Anna Noyes: Goodnight, Beautiful Women

“I wouldn’t know who to pray to,” Joni said. “I don’t believe there’s anyone to pray to. And I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“Call it whatever you want,” said her sister. “Just give the thing a name.” The sounds of a home rattled on in the background.

Joni has been cycling through names. The prayer won’t come, but she can make a list of gods, saying them aloud like she’s giving roll call. Honey Bunny, please. Please, Abraham Lincoln. Merlin. David Byrne. In the morning the sheets smell like soup from her sweat. Her mouth tastes like pennies.

Dawn. Joni’s footsteps mark the wet grass as she walks to the quarry. She swallows the last of her morning tea, then throws the mug toward the dark slab of water and watches it disappear below the black surface. She lies down on her stomach and scoots closer to the edge, fear tangled in her throat like fishing line. Crazy, she thinks, how she’s afraid he will pull her in.

Jack had started to throw things into the quarry. That was when she understood something was really wrong.

In the beginning, Joni only felt good around Jack. She sped home from school, her pulse beating between her thighs. His Toyota, the letters repainted to spell Coyote, was parked with its plow pressed to a melting snow bank. She stood outside and watched him through the garage window, the drill whining against his sculpture. How nice to watch Jack from a distance, listening to the wet landing of flakes on her raincoat’s hood. When he came out to join her, she wiped the rock dust from his eyebrows. His body tasted like chalk, same as the smell that lingered on her hands after long lessons at the blackboard. The snow turned to rain, and the woods had a sweetfern smell that meant spring was coming. His mouth was warm, his cold hand pressing down her jeans. He pulled her into the bed of the truck, spread out his coat and Joni lay back and propped her leg against the cool of the wheel well. And finally, after the whole day of thinking on it, she guided him inside her. She felt like scattered iron filings, and Jack was the magnet that pulled them together.

A rusted Ford emerges from the woods and parks at a cliff across the quarry. It sputters black smoke out the back. Two men climb out. They push the truck straight into the water. She imagines the leaky plume of oils as the truck falls, the blink of headlights and the grinding halt of the motor. The water bubbles where the truck went under.

The men strip naked and jump into the quarry, hooting at the cold. She’s heard stories that the quarry is used as a junkyard, and that dirty people wash there, but she hasn’t seen it. It doesn’t scare her to see it, really. Just old men soaping their beards in the green morning light.

Joni puts her cheek to the mottled granite. She feels almost comfortable with the men swimming in the distance. She hasn’t been sleeping, and she curls up, her breath slow, her body heavy, and then she’s sinking down into the quarry. The water is green and backlit. When she touches ground, two plumes of silt rise like ink around her. She stands inside a circle of cars, their wheel wells silky with green moss. She steps around the beer cans that are wedged into the mud. The abandoned backhoes are tall as trees. The cars’ hoods are caved, their windows webbed with cracks. The bodies waver by in Joni’s periphery. She can just sense the glow of their skin, paled from living so many miles out of the sun. Better lie down, she thinks, keep low to the ground. The quarry mud gives beneath her weight. The map of algae trawls for her sleeping body. It finds and covers her over. How silent the dream is, what a nice place to get some sleep.

In the beginning the sweet taste inside Jack’s mouth was the most surprising. She recognized him as something she’d always known but just realized, like cleaning out her mother’s dresser after her funeral and finding the pine pillow she used to scent her clothes. Joni had never placed her mother’s smell as pine. It was so fiercely known to her, and forgotten. She’d dug her nails into the pillow and sobbed.

It took years for Jack to learn her inventory: the freckle on the middle knuckle of her left hand, the one on the ridge of her right ear, the white scar on her eyelid that she got from playing capture the flag in the woods when she was twelve, the three stretch marks across each hip, the scar inside her belly button where they’d inserted the camera to look for an ovarian tumor, the two chalk scars under her pubic hair from the surgery that removed a benign cyst. He’d put his tongue in her belly button, years healed, very gently, and how good it felt. Only he would know about that place.

When she goes inside at nightfall, the path lights are off even though she left them on. Moonlight. The quarry is moving into the air around her, the woods are humming with frogs and night noise. She opens the back door. Of course, of course, the kitchen floor is wet, the bathroom floor is wet, there are watermarks along the shelves where she keeps Jack’s favorite granola and his nighttime tea, there are two damp fingerprints on the paper towel roll, and a trail leading back out onto the porch where she won’t look. She flips on every switch in the house, lighting the living room, the front hallway, illuminating the bare bulbs in the bathroom and the kitchen. The whole moonlit scene outside disappears and in the bedroom, where there are eight windows side-by-side looking out at the quarry, all she can see is her reflection, eight times over. The mouth hangs open. The eyes appraise her.

Before he left Jack brought home sage, bound with yellow string. He said he needed to smudge the house. He said it was cleansing, a Native American ritual that drove away bad energy and bad spirits. He went to each corner of their cabin and let the smoke wash over the surfaces to clear away all of their impurities. He smudged her makeup case and the plunger that was pushed behind the toilet tank, stood on a stool to get at the rafters, and crawled on his hands and knees to cleanse under the bed. Then he drew the smoke in an oval around her body until her eyes were stinging. When she thought he was done, he moved up to her face, and started making the shape of a figure eight. She laughed.

He went into the bathroom, where he put out the ember in the glass Joni used to rinse her mouth of toothpaste. “Sixteen,” he said solemnly, ticking his fingers against the air. “Sixteen times and it’s only Wednesday.”

Joni gets in the shower and prays. One stream of water is stronger than the others and she aligns it with her backbone, bending so the stream shoots hard against each knob. These days naked she feels all head, where the thoughts are whirring. It is a burden to soap and carry this creature body, all of its many parts. Coccyx, tailbone, scapula.

The next morning there are ants. When she wakes up there is one on her cheek, one floating in a teacup on the bedside table, and then there are more crawling out of the walls every minute longer that Joni looks, tooling along with their feelers twitching up and down.

In town they tell her that ants like to nest in homes where the wood is rotting. They sell her something to kill them, and when she asks how it works they describe ants’ love for sugar. The poison tastes like sugar to them, and it smells like sugar, when they pass their feelers over it. They will carry it, the poison twice their size, back to their nest and give it to their babies, as a nice thing to eat. That is how it kills them all. She buys ten traps and puts them in all the rooms.

When Joni swings her feet out of bed there are piles of crisp ant bodies on the floor. There are small graveyards in the corner of every room. There is a horror show of ants drowning in the toilet. For a moment she thinks, Oh no, they got into the rice somehow, they’ve carried it all over the house, but then she realizes it’s the babies, wrapped in thin white eggs the size of rice, with a surface that folds when she presses it with the sole of her slipper. The ants were rushing to carry the eggs from the nest, emergency evacuation, before the poison slowed them.