Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

Maybe you dreamed your epitaph, she said.

Barns in which a conflagration lurked, but where? Not amid the stalls or in the tack room. A faint whiff of cigar, more threatening than an ax. Barns with rooms so secret not even their rodents knew where the keys were hidden.

* * *

In a hidden room, a room expelled from a children’s story, the child who was myself wakes sweaty, needing to pee. A psychopath stalks the flat. His bare feet creak unevenly beneath the heft of the ax on his shoulder as he pads down the long hallway toward my room. Some nights his rolling eyes can see in the dark. On others he gropes along the walls, more terrifying still as he’ll have to find me by touch.

Three a.m. in the soul. The clock ticks but won’t tock. No rhyme or reason, my mother used to say.

Meaning what? you ask.

Meaning my seniors miss more than rhyme’s mnemonic power. In Remembrance of Things Past , Proust remarks that the tyranny of rhyme forces poets into their greatest lines. Senior citizens are pro-tyrant. Rhyme is tactile to them. When absent it seems there’s no other way to get from cat to hat, from spoon to moon.

From clock, ticktock, to the mad, homemade puppet of a sock named Frère Jacques with the brain of a rock, which could blackjack the psychopath whose fingertips just brushed my face.

Shhh , it’s only the touch of the curtain rising on the thermal of steam heat, a levitating dress fluttering farewell. Sometimes the inanimate comes alive not to terrify but to console.

Shhh , the smell of the inferno raging at the tip of a cigar may simply be the friction between the lilac tree beside your open window and the wild leeks that spike in spring from the pasture where a horse barn resonates in the wind, amplifying the twang of barbed wire and hum of electric fence.

A barn that a country song would rhyme with empty arms.

What’s your favorite rhyme ever? Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, Cole Porter … It’s a one-way question, she said, so please don’t answer, what’s yours?

I guess the best questions are impossible to answer, I said.

Give me the impossible.

Before we slip into unconsciousness / I’d like to have another kiss.

* * *

At the Monet exhibition a little girl reaches out and cries, “Look! Pink ocean!”

A guard rushes over and says, “No one is allowed to touch the paintings, and no photographs.”

The You of the barn poems and I are at the exhibition. We leave Monet behind and browse through rooms of martyrs, Virgins, bloody Christs, and then along a corridor of gracefully muscled statues whose mutilation has over eons come to look as if it were forecast in the original conception. Beheaded torsos that remain beautiful, shoulders no less perfect for their amputated arms, breasts still those of Venus despite chips where there presumably were nipples. Posed beside an uncastrated Apollo, she hands me the disposable camera she’d concealed in her purse.

Quick! she says. Before the guard comes, take one of me kissing the cock of a god.

You must change your life, I tell her.

Says who?

* * *

At what degree of dusk and dilapidation does a barn / pass from the temporal of architecture / to the eternal of sculpture? one of her poems asks before concluding: Sculpture is made to touch / careful, Love, splinters.

Ever notice the eyes that stare from the word look ? she asks. Is that an accident or a reminder of how close language once was to pictures? Clay tablets, hieroglyphs, calligraphy — before computers, the act of writing, whether carving with a pen or hammering with a typewriter, was physical, but now who except the blind touch language? Riding a horse blind is one thing, but reading blind — imagine, running your fingertips across a page like touching the unseen body of a lover, and suddenly: Look! Pink ocean!

Or a barn raised from parachuting dandelion seeds that as kids we called money-stealers, a levitating barn shimmering like the dragonflies we called ear-stingers, a ghost barn erected from swamp mist, raftered with fireflies.

That ghost cat and I were young together. Even asleep I can sense the curtain lifting. I can’t dream him without remembering being happy. Beyond the curtain, on an island, I snorkel along our dock hoping for a fish for supper and the cat follows down the dock. Sometimes I’d spear a small fish for him, a squirrelfish or a sergeant major, toss it up, and he’d carry it in his mouth so the herons didn’t get it. A dream is a kind of remembering. The curtain waves farewell. As I gun my old Triumph into a curve of highway beside the sea, my infant son, riding on my lap like a baguette, is flung by the momentum of my maniacal driving into the turquoise water and floats off like driftwood. Inconsolable, I kneel weeping beside my motorcycle, and a passerby stops to ask the trouble and I say I’ve lost my little son, and the passerby, trying to be kind, says, Don’t worry, you can have another.

But that was the one I wanted, I tell her.

The psycho has entered the barn, spooked the horses, violated the secret rooms. Eyeing her silhouette on the shade, he’s caressed himself on a bale of sweet hay, and afterward lights a cigar. Where is he from, what brings him here repeatedly? — some Depression-era specter, a hobo cursed to travel endless freights, some tramp on the lam who has leaped from the train whose distant whistle I could hear from your window, Love, when I woke to you beside me moaning in your sleep at three a.m. To your familiar warmth; I didn’t want to let go. Shhh. It’s only a train plowing through fields as if pulling its own wreckage, approaching in the dark the unmarked crossing of the country road I’d jounce over on the way to your farm. Owls and swallows, a barn of rhyming birds audible at the end of a dirt road. A red barn on the coast of a pink pond. Lilacs. A pasture where look lowers its lids and becomes the scent of wild leeks.

Thank you to the editors of the magazines in which these stories were first published, in slightly different form:

Alaska Quarterly Review : “Current,” “Brisket”

Boulevard : “Fridge”

Colorado Review : “Ransom,” “Between,” “Wash”

Connecticut Review : “Fedora”

Cottonwood : “Dark Ages” (first published as “Among Nymphs”)

Epoch : “Bruise,” “Coat”

Herman Review : “The Kiss”

Image : “Flies”

Indiana Review : “Voyeur of Rain”

Joe : “Fantasy”

Manoa : “Confession,” “The Samaritan” (first published as “The Girl Downstairs”)

McSweeney’s : “Happy Ending”

Michigan Quarterly Review : “The Story of Mist”

Monkey Business : “Naked”

New Letters : “Transaction”

O, The Oprah Magazine : “Vista di Mare”

Oxford Magazine : “Alms”

Playboy : “Tea Ceremony”

Ploughshares : “Misterioso,” “A Confluence of Doors,” “Ant,” “Swing”

Poetry : “Pink Ocean”

Quarterly West : “Aria”

Rattapallax : “Goodwill”

Telescope : “Midwife”

The Idaho Review : “Ice”

The Iowa Review : “Here Comes the Sun”

The Literarian : “Inland Sea”

The Ohio Review : “Transients Welcome”

The Pequod : “Fingerprints”

The Seattle Review : “Belly Button”

The Southern Review : “The Question,” “Ordinary Nudes”