Amber Sparks: May We Shed These Human Bodies

Your parents will come to see your play and also, to your acute embarrassment, will Jeannie, Danny’s mother. She will hug you and cling to you and whisper hoarsely, I wish Danny could have see you up there, he would have loved it. And you won’t know what to say because Danny hated theatre. It just isn’t as specific as film, he’d said, and you never knew what he meant so it always made you mad.

Jeannie will smell like soap and smoke. How sad, your mother will whisper to your father, she must’ve started smoking again, and Jeannie will hear and turn pink and white. She will also smell a little like Danny, though not really like Danny but like his house. Still. There will be something unnerving about her, a reminder of Danny that you maybe don’t want or need. You will resent this, and smile at her a little too coldly.

Excuse me, you will say, but I have to go backstage and change out of my costume now.

On your next visit to Curtis (you still haven’t quite found your mind, though it’s been coming around more often) he will tell you that perhaps this was not the kindest way you could have behaved.

Oh, you will say sarcastically, really? Sadly, it is the only retort you will be able to think of. You will be mortified. You will respond with silence for the rest of the session, finally giving Curtis two tickets to your play and driving back to the dorm in a huff to run lines with Tanya.

No one ever has any practical solutions for anything, you will complain.

I have one, she will say, and smile. She will tell you about a cast party that Oberon, played by a sophomore named Dan, is throwing that night. At the party, you will get drunk as a lord. You’ll stumble around Oberon/Dan’s house with your tongue loose and thick and a warm blanket around your brain. Oh, sorry, you’ll keep saying as you bump into furniture, and everyone will laugh, mostly good-naturedly. At some point Puck will corner you in the hallway and you'll be swept away

by his sparkly eyebrows and pointy ears.

The next morning, you’ll wake up on Dan/Oberon's couch, headachy and mouthcottony and feeling altogether wretched. And suddenly, before you can get up, before you can even really move, you’ll start weeping. You’ll know then what those Victorians poets meant when they used the word, weep: a faucet in your face, pushing out tears. You will cry the way that you never cried for Danny even when you really, really meant it. But you won’t be crying for Danny. You won’t know why you’re crying, but it will seem that this cry might be good. It will seem that this cry might be the kind a person is supposed to have: cathartic, healing, devastating. A revelation. A hard pinch. A sharp pain to remind you you’re awake.

And you will look up and there — there your mind will be, standing sheepishly with its hands in its pockets, scuffling its feet a little. I got bored, it will say.

Oh! you’ll shout, queasy and swollen and relieved. Oh, it’s you! I’ve missed you! You will sigh and try to hold still so your mind can get settled.

Shup…tryna sleep, someone will mutter from the vicinity of the floor, but you will only smile a little. You will be comforted, and you will be full of sadness, and you will never, never be solved.

He never could tell if her hair was white or just a flaxen blond, if her eyes were blue or brown, or if her face was pretty. He never knew how old she was or even if she was very old indeed; her movements suggested a younger woman, sure and strong and not yet stiffened by time. But he knew he was in love with her, this woman across the lake.

Every morning she emerged from her cottage and walked the length of the pier. Or rather, she glided, her bare feet just touching the wooden slats, her dressing gown fluttering behind her like grey wings, her slim limbs light and full of the natural grace of morning.

She stood at the water's edge for hours, and sometimes, he swore she stood there for days. Sometimes she seemed to slip into the lake like fog, and sink with the swell of the moon. Sometimes he thought he heard a thin high sound, halfway between song and wail, pour out of her throat on the coldest and darkest nights.

He wondered if she was a ghost, a hallucination, a fairy who'd come through a split in the spell between worlds. Or another Circe, trying to ensnare him even across this expanse of water. His cabin was small and his days, smaller. It would not be hard, he sometimes thought, to ensnare me. I think I would become a boar for her. I think I would bear anything to see her close and real and rare.

In his best moments he thought he might have written her, so well that she flew from the page and into existence. Since he had given her nothing to do, she was able to do nothing, and sometimes he regretted that on her behalf. He wondered if he'd been careless with description, let it get away from him. Better to proceed with action. Better to let his future characters live rather than be.

He envied other men, living in cities and in love with women they could touch. He envied people who lived in brick buildings surrounded by paved streets and other brick buildings. He envied animals their ability to root in the earth around them. He seemed only able to stare and stare at the pines, the black rock, the wild lake, and her. Pale hair glowing against her drab gown. Straight and slim as a queen. The water stirring at her feet, birds circling above, the trees breeze-bent and kneeling before her. Could he steal her cloak, hide it like a skin? Could she be trapped by her own enchantment? Was she a white witch, sending water magic across his lake; was she weaving tangled messages on the waves that he couldn't undo?

The man knew that other men had died for love. He read about them in books. He wondered if he might die, too, of this tight white burn in his heart for her. He rather hoped so, after he'd awoken from a dream of swimming to her dock, emerging from the water like his own spirit, of waiting on the dock for her to swallow him whole. He wondered if her eyes were kind. He wondered if she would dissolve like pale ink in a pool if he swam too close. So he never swam close, never approached her cabin, never knew her age or her face or her name or even if she was really there at all — or if he loved but a trick of water and light, a flash of morning sun staining his cornea in the shape of a slim and lovely thing, like a woman.

As she watched her husband give his stump speech on TV, the senator's wife set fire to the furniture. It was a slow process, despite the gasoline, despite the extra lighter fluid she'd purchased. She had to light the curtains in five different spots. Had they purchased flame-retardant curtains? She couldn't think why she would have done such a thing; perhaps his mother had bought them. That was entirely possible; the mother-in-law liked buying things to keep the wife married to the house, things like curtains and crock pots and linens. Things like alarm systems which were not, the wife had discovered, particularly difficult to disable.

The fire trucks showed up just in time for her to catch the last of his speech. The flames were shouting obscenities by then, devouring his slick, weak words. She could see he was in a park somewhere. She could feel her lungs packing it in.

She stumbled to the front door, singed her hand on the knob, wondered whether to make her way to the kitchen and grab a potholder, but decided against it. Decided to let them find her crisped rather than crumpled and sorry on the driveway. She coughed, crouched down in front of the television to find a little more air. Her anger was her home; let it burn hot and clean through the drywall, through the insulation, through the grass and trees and houses and all of the human debris scattered like dead leaves over the surface of the world. Let anger fry the face of god.