Mary Karr

In the valley of your art history book, the corpses stack in the back of a cart drawn by an ox whose rolling shoulder muscles show its considerable weight. He does this often. His velvet nostrils flare to indicate the stench. It’s the smell you catch after class while descending a urine-soaked subway stair on a summer night in a neighborhood where cabs won’t drive: the odor of dead flowers, fear multiplied a thousand times. The train door’s hiss seals you inside with a frail boy swaying from a silver hoop. He coughs in your direction, his eyes are burn holes in his face. Back in the fourteenth-century print lying in your lap, a hand white as an orchid has sprouted from the pyramid of flesh. It claws the smoky air. Were it not for that, the cart might carry green cordwood (the human body knobby and unplaned). Wrap your fingers around your neck and feel the stony glands. Count the holes in your belt loop for lost weight. In the black unfurling glass, study the hard planes of your face. Compare it to the prom picture in your wallet, the orchid pinned to your chest like a spider. Think of the flames at your high school bonfire licking the black sky, ashes rising, innumerable stars. The fingers that wove with your fingers have somehow turned to bone. The subway shudders between dark and light. The ox plods across the page. Think of everyone you ever loved: the boy who gets off at your stop is a faint ideogram for each. Offer him your hand. Help him climb the stair.

Before my first communion, I clung to doubt as Satan spider-like stalked the orb of dark surrounding Eden for a wormhole into paradise. God had formed me from gel in my mother’s womb, injected by my dad’s smart shoot. They swapped sighs until I came, smaller than a bite of burger. Quietly, I grew till my lungs were done then the Lord sailed a soul like a lit arrow to inhabit me. Maybe that piercing made me howl at birth, or the masked creatures whose scalpel cut a lightning bolt to free me. I was hoisted by the heels and swatted, fed and hauled around. Time-lapse photos show my fingers grow past crayon outlines, my feet come to fill spike heels. Eventually, I lurched out to kiss the wrong mouths, get stewed, and sulk around. Christ always stood to one side with a glass of water. I swatted the sap away. When my thirst got great enough to ask, a clear stream welled up inside, some jade wave buoyed me forward, and I found myself upright in the instant, with a garden inside my own ribs aflourish. There, the arbor leafs. The vines push out plump grapes. You are loved, someone said. Take that and eat it.

Once warring factions agreed upon the date and final form the apocalypse would take, and whether dogs and cats and certain trees deserved to sail, and if the dead would come or be left a forwarding address, then opposing soldiers met on ravaged plains to shake hands and postulate the exact shade of the astral self—some said lavender, others gray. And physicists rocketed copies of the decree to paradise in case God had anything to say, the silence that followed being taken for consent, and so citizens readied for celestial ascent. Those who hated the idea stayed indoors till the appointed day. When the moon clicked over the sun like a black lens over a white eye, they stepped out onto porches and balconies to see the human shapes twist and rise through violet sky and hear trees uproot with a sound like enormous zippers unfastening. And when the last grassblades filled the air, the lonely vigilants fell in empty fields to press their bodies hard into dirt, hugging their own outlines. Then the creator peered down from his perch, as the wind of departing souls tore the hair of those remaining into wild coronas, and he mourned for them as a father for defiant children, and he knew that each small skull held, if not some vision of his garden, then its aroma of basil and tangerine washed over by the rotting sea. They alone sensed what he’d wanted as he first stuck his shovel into clay and flung the planets over his shoulder, or used his thumbnail to cut smiles and frowns on the first blank faces. Even as the saints arrived to line before his throne singing and a wisteria poked its lank blossoms through the cloudbank at his feet, he trained his gaze on the deflating globe where the last spreadeagled Xs clung like insects, then vanished in puffs of luminous smoke, which traveled a long way to sting his nostrils, the journey lasting more than ten lifetimes. A mauve vine corkscrewed up from the deep oblivion, carrying the singed fume of things beautiful, noble, and wrong.

From the far star points of his pinned extremities, cold inched in—black ice and squid ink— till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void even for pain, he missed his splintered feet, the human stare buried in his face. He ached for two hands made of meat he could reach to the end of. In the corpse’s core, the stone fist of his heart began to bang on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water shatters at birth, rivering every way.

On the mudroad of plodding American bodies, my son wove like an antelope from stall to stall and want to want. I no’ed it all: the wind-up killer robot and winged alien; knives hierarchical in a glass case; the blow-up vinyl wolf bobbing from a pilgrim’s staff. Lured as I was by the bar-b-que’s black smoke, I got in line. A hog carcass, blistered pink on a spit, made its agonized slow roll, a metaphor, I thought, for anyone ahead of me—the pasty-faced and broad. I half-longed for the titanium blade I’d just seen curved like a falcon’s claw. Some truth wanted cutting in my neighbors’ impermanent flesh. Or so my poisoned soul announced, as if scorn for the body politic weren’t some outward form of inner scorn, as if I were fit judge. Lucky my son found the bumper cars. Once I’d hoped only to stand tall enough to drive my own. Now when the master switch got thrown and sparks skittered overhead in a lightning web, I felt like Frankenstein or some newly powered monster. Plus the floor was glossy as ice. Even rammed head-on, the rubber bumper bounced you off unhurt and into other folks who didn’t mind the jolt, whose faces all broke smiles, in fact, till the perfect figure-eight I’d started out to execute became itself an interruption. One face after another wheeled shining at me from the dark, each bearing the weight of a whole self. What pure vessels we are, I thought, once our skulls shut up their nasty talk. We drove home past corn at full tassel, colossal silos, a windmill sentinel. Summer was starting. My son’s body slumped like a grain sack against mine. My chest was all thunder. On the purple sky in rear view, fireworks unpacked—silver chrysanthemum, another in fuchsia, then plum. Each staccato boom shook the night. My son jerked in his sleep. I prayed hard to keep the frail peace we hurtled through, to want no more than what we had. The road rushed under us. Our lush planet heaved toward day. Inside my hand’s flesh, anybody’s skeleton gripped the wheel.

While the tennis ball went back and forth in time A girl was burning. While the tonic took its greeny Acid lime, a girl was burning. While the ruby sun fell From a cloud’s bent claws and Wimbledon was won And lost, we sprawled along the shore in chairs, We breathed the azure airs alongside A girl with the thinnest arms all scarred and scored With marks she’d made herself — She sat with us in flames That not all saw or saw but couldn’t say at risk Of seeming impolite. And later we’d all think Of the monk who’d doused himself with gas, Lit a match, then sat unmoving and alert amid Devouring light. She didn’t speak. She touched No aspect of our silly selves. I was the awkward guest everybody hardly knew. She was an almost ghost her mother saw Erasing the edges of herself each day Smudging the lines like charcoal while her parents Redrew her secretly into being over and Again each night and dawn and sleepless All years long. Having seen that mother’s love, I testify: It was ocean endless. One drop could’ve Brought to life the deadest Christ, and she Emptied herself into that blazing child with all her might And stared a hundred million miles into The girl’s slender, dwindling shape. Her father was the devoted king of helicopter pad And putting green. His baby burned as we All watched in disbelief. I was the facile friend of friends insisting on a hug Who hadn’t been along for years of doctors, wards, And protocols. I forced her sadness close. I said C’mon let’s hug it out. Her arms were white Birch twigs that scissored stiffly at my neck till she Slid on. That night we watched Some fireworks on the dewy lawn for it was Independence Day. Soon after, she was gone. She was the flaming tower we all dared To jump from. So she burned.

Today I heard a rich and hungry boy verbatim quote all last night’s infomercials — an anorectic son who bought with Daddy’s Amex black card the Bowflex machine and Abdomenizer, plus a steak knife that doth slice the inner skin of   his starving arms. Poor broken child of   Eve myself, to me, the flightless fly, the listing, blistered, scalded. I am the rod to their lightning. Mine is the earhole their stories pierce. At my altar the blouse is torn open and the buttons sailed across the incensed air space of the nave, that I may witness the mastectomy scars crisscrossed like barbed wire, like bandoliers. To me, the mother carries the ash contents of   the long-ago incinerated girl. She begs me for comfort since my own son was worse tortured. Justice, they wail for — mercy? Each prostrate body I hold my arms out for is a cross my son is nailed to.

The Devil’s tour of hell did not include a factory line where molten lead spilled into mouths held wide, no electric drill spiraling screws into hands and feet, nor giant pliers to lower you into simmering vats. Instead, a circle of light opened on your stuffed armchair, whose chintz orchids did not boil and change, and the Devil adjusted your new spiked antennae almost delicately, with claws curled and lacquered black, before he spread his leather wings to leap into the acid-green sky. So your head became a tv hull, a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger sloppy at the mouth and swollen at the joints enacted your days in sinuous slow motion, your lines delivered with a mocking sneer. Sometimes the frame froze, reversed, began again: the red eyes of a friend you cursed, your girl child cowered behind the drapes, parents alive again and puzzled by this new form. That’s why you clawed your way back to this life.