A spring cold was basic biology.
Annie had learned her freshman year in high school how viruses worked, what they looked like, how they attacked the body. She remembered being disappointed when the most delicate, alien looking viruses were specific only to bacteria, designed like lunar landing pods for organisms without the basic humanity of a nucleus. The other viruses seemed so run-of-the-mill, a bit anticlimactically average.
She remembered how they invaded the doomed territory of a cell. Skip-rope of dna unlooped. Cells dividing, splitting, lysing. Her molecules in riot. Against the plain-Jane influenza virus with her runny playground nose, knotted sinuses.
She knew how these things went.
She sneezed. Her only kleenex was wet, crumpled. She put it back in her pocket as she walked down the sidewalk.
It was May, and the cherry trees in Brooklyn were leaking petals – a muffled dismantling of the their genitalia. A little joyfully, Annie thought – relieved that that frantic part of their life was over. Annie was a bit envious of their cycles. Or, at least how quickly they were resolved. The blossoms were never stuck. They were never bored, never had life crises, or felt unfulfilled. They were in a constant state of shedding, growing, preening, flux.
And now this late spring Vesuvius of petals.
She wanted to step out of herself for a little bit, and blossom, and join them.
Be unafraid of bees for once.
Annie walked down Central. She was going nowhere in particular. It was a Saturday. She did not have to work on Saturday, unlike her husband Jay, who was employed by Schneider & Gillespie on 44th. Somehow, Annie thought that he probably wasn't admiring the little plows of spring petals outside his office.
She had met the receptionist before.
Things you just wouldn't forget: an earring, two wine-glasses, to change the bedsheets.
It was spring. It wasn't allergies this time. She was pretty sure that the landlady had given her this. It was okay. She was long due for sickness. She was getting it out of the way.
At breakfast, her husband had turned his face when she went to kiss him.
He said he didn't want to get sick, become contagious.
Make other people miserable.
Annie thought that what she liked most about the streets of New York and their springs were the fruit vendors. She liked to stop and look at the stacked pyramids of fruit, bright, displaced. The blood oranges, the native headdress of the pineapples, subversive presence of tomatoes, vegetable, not fruit. How the rot of one led to the rot of another.
She stopped at a fruit cart on the street corner.
The vendor ran his hands over the mangoes, which came from Fiji. They were bewildered on the street, and far from home. They peeked from behind his apron, like children on the first day of school. She talked to him for a while about the oranges, a little soft and bruised. About the late frost in Florida that year. How the price of oranges would probably go up more than fifty cents a pound. She thought about all those perished oranges in the sunny, frosty orchards of Florida, sunken like cheeks.
The flies they must attract.
She thought about buying some apples, and that made her think of Jay, and their first joint shopping venture after they were married. It was at the Granny Smiths. Arms around the waist, inhaling the nape of her neck. She would tuck her head to one side. He would comment on her veins, angles, triggers. How everything about her was so close to the surface of her skin. How he loved the way the muscles in her neck stood out. They breathed each other for a little while, standing by the mounds Granny Smith apples.
Human and fruitless.
She wanted desperately then for her husband to come up behind her now, there in the street and embrace her.
Instead, she bought oranges, preemptively. Thanked the vendor and kept walking. She couldn't stay around fruit for too long. Especially in the spring. With its flowers, closed sex. The morning breath of loose pollen.
*
Annie liked to sit alone in the coffee shops. Alone, but at a table where she could easily hear conversations. She was a hopeless eavesdropper. She liked to listen to strangers' conversations, draw conclusions about their lives, relationships, small secrets. Through this, there was a certain feeling of symbiosis, of connectedness. She liked to feel as if she was actually a part of New York. Somehow woven in. Somehow felt in presence by the cab driver on the street, the parking meter attendant, the homeless woman. Not known. But felt, acknowledged. Settled nicely, with a ring of dust around her place, if removed.
That Saturday, however, she sat at a table in the far corner of the Starbucks and read an old copy of The Sound and The Fury. She wasn't in the mood to listen. Maybe it was because she was sick. Maybe it was because she couldn't stop seeing children. How the rot of one blossom led to the rot of the other. The shop was warm, stuffy, like closeness before a kiss. She felt as though she hadn't seen Jay in ages. As if he was on the other side of the world. As far away as Japan, with its own fleets of cherry blossoms, instead of at work, a few blocks away, at a desk. Maybe he was in Japan. He was.
For all intents and purposes.
For weeks, she had been sending him small postcards:
touches, smiles, whispers.
With pictures of places they could be, ought to be.
She thought that she had known all along that this would happen. It was the twenty-first century after all, and everyone were searching for regressive patterns. Everyone was looking back, like Lot's wife, salt on her lips. Except the old curses were not holding true. Scientists studied spider silk, the wingspan of the albatross, saw great symbolism in the food chains. Annie knew that it was old-fashioned to view herself as separate from nature, to view her race as something superior. Non-animal.
But the kingdoms, after all, were Animalia, Plantae, Protista, Fungi, Monera.
There was no Kingdom Humana.
With their hair, mammary glands, egg sacks.
She looked outside, and watched May-swollen robins sing. She knew them for their polyandry. This was how things worked. A nest was only made of twigs and spit, a spool of twine, a hopeful tune.
A man approached the table and asked her about Faulkner. He was gray, held a briefcase and a coffee in his hands. Something Semitic in his facial structure, the tight precise clockwind of each of the curls of his hair. She said that she couldn't get through the first part of the book. He understood. The part from the point of view of the mentally retarded thirty-three year old? Had she read any Faulkner before?
This was her first.
He said he was interested that she hadn't started with As I Lay Dying and asked if he could sit.
“I'm contagious,” she said.
He smiled, and sat. He talked to her about the intimacy of contagiousness. Sex was one thing. There was an exchange, but a baby, the product, was an unrelated manifestation. The two lovers left without having physically altered the other. Now, did she know anything about viruses. A virus is an ever-changing organism. A virus will first change a cell's basic coding – unravel the DNA, weave in its own. This will lead to the production of more viruses. However, when the cell bursts open, the emerging viruses are different than the initial virus in that they contain some of the DNA from the original cell, personalized by the infected individual.
He smiled again and said that a virus passed on was like imbedding your DNA in another person. You became them. They became you. A molecular memento.
It was all very romantic and forward of her to be sneezing on him like that.
She asked him if used Kleenexes were a turn-on.
He asked if he could buy her another coffee.
*
The clouds outside her kitchen window were big and hammocked, like afternoon naps. Getting ready for dinner, Annie cut her thumb pretty badly while slicing a tomato with a new Wüsthof cook's knife, and clutched at it, as if it were a slackly foaming bottle of champagne. She could literally smell the blood. It pulsed redly like a told secret and dribbled down her hand, down her arm until it dripped off her elbow and onto the linoleum. Into satellite spatters. She swore and went dizzy and pulled a hand towel off the oven handle. Tried to remember where she kept the first aid kit. Wrapped her thumb.
Since she was a kid, she couldn't look at wounds like this. She avoided looking at her thumb. Hopped around a little. Hummed. She didn't know why she hummed and hopped. She felt the urge to suck the wound. Bite on it. Curse God.
The blood was bright.
She rummaged for gauze and bandaids under the bathroom sink. She wanted to call Jay at his office. She wanted him to tell her that he was going to drop everything and hurry over. Dress her wound. Make this an excuse to cradle her on the bathroom floor and kiss her, beginning at her thumb, and radiating upward.
Things to remember: do not stay out past three in the morning, wash lipstick from lapel, use a lint-roller to collect long singular strands of hair from jacket.
Instead, she felt the strong impulse to call the guy from the coffee shop.
She wondered what he would do. He would talk to her about the erotic nature of blood, about vampires, real vampires who knew their way around a woman and a crucifix. He would clean her wound with hydrogen peroxide. Wrap it very carefully in gauze. He would touch the freckles on her arm, trace them like small pacific islands, in their archipelagos, straits. What would he do next would he kiss her. Would he kiss her very softly. Would he not say anything about viruses, about doubts, apprehensions crippling sorrow discovery.
Just warm kisses. Starting at her thumb. Traveling up the soft skin of her upper arm.
She gritted her teeth and looked at the thumb, with a little nightcap of severed skin attatched by a hinge.
In the shop, she didn't know why she hadn't told him she was married.
Or why she had accepted his phone number.
No.
She knew exactly why.
It was spring. She had a cold. She was contagious.
She was tired of knowing, and not doing anything about it.
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,855 Reviews
Hey Kylan!
So… Granny Smiths, William Faulkner… yeah, you can tell I like this story.
This is boring. There's only so much of this kind of stuffing sentences you can take. This story hardly had any others, but for some reason lots of my reading experiences consist of text where I have come across with a sentence like "This is how I roll", "I know how this stuff works, yo" or, in this case, "She knew how these things went." When you think about it, it's so insignificant, it does no good for anyone, it works merely as a roadblock. Maybe I'm being pedantic again, but when you see something that you're not a big fan of to begin with frequently enough, it becomes just annoying.
The idea behind this sentence is a little unclear at first read. I've got it now, but I had to read it more than once. It would be easier to understand if you could hear it spoken, with the intonations, but you might want to rethink the phrasing if you want to have the emphasis where it should be.
The "to change" disturbs me… Maybe I can't read it the right way? To me, this would make more sense if it was "the bedsheet changing" or even "the changed bedsheets".
The "they" refers to Annie and the man, doesn't it? In that case, my ear would like to hear the little "in" after "could be". I don't know whether what you have there right now is grammatically incorrect, but it doesn't sound right to me.
No kidding. Another one. It actually made me laugh a little, just because of the energy I spent to bash that first one. Oh well.
Haha, I like the scene with her and the coffee man. It's great. And clever.
I don't really see what the "pretty badly" is doing there. Simply the fact that it's a new knife makes me think that it's very sharp, and therefore the cut is not your regular "let's put a Barbie band-aid on it" type. I don't know. It doesn't really even matter, though, does it.
On another note, there's something that you keep doing that I don't know whether you acknowledge, or whether it's more like a reflex. It's in parts like these:
You know what I mean? When you scratch the subject sentence after sentence like that. It usually creates a good effect, and it's something that's typical of you, so it's not a bad thing. Only when you suddenly use it so often, it starts to stand out more than it should. You know, it's how these things work.
I do see that it's mostly used in the latter part of the story, where it's probably partially meant to symbolise and demonstrate the somehow changed way of thinking of hers. Still, I would watch out for doing it too much if I were you.
Overall, though, I really liked this story, Kylan. It would be nice if I could express it by using words and allusions that I don't even know the existence of (yet), but not today. What I liked about this was that there was enough of everything, and not too much of anything, apart from a couple of insignificant-in-the-big-picture things that I've already pointed out. Some parts were slightly touching, even -- I couldn't help but think of Catcher in the Rye. Not that the stories have anything in common, but you know how much I relate to Holden Caulfield. I almost felt like some of it with Annie in this story.
So, here are some of my thoughts, thanks for the read again!
Dems
x
Hey Kylan -
So, a maddening piece, a wholly unsatisfying one - and that is meant in the best of all possible ways. That effective use of conflict upon unresolved conflict was what drove the piece, and not only did you mimic it stylistically - ever so slightly - but also structurally. In a word, I enjoyed it for its tension. And even more so for the totally unsatisfying ending that leaves us, ironically enough, sick of her being trapped in the situation, demanding action, reeling with thought and emotion.
There are too many themes and subthemes to name here, for sure. But I will, nevertheless. The words 'anticlimactically average' introduce to us the possibility that it's not a new idea, that it's such a common problem in society that it's almost average, almost accepted - but it is the very fact that you don't have us accept it that refutes this. 'Molecules in riot' - first introduction to the conflict, an emotional conflict made physical as well (and later externalised!). Her marital problems become her disease. 'Blossoms never stuck' and 'She was going nowhere' indicating that she's trapped in it. And then, this incredible yearning for the impossible - 'She wanted desperately for her husband...' and the juxtaposition of 'shop was warm, stuffy...' and 'hadn't seen Jay for ages' - it's like she's is suffocated by her sense of isolation - a paradox. 'Human and fruitless' - desire for fulfilment of any kind, not just by marriage; she doesn't even have a 'memento' of Jay in a child; and a hint at the possible cause for their problems as well. 'Rot of one led to rot of other' - like contagion, like infidelity of one leading to infidelity of the other, like the communicability of immorality. ‘Maybe he was in Japan. He was,’ indicates her mental sense of disorder as well – madness, conflict. ‘She knew them for their polyandry…hopeful tune’ – begs the question: is infidelity contagious? Is social isolation? Is love? ‘ “I’m contagious,” ’ being the only spoken dialogue between them is this powerlessness, a near acceptance of seclusion, habituation to it. And the ultimate link: the simple meeting/ an almost viral exchange that changes her more than marriage/sex can – ‘Sex was one thing…a virus changes a cell’s basic coding.’
Wonderful architecture there, thematically. I don’t even want to think about the preparation that must have gone into planning that multilayering effect – or did it just gradually creep in while writing? Either way, it works. And the extended metaphors were great – viruses, flowers, fruit, all tethered tightly together.
There’s something fascinating, too, about the structure – it’s Shakespearean in its alternating manipulation of emotions. There is a constantly changing comedic-tragedic portrayal of anguish here, rather similar to the Merchant of Venice in its impact. You tip the balance in either direction every few paragraphs so we swing from amusement to frustration and back again. Was this intended? Or did it slip in, naturally? Because, whatever it was, it worked – it enhanced the feeling of distortion, of dislocation, of emotional turmoil and extremes without being too intense itself. You leave us confused on what to feel. Fittingly. To make light of it, or to give weight to it? Also, on the topic of structure, it’s rising, leaving one at somewhere just after the climax, which I would argue is at the line, ‘The blood was bright.’ A physical effusion of the conflict, externalizing it. And the irony is that blood is always spilt in external conflicts. (Oh yes, forgot to mention: the irony also drives the piece nicely: ‘It was all very romantic and forward of her to be sneezing on him like that...’ ‘He said he didn’t want to...make other people miserable.’) Leaving us on the verge of action is the best thing for this piece – you present no solutions, only the problem and leave it for the reader to feel enraged enough to keep thinking about it.
Even the style switches mirror this – from more descriptive to more straightforward – but this is subtle enough, I felt, to not mean an entirely different style altogether was being used; just a different substyle, I guess. I took another look at your description, and found it was well spread throughout the piece, as it should be, but where it appeared, it gave a decidedly bitsy, cluttered, haphazard effect. Which is great for the theme of madness – because, paradoxically enough, in the moments Annie is most mad, she sees most clearly. That’s when the metaphors erupt into view.
And a last word
Perhaps not so much in your recent poetry, but in your former poetry - and I think I have said this before - the style is like an ocean. One must think twice before diving, take a deep breath, get ready to be tossed about in a sea of imagery and totally forget one's immediate surroundings and leap...plunge in headfirst. It's consuming. (Of course, more recently I have seen lightness and less imagery-oriented drowning - more head and heart thrown in - but then again, having read so much of it, I think personal habituation to the style has made me unobjective in that even if it is heavy, it won't appear so to me any longer; I am used to it, can handle it, hence it becomes light, even if it is not. But that's an aside.)
You mentioned to me that you wanted to walk the exact line of lush writing and solid storytelling, to be less poetic, but retain it too. Short stories, thus, I'd liken to going for a pleasant bushwalk. You walk some, the action progresses - sometimes quite a bit of it, too - so you stop, recover and while you do, you look around your surroundings, grab a photo or two, remind yourself why you came, and be on your way again. For a piece of this lenght (of Viruses), I wouldn't say there are so many photo-stops (i.e. description / reflection / intellect, possibly emotion) that it's like we're pausing everywhere - and usually, where they are, they mean something. Yes, there is a balance between action and description, plot and character/setting to be reached, but it's impossible - surely - to do it simultaneously; to have movement and stillness at once, to walk and not walk? What would you say? So, it's a continual, rather Shakespearean balancing act of high drama and lengthy soliloquys in between, more of an up-down roller coaster ride. Can one be still and fluid in one? It's something to think about, for sure.
And even I am not certain how quickly the changes should come - how long do we need to walk for, how long to stop for? Change and stability. It probably comes to the vague and useless 'this feels right' feeling. Of course, if you're curious as to what the story would be like were it to switch between the two faster or slower, try it and see what you end up with. Maybe even have two different versions, one as minimalistic as possible (i.e. mostly action driven) and one even more poetic, see how they compare. Just for fun.
An enjoyable read, all in all. Specifics critiqued in document - mainly there was the problem that the piece was so tight, thematically and structurally, that it couldn't really afford any kind of random tangents that didn't relate properly to the central storyline.
Thanks
Navita
Hey Ky!
) But one little thing, para where you talk about the lytic viral pathway, maybe you could restructure it so it looks less like an info (read science) dump on the readers.
I have to say, I loved it. I don't have time to do a review (
Good work, though.
~Lava
Thoroughly interesting. However, I have a disagreement with it on a fundamental level.
Poetry has its place in poetry. Shorter and easier to swallow, so the ponderous pace has its place.
In short fiction, however, it seems to drag and stutter. It's my personal belief that the purpose of a story is to tell the story, not to stop at every rose. And just imagine if we had an anthology of short stories, 10 stories, ponderous and (admittedly) unexciting, due to the lack of action, movement, speech, plot development. I would sooner read 10 poems about 10 states of mind than read 100 pages about 10 states of mind.
So on a fundamental level, I have issues with it because of
1) the inefficient ratio of words:action and the lack of explicit dialogue (which has been replaced by "dream tones," an inherent quality when you only say "He asked her how she was. She said she was fine. They talked about _____").
2) the sometimes tedious descriptions that seek deeper and deeper levels of explaining the same thing (I understand, it reflects an attitude towards the subject and an outlook on life). For example, the 96 words you use to tell us what a virus is. We know what a virus is. Or the 107 words between
that show us how much she wants to always change like a flower.
It's a tad overkill.
So a couple specifics:
This part was good, though it seems an almost irrelevant description without it playing a part in the story. And, yeah, it's another example of how she's dissatisfied and wants the lives of others. But I liked it. It went on a little long, though, from the "Somehow woven in..." and onwards.
Again, I'm not sure if I feel the necessary relevance. It just feels like airy fluff.
So that's it. Overall, I enjoyed the read. Your thoughts and comparisons and word choice are excellent. And doubly excellent in poetry. But I wonder if most of them are necessary in this venue. With so much to get through, and with the idea that we're supposed to get a full story out of this, it kind of lends to "skimming."
This is an interesting piece, and I do think it's a good read, but a difficult one.
I don't think your vocabulary is too advanced, or that your sentence structure is overly complex, but the metaphorical speech that you've put into this story just seems forced at times. Some of the parallels that you draw are striking, relevant, and serve only to enhance the pull of your story, whereas others seem more...stagnant. Their complexity pulls away from the backbone of your story and--in my opinion--is detrimental.
Another thing that bothered me a little was the overabundance of detail. Detail, when used correctly, can really boost a story and create a tone that really pulls the reader in, but I felt like the detailing you've used here makes this a very time-consuming and mentally exhausting piece. Because you've chosen to have the reader pick through dozens of seemingly irrelevant details, I think you risk allowing them to lose track of the story as they are getting tangled in the blossoms on the trees and the other tiny things that you bring along in the periphery of the story.
I do think that when you are not being poetic in your language that your structure is lacking a little bit. Your tone lapses into informality unless you are speaking in metaphors, and the switch is a little disorienting.
Of course, this has potential, and you are without question a very skilled writer. With a little refining, this could be awesome!
(edited to keep this in English the whole time....)
This has some very good allusions, and similies!
I like the way you described her as contagious, and how you showed the way her husband was cheating by saying "Things you just wouldn't forget: an earring, two wine-glasses, to change the bedsheets."