Catie Rosemurgy

Pretty girl. The weather has knocked her down again and given her to the lake to wear as a skin. Why am I always being the weather? There were days in the winter when her smile was so lovely I felt the breathing of my own goodness, though it remained fetal and separate. I was a scavenger who survives with a sling and stones, but whose god nonetheless invents the first small bright bird. And it was like flight to bring food to her lips with a skeletal hand. But now she will always be naked and sad. She will be what happens to lake water that is loved and is also shallow enough. The thickening, the slowing, the black blood of it, the chest opened to reveal the inevitable heart attack. God, the silence of the chamber we watch from. What happens to water that isn’t loved? It undergoes processes. It freezes beside traffic. But the reaching out to all sides at once, the wet closing of what was open? That is a beautiful woman. So of course I stand and stare, never able to pinpoint the exact moment I killed her.

But whose did? She’s crumpled where she’s supposed to be unfolded, something bad written on a piece of paper. Her walking is a devolution that hunches and shrinks everyone as she moves up the tree-lined street. I’m on my porch waving to my neighbors and having one of those honeyed afternoons when I don’t know who I am. I know everything else, though, and it’s ringing in my head. Then there she is in a pool on my front steps, laughing, asking about lunch, as if the bones of at least four different animals weren’t loose inside her, scurrying this way and that. Someone needs to find her a place to live, a hidey hole we can cram food in and get away from quickly. We could call her part bird and be done with it. But everyone is dying right under the surface these days, especially around the eyes. Death has crawled up into the face to nibble away whatever blocks its view of the stars. We’re riddled with it. It’s pulling our flesh into outrageous, unwilled positions, like the huge smile on my face as I lift her onto my lap and hold her together for a minute before I tell her she isn’t welcome here.

I. Pledge Sister Everyone looks at me as if I’m a rainbow drawn by a slow child. Because they can eat without a ringing in their ears. They can ask for gravy. They miss the point I’m always aiming at their heads. The pills I suck are like me: pink, fizzy, and totally legal. They turn listening to noise into a type of eating. Everyone wants to know about my pubic hair. They say they’re looking for signs that I’m dying, but what they really want is the food melting on the fork when they finally say none for me, thanks. They worship the pain they think I’m in. Meanwhile, I’d eat a beetle if I thought its legs could make my lashes longer. I’ve got all these organs inside me and I can’t resist teasing them to see if they’ll go away. Everyone likes it when I finally die in the magazine article: the cries no one heard, the love I needed massaged into my hamburger meat. No one knows I am the flower, the bee, the wind, the rain, the dirt: all the vectors. No one knows how well I sleep, how well I lie in bed not sleeping. I run and sharpen the bones of my face. The other girls say they don’t care if their shadows aren’t museum quality. They’re happy just knowing they’re made out of marble. They have no respect for the chisel I would take to the human race. II. Spring Break Love isn’t above starting this way: you can drop me from a second-story window if you pin me against it first. It doesn’t want to start this way, and who can blame it. There’s the electric outlet and then there’s the baby finger stuck into it. I was both. A couple nights later, on a busy street, I recognized his walk the way a mouse must recognize a hole it used last winter. Sure, I wish the universe could clear its throat. Sure, I’m sick of the source of great fire always being the sun. A few nights ago he peeled off of me as if he were my own skin and he didn’t want the job. But afterwards he kissed me as if to apologize for every brutal thing he was strong enough to have just done. Later he walked me across town, and we ended up in an expensive place, in the middle of a loud song. He looked right at me the whole time, as if I were still the one thing he would choose, even though the damn thing couldn’t stop spinning and was clearly broken. III. The Essay It is dumb to know what one has longing for. I am moved by the orange stitching on a girl’s corduroy book bag. I, too, wonder what I am happy about. There is always something natural in pieces like sand or snow. If early Western cultures had perceived the surface of the day as wrapping around them like a shell, I wouldn’t be here right now. Not exactly me, not exactly here, not exactly now. The world spreads out from how we look at one thing. I tell myself this and then I look at things for hours. Don’t think I don’t know how stupid I sound. Please, do not think I don’t know. IV. Fifth-Year Senior Everything tastes like love. That’s what makes me nervous. That and I wish I knew what I will act like later today. I watch myself being kind sometimes and I think, is there nothing you won’t fake? But that’s unforgiving. A smile, a purse, an ax, these are all things you pick up and carry. Lately, I pick up the lightest things. I am floating and honored to drag myself back and forth like a huge feather across my sleeping boyfriend. He thanks me by actually changing under my touch. He is smooth and I worry that I barely feel him, but doing things no one should see seems the only good use of my time. He buys me jewelry I never wear. I love it because it piles up, which proves I’m alive. The boys my age cry more than the girls do. They’re always losing games, and those are very symbolic. My girlfriends and I can’t get off the couch anymore, and summer is seeping in under the doors. My friend says people are wrong about us. It’s the ripe fruit that gets eaten. I say the truth is I don’t work at things because then I get them. V. Graduation Address I like to be at the end and look back at the beginning and see all the stupidity there. I think we are young. The posters all say so, and though no one ever officially joined our clubs, we designed many logos. The beautiful, dumb girl you loved was everyone at our lecture, and what a strange boy we all were in the corner with our walking stick, talking too much about the board games back home. Many of you were next to me at the talk where I became hyper-aware of the creeping in my heart. As you know, I became obsessed with the on and off inside my chest. Failure seems to be one half of the deal, which is why I have occasionally climbed on top of some of you and then left the room. But there is another way to look at it: like you, I am a house for a wet animal that is sneaking up on something it is terrified by. What is that something? The wet animal doesn’t know. The wet animal doesn’t even have eyes. There’s no way that wet animal isn’t brave.