The need to write fictions arises from the desire to say one thing and mean another. Storytellers are just that: storytellers. And a lot of storytellers think they are writing fiction; however, the fiction writers, the true writers of fiction, branded with invisible wings, dare not crush the storytellers’ egos, dare not dispel their notion of sky as sky. Fiction writers are wearers of the magician’s top hat and like gods, they can create ex nihilo; they spin cocoons around mere storytellers; they emerge as winged things; they begin in various ways; they all say: When I first met Butch, he was chopping chickens at the block.
Chapter 2
When I first met Butch, I was already aware that the sky was held together with pins and needles; I had already given up on watercolor, having progressed to charcoal. You speak in riddles, he says; no, the riddles sneak into objects, needing the manifestations of ideas. Then a boy blows his horn, hides behind a red wheelbarrow, and cries wolf. I mean, someone performed a magic act; I mean, what the red wheelbarrow means is so much more than everything that depends upon it; I mean, literature. I mean, give me a bag of bones and I will shake them and cast them into the dirt and make a fiction.
He said he was engaged; he asked, Do you want me to take her? She looked up at me and asked, Mommy, was that man my daddy? He overheard. She was confused by the word copse. A wooded area, I tell her—in this case, where the male characters go, for sport, to shoot birds. You speak in riddles, he says.
CONCLUSION
What I mean was, my body wasn’t taken with me. When the soul goes, the soul is a very spacious thing. Our dreams were right: we would come to discover, over time, independent yet certain truths. Discovery number one: we will be lonely. Two: no matter what, you will never be privy to my diary. Three: even though the moon may be rising, there will be no weeping trees or intervening ivy, no conscious oaks, no dowagers, no dowries, no contemplating orderlies, no oranges, no redeeming qualities. When you leave, you will leave incredibly softly.
Fragments
The arrangement of words
Every love affair presents itself as a rough draft, to which, ideally, both partners contribute. I wish to delete the last few winters; for the sake of simplicity, I shall refer to this error as X. X and I could not agree on one word in our poem. I wanted Love; X insisted on love. All winter, X lit fires; all winter, the early mornings were icy and gray, traffic sounded from far away. All winter, in bed, X and I became a hibernating microcosm. X is the embodiment of many persons, all that I have encountered and left behind or was left behind by. The arguments always began in February and continued into April. Once, they ended with a telephone call. While X was conversing, I stole away to the kitchen and sought the use of those refrigerator magnets with words printed on them. I arranged a handful in the manner below and then, having said all I needed to say, departed.
The last thing that X said to me before the phone rang was, “I can’t do this forever; something has to give. If you are looking for love with a big L, I can’t give this to you. I don’t know where my heart is. If we continue this way, both of us will succumb to some sort of falsity, which can never be good for a failing love affair. You may know me better than anyone, but it matters little; I am accustomed to being with myself; I stay here alone; I live alone. You can continue sleeping here with me, but no more talk of the future, no more talk of emotion. If you need to say love, I prefer you substitute that word with the word pizza.”
Somewhere in those last words, if I arrange them to my liking, X said, “I prefer you alone. I give you love with a big L. I give you forever; succumb to my heart. Talk of the future, talk of emotion, say love. I pizza you.”
I resigned myself to knowing that X and I are like two words that do not belong next to one another. If we are two signifiers pointing at the same sign, then we are written in two separate languages; therefore, we may occupy the same story, but we exist in different books, on different bookshelves, in different countries, conjuring our separate connotations.
Lines from the terrible poem
The rough draft exists so that one may partake in ritual: one may rip, crumble, scribble over, cross out, discard, burn, destroy those words that are not arranged to one’s liking. The rough draft exists so that one may select those portions that are to one’s liking and build on these favorable arrangements.
After confronting an X, after the great deletion, there exists the ritual of ripping the rough draft and attempting to discard it. Afterwards, each morning, drinking tea and mourning, I began thinking about sky. Indeed, I even woke with dreams of sky: the sky a pale blue, blank of clouds, the sky cut here and there by the flight of birds.
One morning, the sky, I remember, existed solely for me. I wrote a poem. It was, like my typical post-breakup heartbreak-without-the-appropriate-mourning-period poems, terrible and forty pages of self-pity, quasi-aubade, quasi-elegy. It took until dawn the next morning to rip the poem to shreds. I drank tea and looked to the sky, which existed exactly as it had the morning before. Taking the poetry shards, I wandered outside and cast them into a cloud of monarchs flitting by. The monarch butterflies carried them away and high into the
