On a machine, a basement in Vancouver — a well oiled machine — the plain surface ahead; no shine, no nap, dull matte. Under scrutiny the flaws evident, unavoidable. A seam sewn how many times and here's the bitch of it. Every one inside out gone bad, gone wrong. She sucks back a cackle.
Pieces of cloth decorate the floor, post-modern hopscotch or trip hazard, take your pick. She has not picked up pen or paper of late and this awareness needles her. She does not own the machine that's replaced them. Her timing couldn't be worse: the offspring's dance recital might as well be yesterday. She examines the sewn pieces. All of them, one after another, relentlessly, flagrantly fucked. She's of a mind to find the neglected vacuum and suck up the evident failure. There, she would proclaim to the withering offspring — facing down the corps de ballet elders of identical gorgon glare — it's the void. Not my fault if the great chasm opens up at last and claims, thank god, only the gaudy bits.
Oh, Mom, the offspring cuts in, nobody gets your jokes. They're ...
What? Obscure? Erudite?
Kind of lame, mom. Sorry, she adds, offhand shrug notwithstanding.
Where did she come from, this junior planetarian without a stitch of irony? And why does she not own the machine that's replaced pen and paper for every writer who writes not a stitch. There are those who sew and those who knit and those who cook and those who wander naked on the moors, blasted heath and weathered stone be damned.
Oh yes, but that was long ago and far away, another galaxy. She was younger then, she had sisters, a brother, an adoring father. They lived together before television, before computers, before machines that razzed and hummed and retorted. They told each other stories. They laughed, they sang, they played and studied interchangeably. They wandered out on the moors in long, ungainly clothes, hair unspeakably neat, nothing and everything indistinguishable from the blasted heath. She put up stories sprung from weather alone, hardwired by the elements. Her sisters shrank from her thunder. You have to write about people, they insisted, you can't just thrash around with bones and mud and gables and stones. So to spite them she did. Banshee-voiced and sinewy, she wrote of souls possessed of the desolate landscape of longing, of cliffs and quarries and lightning.
So goes the fiction. She's heard it all before, endless playlist if she's feeling especially masochistic. Sometimes a tap dance, sometimes a slouch. She sings one to the offspring, who if she bothers to listen between episodes of the Simpsons, complains the notes sound flat, the tune weird not catchy like Rihanna or Britney Spears.
The longer she stares, the more she drifts. It's no use, there's no fix, no salvage, no workaround, no miracle save. She must be rip roaring Jack today, the whole nine yards and more if she's unlucky, and she is. Get back, she hums. Get back to where you once belonged. To where I was, when I was, what I was ... Can it be so hard to find the means, the technology, the mojo, the juice, the transport, the light saber to blast the goddamn stumbling block to kingdom come?
Hold onto the material. Don't let slip. Still time.
The moors...what a trip. The basement of a house she merely occupies, all warmth and comfort, no draughts, contagion, bloody coughs. No goddamn sickness unto death.
Rip the fabric. Still time. Stitch by stitch.
No comments:
Post a Comment