water and, quite by accident you understand, somebody had put vinegar in it by mistake — now there is nothing wrong with vinegar in its time and place but when it is the time and place for sweet clear water vinegar will not do.

The dragon reached down and took the thimble and daintily tossed the clear liquid back onto his long blue tongue — he gasped and choked and coughed and when he coughed a spurt of flame came shooting out about a hundred yards and burnt up a little boy who had been standing by the dragon’s foot cutting devil’s food cake out from under the dragon’s toenails — the flame also scorched the dragon’s shins and set him dancing about yowling and coughing and whipping his tail until every house on the mountain fell down into itself from the shaking — with every cough the dragon burned a half a mile of whatever was in front of him and hurt his throat terribly. The more it hurt the more he coughed and the more he coughed the more it hurt. The people ran screaming in the streets and the streets caved in from the dragon’s bouncing and if they were in a field or under a tree they were burnt to little smears of charcoal whenever the dragon coughed — all that day he coughed and all that night and for a whole week all of every day and all of every night until from the ocean to the right and the ocean to the left and as far as anybody could know to the north and the south every living thing was burned and broken — bugs and birds and grass and trees and people and cows and all the houses and all the cars and all the land lay naked and black and the dragon stood alone on the top of his broken old mountain and gave one last tired cough that didn’t burn anything except one little yellow hair that liked to grow in the caramel crust just below the dragon’s belly button and the poor dragon was so tired that he lay down right there on his back with his legs in the air and fell sound asleep.