Today was the longest of long days. I experienced stress, crankiness, anger, sauciness, comfort, distraction, peace, self-acceptance, and then a lot more crankiness.
I have been at work, thinking about other work I need to get done outside of work. On my break I walked out on the pier and looked at the ocean just as it was starting to rain. I tried to concentrate on how heavy the ocean looked and how tiny it's sounds were, like bodies rolling over in a bathtub. I really wanted to feel something other than taut and wordless, and I did a little bit. I felt a great affection for the gray. I decided that I would put off responsibilities long enough to write something pretty and pointless.
I like this. I really did see a pink cake of vomit one day. I like these characters a lot, too. I want to see them do more, but I also like them just like this. I like how the story (or poem?) starts with him and moves to her like a gently shifting scale. I like how there's a balance between the relationships, but how they are also disconnected from each other. I wonder if it could read like it's all one person, in a wholly internalized world.
Well, enjoy today's little fruit of defiance.
The Promise of Life Without End
The vomit was bright pink and evenly round. It appeared dense, yet spongy, like a cake.
It was Christmas on a Sunday and, in his spirit of thrift and cheer, he combined the rituals of Sunday brunch and Christmas dinner. He felt mischievous and ate without remorse, like someone might eat a twenty dollar bill found on the sidewalk.
As he was driving to church, Emmanuel announced his coming like one solid butterfly in the stomach. Up came the brilliant baby, born onto the pavement just after he parked the car. He studied it: had it come out intact, or did it neatly congeal after hitting the ground?
He considered shutting his door and driving straight home, and then he did.
It seemed fitting that our humble Lord would choose this spot, outside the sanctuary, beside oil stains.
What had happened was so clean, so sudden. He felt lighter. It was an act his body had conceived alone; no one saw.
He didn't compare himself to Mary, or any of history's immaculate conceptions, but when he was driving away he thought about Miriam releasing her baby brother among the reeds.
Who knew what this Bundt cake--to which he was strangely and intimately related--might do?
He felt the peaceful grip of trust and put the question out of his mind.
The image of the vomit stayed, leaving his thoughts for a warm space in his chest.
He was not very old, not very young. Handsome, but with a helmet of black hair and a forehead that was perpetually wet. He shone like a seal.
He lived in an inherited home and occasionally rented out spare rooms, but only if he felt sure the inquiring tenant would demand little fridge space. A well-spaced fridge made him feel that life was not moving faster than he was. The sight of leftovers crowding an unopened pouch of broccoli made him gasp. It was like waking from a too-long nap.
He spent his whole life gasping. He gasped at every wilting leaf, falling hem and setting sun he ever saw.
Had his vomit been something other than self-contained--more liquid or oblong--he would have felt betrayed.
He phoned his ex-wife to say Merry Christmas.
He was fascinated by their calls, which happened once or twice a week and raised an emotion that he didn't understand.
It was an emotion that only showed it's back; a body in a white tunic he followed down the street.
He was attracted to it, imagining the face from the back of the head and the peeking corners of the jaw. It was sad--this person was always walking away--but it was beyond his control.
It was not like longing or desire or regret or mourning, just an evenly paced procession of one.
It was forgetting (impossible to recognize) made easier by his acceptance of the promise of life without end.
His ex-wife had not accepted this promise.
Her emotion was full-faced and constricting, not because she missed him, but because she kept track of her age and made a little tally on the calendar each time they talked.
The face of her emotion had wandering eyes and was always chewing. It was an ocean that pressed it's weight against her when she looked down at it.
She was small but stood with a very straight spine; a lovely woman with violet eyes, for the sake of which she wore gray.
She was clean in an effortless way, and warm to the core, except towards children. She was lovable, but he soon started gasping at her face in the mornings.
She developed a stone in her stomach, an irreducible mineral: the constant expectation of the end of her everything.
In this way they were essentially the same: the momentum of aging made them ill--she, with a stone inside, and he, with a loss of air outside.
She did not pick up the phone and he remembered that she would be at her mother's.
She took her mom to the Christmas service, relieved that they would have entertainment for an hour and a half.
She parked the car and walked around it to open the passenger door. She noticed the color first.
Since church, to her, was a cute and alien place--a land where people ate the world with delicate forks and knives, yet never digested a thing--she was not surprised by the pink tuffet beside the car. She saw her mom's foot positioned directly over it and didn't even think to warn her. It seemed as though it was meant for that very thing: cushioning a worn woman's heel on it's way to greet the savior.
Her mom moaned. The vomit had warmed and crusted in the sun and it absorbed her whole foot in its glutinous mass.
She stared at her mom's disappeared foot and smiled briefly, before the freshly released smell reached her.
She gasped and frightened herself, then laughed loudly. Her mom kept moaning, like an embarrassed child who wants hit someone.
Her mom hit her, with intention, on her arm. She looked around, not knowing what to do, half-expecting Christmas elves to come with mop and bucket.
After several trips to the bathroom, bearing armfuls of wet paper towels, she wrapped her mom's shoe in a plastic Subway bag and they drove home.
To fill the time that was supposed to be spent in church, they watched part of a movie with reindeer and a girl with a gap in her teeth.
The phone rang and she decided not to answer it, since speaking to him would only upset her mom.
Her mom was slowly recovering, nibbling on honeyed ham and cheddar cheese.
She thought about the stone in her stomach and whether it would fit between the girl's front teeth, whether she could give it to her and be happy.
