Summer
Elias Simpson
Copyright 2010 Elias Simpson
**These ten “vignettes” are intended to be produced separately on long scrolls of four or five lines and sold for five dollars inside empty spice containers.**
Fireflies
The fireflies in the hayfield and the crescent moon stick in our retinas. Understanding of their motion, brief as vision, lasts. The sky bends: close, far too close. Dancer steps slowly in the field. In thirty steps he startles a rustle from the bushes. In thirty-two steps he runs. Joy stands near me, as pregnant as five moons. We wait for Dancer to appear from the between spaces. Fireflies crest like a wave. Grass is still, its color ripples. Joy touches me and the touch flares. Fireflies vanish. I am gone. She is gone. We grope for each other. We find a hand, the soft lobe of an ear, generous breaths, a breadth of hip. The soft and liquid heat of a kiss on my neck. Orange comforts down the back. Her hair aggravates the skin under my chin. Dancer’s four hundred and ninetieth step compresses the acre of dirt in a shoe print. Square acre, acre cubed. She spreads my chest across her hand. The grass is brown and dry: a habitat to trample for the pleasure or the comfort. I do not go yet but consider my body in a pointless dance. The cage of her fingers on my fingers lifts. I run. I am halfway to invisible, then three fourths. Dancer’s trail breaks the field. I could cut him off at the black stream. Joy is patient. She appears as bright as the moon. The temperature of her ears is pale blue. She makes the light of her face by not moving. The baby in her understands never.
The Theater
The actors begin the second set. After Joy complained the stage managers opened the French windows behind the bleacher seating. The air cools where Lucky and Joy sit. Dancer has joined them after a hike. He pulls a tick off his thigh and shows it to Lucky. On the other side of the stage is the friend with vine hands, and his ex-wife. He wears his glasses with a smirk. Lucky is conscious of them as he is of the height of the room, and the actor’s brown leather shoes. The stage is set with two main rooms: one for drinking, one for exasperation. Lucky drinks from one of Joy’s water cups, which he bought across the street to keep her cool. Joy pulls Lucky’s hand to her stomach, urgently, as if the thing is about to vanish. He feels a flutter, a lumpish kick. It’s dark behind the shades. Joy has her feet up on the row in front of her because they swell in the heat, and she feels very hot. A tick nestles into Lucky’s thigh. Joy tries to fan herself with her hand. On the stage an old man has just returned from buying flowers. He throws them like spears, one by one, at the woman in the loose dress. It is a heartless scene but Joy laughs. Lucky frowns slightly and narrows his eyebrows. The man on stage says bitterly that the woman on stage has killed their son. The son who is not on the stage, and no longer lives even in imagination, cannot make a sound. Again Joy pulls Lucky’s hand to her pregnant stomach.
Two Cups
An old friend bought two clay cups, glazed in blue and brown. He brought them in a box of tissue paper tied with a gold vinyl-covered elastic bow. He stares directly at the lines and texture. The three sit at the table with feet apart, their hairlines moist from sweat. The stove bakes, the stove top boils. The gift excites the conversation. The friend sits in kitchen light but his face is shadowed: his eyes beneath his brow, his cheek below his cheek bone. A long wrinkle across his jaw to which other wrinkles feed. The couple smiles appreciatively. His hands flutter on the table. Her hands flutter underneath the table. The hands of the friend do not flutter. They vine. They vine their way into the cup he clasps, and begin to vine across the table. It’s nearly sundown. Water condenses on the water glasses. When he speaks, the friend looks at the woman, not at the man. One of his eyes is lazy. The man looks at his plate when the eye points at him. The woman wears a long dress. Her breasts are supported by the dress’ straps. She sits across from the friend. She is ebullient. The salmon is nearly ready. The friend says that he’s sure the salmon will be excellent. The salmon in the oven, painted with thyme, and butter, the hue of a cotton field at midnight. The butter boils. In the pan the semolina at the couscous’ center softens from the hot salt water. Heat weaves through the kitchen. Some threads through the open window adjacent the eating table. The friend, his vines laid out upon the table, still, his eyes now roving on the empty table top before his belly, and then up at Joy, sets the cup onto the table top. She is jumps in her chair at the clank.
The Sunflower
If anyone could capture the soul in her chest and compare it to her radiance, when she stands under the sunflower, beaming, her radiance would be the more stunning. She wears a yellow tank top from the maternity section of a department store. She also wears a pair of khaki shorts, and not a skirt, to keep her thighs from rubbing. Her hair is parted with pins, dark blond to her shoulders. She smiles for a picture. She is in love with the photographer. She wants to stand under the sunflowers. He tells her to stand under the sunflowers. The smile is toothed. The ten foot sunflower behind her droops with an enormous flower. The dried petals’ burnt yellow colors ablaze and wrinkled. The thick stalk holds itself up, wonderfully straight on its crooked path, tilting south. Unable to keep the head alight, the stem at the top flexes permissively. The flower hangs motionless, full of diamond shaped seeds. Sunlight shines clearly on the flower and the woman. They neither wither nor need more radiance. The shadows of the garden in the background and foreground cool her feet in yellow linen shoes. Tall, she and the sunflower attract the resplendence of sun before morning ends, and everything else basks in thermal splendor. She smiles as if she’d been there from the start, humbly enclosed by a garden fence, written into the dimension of life. Catch me blooming in the morning, with my joy heavy and bright, imperturbable. “I smile because he’s going to take a picture,” she thinks. Her smile leaps forth.
Wilderness
The rain rains duly. It wears through the trees. Lucky and Dancer have taken shelter under a crag. They take the time to eat a bite or two. Lucky chews the energy bar Dancer traded to him for a muffin. Rocks green from moss and vines flow across the mountain ridge. Trees populate the sight for miles. Light neither reflects the trees in the collecting puddles, nor makes them shadows on the floor of dirt and stone. Under the crag it smells of sweat, wet dirt, and spiders. The dripping leaves redeliver rain outside the shelter of the crag. The hikers’ backpacks lean against the rock. Dancer’s legs lean against the rock, which slants inward before reaching out. His face is steady as he eats. He looks beyond the trail into they gray light. His hair is darkened from the rain, or sweat. Lucky’s more reclined on the rock. His thin back presses him against it. His neck tilts forward so he can best measure the light down the incline, coming up the ridge, through the trees. His hair is wet, too, but not curly like Dancer’s. It looks like he grins with impatience. Beside him a folded map sits on Dancer’s backpack. In certain directions the air looks green. In other directions the air looks gray. In Dancer’s eyes there’s a quiver that Lucky keeps his head turned away from. His eyelids are low on his eyes. The sun falls. A crack of lightning rolls off the crag. The two men bend to the ground, deafened.
A Walk
Joy and Lucky stroll between the horse meadow and the country club. Lucky tries to finish eating an asparagus stalk he picked. Joy’s hands are white, and for once she won’t let him hold them. The grass in the pasture is dark brown or green. The day’s only clouds are apparitions in the west, high above the valley. Pink, baby blue, and violent purple, travel through the steamy mountains. The walkers climb a large hill with difficulty. The heat of Virginia makes their shirts sticky. Lucky, on the shoulder of the road, leans his upper body toward Joy, whose body bends into the hill. Her back sags from the weight in her belly. Cheerful as Lucky, with his frivolous green stick, she is pale except a tint of red on her forehead. She looks
for a moment to see if the horses are still there. The sky over the meadow is pink, highlighted with grays and whites of clouds. The sight does not interrupt her heavy breathing as she steps. The horses are there, eating as usual. Lucky gazes at the road. His mouth is tight, and his skin taut around the cheeks and forehead. He breathes heavily, too, his smile covered by a pursed focus. He loosely swings his arm with each step. Joy’s arms are shorter, she keeps them slightly bent at the elbow. Her steps regulate her breaths. Lucky spies a leafless tree ahead. It’s a short tree, the bark coarsely textured. “A dead tree,” he says. “I wonder why it died.” One more step.
The Market
Money makes its way around, but never much by much. The newest vendor is a woman who sells her raspberries in used yogurt containers, and bouquets of flowers in Bell jars, with a pale blue ribbon wrapped around the lip. For vegetables, she only offers a small Christmas package worth of green beans, a ream worth of small potatoes. The handwritten menu, replete with stains from use, perhaps from the years before, lists the green beans at $2.00 a pound. The way she stands, with the fingers of her bony, blue hands on the fold-out table, makes her look like a market guru. She is short, shorter than all her customers, except the children. Her dress’ thin fabric, faded like a favorite table cloth, fits her plain shape. Her hairs are not all gray; they are thin. Her face rarely smiles. Only after a transaction, for a minute, for politeness. If you compliment her eyes she might truly smile. Her face warms. Her eyes are the color of icebergs. Because her table is so small there’s space on either side. This, too, contributes to her appearance as a guru. When Lucky steps up to the stand he says “I’d like a pound of green beans.” She bows her head at him. Her thin fingers claw at the beans. He can smell her faint perfume. In the wind for a moment he thinks she has disappeared.
A Conversation
Lucky winces. There’s a sentence in the air. Replete with self-disdain and hatred, her hands cinch its vital passageways. Silence except for the tower fan. Lucky stands in a modest soldier stance, his chin aimed in the direction of her neckline. His chest is in mid-breath. He smells of worn deodorant, and an apple. His palms, at his sides, twisted outwards, catch a brief current of air as they twitch minutely. The words rocket through their semantic course, blazing a trail that cannot be altered. Sinister meanings ignite in her thoughts. She sort of sneers. Her torso turns away from him, the belly with their unborn baby inside. In profile her frown appears animated and dynamic, tottering toward an abyss. Lucky’s hands still palpitate. Subconsciously he also turns himself away, slightly, as if to follow her reflection. He cannot step closer to her without entering her half of the conversation, which he cannot do without dissolving, without half the house disappearing. So he remains slightly turned as she turns. She turns so slowly he is startled, his hands still trembling without consequence. The walls of the house are dark white. The shadow of the ceiling fan trolls the walls. Her shoulders turn away. She needs some nourishment. She wants the word that’s like a diamond.
A Ride
Joy sits cradled in the passenger seat of my rusted Ford. Classic rock sprouts from the speaker at her right knee. Waves travel down and up her leg, over her abdomen and chest, and through all the spaces between her hairs. She hardly notices, even the waves which crawl through her ear, she couldn’t say what the next word will be, or what the last word was. She slouches forward slightly. In the movie that night the protagonist couldn’t be said to represent the struggle that he should, for the woman’s cause. My elbow juts out the window. My head rests against my hand. The car smells like gasoline. The windshield slants sharply, like the mirror in a periscope. The downtown city sky is too light blue to see more than a planet or a couple stars. Joy’s hair is short, still, slightly past her shoulders. Its shape holds some light. Her face glows in the residual electricity of the town. She’s going to ask something. I can tell because we stopped making jokes. I am eager to talk, yet my upper body is still and focused on driving. The movies often excite me. I would rather contemplate the ambiguous ending, the hero without a code. Joy asks me about my ex. Joy wonders, so she asks. “How are you doing?” She hears the “whoosh” of a parked car in her window. Lucky told her once that there’s no suffering in the passenger seat of my car, only comfort, perhaps induced by leaking gasoline fumes. “Like that silence," I say, wanting to go home and have a drink. A still, black space outside the window until the next parked car, then another “whoosh.”
The Cellar
The dank smell of damp dirt, low beams stuffed with pink insulation, and black plastic landfill bottoms crowd the entrance. They crowd the rest of the cellar, too. The tallest point is 60 inches. Stand too tall and the insulation rubs off onto your shoulders, hair, or backpack, even if you hunch. The ground slants toward the windows. A ditch in an “L” shape resembles a walkway. At the first window are three inner tubes of varying inflation. Covered in dust, dirt, and cobwebs, you still imagine them out on the river, saving you four dollars from the rental business. By the second window, stacked obliquely, a stash of shingles, whose packaging is receding from rot, marks its space with a barely discernible shape. Unaccustomed to the smell and dampness, you stifle your breathing. Spiders, of course, love the cellar. Unrankled by wind or bigger insects, they hunt. You begin to wonder what it is you came down for. A beer stored somewhere out of the way? One of the knotted plastic bags, heavy from potatoes? You crouch further, brace yourself with your arms, planted on your knees. Only light from the neighbor’s kitchen enters through the two windows. You stare at the blackness whose exact tone you cannot place. So little life happens at this moment. Then you hear a shuffling on the cellar steps. Realize someone is opening the door to meet you.