Robyn Schiff

God knows how our neighbors manage to breathe. No one is allowed to touch me for infection is a hazard of mercy I will not transmit as Legion transcribed from the mouth of Error into his body and sent into a herd of swine who sent it to the sea who’s been trying to return to earth since creation and nearly succeeds every day. I just took my temperature. 98 degrees. I am better than healthy. I am cooling even as earth heats, even as it meets the sea further inland and negotiates distance from increasingly disadvantaged position. I am cooling because nothing touches me. Others may go to the petting zoo and country fair but don’t even tell me what they touch there. I’m taking my temperature again; my thermometer is digital and pink and its beep is my name being read from the book of life, which is available on Kindle and allows me to avoid the public library but contains peculiar punctuation errors and is transcribed by evangelists while they wait in line at gates you can’t see from here. 98.5. Still cooler than life. I have another glass of water, and feel you turning in me, my little book, flipping over and over, it’s time for bed little sow, little sow. The book of death is open on my bedside table and is called The Pregnancy Countdown

Everyone has a cousin Benjamin Bunny. Peter said a walk would do him good. The edge of the wood. Peter did not enjoy himself anymore. He never would again. The brooding lettuces in their falcon hoods. The coppice gate wound shut by weeds, the jaws of life trying to keep it closed tight but anyone can climb it. As a child I played on a gate in a neighborhood park that swung of itself and sounded like the distress call of a rabbit. I stood on the bottom slat and backed in and out of the air. I’ll never get out of here. The gate was pure folly, without fencing on either side, Greek tragedy staged around a doorway the imagination strains to enter. I was raised in an aisle seat with an eye line of an actor about to come through from behind it. Melodramatic onions grew wild. I cried and cried until someone said it’s okay to cry, it means the onions are fresh. Every dream begins with a threshold. Meat in the driveway where dogs tipped the garbage. Where’s your mouth? There is a whistle you can buy that makes the sound of a rabbit screaming hunters use to call whatever they want out of the thicket because everything they want wants rabbit for dinner. Move your hand along the shaft to change the call from jack to cotton- tail and back again. Once you see them nose out of the interior at your bidding what stops you from sounding every single day? All day? The shrill imagined rabbit’s canned terror. You can do it with a reed of grass. Cup your hands. Everything alive is listening. I knew a hunter who could do a spot-on fawn whose suffering would bring a doe into the open every time. He didn’t want a doe, though. He wanted a buck. Here’s what I can’t stand to acknowledge: when bucks hear the sound of the fawn my friend makes with his mouth they come, too, not in pity, but in lust, so badly they want the doe drawn by the yearning of a fawn in need of her. Everything is within range suddenly, and who am I to judge. He mounts her relief and spring comes. No. He takes a bullet. I was caught up in theatrics and forgot whose theater this is.

I remember a performance of Antigone in which she threw herself on the floor of the universe and picked up a piece of dust. Is that the particle? It startled me. Was it Scripted? Directed? Driven? I am a girl, Antigone. I have a sister. We love each other terribly. I am a woman of property. The milk of the footlights. The folds of the curtain. I remember a performance of Antigone. She stooped. There was a wild particle. It was glorified by my distance. I heard the hooves of the dust. The ticking of the script calibrating oblivion. I saw the particle hanging and Antigone needed something to do with her hands and she did it.

There’s blue, and then there’s blue. A number, not a hue, this blue is not the undertone of any one but there it is, primary. I held the bouquet in shock and cut the stems at a deadly angle. I opened the toxic sachet of flower food with my canine and rinsed my mouth. I used to wash my hands and daydream. I dreamed of myself and washed my hands of everything. Easy math. Now I can’t get their procedure at the florist off my mind. The white flowers arrived! They overnighted in a chemical bath and now they have a fake laugh that catches like a match that starts the kind of kitchen fire that is fanned by water. They won’t even look at me. Happy Anniversary.

There was a need to be weak and I met it. I appeared in the confusion between strength and surrender, as if out of nowhere, that’s the illusion. I was reared ruminating in a thicket of sorrow with a beautiful string of drool hanging out the side of my mouth like a loose phosphorescent tether. How will I know what to do, I wondered. No one does, my mother said. And then, as the drawing back of the ocean before a tsunami suddenly exposes outrageous fish on the seabed, gasping, a great inhalation placed me here panting on the sacred grass. I feel like a girl in heaven, but I am a beast in a clearing. I came to as the wind picked up and in the bay as the tide came in, what a blow to mankind, an animalcrude wind to war, toward war, untoward toward war took my breath away with it.