A/N: This is part one in a series of vignettes I'll be posting under the same title of "Aliens". They have nothing in common but a theme, which hopefully will be obvious eventually. I hope you enjoy this piece.
--
The LORD speaks.
The LORD speaks through all things, through these very atoms. He is in the sound of a snuffed candle, of a cooling house, of grass ticking to an upright position after being laid on. He is evident in a smile, in the ripple of a puddle, in a drop of blood on a thumbtop. His words are everywhere. He speaks to me through the Good Book, through Leah, my daughter. My little one. My only one. The LORD speaks to me. Mother and Father believed that He was a dead being. A fossil, an echo. That His soul had been trapped inside the Good Book, like a petal pressed between pages. He was a tired, old god to them. He was a tired, silent god. Extinct specie, residual spirit, breath on a mirror. Mother and Father died unhappy. They died deaf, blind, going to meet a maker who they knew not. Holy, holy LORD of hosts. To thee, to thou. I am thine, thou art mine. Now I lay me down to sleep, my soul to keep, upon a star, gentle lamb, bleeding lamb, found/lost/crying/supplicating lamb.
^
The dead grass along the trail leading to the top of Bailey Summit rusts and shudders in the dry, rubbed sunlight of the late afternoon. The stream running alongside the trail is cracked and warped, plates of mud curling up like tea-plates and the few white wild peablossoms edging the bank of the creek shudder and bow their heads, like children given to the church. Day moths group in couplets, sipping the shadows -- tears at the edges of eyes. The tree leaves have dried up prematurely – it is only halfway through august. They are not wearing proper hiking shoes. Mother wears cracking ballet flats and her twelve year old daughter, Leah, wears old converse all stars with bloated, frayed laces and broken soles. She doesn't complain though. They are on their sunday afternoon walk, after all. Two hours away from the grind and muffle of the city. From the blank walls of their apartment in the tenement slums of the city. The apartment whose wallpaper is leprous with water damage and cigarette smoke, whose plumbing is old and leaking, whose living room bares only the decoration of a crucified christ, with agonized upturned eyes and threads of blood leading all the way down his body and the paint on his nailed feet fading and chipping because Mother has kissed there so often.
Leah takes a deep breath as Mother calls for a break, swinging off the backpack with their picnic lunch. Here, the air is a little cleaner. A little less chemical. Her eyes don't burn, her ears ring a little from the silence. They will climb as far up Bailey Summit as possible until four oclock. She lives for these Sunday afternoon hikes. The cicadas buzz error, and locusts spit up and down the trail. Leah looks over at Mother. She is tired, and her smile is a righteous, persevering, quiet smile. Except, this time, it is sadder. She asks if they should keep going, if she's had enough rest. Leah nods. She licks her lips and tastes dust on her upper lip.
^
The songs and the prayers and the smells. It has always been about the smells. The smell of a bed that's been slept in for four days straight, the smell of incense at high mass, the smell of a baby's just washed skin pressed smooth up to the roughness of your own skin -- the puzzlebark of your skin. The smell of a fever. The smell of the Good Book on a rainy morning. Of a handful of pills. Of the night and not being able to sleep, to sleep, to sleep. The smell of the women's asylum, with its delicate inhabitants, with stitches under their bangs, purple bruises under their eyes, and a vacant look -- the look of a missing book on the nook of a shelf. Strange phylum of creatures. White, transparent creatures, brainstems hooking like pulled out beestings. Lamped eyes staring, their delicate hands crushed in their laps like crystal crushed underfoot at a wedding. The LORD was not there. Not with these living dead. Not with my etherized brothers and sisters of the day eternal. Of the incandescent bulb. Of the motionless games of chess and four-in-a-row. They took her away from me. Dear Leah, darling Leah. Suffering daughter, suffering daughter of God. And the LORD (HOLY!!HOLY!.!) gave her back to me. I am huge, I am small, and I am everywhere. He is everywhere. I am everywhere with Him, stretched thin across the universe, like a mother's patience. I am between His finger and Adam's in the basilica of St. Peter being prodded/chosen/given/selected/endowed. Darling Leah, don't you see? Don't you see what I see? A star, a star. Over Judea, over your head, over my dead body.
(please don't make me do this, LORD.)
^
It is during the late summer that all of the poppies are in bloom, a rash of red teacups along the southern slope of Bailey Summit. They tremble and flush, like children faking sick. They are at each others throats, jugulars, clustered platelets, scabbed over the hillside. The bees attach themselves to the preening, chapped poppies like kisses on a bottom lip. Leah moves among them, careful not to disturb the bees, hunting for the most perfect poppy. One with the straightest stem, and a perfect royal flush of petals and tiny pincushion of pollen at its center. She will take it home and it will brighten the house and then die a slow, agonized, public death. Killed by harsh, itchy overhead lights and the smell of cigarette smoke and by sleeplessness.
Mother is over by the log they always sit on to eat their lunch. Leah looks over at her among the poppies. She feels like one of them, skinny, red lipped, bleary eyed and frantic, frantic for a compliment, for attention, for quiet, for solitude. She doesn't answer to her mother at first, who yells for her to come eat lunch. She crouches perfectly still in the poppies and doesn't move. Doesn't breath, doesn't flinch at the bees. She soaks up the hot, dry sun. Her mother calls again; tells her it's time to eat lunch and rest a while. She scrambles to her feet and runs to the old, fallen log that that she and her mother eat their lunch at every sunday afternoon. The log with its generations of peaceful bull-ants and fungal stoops. She leaves behind the poppies like playmates on a summer evening.
Her mother asks, “What are you feeling like today? The peanut butter and banana, or the peanut butter and honey?”
“Banana, definitely. Please.” She always picks banana. Fresh fruit is hard to come by between them. Her mother always asks her the same question. She accepts the PB and banana sandwich from her mother, made on wheat bread, because Mother believes that white bread is all starch and chemicals. Plus, wheat is good for the body, the mind. And there is no mention of Wonderbread in the bible. Mother lives by the bible. She calls it the Good Book and has been teaching Leah how to read from it.
They eat their sandwiches and look over the broken mouthful of buildings in the city. The poppies are big and intense and repeating one after another like birth pangs. They hurt Leah's eyes a little. Mother doesn't eat her sandwich. She holds it in her hands, which tremble a little. Her hands have long, nail-bitten fingernails and her wrists are criss-crossed with old scars. Leah finishes her sandwich, looks up at her mother -- her broken, tight-jawed mother looking over the city, struggling on its back like an overturned insect. Mother sets down her sandwich and starts to cry. The bull-ants converge. Leah feeds her fingers through her mother's hand. These things are quite normal. This vacancy in her mother's eyes is normal, and so is the shaking and the clamminess of her hands. Leah is wondering if she put the pills in the backpack, but Mother turns to her.
“Lay down for me, will you baby?”
“Lay down?”
“Yes, right here, just on the log. Just for a minute. Just let me hold your head in my lap for a little.”
Her voice is quiet, slow, like drying ink.
“What's wrong, Mom?”
“Nothing, honey. Right here. Just lay right there. I just need to hold you.”
^
And Sarah begat Isaac in her old age. A healthy, baby boy, who she pressed to her old, rough skin as she lost hair and lost energy. She hoarded the laughs of her baby, her baby boy, like pennies. Pennies dropped, tingling on the ground, bouncing and dancing and spinning, spinning, toiling lilies of the field how they spin, how they growgrowgrow. And now her baby a growing boy! And now Abraham communes with the LORD and the LORD tests Abraham, father of nations, father whose seed is numerous as the sands of the ocean, saying, give to me a sacrifice. Give to me your baby, darling boy. O what words God speaks to me. What words in the dark -- give me a sacrifice. And an ellipsis of pills lined up in front of me on the kitchen table and dull, strutting purple migraines fluttering around me like capes. I am capsizing. I am rising. I am spread, spread. Can't barely hold a string of thoughts. My thoughts, they scatter, like windowsill ants at the slightest sign of intrusion. And in the dark, in the moon-gilled dark, I find the LORD, whispering in my ear. Warm, dark blue with a current of whispers. Giving me peace, giving me words to live on. Throw away the pills. Drop them down the sink. Live a pure life. Live a life of fevers/chills/hope/redemption.
I am the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Give me a sacrifice.
(o please o please o please, not leah. not my darling baby baby baby girl.)
But thy will, and not mine, O LORD, be done.
^
Mother smooths the hair out of Leah's eyes and settles her head in her lap and they are silent. Leah can feel the sun on her face, heavy, turning the insides of her eyelids red when she closes them. Mother hums. She hums a hymn that she used to sing to Leah in the dark when they both couldn't sleep in the tenement, which never slept itself. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.
“Keep your eyes closed, baby. Isn't this nice? Just feel the sun and let me hold you for a while. Ah! No talking. Just quiet. Just let the moment sink in. We'll get home in time, don't worry.”
Mother is still crying. Leah can feel her tenseness, her fluttering hands, not sure where to touch, where to land. Leah plays along. Her mother is happy when she plays along. Her mother stays when she plays along.
^
T'was Grace that taught...
my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear...
the hour I first believed.
O Abraham, did it feel like this? Did it feel so dark/empty/cold?
^
Mother pulls the kitchen knife out of the backpack. Plays with her daughter's earlobe. She can see her skinny clavicles through the thinness of her t-shirt. Her daughter's head seems too big for her malnourished, bony torso and limbs. The knife is very cold. Mother's eyes are very dry. Leah shifts. Mother looks to the sky and stifles a sob and asks why why why why. And her answer comes from the sound of the bees, cicadas and poppies, which sway, wobble, like just-born colts:
because
because
because.
^
The angel! Where is the angel appearing and showing me the ram? The ram to be sacrificed in the place of my child? This is a test, this is only a test! O Isaac, close your eyes. Don't see me like this. Please keep them closed. This is only a test. Don't worry. Don't worry. You are so small, Isaac. You have such old thoughts for one so young. Don't. Don't look at me like that. Don't look so calm and peaceful and trusting! Hate me! Open your eyes and run! Isaac, you fool! You childish fool! Stop me, somebody stop me and kill me and put this bitter cup from me!
Are you ready? Are you faithful?
Or are you weak/damned/impure/flammable, like the rest of the world?
