Once, I was me.

Once, I was a human, tricked into being part of a false world order, shoulders hunched as I type type type into a void.

Once, I woke up and remembered a twilight space between forms where the blackness stared at me and laughed.

Once, I was a blade of grass, shivering in the wind.

Today, I woke up and saw that the world had been replaced with metal and glass and synthetics, and I'm still smearing mud onto stone walls; there's something pounding at the back of my head, a reminder that I'm supposed to do something, that there's something I forgot to do; but my fingers are smeared with blood now; they streak across the rock in red red red.

Travel

I can't wait until I get into the extremely structured and orderly environment of the airport.

ruttin'

It’s hot, with a side of muggy. She don’ like it. Always dreamed of bein’ in a place where there ain’ the humid side of things, maybe e’en someplace where there’s snow. So she up ‘n packed, tellin’ Paul he could stick it where the sun don’ shine. Bastard didn’t deserve no better nohow, not after she caught him ruttin’ with the neighbor’s dog. Weren’t natural, jus’ like all that water hoverin’ in the air. Time she was movin’ on.

The change didn’ happen overnight. It was real gradual-like. The bus with its nose pointed north like a compass, air conditionin’ just sure to dry out your throat, stoppin’ for a bit of grub ‘n a piss every few hours. It weren’t ‘til the third day she could feel the change in the air outside, where it weren’t pressin’ down on her lungs as if she were drownin’ in her own spit.

Sometimes she wondered if Paul e’en noticed that she weren’t around no more. When she’d sleep, bus barrelin’ through the night, her head all a-lollin’ off to the side, the air conditionin’ burnin’ dry acid up her nose, she’d see him again with that dog, goin’ at it like a viper, his eyes turned inward. But the dog weren’t there: she'd just see herself on all fours, a cringin’ look on her face, the same look as she’d seen on that pup. A look that said she’d be grateful for a whippin’ as long as it come from him; the faithful bitch, crouchin’ for whatever crumb of attention her master might be willin’ to parcel out.

Wakin’, she scrambles for another piece of clothin’ to keep her warm, tryin’ not to wake the snorin’ fat man next to her, her hands shakin’ in the frozen cold. It were just the air conditionin’, she tol’ herself. She weren’t no man’s bitch.

Aubergine

When Mimi's mother finally died, Mimi immediately decided to squander her entire inheritance on a trip to Paris with her daughter, Rosemary. In their moldy-wallpapered apartment in Bedstuy, Mimi pulled out the only suitcase she owned and told her daughter to start packing. Rosemary packed her blue dress with the white flowers, her green dress with the white pockets, her pink dress with the black stitching, a single black ribbon to tie back her long blond hair, and her sketch notebook; Mimi packed her stiletto-heel leather boots and a few packs of Marlboro menthols.

Mimi found the most extravagant item in the world on her first day in Paris: a fuchsia-colored plastic purse with the two golden Coco Chanel C's glued to its side. She wore it high on her left shoulder and used it to start conversations with the Frenchmen in bars. Mimi would then say to them things like Je veux ramone avec vous and Voulez-vous un turlute? Rosemary was jealous of her mother's skill with the French language, of the way her mother could make all the men in a bar turn and stare just by uttering a single phrase. During the conversations, Mimi would give her daughter some francs and tell her to go to the café down the street and wait for her mother to come get her. Instead of using the money for a croissant, Rosemary used the money to buy a new colored pencil every day. After buying a colored pencil, she would then go to the café and order un thé au lait avec sucre, s'il vous plaît, and sketch until her mother came back. Her mother often returned with her head hanging low, her makeup smeared, wobbling on too-high heels, purse strap dangling in her elbow, with no man's arm to hold on to, but with a few extra francs in her pocket.

It was an unusually overcast day in Paris the day Rosemary bought the colored pencil that was the color aubergine. She had sketched a purple tree, with blossoms like white pansies, their terrier-dog faces weeping red tears that flowed into the mouths of the blue-skinned babies crying beneath them (she had not yet gotten around to buying the pale peach pencil that was skin-toned). She was concentrating on getting the pansies to actually look like terriers' faces when le garçon came to her table. He handed her the check and told her that the café was closing. Startled, Rosemary realized that her mother had not come for her. It was three in the morning. As she gathered her sketches and pencils, she pouted for the sake of her absent mother and remembered all the other times Mimi had forgotten her somewhere. Walking quickly down the darkened streets, she kept her eyes forward and tried not to look at the homeless sleeping under piles of clothes in alleys and on street corners. She reached the hotel, a dark building with cracks in the stucco that stood above her menacingly, and went inside. There was no doorman or bellhop in the lobby, just the old woman with a twisted nose who nodded quickly at Rosemary as she walked past. Rosemary climbed the stairs to their hotel room at a run, skipping every other step. The red carpet that ran down all the hallways and stairwells was stained with a thousand mysterious stains, and Rosemary was proud to claim one stain as her own, a cup of tea she had spilled a few days before. She came upon their door quickly, turned the key in the lock, and opened it, expecting to see her mother crying on the bed, worrying over her daughter.

Instead, she saw something she could not place. It looked like a person's skin was poked in upon itself, the edges puckered, dark and endless, like seeing the pictures of her grandfather's hand where the bullet pierced it: a fleshy absence, a painful wound. She realized then that it was a man's hairy ass hole.

The man was kneeling on the bed, jerking his body forward backward forward backward violently, and though Rosemary could only see his hairy asshole and his dangling hairy balls and not his face, she knew that he was ugly. Her mother lay on the bed below this man, their “privates,” as her mother said, entwined like lover's hands clasped together in a theater. Rosemary heard her mother make sounds like a dying cat, watched her clutch at the man as if he, her tormenter, was the only thing she had left in the world. The man made deeper grunting sounds, like her father had on the toilet when Rosemary was younger and he had still lived with them. As she watched what she did not want to see, her mother slowly began to transform into a beast, a monster, a creature of extraordinary grace and of hideous beauty. Rosemary adored and feared and hated her mother, this beast. She backed out of the room, closed the door, and squatted beside it, her arms wrapped close against her chest, her stomach cold. It felt like hours before the door finally opened and the man walked out. He glanced at her once, but said nothing and left quickly. Rosemary smirked a little because she had been right: he was ugly. She stood up and walked back into the room.

Mimi watched herself in the mirror across the room with empty eyes, fixing her hair with one hand and holding a cigarette in the other. “I'm sorry I didn't come to the café, Rosie,” she said, her voice as empty of feeling as her eyes.

Though Rosemary hated herself for it, she forgave her mother then and there for everything. “It's okay, Mimi,” she said, remembering that her mother hated to be called a mother by any name. “But when are we going home?”

“A few more nights in Paris,” her mother said with a smile. “Some would give up everything for what we have right now.”

Thirty years later, Rosemary returned to Paris with her husband. The Paris trip was supposed to resurrect Rosemary and Paul's marriage, so they got a room with a view of the Tour Eiffel, and attempted to make love every night. The problem was that Paul had begun to remind her of the man with the hairy asshole, and she reminded herself of her mother. But Rosemary refused to put all the blame for the failed consummation on herself. As he aged, Paul was becoming ugly. At forty-eight, he had lost half his head of hair, most of it receding in the front, and a good portion of it thinning at the back. The rest of his body seemed to be growing even more hair: little black curls scattered between his nipples, fuzz sprouting from the finger segments above his knuckles, fur clustered around his navel, leading down to his hairy cock and balls, back around to his hairy asshole. His nose drooped, his ears stretched, and his cheeks sagged. Sex had become mere movement, with Rosemary closing her eyes and waiting for him to be finished. When he noticed, he would ask in his timid voice, “Are you okay?” He did not really want to know the answer. She would nod and smile in a soft way that gave him enough room to back away and pretend nothing had happened. They would lie side by side, not touching, breathing lightly. He would fall away into loud snores while she lay awake, hating his features that she had once treasured as uniquely “Paul.” She felt terrible about this. She wanted a normal marriage.

That night, while they were having sex, she imagined an ancient scene between lovers, male and female bodies entwined in perfect connectedness, like in the garden of eden. She imagined that what her mother did with men to make a living was sacred, not merely a carnal desire fulfilled, but the prophetic ideal union.

She felt something, then. Longing. She was not herself anymore, but was instead caught up in a recreation of something bigger than her. With her thighs, she urged Paul's hips to speed up in time with hers. She moaned. She could feel her belly button tingling, felt her body pulling him in. She clutched at his hairy back with her fingernails, painted the color of red wine. He finished before she was ready to be done, but she was so caught up some strange new feeling that she didn't care. They unstuck their skins and he collapsed beside her. They breathed as if they had just been running. He lay with his head on the pillow and his eyes closed.

Rosemary knew that she was no longer herself. She felt like she didn't have the right to be in her own body. She was exhilarated with the strangeness of it, the feeling of power it gave her. She never wanted to leave. But as she caught her breath, the feeling began to fade. She reverted back to hating the man lying beside her. Maybe she hated him even more than before. She no longer wanted the intense feeling of being taken out of herself. She waited for Paul to fall asleep, then slipped on a dress and wandered out the door.

She went to the small courtyard attached to the hotel and sat on one of the rusted benches. The large sycamore looked calm in the darkness. The shadowy gates around the edges of the garden looked menacing. The stray cats came over. They crashed into her legs with full force, stroking themselves in this way. She didn't pet them, even though they continued to demand it of her. Instead, she watched the leaves on the tree. She watched the leaves and imagined that they were each a little dog face staring back at her from the depths of the earth.

The Sidewalk

I was out for a walk yesterday evening around sunset, the world painted in orange and violet. Meandering down the sidewalk, I saw two people approaching me: a man and a woman. They were taking up the narrow sidewalk, embroiled in a conversation.

Perhaps I should have moved to the other side of the sidewalk, where I'd come face-to-face with the woman. She would have moved behind the man, giving way without thought to a fellow traveler. I could see it in her face, the unconscious prepping to move aside, to make way, to be pliant and moveable and a "team player" in the greater scheme of life.

I, too, had the impulse to move that way, or perhaps to move off the sidewalk altogether to make way. To be compliant. Malleable.

I had just put together a website for myself, just finished it that evening. Just published it, cringing with every press of the button, sure I shouldn't force myself or my work on the world like this. Everyone says that you need a professional-looking website in order for the world to take you seriously, to begin to treat you like a professional, but I felt guilty. Guilty of making way for myself instead of others.

I was still on a collision course with the couple walking toward me. Instead of moving to the other side of the sidewalk, across from the woman, I steeled myself and kept walking. Sure, I moved to the edge of the sidewalk, but I didn't move off it. The man barely glanced my way as he barreled toward me. I thought he'd move eventually, either behind or in front of the woman, but he didn't. He just kept moving forward: he is man, not compliant or malleable. The sidewalk is his domain -- the world is his domain -- and he's not going to move an inch.

As he got ever-closer, I had to quell my urge to just move off the sidewalk in to the grass. How many times have I moved out of the way, moved onto the grass? How many times have I stepped aside, how many times have I not stepped forward?

I held my ground. He just kept moving forward. When he passed me, he nearly pushed me off the sidewalk. He never did glance my direction. He never did notice that he was taking up the entire sidewalk. Instead, he pushed the woman next to him to the edge on her side, and pushed me to the edge on my side -- without even thinking about it, he felt his place was the center of attention. He felt he had the right to step forward.

I looked back at him, aghast. And then I realized that the person I was most aghast at was myself: it was because of me, and others like me, who constantly step aside, that men like that think it's ok to dismiss women on the sidewalk. It's so ingrained it's not even thought about. And my own habits are just as deeply ingrained: I feel guilty when I don't move out of other people's way; whenever I put myself and my work out in the public eye, I'm sure that my work should step aside.

But not anymore.

It is my right to walk on the sidewalk.

Story Three, 7 July

(This one we had to take either one of the previous two assignments and turn it into a play.)



------ 
La Boucherie

Scene opens with PALAIS, who stands behind her father, LORENZO. LORENZO holds a long, thick knife. They are in “Boucherie Rue Atélier,” the family butcher shop in the 20^th arrondissement of Paris. It is 1881.

LORENZO stands in front of a large chunk of meat. The meat rests solidly on the wooden cutting table which is behind the display of cured wares. The cutting table is stained deep brown from blood that will not come off.

The boucherie is covered in red and purple and blue. Sausages hang in front of the windows. A cured cow's head is placed among the other cured meats in wooden crates that have been risen to hand-level with wooden crates stacked below. Pig's ears, feet, snouts, and jerky strips are lined up in the display crates. As an attraction to get customers to come into the store, LORENZO has cured an entire piglet and dressed it up in a child's clothes. It stands in front of the door, one arm raised in the direction of the shop, beckoning.

LORENZO

It is time, Palais, for you to learn how to be a proper bouchère.

PALAIS

Papa, I told you before. I will cut meat, but I will not be a bouchère. I want to be a novelist.

LORENZO

Novelists! Novelists write lies! And besides, everybody knows novelists are all gypsies and sodomites.

PALAIS

Papa!

LORENZO

Eh, but it is true. You do not understand, you are young. Come! Stand beside me. Watch.

PALAIS stands at her father's left arm.

LORENZO (ct'd)

It is of the most importance to find the way the cow wants to be cut. You must listen when the meat speaks. This piece of meat, here, you see it? On the table?

PALAIS

Yes, papa.

LORENZO

I know this meat. I can hear it. As I cut--

PALAIS watched her father's wrist begin to move in twisting, up-and-down motions. It pierces the meat, and she hears the sound of the meat's resistance against the knife, a soft tear, like paper ripping. Her father's knife slides through easy and clean.

LORENZO (ct'd)

I hear this meat. It comes from the fields, it eats grass all day and shits out round pies that heat in the sun. The cow lies in the shade where flies buzz and it flicks them with its tail. Palais, you must remember the meat for what it was, and listen as it whispers to you how it must be cut. There are many ways to cut a cow, but a true boucher will know just by the whisper of the meat.

PALAIS

But papa, I have been cutting meat for years. I have never heard it whisper. Dead things do not talk.

LORENZO stops cutting and puts down his knife. LORENZO puts his left hand on her shoulder.

LORENZO

The meat will tell you if you will just listen. I know. I am the greatest boucher in all of Paris.

PALAIS

(wryly)

Yes papa, you have said.

LORENZO

And now, it is your turn.

LORENZO hands PALAIS a clean knife. There is still have a large chunk of the original slab of meat that has not been cut. PALAIS takes the knife and stares at the meat.

PALAIS

I can't, papa.

LORENZO

You can, my daughter. You must.

PALAIS

I will hear nothing.

LORENZO

No! Lies! You will hear. You know meat. You are no stranger to it. Tell me, Palais, tell me, how does it look?

PALAIS

Like the setting sun.

LORENZO

And how does it smell?

PALAIS

Like iron. Sweat.

LORENZO

What is its taste? Its sound?

PALAIS

It tastes of roasted hazelnuts. And the sound, like... like sucking up water.

LORENZO

And how does it feel?

PALAIS

Like flesh.

LORENZO

You know meat, Palais. The meat will speak to you, all you must do is listen, please, Palais, take the knife and slice the life so that we may hear it sing!

PALAIS, a determined look on her face, cuts into the meat. COW enters, a woman wearing thin white cloth over her naked body and a large black-and-white papier-mâché cow's head as a mask. COW stands and stares at LORENZO and PALAIS, still cutting, who in turn watch COW. Off-beat music, with drums and cow-sounds, begins.

PALAIS

(amazed)

I hear it, papa. I hear the meat, like a whispered ghost on a grassy hill with others black-and-white stinking hides, while the calves were all taken away, grass like life itself like the sun herself, with prying hands, milk that should have been for babes and gone away into buckets, human hands clutching, perverse, overgrown fetuses, sucking and slurping the white life, cycles that seemed to never end... until the milk ran dry, and they carried her away to hang upside-down, blade along the throat, watching the life spurt out in gushes of thick red juice...

PALAIS drops the knife and it clatters to the floor as COW exits. There is a long moment of silence. PALAIS begins to tremble.

PALAIS

(whispered)

I heard it.

PALAIS looks at her father.

PALAIS

You are not the best boucher in Paris! Only the cruelest, to know of such horrors and to continue anyway! The meat tells me what it has suffered, but I will never be great!

LORENZO is silent. He does not meet his daughter's eyes.

PALAIS

But now that I know, now that I have heard... what else is there for me to be but a bouchère?

LORENZO looks at her and PALAIS looks at him. As they stare at each other, the lights fade to black.

Story Two, 5 July

(Here, we were supposed to take the first assignment (set in Paris), and make it take place in New York. I did something a little different.)

-----

The Butchered

Before there was memory, there was instinct. You emerge, blink twice at the circle shining in the pale sky, so close you might lift your nose to the heavens and smell it. You have always known that it was really only the ground underneath you that was moving. Sunrise is your favorite time of day, sunrise makes the fields drip with water, and the wet feels cool on your legs, like your mother's tongue. You seek the tenderest patches of grass while the ground you stand on moves, tilts. The sun's angle shifts like it was blown by the wind. Straight above you, it sucks moisture from the grass and makes the blades warm with light. You seek shade under a crooked tree. The others join you so you can sweat together: black hides and black fur, nostrils flare, nostrils snort, hooves kick at dirt, tails flick at the biting flies, teeth clip grass and tongues twist to guide the clumps towards the back molars, bulging eyes wide, alert. You know them all, your herd. There's that one, with the twisted ear, and that one, with the white spot on his chest, or that one, who often smells of his own shit. Those ones over there have found better shade under another tree, so you follow slowly, along with the rest of the herd, playing sentinel to the grass along the way.

Time passes because that is the way it has been and will always be. Existence moves in one direction only. Your body grows because this is the logical course of things. The idea of nations and borders does not exist, so you do not know that you are in a place which some call Texas, on a wide spread of land, with a trailer parked on it. You have a hole in your ear, with a numbered piece of plastic strung through it; but 247 is as arbitrary as the clouds, and you are you regardless of how anyone else identifies you. The fences that cage you are arbitrary as well, and the only reason you don't stray past them is because they block your way. You know that it was not always like this, but for you there has never been anything else.

You do not dream of being anything else; you are always a cow. Sometimes, you dream of grass that tastes sweeter than any grass you've ever had, sometimes you see humans as giants above you, and sometimes you dream of the fences disappearing and fields that go on forever. You do not dream of having wings, of taking flight, of climbing trees, or of burrowing underground.

You sleep with the herd at night, their legs tucked under their black barrel bodies under the black sky with shining flecks of flight. The ground does not stop spinning when you sleep. Some days it is so hot you feel your mouth begin to foam and your tongue to swell, and the water in the trough is gone too quickly, so you find shade and everyone tries not to touch, waiting for the earth to spin out of reach of the some so that it will be cool again. Some days it is so cold you huddle with the herd for warmth and every breath comes in little smoky puffs like a morning fog over the fields. Some days there are blackbirds that come to peck at the grass grains. Some days it rains and your hot hide seems to hiss with release. Some days one of the herd lies down in the grass and doesn't get up so the humans have to come with their ropes and haul the carcass away.

One day that should have been like any other day, there are men with sticks who hit you until you walk through a narrow passageway, nose to tail with the herd, squished into darkness. You huddle together as if it were cold, but it is hot, hotter than ever before. You see nothing but empty black, smell fear in the sweat of those pressed up against you. You begin to wonder if you really are a cow or if you were instead born as a blade of grass and you are now in someone's belly. The others begin to low softly, but soon there is a roar louder than all the herd, and the earth is moving too fast and you are being jostled against those around you and you lose control of your senses. There is only hot, sickening fear that pulls at your insides and makes you feel like you're falling into the black that surrounds you.

When the world stops shaking and there is light, you follow the herd away from the endless, starless darkness. But this is not the field, this is another narrow passageway, the only path to follow. The scent of fear grows stronger, and the nervous moans pervade and echo in the tight space as you walk, each one of the herd with dignity, one hoof at a time, at their leisure, climbing the ramp. You begin to hear death-cries ahead, and you wonder what could be happening, because this has never happened before. Never so many dying all at once. The space is so small you can't turn around. Your nervousness urges you to move forward. Before you understand, the cow in front of you is flying through the air, and now you imagine that you all might have been birds, that being a cow was the dream. You, too, are forced into the air, with a pinch at your legs, and your head hangs. You see motions before your eyes but the world is moving strangely. A jolt, a sudden pain, worse than the biting flies, worse than the hot sun or the cold wind. You can't move, but you are conscious. A soft moan from deep in your throat, like a question. When they slice your throat, you do feel it, you see the red spurting in time with the throb of your body. You blink twice at the circle shining in the pale sky. As your memory fades and tells you that you are nothing but a cow, that cow is all you could have ever been, your instinct remains, reminding you that maybe you were a blackbird, a blade of grass, or even the earth itself.

Story One, 30 June

La Bouchère

Palais stood behind her father, who wielded a large knife with ease and used it to gesture with as he instructed her on how to properly be a butcher.

“It is important to find the way the cow wants to be cut,” he said, the knife one second pointing at the ceiling, the next dangling near her chest, and the next wiggling precariously close to her father's eye. “The meat will speak to you. Think, Palais, think. It comes from the fields. It eats grass all day, and it shits out round pies that heat in the sun and can be burned for fuel. It smells of animal. It gets soil stuck between its hooves. The cow, it sits in the hot sun, or lies in the shade, flies buzz, bite, it flicks them with its tail. Remember the meat for what it was, and listen as it whispers to you how it must be cut. There are many ways to cut a cow, but a true butcher will know just by the whisper of the meat.” He patted her shoulder with the hand that wasn't holding the knife. “You will see, my daughter, that it is also like being a woodcutter. The woodcutter must know the tree, must listen to what the tree is telling him, and must find the grain of the wood on which he may cut. The same is true in finding the grain of the meat. Try to cut meat the wrong way, and it collapses into mush under the pressure of your blade. Work with the meat's will, and not against it.”

Palais knew that this was insanity. Her father was convinced he was the greatest boucher in all of France. But simply from long-distance dating Paulo, a butcher's son in Cannes, she knew that there were better bouchers in better boucheries all over France.

Still, she tried her hardest to listen to him.

“Watch me, Palais, and see how it is done.”

She watched his wrist move in twisting, up-and-down, roundabout motions, and could almost feel the blade piercing the tender meat as if it was her own. There was the sound of the meat's resistance against the knife, like no sound at all, and the sharp cut-cut-cut, the sound of the knife on the wooden table. She thought it did sound like chopping wood, though she had never heard anyone chop wood before. She liked the way her father's knife was able to slide through tendrils of muscle and strings of fat so easily. She wondered if this was the way wild animals feel when they bite into their prey and their teeth sink through living tissue like it is soft cheese.

“Now, it is your turn.”

Palais had been cutting meat her entire life. No one, especially not her father, had ever asked her if she had wanted to become a butcher. She might have wanted to become a maid, or a florist, or even a writer, but no one had ever asked her what she wanted to be. She hoped, one day, to write a novel about being a boucher, but she would rather be anything than a boucher.

Now, with her father watching, she poised her wrist with her own large knife carefully over the fresh chunk of meat, and began the cut. She went slowly, remembering to watch carefully for the flaws in the muscle, to work with the way the rivers of tiny veins flowed.

As she was cutting the meat, Palais remembered when she had once brought a friend home from school, Yvette, to play with her in the back of the boucherie while they waited for her father to close the shop. Yvette always smelled like flowers because her mother was a fleuriste, and she carried dried flowers with perfume in the pockets of her clothes to make her smell even more of flowers. Palais had liked Yvette because Yvette had straight black hair and big eyes and smelled like flowers, and Palais imagined that she might be a doe in disguise as a young girl. At the boucherie, there was blood all over Palais' father, there was blood in buckets here after it had been drained from the animals, and there was red and purple and blue everywhere, the shop like a huge bruise crawling from underneath the skin to the surface. Yvette stepped into the back of the boucherie, where all the raw meets hung in the freezer waiting to be cut or cured, and her face turned very pale. Yvette then fainted, and did not talk to Palais again after that.

When Palais was a bébé, her father used to set her down on top of a coil of sausages. Palais would stare at him with her pale blue eyes and watch the red blood trickle down the blade of the knife and form puddles on the wooden table.

She knew meat, its sunset colors, its smell like iron and sweat, its touch soft and resistant, its sound like sucking up water, its taste like blood and roasted hazelnuts. Meat had surrounded her since birth, meat on its iron hooks in the dim lighting of the freezer, body masses cold and dead, hanging all in rows, bumping against a form and hearing the slight jingle of the metal chain, the sigh of the freezer door opening. She knew meat, in all its states, and as she cut-cut-cut the piece in front of her, twisting her blade carefully, she realized that she could hear the meat. It was whispering to her, in soft little sounds, of its life that had passed, of all the places it had not been, of the French countryside in which it had been raised with other cows. The whispered ghosts of the cow told of the calves who were all taken away, the females to be raised for milk, the males put in tiny boxes for weeks so that when they emerged, starving and tender-muscled, their legs wobbled and they could not walk and the men leading them to slaughter had to shock and beat them to get them up the ramp. How the cow had eaten grass every day, had more calves, had them taken away, and been milked by machines, again and again in the cycle that stopped when the cow could no longer birth calves safely, and did not give as much milk, and was carted away to be slaughtered, clip-clop hooves, deep and uneasy lowing, up the ramp, chains around the legs, hoisted in the air to be conveyed into electric water, barely stunned, then blade along the throat, and blood, blood, blood collected to be sold, and meat still alive watching the life spurt out of it in gushes of thick red juice.

When Palais was finished cutting the meat, she turned to her father.

“You are not the best boucher in France,” she said. “The meat tells me what it has suffered, but I will never be great.”

Her father nodded his head solemnly. “That is the curse of the boucher, my daughter.”

Palais stood in front of the cuts of meat she had made, knife slick with blood, and thought that maybe being a boucher really was like being a woodcutter. She looked down and heard the blood on her knife still humming with stories, still vibrant with the life it had once given, and knew that a boucher was the only thing she could be.

Class Exercise, 28 June

Prompt: Write a short short using only one-syllable words.


Leaf was the one in the room with no light, the one who did not see when they all saw. Leaf was the one left while they all went out to see the sun. Leaf could not tell you why she was in the room with no light, save for what her ma had once said to her: you were the one born with no eyes. The day of the change was dark, like it had been since the day she was born, but a sound was in the air; a soft note, not a true noise. Leaf went to where she thought she heard the note, and put out her hand. She felt a thing, cold, soft, and as her hand went to its edge, she knew: this was what they all saw, all the time. This was how they spent their days, at this thing, with their eyes back and forth, to trace what they saw, to lift their hearts.

Paris

I am part of the NYU Writers in Paris program, until the end of July, taking classes and reading and writing in English in Paris. Yes, I know.

I have figured out how to eat, sleep, and use the bathroom, but I am still learning how to speak. I have reverted back to my infantile state. In this foreign country, I am given a status less than a child's, and the foreign children love this; but they are not foreigners, really, because it is their country.

I got lost at the airport when I couldn't find the girls I was supposed to share a cab with. I got lost on the subway system, but luckily only had to backtrack once. I got lost on my way to the apartment building. I got lost this morning and wandered into the 20th arrondissement. I keep forgetting to eat, because that requires money, and so I am dizzy and hungry and confused most of the time. This might also have something to do with the jetlag that I have almost cured. Since I fell asleep on the plane thanks to Benadryl and Advil, I am pretty much already on Paris time. The tiredness comes from many things: the two hours I spent looking for the girls in my program in the airport; the two hours I spent looking at a map, finding the subway stop closest to my building, and lugging my luggage through the subway; the four hours I spent at a nice dinner paid for by the university not drinking wine and eating slowly so as not to upset my stomach; the two hours I spent wandering around the 20th, very lost, magically finding my way back. My concept of time has shifted, as well as my ability to perceive it.

I missed a few spots shaving and there is again that nagging feeling, "I am not a real woman," and then I look closer at the legs of the girls sitting next to me and there are tiny bits of hairs still on their legs too, and I think maybe all women everywhere have the same feeling of not being woman enough, which is Judith Butler in a very small, female-centric nutshell. All the boys here feel that way in the sense of being men, and they are correct also in that they will never achieve that. This is way so many heterosexual relationships don't last: the man and the woman have not questioned the inherent genderedness of our society, and therefore are still trapped in it. They go around thinking that they both need to be some sort of perfect versions of a man and a woman. They also believe in effortless relationships that they float through because of some mysterious element called love that other people could never have experienced. If they had experienced it, they would have just pushed through all the snags in the relationship. Ah, but a relationship is literally about tying the knot, about creating maps for the snags so that each time you create them you will have less trouble creating them again.

I think it takes a long time to starve as long as you are drinking water, and since I am eating a little every day I know that it is impossible that I will die. So far, this thought carries me through the days of not eating much. The cheap crèpes and paninis don't sit right with my stomach, the cafés are too expensive, and my stove doesn't work. Also, there is no hummus in France, apparently. The supermarkets are just like in Rome: small and full of nothing. At least in France the selection of cheeses is very large. Here in Paris, there is not a market in every neighborhood, so the supermarkets must carry more. I broke my 50 euro bill with all my groceries--at least it wasn't a 100.

I am still wondering: why did I have to come to Paris to be inspired? Because I didn't. I have a great idea still floating around my mind from being in the states. Everything inspires me. This city, it's like all other cities. I didn't need to leave New York to become inspired.

But, I remind myself that there are differences. And those minute differences will be what I will write about and how it will be a particularly Parisian story. Something that could not have taken place anywhere else, that is what I want to write. I am also praying that my laptop doesn't go dead while I'm here, after spilling some water in the keys and putting it upside-down in front of a fan for half an hour.

There are people outside playing loud music, the birds are loud, the voices are loud French from the upstairs windows, and everything is foreign. But the streets are just like Rome, the signs, the stop lights, the cars and motorbikes. And I have everything here to last me the month (I am hoping to do laundry only once).

That is almos everything, besides the chatty girls in the graveyard and Oscar Wilde's funny grave.

Also, Frenchmen think everything is very funny, but they are always wrong.

Kayaking trip, etc.

So I just finished reading "Ammonite" by Nicola Griffith (as recommended by Hannah, of course), and my reality is still cloudy with dream-influences from that book. So here's the dirt on my cloudy reality. My memory being bad, and my problem with the blending of reality and fiction, means that you shouldn't really take me up on this as reality as how you might witness the same events.

The kayaking trip. The waves were gentle swells and the sky was breaking into robin's egg instead of royal blue. The sand was already warm, the water felt like stepping into wet air, and the beach was swarming with tourists before noon. The slim, half-moon, banana kayak bobbed in the water like the crab trap floater-buoys, or the soft-haired head of a drowned young boy. Soaring along the crests of the waves, sliding down again or falling and careening off their edges to create an explosion of sea-water along the bow and back out to sea through the scupper holes. Reaching the middle of the sandbar, we steadied the boat as best we could. I jumped with one knee up, keeping low, turned and slid the rest of the way into my seat in the front. I grabbed both paddles as Hannah jumped and landed on her stomach and clambered her way into the back seat. I handed her a paddle. Logo upright on the left is how you know it's situated correctly in your two hands. The waves coming at us from the front, the beach behind us--cluttered with tourists like so many pieces of trash on the streets of New York--we both set a pace. Using shoulders and arms and core, I dipped one blade kind of sideways and pushed back, then the next, trying not to lean, only to bend, to keep a steady rhythm in time with the waves and the earth beneath the toss of saline water.

We did see birds. Egrets, with their fuzzy white heads, standing still among the reeds, dipping their curved necks, black beetle eyes closed, into the shallow water and through to the sand to search for tiny creatures to crunch in its slim beak; grey herons with their salmon-pink necks and bluish feathers standing among the mangrove trees looking weary; sand-pipers making shrill sounds I'd never heard come from them before, in doubles leading us away from nests, the black strips on the bottoms of their wings revealed as they circled with panicked calls; an osprey, concentratedly surveying the water, swooping at the sight of a fish, and swerving back up after realizing that it was only a glittering shell lying still and dead at the bottom of the shallow inlet; a few other species we didn't recognize, gull and sand-piper and skimmer variants in the shallows all together. The bird preserve on the other side of shell island.

Sometime, we will once again paddle to Fort de Soto, and break at one of their campsites for the day to eat lunch and replenish our water supplies. But the birds were enough for this trip. My arms and shoulders and even my legs have been aching and spasming and cramping for these days after the trip, my justification for the skip-days. But tomorrow, maybe, we'll head out again.

Today, we ventured out to the water a half-hour before sunset. The water was darker then, the waves blown sideways. The moon, gibbous, shining bright even in the pale blue setting sky-light, and I thought maybe it was pulling the current sideways, tricking it into going the opposite way of the waves, which the wind blew towards shore. The sand and the air were cooler than the water, and the sun glowed nuclear-like as it moved towards the horizon. We danced and twisted in the ocean like children, like sand-beasts re-learning how to live in the water out of which their ancestors emerged, until the sun sank slow beneath the sea and the sky turned dark. It was shiver weather on the way home, with high wind and a chill breeze.

Inside the house, the branches scraping like fingernails against the window panes convinced me that there was someone in the dark, a shape of black, an emptiness, watching me, waiting to suck me into the void. Music is the cure for that emptiness. We deny death by drowning it with sound, but it is coming for us all. Someday. But in the meantime, we will dance in the sun and the moon and listen to music and bake cookies and wait.

...skip day...

Some days exist and some don't. Or, at least, in my random reality that how I think of things. There's the days that exist and the days that are "skipped" -- and that's the beauty of our time here in florida.

Two days ago we took the trolley to the grocery store. After our discovery of the crack-laced ice cream at the ice cream store, we finally decided to do something about it: namely, buy some ice cream at the Publix. We walked in with the plan of buying a thing of ice, and putting the ice cream together with the ice so that we could get it home without it melting to ooky ice cream dribble. But we did a once-over of the dollar store, and found a little disposable-type cooler for a mere buck -- perfect! Emi was able to fit the entire cooler into her backpack, and we put two half-gallons of ice cream (mint chocolate chip for Emi, chocolate-chip cookie dough for me) plus two pounds of fish into that thing, and got everything back safely. And, the best discovery was that, since we both have student ID's, we don't have to pay as much money for the trolley! Quite the day all in all.

Then, yesterday, we were supposed to go kayaking again, but I convinced Emi that I needed to not kayak but instead do Shakespeare-related work (silly work), and that then we'd do a longer kayaking trip on a different day. Good plan, huh? I got some work done, but we spend half the day playing silly video games and being silly in general. And we scooped our own ice cream cones and wandered to the beach for sunset.

And then, today, Emi set her alarm for the much-too-early time of 8am, and we scurried through our morning (I'm being sarcastic here) and put the kayak in the water shortly before 10. We took a leisurely trip south through the islands, and then came back on the gulf side of Shell Island. It was amazing: we saw a ton of amazing birds, and had 12- to 18-inch fish jumping all around us half the trip. We got back around 2pm, sunburned and happy. And I have yet to do any work whatsoever. Oy.

It feels like the last many days have flown by without doing anything "useful." Which, in some reality, I'm sure that a day without producing anything useful is a "wasted" day -- a skip day. I'm not sure which one of our days was a "skip day" -- perhaps all of them? But I can say for sure that I plan on skipping days as often as possible.

there's crack in the ice cream!

So there's this ice cream store on the corner of 8th street in lovely Pass-a-Grille. We love the ice cream store. Why? Because they have ice cream. Like, duh.

We started our evening walk tonight much too early -- nearly an hour before sunset -- because we were both dreaming of eating ice cream and watching the sun set. Because it's what we like to do. There's a beautiful symmetry to it, somehow. Peaceful, despite the hordes of other people out doing the exact same thing at exactly the same time.

Tonight, as we approach the ice cream store we see a horrific sight: a fire truck and an ambulance sitting out front. Talk about a scary sight! I mean, what if all the ice cream was on fire, melting to icky ice cream mush? Tragic, that's what it'd be.

Luckily, the ice cream store was fine, and the ice cream was unmelted. Whew! Just an elderly woman rushed to the hospital, nothing to worry our little heads over.

We walked out to the wall where there are a bunch of seats and sat down with our ice creams. Then along came an old woman with two white puff-ball dogs, and a little kid that didn't want to sit next to us. It was all quite funny that, when his uncle said, "let's sit here" the kid ran past us at high speed yelling, "nooooooooooooo!" until the kid's dad walked by carrying all the kid's toys from their day at the beach. I nodded hello and smiled, and that jerk gave us a look...good thing it's florida, because otherwise we'd have frozen, literally, with that cold glare. He went on to join his son at a different bench further away, and we decided it would probably be best to move on to a different place on the beach -- didn't want to suffer permanent frostbite damage or anything.

We walked quite a ways along the beach -- did I mention that we went out to watch the sunset much too early? And, probably because of that jerk, we noticed the disgusted (and a few disgusting, mostly from icky-gross-men) looks of so many of the people we passed.

So we got back home and sat down, not sure if the beauty of the deeply-red sunset, the sea-foam that looked purple in the sky's reflection, and the skimming sea-bird were worth the looks. On the couch, Emi says, "Is it bad if I want more ice cream?" And that's it -- it's for sure. They're lacing the ice cream with something addictive at that crazy ice cream store. Probably crack. Probably that's why that lady had to get taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

After the overall sunset-beach-walking experience, Emi decided that we should never time our sunset-watching so poorly: from now on we'll have to wait at home until right before the sunset, run out to watch it, then run back.

But don't worry, we won't neglect the ice cream.

Water water everywhere

Monday morning dawned cloudy and dark. I wasn't there to see it, but Emi woke up...and bugged me to get up. No way, I said, as I pulled the blankets over my head. At 7am, she walks back in the bedroom and announces that the Seahorse won't open until 8pm. I think I muttered something evil into my pillow and closed my eyes tight. Emi flopped down into bed to wait out the next hour...and promptly fell back to sleep.

As we both slept, the thunderstorm came to a head: thunder and lightning and sheets upon sheets of rain. I dreamt I was in the middle of the ocean, rocking back and forth peacefully, watching the lightning peacefully strike around me...Emi apparently dreamed she was drowning. Go figure.

We woke up finally about 8:30, after the thunder finally rumbled into the distance, and headed to the Seahorse. And, less than half-way there, the downpour started again. So we ran, me faster than you'd expect a fat girl to run, Emi leaping over puddles in her flip-flops. We sat in the diner and drank bad coffee and waited for the storm to pass...but it didn't. It just kept raining. It'd slack off for a few minutes, then pick up stronger than ever. Finally, Emi couldn't sit still for even a second longer, and we decided to run for it...again. By this point, all of the storm drains were clogged, and puddles had formed that came up to my ankle -- as I quickly discovered. By the time we ran through the front door, we were both soaked.

So we waited. No milk or eggs or cheese in the house, and it's storming too hard to go to the grocery store.

Then, almost magically, it began to clear up. We headed to the trolley stop, and before you know it there we were at the Publix. Emi bought two dresses, and we bought a ton of groceries...at least, it felt like a ton as we lugged them all to the trolley stop just in time to miss a trolley. So we sat in the uber-humid air with our milk getting warm, slapping ants off our feet and chatting with a local as we waited for a half-hour for the next one.

After all the rain in the morning, you'd think we would have had enough of water...but no way. Absolutely not! Never enough! Time to go swimming.

Which was beautiful, of course. Lots of waves still from the storm, and stormclouds still in the east, but that made it all the more beautiful.

And then this morning we went kayaking. After a bagel and coffee, we headed out to the gulf and paddled down to the Don and back. Lots of waves still, but nothing we couldn't handle. Don't we sound tough? There was lots of seaweed loose in the waves, probably brought up from the storm. We also saw a dolphin, but it didn't come close enough to play with us.

It was only 11am, but I was starving, and practically fell over myself to make a tuna sandwich and subsequently inhale it. Then, this afternoon, we went swimming again.

There are more thunderstorms in the forecast, which means more rain, the big-dropped type rain where the sky dumps the ocean on the land.

I'm looking forward to it.

Gaga

Telephone

Early thoughts

Dark morning, no sunrise in sight. I sat on cool stone tiles, wet from the remnants of the threatening storm, dotted with dampening pearls. Dragonfly poised so still on the edge of a frangipani leaf.

...and the Seahorse doesn't open until 8am, so why am I wide awake and hungry?

New life

I wanted to add the smaller bits of today, and the gardening that I enjoyed while Hannah was napping...

We were starving after we finally got off the bloody Supershuttle, and went in search of noms somewhere on the beach... riding the trolley to Publix to find food was not an option. First, we tried the ever-so-lovable Seaside, but I'd forgotten the evil name change (Paradise Grill WTF?), new management, and price hike ($7 for an effing sandwhich? This is not Manhattan, people). We ordered, and paid, and waited. They were out of root beer, so of course, I got coke. The coke that came had a strand of the cashier girl's long, orange hair in it. I picked it out and me and Hannah just looked at each other. Then there came the announcement that they didn't have garden burgers. So there we were, baking in the hot sun, starving half to death, and sleep-deprived, and they're out of garden burgers. Basically, Hannah went into bitch-them-out mode and demanded our money back. And boy did we get it back. Then we took our business elsewhere. And by elsewhere, I mean the Hurricane. I ordered a grilled salmon sandwich with fries and a root beer. Let me say: BEST MEAL OF MY LIFE. If only because I was starving. I still have a small piece of leftovers in the fridge that I'm eating for lunch tomorrow. Oh, the good life

I gardened while Hannah napped. This involved standing under the broad expanse of stormy sky, watching the gathering clouds twist and darken, as I got out tools. I swept the sidewalk of the dead blooms, trimmed multiple plants that were in the way, and began to process of taking out my giant agave plant that just died in the freeze. Fire ants have moved into his corpse, and so I just hacked off a few of the leaves looking for any babies that he had sheltered. I found two babies, and a ton of little spores from the giant offspring shoot he sent out just before he died. I'm gonna dig him the rest of the way out and re-plant the babies tomorrow. Hopefully, after shopping, we'll go swimming. I can't wait to get in the water.

Breakfast at the Seahorse tomorrow. Whatever shall we do with leisure time in sunny Florida where there are supposed to be random thunderstorms, blazing sun, and 80 degree weather all week?

All about a Cab

So it started today with a cab. Or, rather, not a cab -- I ordered it last night, but at 7:30 this morning...no cab. There Emi and I sit, two HUGE bags packed for Florida (and Paris, in Emi's case), two packed-to-the-gills backpacks, and a loudly-meowing cat in a tiny carrier. And no stinkin' cab. I call, but they don't take calls. So I e-mail them, knowing it's useless. Emi starts to freak (I was too, but I was working pretty hard to hide it), and so she calls another service: they say it'll take 45 minutes just for them to get to us and it'll cost $65. WHAT?!? Since she has good common sense, Emi politely told them to go to hell. And we head out, with all our crap, to lug everything up the many stairs to the train station. We get five steps...and we see a black car with a car service logo: it's our cab! It's finally our missing cab! The poor guy lifts my 77lb bag into the trunk (along with everything else), we hop into the back, and Ginger serenades us with tortured meows the entire way to JFK airport.

Life is wonderful. We get to the airport...and then they weigh our bags. And, yup, I'm at 77lbs. Emi's kind enough to let me load a few pounds of books into her bag, and we head over to the dreaded security line...with Ginger. At this point, I'm freaking -- last time I went through security with my cat, it was an ordeal. And that was Portland Oregon...nothing like the chaos of JFK. Of course I shouldn't have worried: Emi calmly pulls Ginger out of the carrier (Ginger was far from calm -- she tried to take the carrier bottom with her by force), and waltzes through security as if it's a walk in the damn park.

Through a late cab and security with a pet in tow, we got to our gate....TWO HOURS EARLY. Must be time for hot chocolate and coffee. :)

The flight itself was uneventful (thank goodness!). Not even any jokes from the cockpit. Emi did eat blue potato chips, and since when are blue potato chips the norm? I'm from the dark ages, I swear.

We grabbed a Super Shuttle (which Emi had the foresight to reserve), and then we got the grand tour of Saint Petersburg: never have I seen such a combination of golf courses, run-down single-level homes, random jungle moments, and gated communities. We were the last to get dropped off. I think probably because the driver wanted to take his lunch break here. We saw the van parked near the beach when we went to go find food...so it wasn't just my crazy imagination. Really. I swear. Emi thinks all Super Shuttles look alike, but clearly she didn't see the gleam of anticipation in the eye of the driver at going to Pass-a-Grille.

Then, to kick it all off, I get a call at 6:39pm tonight...from the cab company, asking if I ordered a cab for 6:30. What? No, I say -- I ordered a cab for 7:30 THIS MORNING. Poor guy sounded a little confused and hung up. Less than a minute later I get another call, this one probably from his supervisor. I got a little snippy, and he sounded appropriately apologetic.

So how did we get a cab to the airport this morning? Still figuring that one out...talk about some seriously good luck, despite how it felt in the moment.

First Entry?

So we started this blog on a whim when I said, "Let's start a blog!" and Hannah replied, "Okay, sure."

We're not really sure what's going to happen here. Sometimes we'll post on the things that happen in our daily lives, sometimes big events, sometimes nonsense... funny stuff, sad stuff, boring stuff, etc. And we'll start during our summer trip to Florida, and end who knows where.

:)

Much love to you all,

Emi+Hannah