Amelia Gray: Gutshot: Stories

My partner arrived home with groceries and I put them away. I prepared dinner and climbed the stepladder to serve the girl after we had eaten our share. Playing her part in the order, she ate quickly and then crawled to store her dish. Each of us had our individual function and hers was to embody the house, which had begun to smell like a hot scalp.

She had grown silent around me. I mentioned this to my partner while he was feeding me dessert. He spooned fat curds of cottage cheese into my mouth and said that it was only natural that the girl had become comfortable with her surroundings. He reminded me that I had not challenged the boundaries of my own life in many years, nor had he challenged his own. Even though we feel quite free, he remarked, every life has its surrounding wall. He wiped my chin with a napkin and kissed the napkin.

The next morning, he was in the duct with her. He must have been watching me sleep from the vent above the bed because when I woke up, he requested I replace the screws and tighten them.

He phoned the girl’s employer while I was sweeping up in the kitchen. Over my noise, I could hear her say that she had decided to quit. There was a silence. At first I stopped my movement and strained to hear, but there was nothing. I tried to forget the silence and my hatred of it, opening a cabinet to put away the clean dishes.

In the back of the cabinet, over the plates, there was a portal through which I viewed the windless void of a new ecosystem. I could almost hear it breathing.

William was a puker. His expulsions — the color, consistency, and volume of a baby’s — occurred after every sentence he spoke. This unfortunate fact of life began innocently enough during his infant coos and babbles, but by the time he was barfing onto his coloring books, the doctors were stumped. He had to carry a paper cup throughout middle school. By high school he didn’t have to worry about direct ridicule any longer, because he had no friends. And then everyone in his peer group graduated and left town and he was blessedly, blissfully alone.

After William was done with school he took a job at the local post office, where customers tended to be enfeebled or insane and everyone had larger problems. He would spit up into an empty soda bottle. His coworkers assumed he chewed tobacco and gave him tins of it on his birthday.

Each day at work, he stood at the counter and observed a large map of North America, which hung over the desk where folks filled out their change-of-address forms. Time passed and William began taking a daily visual interest in the Northwest Territories, which jutted down like a thumb holding Canada in its confident grasp. He imagined it as a pleasantly desolate place. On smoke breaks, he washed out his soda bottle in the bathroom sink.

One day, a woman with a wind-chapped face approached his desk. Her right arm was wrapped in a sterile bandage and she held a plastic cat carrier under her left. “What’s the lark,” she said.

“Beg pardon?” William said, raising the bottle to his lips.

She horked up a little something of her own. Her shoulders seemed to be coated with a thin paste. “What’s the lark, what is the lark,” she said.

“The lark?”

“The lark the lark,” she said, inserting a fingernail under the wrapped bandage to scratch a spot.

“First-class stamps cost forty-nine cents apiece,” William said. He was halfway through the sentence before he was overcome and had to grip the countertop to complete it as the bile rose. “We have some with birds on them, but I’m not sure the skylark is featured.”

She hefted the cat carrier onto the counter. It registered just over thirteen pounds on the metered scale. Inside the carrier, an orange tabby let out a low warning growl. William couldn’t see for certain, but it appeared as if the animal was missing all four of its legs.

“The loork , the lark lark the lark lake lurk lark,” the woman said. She spoke with a reasonable cadence, as if she was asking about shipping rates to the Northwest Territories. William wondered briefly if perhaps she was indeed asking about shipping rates to the Northwest Territories and that his brain had transformed a reasonable question into the garble he now discerned, that he had finally lost his mind and would only hear phrases such as this until the merciful end. The cat rolled onto its side, moaning.

“Rates really depend on what you’re sending,” he said. He spit into the bottle and pulled a kerchief from his pocket to wipe a pearly line of drool. “If you’re considering dispatching your cat, you should know that the only living thing that may be shipped via air transportation by the USPS is the queen honeybee, and that’s quite an expense indeed, particularly internationally.”

He had never spoken so many words in an uninterrupted spurt. A coworker looked up from behind a stack of packages. For one wild moment, William was unaffected, but before he could truly appreciate that potential, he felt it welling. He gripped the counter for support, reaching blindly for the bin. His hand found an open box and he brought it to his face before the torrent unleashed.

Customers stopped their talk to watch. His coworker covered her mouth with both hands. The material soaked the box and splashed back on his shirtfront. In it, he detected the odor of his mother’s warm milk. The lark woman brayed with laughter.

William experienced the same absence of thought he always felt during the act. But because this episode lasted so much longer than usual, he found he could go further within it. He saw its bleak topography, an underwater mountain range, which revealed itself in waves of alternating anxiety and calm, the waves themselves muted and consumed. At the end, there was none of the clenched jaw and turning away that he usually felt. William realized his true freedom against the grip of time.

He saw that his unwitting target had been a box of bulk postage and he now held hundreds, if not thousands, of ruined stamps, stuck to the cardboard and each other. The box was heavy and warming at a pace that matched his rising guilt at the destruction of federal property.

The lark woman’s laugh calmed to a few odd snorts. She swayed, smiling. Everyone else remained shocked beyond movement. William and the woman leaned toward each other like an old couple over a kitchen table.

“Have you ever been to Canada?” he asked.

She nodded vigorously. When she saw he was about to be sick again, she reached for him. He had a vision of her hair matted by a corona of dark ice as he readied himself to fill her cupped hands.

The poet brought his people to the bay and waved for them to quiet. When they did, he said, “Build our city with wood.”

The people of the bay — for they were now people of the bay — took in a shared breath. “The wood will warp and split,” they said. “Our city quakes.” The ground rolled a little to confirm the fact.

The poet parted the crowd to approach the loudest man, a worker who had raised his voice out of a professional concern. The poet clapped his hands on the man’s shoulders. “Raise high the cathedral walls with oak and pine,” said the poet. “Make a church that becomes an ark when turned.”

And so the people built the city with wood they found in the flats nearby. They built palafittes and schoolhouses and shops and a great towering wooden sanctuary. Before they had even finished these projects, the wood had already begun to split as the builder had foretold.

The poet arrived and regarded the project. He wrote something on a scroll and tucked it behind the piano, which had just been delivered on a boat. Once he was gone, the people dug out the scroll.