Terese Svoboda

You don’t need a machine to do that. A plastic bag will do. But he built it, his tools cast about in the unit while he got up his nerve to use it. Nothing more was stored there. A poured cement floor, a triple-locked door after door after door down a corridor reeking with the odor of everything over. In heretofore phrases, he left a note outlining his Help! in argot so wrought it was hopeless to ferret out his intent, meant or not. A ball-peen hammer was all she had. The shards cut her. What else had he hid? At least, she cried, he’d thought ahead. He drove home instead.

A sudden not-breeze fills the air. Two men dressed in corduroy approach, one pulling a boat. A boat of agony. Heigh-ho. Greeting. Greeting. Fleeting smile, both. The word smile left on the faces of the fourth wall. How to read that? The optic nerve gets it up. What has been done weighs the heigh. The smarter of the men has a dollar hanging from a pocket. Acquisitive or generous? Balance implies a man out of sight line removing his shoes. Why a man? is the question. The philosopher in the second row wants to punch the usher. Such restraint stupefies the audience into paradoxical sleep. They worry but their eyeballs still roll. And if the heavens help with a hole in the roof above the lights: drip, drip, the two men look to the exit, shamed, unwilling to follow one or the other without a speech. Let us bury Caesar. I hope we find some sand.

The exhausted dream I live in is scattered with teeth, the little tombstones of Freud that, plowed under, grow up warriors. My son buries his between pillow and case so no one can exchange them for foundling dollars— he wants to string them together, the miser. The rule is you lose a tooth for every child. The new baby grinds, gnashes, butts at the inexplicable ache inside— the dog that won’t shake off. Yet he gums prettily between howls. So smile! repeats his jack o'lanterned brother, as I do, falsely, as Death does.

Always fatal, Tay-Sachs disease affects only Eastern European children. For R.N.B. Over the waves of his chest, you watch the sun go up, again. How accidentally the birds cross it! How seemingly accidental. What random choices led you to him—your darling from the same steppes as Zhivago's, and your own. Then he's dressed, and you're almost. Leaning over, he pulls your slip up to put his hand over that fat part of you, where swims the swimmer. Enter Tay and Sachs, two men good at identifying a certain kind of certain death due to a certain mix of genes of children with certain parents. Today you go to determine your chances, rather, its chances, all euphemism unable to cover the chance red spot on the growing retina. After your doctor has his way, you can see on the screen the little swimmer trying to escape, holding the needle with both hands, just reflex. The verdict takes time to swell and ripen. The doctor offers his only balm, a curse: knowledge without antidote. All you know is that the immortals throw no bones, that you inherit nothing but genes and bravery, both faltering. You trot back to work and your new belly swirls with the fetal pig you took the eyes from, grade ten. To market, to market. You pull your goddamn shrinking coat around you. Nothing like the stir of life that has no chance. You shrug. It’s only the size of your finger, you don’t care— But knowing at the end of ten hours’ pitched screaming, your insides reversing, you get nothing— What goes where with death? You know all about life. You majored in biology, pirouetted through the wedding night. Does it make sounds yet? Choose happiness but accept the truth: the child might die, you tell your husband. Suffer and die. In the three-week wait you type and each hammer moves the days along. Waiting, every word from everyone hurts, every Good day, careless or concerned, every word. The only sympathy you want is the same cruelty shared, all else grates. Inside, it spins—in fear? What you must swallow is the sugar cube of your continuing, the inescapable desire to pee that stirs you mornings, hours before dawn. But if, at the end of these weeks of waiting, the white-masked priests come back bearing no news, which is their best, you will have brushed off death, rimed him bright and acceptable and seen it slant. Either way. That is, what happens doesn’t matter. You eat. You lie down. The sun shrinks. The daily din you’re thankful for rescinds its paper currency that nothing backs up. Your husband puts on a pot to boil, and another. He can’t feel it inside, though he’s eaten the same sour apple, bearing half the genes, those underclothes, the bra, the brief of the body. You are dumb before his helplessness. The cord to belly to cord will not be broken, ripped untimely as it may be. Mama has happened and the rocking horse of your heart heaves on.

The jay streaks through the lilacs in color clash. I note down: Invent outdoor birdswing so birds drunk on berries fall off in plaid in front of my window. I file it.  After all, the pussy willow’s barely tufted— I have time. At the drain, lifting its feet, a Modigliani bird—another invention? The brook agrees so brookishly, gulping at runoff like a bear in spring, like my husband. He didn’t trust my patents: the squirrel-free gutter chain the collapsing arthritic’s cane a lever for pulling old stumps in heavy rain. But every act harbors a corresponding gadget. It is that way with God: adjusting the acorn, locking the tree. With the womb, He was clearly Italianate, the bulbous lines, the excess. I often think of Him humming Beatles songs like me, over six Mason jars of pickling— my offspring? The dog laughs. You heard it: a choke, then black gums, a frothing irony. He’s all wet from rescuing bones from the brook. He drops them in, then goes in after. The brook’s rising with bones and I’m afraid the electricity will fail. Will the dog save me with his laughing? That’s what this invention’s for: the automatic rosebush waterer, hooked to the sun and this wheel, in perpetuity. Once a pirate working on my outboard told me, Betty, better sand trickling in the hourglass than a shifting dune. Even the Sudanese plant borders of aloe against the drifts. But I like the look of roses. Oh, that’s the husband at the door, scratching. Nights his furry self stands naked before me, until the dog removes his stuffing. O bear! Only by opening the blinds do I see he’s bleeding. It’s him, not me, aching with overdue maternity. A simple drawerful of cobwebs kept for emergency does for him, self-sticking, then together we apprise the chimney, holding hands and chatting about the soot stains. That was in winter before he died, the deft air stealing all we were speaking. Yesterday a patent came for my speech retrieval unit, an unusual event, even for me, because the government usually can’t get past the drawings. And these were intricate: I had the duck by the neck, her feet in food coloring, each step inked in. It all made sense—listen to the ducks now. And just in time for the aspect— ghosts are aspects, aren’t they? Of all but speech I have memory, that one sense shy of mimicry. In the spring, now, in fact, I take the blackfly larvae off rocks in the rapids. On toast, pre-maggot, the very eggs of mortality, eating them I figure I can lure Death itself, a raccoon washing and washing in the dark, and from there, patent the trap. I’ll be rich if its works. Works, go the frogs,works, works.

You could hike over it, the you without a problem, its mountain viewed from the closet coats are found in, your constant Yes/No a hee-haw, a mule alert that’s pasture-perfect, a coronary at the last corner. Nobody’s framing you for the chintz- covered wall to cover the leak. Besides, you like leaks, you’re inside the view as if hibernating or crazy, you try not to erupt. Hypothesize the rest, the languor and freshet, the crags, the serrated parade. So — heights? What about the hairy stream, the pushed-up bushes saying Pet me? You got a problem with that? Cascade is what you call it a voice off the hanger, the blouse cast in a corner or animate.

She dances only in her necklace, scotch-lit surely. He touches his glasses. Nightie-less, dugs whipping, hair sprung, some music inside, out, wet tongue tip at her lip, no mere palsied shuffle, both bony feet lifted, elbows awful. Shakespeare’s banshee of wailing parts, a woman with hair, a woman with warts. He’s fixed to the floor. Dear Heloise: do other presumed-sane mothers do this— wait in the dark after the ball to strip for their sons at the end of the hall? A dream, insists his sister but his first wife knows better.

A stick, pared clean—no, a silver-topped bamboo-with-dagger, class doubling as club, the advantage of gravity lifted high overcoming the disadvantage of poking ahead. He demurs. Weakness either way. A man should crush opponents with a word. Naive, I muse, at your age. A cane replaces the sole’s sensors, bolsters them. Balance is a matter for the unbalanced, he says, all nuance, accusing me, Lear-lover, of too much. The earth is now close, I tell him. A sharp look. I’ll walk, he says, without.

Aphra Behn is not wearing all her clothes in some part of South America nobody knows. Everyone is polite, and not. Maybe she left off her petticoats, her skirts look limp. She coughs. Of course her bosom is bare. He's bats about her, also noble and misunderstood — that’s too much culture for you. His black skin is just skin, what with his wealth,frisson, and all those bearers and banners. The play is predominant, the manor- house-reach. What she makes of it — not of husbands, not even of the rights of humans richer-than- thou, the local gentry who scheme more than they breed — is insolence, not to bore us. What is real is real, she says, wearing what he wants with Damn the insects biting. His type tends to the florid—strange how everyone speaks well of him, then how chains become him — who says that? — and someone dies, someone like her father who fueled a nice plantation with witty wives and loneliness and slaves enough to drive the horses into pantaloons and full sleeves— or play. Aphra grins at us, in disrepute as always, sailing to England on a petticoat.