Amber Sparks: May We Shed These Human Bodies

Fifth Period: Literature

In class you are reading Beowulf. You think it’s bullshit that Beowulf could slay Grendel, just like that. You like this story but you can’t believe they would waste a great bad guy so quickly. Grendel, you whisper to your one and only friend Jeremy, should be a regular monster. They could have written lots of stories about him. He could have been a great adversary for Beowulf. Jeremy nods. He’s not really into medieval stuff — he’s into Marvel Comics pretty exclusively.

Your teacher clears her throat. She asks if you would like to share your thoughts with the whole class and not just Jeremy. She says his name like this: Germy, like all the kids do, and so you know she is not on your side. But, okay, you say, fine, and you do, you share your thoughts. You tell the class about how it was too easy, killing Grendel. Your teacher seems impressed with your observation. She says there were characters that appeared again and again in ballads and stories, like Arthur and Taliesin. She smiles, and the class snickers at you behind your back.

After class your crush, pretty Tanisha Smith, laughs as Paul Boehler squirts a ketchup packet down the back of your shirt. Someone slams you into a locker. Someone else has you in a headlock. You think about Beowulf, and how he should have been invincible. You think about being invincible, and how that would be the best thing of all. Even if you have a weapon, they can still hurt you. Medicine can heal you but it won’t stop you from getting hurt again. You can even be hurt while wearing strong armor. But to be invincible — that would be the only way to do it. The only way to be sure no one could ever hurt you again.

Assignment:Find out how to become invincible. Study famous invincible figures like Superman, Wolverine, Galahad, Tom Strong, James Bond, Godzilla, The Punisher, the Wolf Man, Achilles, Hercules, even the Monkey King. Study them and learn and be sure of one thing — you will never find Kryptonite. You will never stand up to a dose of radiation. You will never be born of heroes or gods. Study and understand, finally, that this fictional science is just that — fictional. Some people are just born with the wrong sort of mind.

Think that maybe the world is very small anyway. Think that despite the hope you confuse with a winning streak, you will never be the same as the others. That you will always eat your cheese sandwiches alone. Dream of invisibility, at least. Dream of throwing a blanket over your lonely life at last.

He’s tired of everything, most of all the loggers skating around on that stupid frying pan. Don’t they realize that joke gets old after a while? I mean, it was kind of funny the first few times, but never exactly hygienic. God only knows what kind of bacteria he picked up last time he ate flapjacks out of that pan. He got so sick he passed out, toppled right onto a family playing Frisbee. It was terrible. They had to peel the dad off of his left shoulder, and his shirt was all covered in bloodstains and ruined. And a custom-made flannel shirt the size of a football field is not cheap.

Which is why, when all the loggers hover at his feet, toe-height, chirping at him and pointing to the frying pan hanging high on the wall, he gets a little angry and accidentally stomps on one of them. It’s not like it never happens, and the other loggers know the risks — it’s a calculated risk, his size relative to the work minus his temper relative to his size. Still, it’s never good when he kills one, and he has to go see the wife and kids and listen to them chirp at him while he pretends to understand. He can nod every once in a while if he is careful, but mostly he must stand extraordinarily still, leaning on his axe and trying not to breathe too much. There’s a funeral inside their tiny church so he can’t come in. He stands outside, hat in his hands, but he can’t hear the priest or the mourners. All he can hear are the tinkling hymns spilling out of the church windows like glass.

It’s lonely up here. They don’t understand how lonely. They think they’d like to be big, to have his arm span, his strong swing. They’d like the earth to shudder at each step and forests to collapse in their wake. They think it would make them important. They don’t see how you disappear past the tree line, that something so tall becomes more landscape than person.

He’s especially sad now that Babe is dead, now that he’s lost all his hair and most of his teeth, now that he gets arthritis in his wrists and his back cramps up every morning. Now that the earth has shrunk so small, there’s no room for the bigness of him. Sometimes he tries to remember what his story was once. Why he was the myth the people made for themselves, him and Babe, back a long time ago. Back when he walked the land free and easy, putting one huge foot down in front of the other, creating contours and hills and lakes. Back when he shoveled up earth and felled forests, traveling westward with the rest of the company. He knows it’s not a story anybody needs anymore. The air is thinner now, and the long past is crumpled behind him like too much paper. Sometimes it seems like there couldn’t possibly be any more trees.

What he needs is to retire, though he knows he’d have to go away to do it. He knows very well these loggers aren’t going to suffer him to stick around, to keep feeding him if he’s not earning his keep. But that’s okay. He supposes he wouldn’t really miss their tiny voices, their incomprehensible phrases and gestures. He just wants to sit for a while on a cliff, somewhere high up and barren and far from any trees, his monstrous head closer to the stars than any other living thing on Earth.

There are no paintings of Ellie in Esther’s imaginary gallery. Ellie is the opposite of a painting; she is the fire that burns the gallery down. She is a candle made to melt oil and scorch canvas.

If she did paint Ellie, Esther would use a sunny lemon yellow, with streaks of Prussian blue marring the image on the canvas like lovely drips of poison. An accident caught in time. No, Esther could never paint Ellie. Ellie can’t be captured and never will be, not before it’s finally too late.

The sisters decide to set fire to the past. Board games, clothes, stuffed animals, toy cars and plastic blocks, playing cards, picture books, even package after package of unopened diapers — Ellie and Esther take turns hauling a lifetime of refuse out of their mother’s house in heavy armfuls, tossing it into a big blue dumpster out back. It is Ellie who suggests the fire, a final offering to the gods who govern memory. Let them collect the ashes, she says. But the sisters aren’t prepared for the angry black smoke that coils back at them, the acrid smell of burning plastic and polyester that wafts from the dumpster and drives the neighbors out to complain.

Maybe we shouldn’t have burned the diapers, Esther says. Maybe I’ll have a baby someday.

We don’t need babies, says Ellie.

Esther has no one but Ellie. She doesn’t much mind. She lives a very small life, but lives it nonetheless. She projects serenity, holds still, wears grey and beige and acts more like furniture than a person. She is a film projector. Ellie is the moving image. Ellie is the one people tear themselves up for. Esther grows beauty inside of her head; her skull lined with lilies and violets and orchids.

Esther works for their father, in the church office, with a Remington typewriter balanced on a metal cart. The only decoration in the room is a small dried-pasta crucifix hanging on the wall. She made it when she was eleven, and it is the only thing of hers that has ever occupied this space. She types out her father’s sermons and correspondence while he asks his congregation in a voice like stone, Do you know Jesus? And they yell, Yes! And then he asks louder, But do you KNOW JESUS? And they all scream OH, LORD, YES! and then fall to the floor, thrashing about like epileptics. Her father doesn’t see Ellie at all. He maybe sees Esther as a pencil, as an instrument of his will. But mostly he sees god and the devil, taking up all the room in the world and casting long shadows on the horizon. Long shadows on his soul.