A Triptych

Danseur

I will never forget the day they disappeared, though of course they did not both disappear, no, him I discovered many days later weeping in a closet in an antechamber, and he pulled down his tights and inserted himself into my bottom and rubbed a hand in my hairs, of which I have many, but he never touched my penis which saddened me. Often I would wail for him, which was bad because he was supposed to have been disappeared, and he would get very angry with me for the wailing which he felt was loud and inappropriate and he would strike me and once I struck him in return and he cried, "Oh! Oh! It is as if I have been assaulted by my own food!" and he beat me savagely and stuffed me into the crawlspace with her and for days my skin pressed against places on her small body that split open like wet, malodorous sponge.


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Likely Being a Representative Excerpt from the Diary of Some Complete Stranger

October 15

What the fuck! So the fucking insurance company won't cover the cost of the emergency room visit, and I'm like, talking to the guy, and he's like, 'well, they keep submitting the claim electronically and we don't process them that way,' and I'm like, 'well, do you know you guys don't have your address on the insurance card?' and he's like, 'yes, ma'am, we only have a certain amount of space on the card,' and I'm like, 'MIGHT THAT BE WHY THEY KEEP SUBMITTING IT ELECTRONICALLY?'

Plus, "ma'am"? What is that? Cheeky, polite, cheeky, polite?

So I was thinking about that thing 'men want a woman to be a lady in public and a whore in the bedroom' and what I don't understand is, I mean, I'm cool with the whore part, so where's the lady part? It's like they can't keep both ideas in their heads. I mean, I want to be cherished, worshipped by slaves, etc., and fucked like a cave whore by Cro-Magnon man, or, hey, duo (duo! Cro-Magnon Duo! Can't…reach…newly…fashioned…spear…must…use…fire), or, or be a saucy tavern wench bent over the--

fuck, I just got chocolate on the page again.

October 16

I wonder if I'm gay.

October 25

Holy shit! I was reading this thing on synesthesia and it totally relates to my theory about the subconscious being the real, what, what, modality, shit, not modality, that looks weird now…modality, modality, whatever, the thing, where information is actually, actively being processed, not in the conscious brain at all--it's all backwards! Like, we think the brain is this great thing, so how come we can't understand it?

I wonder if I think about sex too much.

October 26

God, I had this incredible dream about lions mating--the part they love to show where they're fucking and he bites her on the shoulder and she snarls, and it always seems like this warning thing to the viewer, like, waving a "finger" at us, rape is natural, but I woke up and I was like, it isn't rape at all--she's into it! She's into it! I mean, they only mate when she's in heat, when she wants to! David Attenborough can bite me. Whooooaaa, there's an interesting subconscious correlation. Wow, I wish Dick Cavett narrated those things.

October 28

Parsley bothers me. I mean, what is it, some kind of potato-famine, grass-eating chic?

November 21

Man, I hate Donald Barthelme! Really, these guys standing on the edge of everything pointing out how stupid we all are, which I only say because he pointed out how stupid I am. I mean, it's a completely different thing when I'm in on it. But he's all like making fun of these pathetically hopeful, deadly serious playwrights and he's like, "And the play was weighted with the gravity of irretrievable time." Which I had totally been grooving on torturing myself with. He, apparently, was troubled by genuinely, what, bad things. Like Snow White.

Anyway, Nina came over--she's fucking gorgeous. I mean, she is just this incredible, physically elegant creature. I could totally put my mouth on her cheekbones. God, she's annoying, I don't know, talking, talking. Oh shit! I was like scrambling around to get the house cleaned up and I didn't have time to wash the pots and pans, so I put them in the shed, and when she gets here she's like, 'may I have a cup of tea?' Tea. Only if you take your shirt off. And I'm like sure, but I forgot all the fucking pots and pans were in the shed so I had to pull out the 12-quart Dutch oven to boil the water in, and she's like, 'You're not a tea drinker are you, Mary*?'

(*I'm pretty sure that's coincidental.)

January 7

I wish raspberries didn't have seeds.


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The Toad Sister

My heart beats too hard and too fast. So loudly and violently that the sound overwhelms my senses--I cover my ears, I press my hands against my sternum despite knowing the futility. My sister would have me lie down. She would arrange my hair into the shape of a sea fan and caress it and tell me the story of our mother.

Nim lived deep in the ocean--her eyes were iridescent and her hair was longer than yours. She had the body of a woman, but she was a sea being and thought and lived and pained in underwater ways. She decorated the mouth of her cave with a filigree of gorgonian coral, rich and deeply red, slept on a bed of silt and scallop shells, swam just to feel her gills flutter, to feel the water, its touch almost viscous, as it moved over her body. But she was alone.

Our house is a shack in a wood so humid that strange lichens and tall, translucent stalks of fungi grow in rapacious abundance. A fog stays low to the ground most of the time--the air is stultified and confused, it does not know what it is. It is air, but it is heavy and wet; it is amphibious. In the rare breezes, the vegetation moves, but it does not undulate, not in the way I imagine the sea grasses around my mother's cave.

She could swim to the darkest, iciest depths and capture bioluminescent creatures, creatures so deprived of light their bodies learned to invent it. She was not welcome at the surface, among any kind, but she sometimes yearned to breathe the air that was only partly her birthright. One day, swimming toward the sunlight, she saw a broken container, creatures like herself spilling out, some already deep in the water, sinking. She went to one and held it and its anguish at dying passed into her. The transference mystified her--as she absorbed the anguish and somehow replaced it with calm, she felt eggs inside her body perish. She went to others and the transference continued. Their anguish caused an absence where her eggs had been and the absence took up more and more space. Metastasizing.

Insects thrive here, reproducing in a steamy, orgiastic frenzy. Silverberries, sea grapes, climbing ivies, honey comb, thick clusters of hickories spilling their nutmeats on the dank, mossy ground. There is enough to subsist, if those were my needs. My sister would hold me, her skin so full and lush it looked as if it would give with a briny snap wherever I bit.

She clutched a small one and tried to bring it to her cave, but before she reached the cave, the small one's eardrums ruptured and ink, she said, poured out of it. I tried to explain that it was not ink, but she believed it was trying to escape her, even in death. As she swam back, she was aware that only three eggs remained, and though she had never hoped to use them, she had also never considered the implications of their absence. Sinking past her was a beautiful one, no pain in his face. He was relieved to die. She held him and her eggs survived, the transference reversed, and it was agony. She sliced open his stomach, more ink, he too was trying to escape her. She watched his entrails coil out like pale, somnolent snakes, then reached down inside his body, grabbed the source of his eggs and ingested them. Of his millions of eggs, a defective one reached one of her three and the larva disintegrated. I had seventeen years with her before she died having you. She was ready to die. She knew she had to give you up to the air.

My sister--I continue to call her that as she wished me to--is still here with me. Her body is. My heart beats terribly, no rest or quiet between beats, like the tolling of a great bell, each note connected by the thrumming filaments of reverberation. It throbs like the dark sister of an orgasm, relentlessly mocking my solitude.


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Mary Kelly has no sense of proportion and thrills to the consequences of bad judgment. She, accidentally, shuts various parts of her clothing in her own door several times a week. She can be reached at: pkelly@netsense.net.

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