Steve Tem - Onion Songs

The young woman stared as the lady walked through the lobby and out the front door in her bare feet. Everywhere the lady stepped, a scorched teardrop appeared in the rose-colored carpet.

He and his wife led their small life. No great adventures or newspaper photos.

Neither did anything you might remember the next morning.

Tiny bodies, tinier heads—they disappeared in the glare of one bright day.

A dozen and more owned the house after. None recalled them or their time.

Then one morning cleaning we found handprints on ceilings, footprints across walls.

My wife angrily climbed the ladder with dripping mop, overflowing pail.

Kids? Elves? Way up here?

What is that red spot? Blood?

Peering closer she found a delicate, miniature painting: an alizarin rose.

Written beneath were flyspeck words:

“Tom loves Martha. She says hello.”

The woman in the photograph has no name. I have no story for what she is to me. I want to say she starts her day with “A,” first in the alphabet, and that she is first in my heart. “You’re just the best,” I say to her shimmering image, as if encouragement will grow eyes that see out of that paper portrait and soft lips that speak, identifying herself, available for more.

She may be alive or she may be dead. There is no difference inside my happy skull.

The day (morning? afternoon?) is cold. I reach out to wrap my children around me. I try to be careful, but some always fall away. I can hear them tumble, even with my eyes closed and hands clamped over my ears.

It is so sad to see an unfamiliar face in the mirror. I have fallen into someone else’s life, and now I must teach him how to cry.

In the distance there is the sound of buses pulling away for home. I can hear nothing with this fellow’s ears, except the stumble-bum rhythm of my own heart. It is so sad to see the backs of people’s heads. They are like portraits without features.

Inside my skull, people rearrange themselves. They may not realize how terrifying this game is.

This woman holding my hand: a very long time ago I stayed up all night building her a house full of dolls. I decorated each room to be like a room she might one day live in. Perhaps now I can crawl into one of those tiny rooms and stay. I will make myself very small: they will feel me against their faces or around their ankles and believe I am a soft breeze.

For years everything will be the same. I will have memorized the positions of all the furniture. No one will have thought to rearrange things. I will have a name for every voice I hear. Their names will be like music. Said together, the sound will make the walls shake.

Finally the girl’s hand arrives. I remember it being as delicate and tentative as a new bird learning flight. It is all that and more. The hand wraps itself around and takes me high in the air with its tender embrace. Careful not to break me, but this reunion is breaking me up inside, as wife, children, and grandchildren come tumbling out of my mouth.

The child watches me for a very long time, as if examining me for surprises. I cannot change the smile painted broadly across my face. Carefully she places me back inside rooms within rooms.

Sometimes I get lost, and it takes years for the memories to find me. Someday I will wake up big. I will wake up huge.

Until then, sweetheart, tell me your name. And if I still look confused, tell it to me again.

He wakes with the door behind him. It rattles, rattles again. He hears the eager key opposed by the reluctant lock. He hears the torn breath of the key’s owner, as if even this is too much effort. He hears a familiar language whose words he still cannot understand. He hears a music of distressed syllables, low vowels, painful consonants.

He risks a constricted, claustrophobic breath: these objects in front of him so close and yet somehow unreachable: the miniature table with the picture of the young girl: the bright red necklace arranged about the neck of her black and white image: the necklace moving one segment at a time down her throat: the click of insect legs on glass as the narrow red body disappears around the edge of the stained silver frame. A few inches away the square of soiled handkerchief, its aged stains graying into a spotted lizard hide. And on that cloth square, the ruins of the young girl’s comb, metal teeth broken and handle cracked, a swatch of blonde hair caught and held for decades, the whole of it collapsed like a wolf’s decaying grin. And beyond that grin, crumpled like a life regurgitated, lie the meager remains of her last letter, paper fingered again and again almost to transparency, the blue ink of her words floating above the shadows.

And, hanging around him, the clothes he wore that day, as if he were standing in the changing room of a large swimming pool, as if the objects on the table were the things from his pockets, laid there, away from the dampness that must eventually creep, that must eventually spread everywhere, and soften everything, and dissolve us all in its path.

The back wall of the room shimmers, as if metal or glass, but he knows it’s not metal nor glass, but he knows… nothing. And leaving the realm of factual carpentry, he understands that this is the corridor outside the changing room, leading to that grand public swimming pool. The passage glitters, reflecting the pool that lies beyond the doorway, around the short hall to the left, where the water extends as far as his mind will allow, as deep, where every word he speaks has an echo, where the other swimmers repeat his awkward speech, but will not show their faces.

But he will not go there. He is not ready to go there. He hasn’t done enough, even with all these rooms to show for what can and has been done, each one holding a moment he can climb into. He hasn’t gathered enough. There’s never enough time to gather everything he needs, and never enough space to hold it all. And what is there to do when every moment he’s collected demands focus, insists upon his attention? Sometimes all he can do is leave.

He turns around and grabs the handle. He runs through all his keys, trying each in succession. The door rattles, rattles again. The reluctant lock resists the eager key. He hears his breath begin to tear in the close space of the room. He rests his hand on the interior wall and is alarmed at how leathery it has become, how brittle, how yielding. He starts to pray in a familiar language whose words he cannot understand.

His repetitive plea becomes a music of distressed syllables and low vowels. The consonants are painful in the tender space of his mouth.

The night before Charles’s wedding, his mother took the long bus ride from her small house in the suburbs to the run-down apartment building downtown where he had been staying for many years. She had never visited him in this place, and although she missed him terribly she didn’t at all look forward to the meeting. Off and on during that day she had such spells of absentmindedness—misplacing her keys, forgetting why she had gone in to this or that room, walking out to the clothes line with her blouse all undone, finally losing the worn-out slip of paper with her son’s scribbled address—she eventually just had to sit down and have herself a good long cry. She really hadn’t thought she’d been sad, and wondered if sadness was really the right word for what she was feeling. Sometimes her body seemed to feel things she herself had no knowledge of.

Eventually she did find the piece of paper with the address—she’d put it in the canister with her teabags—and she managed to get herself dressed. It was one of the outfits she regularly wore to church, and it bolstered her. But even with these improvements in her condition she discovered that her hands weren’t working properly—they trembled so badly she dropped her fare by the bus driver and he had to pick it up for her. And maneuvering her feet down the narrow moving aisle proved difficult, her shoes feeling oversized and full of stones.