RE:
By Brian Washines
1.
Madalyne felt her skin itching around her ankle. Tiny burrs needled into her leg to where she knew those parts of her prone to falling asleep. She kept mobile, running, levitating.
She reached down and felt cacti sprouting up her ankle and jerked her hand back and looked down at what might have been insects, what might have been flora, what might have been both.
Touching them was out of the question so she pulled out the top of her sock to stretch the fabric away from her skin and saw how miniscule the burrs were, so she flicked her fingernail against each one until they burst out and away, landing in the dust around her. People weren’t looking at her but she suddenly cared if there were and if they did. Her two brothers were already about three car lengths ahead of her.
An ancient grey tractor was parked against the nearby barbed wire fence. She could smell the weeds that grew beyond the tractor and wondered what life was like when the tractor ran. Ages before she was born, maybe.
Madalyne looked up at the sky. The sun didn’t come back, she said, unless it wanted to. The same with certain people. People she liked.
No one understood machines anymore, nor did they want to, least of all her brothers, who were turning and calling out to her, as if they’d not trekked this same patch a hundred times before, not days after she’d learned to walk on her own to now. They’d learned by rote and understood the smell of rain and the sensation of quick charges in the air, that of electricity and moisture fighting the ensuing dryness pushing up from the south like a pregnant stomach, pulsating with Live Thing.
Madalyne, Madalyne. Her brothers called her. Mad, a line. Mad, a line.
She twisted her head up so hard she heard her neck crick, and some of her hair flipped down over her eyelashes making her blink, but her brothers were too far now to gauge her expression, which was an admixture of displeasure and impatience. She bit her lip and it squared her jaw, and this expression her brothers could see even in the dark of night across a shared bedroom. It upset her that her brother’s names didn’t match or rhyme with anything save hers. Cross was cross. Matt was matt.
Everything was singular. Save her.
She cleansed her sock of each bristly seedling, and saw the immobilized throng scattered about the dust coating the road home. Elsewhere, they were going to be scattered or roved over or decimated by age, she didn’t much care which. All she did care about was that they no longer irritated her. So, she moved on, knowing she wasn’t going to catch up to them, but would make it home all the same.
2.
He fell in love with the aroma of paper. Veritable types under specific circumstances.
Manila; when it was raining and everything else was completed.
Parchment; everything done without hesitation, and without candor, and without abandon.
Copy; for as long as there were fluorescent bars to match, above and elsewhere.
Rice; dinner date with a strong wine and familiar company, an old flame maybe.
Bond; graduating handwritten manuscripts to type with plenty of coffee on standby.
Carbon; his first time reading All the President’s Men and The Executioner’s Song.
Newsprint; art classes, HB graphite, the Smiths playing through a pair of headphones.
“Cross.”
He turned in his chair and looked over his shoulder.
Denise wore purple again. Three days in a row. How disconcerting was this that he failed to ask her about it then, and failed to ask her about it even now?
“Meeting in fifteen.”
“Did they say this ten minutes ago?”
“Maybe.”
“So,” he said, turning back to his desk. “Meeting in five?”
“Pfft,” sounding as if she had hair caught in her lips, and she made it when ducking her head back out of his office, with an equal brusqueness in which she’d poked her Roman nose.
He looked down at his draft; eight bridges. Nine work hours and he managed only to produce one. Something a third-semester student might submit as his final, that good, yes, but he’s been with Marchan & Dodger for over six years, now this?
Life used to be a Pepsi machine.
3.
It was hard to shake the weather from his hands. Most of the kids were home already and Inka was elsewhere. It was common to spot the kids long before his wife. It was rare for her to meet him at the door, feeling and smelling her hair whip past him as she tugged the keys from his hand as he crooked an elbow taking his wet jacket off. She would whistle a single note under her breath while doing it, as if to signal her intent. She only met him at the door if he forgot an item at the store that needed immediate replenishing.
Cross was on the floor of the living room with his notebook open, scribbling faces, one over the other, across long distributive math problems involving fractions. He looked up and hopped up on both knees and asked a question his father had trouble hearing the first time. He nodded, and so Cross laid back down on his stomach, drawing five different faces that shared a left and right eye to one another.
The doorway through the living room to the kitchen was covered with a beaded curtain so he heard Matt race into the living room carrying a bowl of dry cereal. It was four in the afternoon.
He opened the door. Inka was lying on her side facing the shaded window facing east. There was a bundle of old socks piled by the foot of the bed he knew were his but didn’t know from where she culled them.
“You don’t wanna do that,” she croaked.
“What?”
“Flick the light on, don’t.”
“How’s your head?”
“Kids home?”
“Yes.”
“Head’s fine.”
“Fine, I won’t flick the light on.”
Instead, he sat on the bed and removed one boot after the other. The cold weather was still trapped in the treading on the bottom. It reminded him of the things at work that stopped working, cost money, so they just sat still until they warped into the general ambiance of whichever it was a co-op stood for.
He buried his moist sock from today under a clothing pile that was generated only recently.
“Tommy.”
“Yah.”
“Bring me ice.”
“Ice.”
“Just in case.”
He nodded. As if he could see her, and nodded as if she cared if he did, but she cared if he moved, if the weight on the bed changed with her say so, and it did, so she said nothing else.
There wasn’t any ice broken so he broke them out of their trays. Then he spotted Madalyne.
She sat on the sill by the dining room window facing west, coated in light, where she bounced around until certain that her father could see her sit, pulling one of her socks down. He saw her ankle covered with tiny welts and scratches. Nothing major, and nothing to cry about, if she ever did.
Cross didn’t hesitate to bring up broken laces or missing change, so Matt mentioned things up to Cross if he himself had concerns or complaints; they didn’t balk at telling their father things. Madalyne was a zebra in a world of sorrels and palominos in those regards and it didn’t, or shouldn’t, upset him as much when she would rather force her father to ask, only to give him a stern, distraught look in response – her eyebrows furrowed, burning an 11 into her forehead—before darting off to parts known and businesses unknown.
Yet, as it were in this case, when he didn’t bother, she would stare out and sulk until one of her brothers approached her, and then she issued a torrent of random emotions out on them and stormed off to her room. Her father rattled the bowl of ice as he walked past where she sat.
There was only room for one queen in the house. Everyone else just occupied a collative block up in a corner, like the first Fridays and Saturdays on a calendar.
4.
The first thing they did to her was insert tubes. Weeks later they’d remove them, but back then, Madalyne regained responsiveness, so they pulled them out and put her on a steady dietary regimen that included paste-based foods. Farina, oats, cornmeal, her dad made her cha’lie lukameen, which she used to make with fried potatoes, the way only her father could make it. Her brothers weren’t as keen on their father’s traditional foods, so they relied on him to supply them with the simple recipe of flour, water, some condensed milk, and the minced smoke-dried salmon which they knew not where their dad got it.
When the tube became permanent, the most her father and brother could do was sit with her. Mom’s been dead for years. So has Matt.
A nurse came in one day and asked about the charcoal Cross was working on and he turned to talk to her over his shoulder.
“The noise won’t bother her would it?”
“Guess not.”
“What’s your name?”
“Julie.”
“I’m her brother.”
“She talked a lot bout you.”
“You were here the first time.”
“There were a lot of times.” The cryptic nature of people was sometimes inadvertent. He lowered his head and grunted in response. “You’re very good,” she said.
“At what?”
“That.”
“It’s a living.”
“Drawing your catatonic sister’s a living?”
“I’m a draughtsman. So no and yes.”
“And how bout her dad.”
“What about him?”
The nurse walked around to where Madalyne sat with her head propped up by a brace fastened to the chair. She came to where Madalyne’s arms were pinioned to the armrest on which there would’ve been a touchscreen through which she might have communicated but couldn’t. There wasn’t a window in her chronic departure large enough to allow this. A few days and she was no longer responsive to verbal or physical interactions. There was a fine coat of film over her pale eyes.
She was measuring him now. Ninety percent of her time would have been Madalyne but now she was working to figure out the ten percent that wasn’t.
“You don’t wanna talk to me that’s fine,” she said.
“I sincerely don’t want to talk to you and it’s not fine.”
“Okay.” She crossed her arms.
“She only got me when she wanted to. When she had no one else. Boyfriends, then a girlfriend, then another boyfriend, who left when this started, and he didn’t stick around to see it turn into this.”
“I wouldn’t have you as my biographer, that’s for sure.”
“But that’s not her life. This – isn’t her life.”
“What’d you mean she ‘got’ you.”
“Understood. Then, listening as if she did understand. She could do both. Toward the end, too.”
“Okay.”
“It’s getting harder for my dad to get around, and all these restrictions are dampening his reserve, you ever hear anyone say that? Dampening his reserve?”
“Not a lot.”
“It’s safer for dad to be where he is, and he’s missing mom and he’s missing Matt and he’s missing her.”
“And she’s here.”
“It’s only a matter of time.”
“For your sister? For your father?”
“Both.”
5.
Inka sat in her chair with a paperback book she was sure was going to take her weeks to finish reading. It took place in the early 1970s during the last years of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia, about a group of Army specialists trying to take a valley.
Her sons were having a grating, pointless discussion in the next room.
“That and a dog.”
“Which one?”
“That dog I saw.”
“No, which one—man.”
“I don’t know any white dogs.”
“That’s not it.”
“I don’t know any dark brown dogs.”
“No that’s not it either.”
“Here then.”
“Shut up.”
“No, here.”
“That one?”
“I don’t know any brown dogs.”
“There’s a lot.”
“How bout a purple unicorn dog.”
“Right – I don’t think so.”
“Point at it.”
“There’s just that one.”
“Mom.”
“Mom.”
“Mom.”
She put her book aside for a moment and peered into the next room. A look was enough.
Cross held up a picture book she got for him last week. He liked books with paintings in them, and this book showed Impressionist paintings from the late 19th century. She made her lips small, squinted, and shook her head. “Those aren’t dogs,” Inka said. “The hell’s wrong with you two.”
Matt scratched his head and looked at the book Cross was holding up. “You sure?”
“Purple unicorn dogs – those are horses.”
In unison the brothers shouted: “Horses?”
“It’s from the Bible,” she said.
Her sons kept looking back and forth from her to the book to her.
“Yes, dorks. They talk bout unicorns in the Bible.”
Having taken her word for everything up to now, the boys decided not to make this the exception.
With that issue settled Cross took out a different book.
“Diplodocus.”
“Say what again?”
“Diplodocus.”
“Huh.”
“Long neck bout as long as two buses.”
“One bus.”
“Deinonychus.”
“No way.”
“Five feet tall.”
“Uh huh.”
“Archeopteryx.”
“Bird.”
“They were all birds.”
“But that’s a bird-bird.”
“Just a bird then.”
“It’s the only one with feathers.”
“I don’t wanna go alphabet order.”
Flipped the book closer to the end.
“Pachycepholasaurus.”
“Huh.”
“Quetzalcoatlus.”
“Not just a bird then.”
“Wingspan.”
“Two buses.”
“Tarbosaurus.”
“Turbosaurus.”
“No you. Tarbosaurus.”
“Huh. Looks like a T-rex.”
“Smaller.”
“Shorter.”
“Mom?”
She leaned forward without putting the book down to look into the next room where Cross held the book up and open to show her.
“How come unicorns are in the Bible and they’re not?”
She shut her eyes, shook her head, and pulled her head back to pick up where she left off before she was interrupted.
Later, they sat at the dinner table. Chicken alfredo and pasta. It didn’t matter what it was called on the package. Elbow macaroni, rigatoni, fusilli, rotini, angel hair—their mom called it pasta.
Their father sat down and opened a can of Olympia and poured it into a barrel-shaped novelty glass.
“We didn’t have enough hours to go around but guess who begs,” he said. No one was sure who he was talking to. Himself, most of the time, sure, but these lines were lofted into the air in a pattern that none of the children could decipher, except as a morose portent reserved only for their mother. “Giant gaps in the schedule. And there’s two who’re crap for heavy lifting, the rest are new who think they worked there for eight years tryin to tell me what to do and not do. I can bury them, easy, and I do. But who gets talked to.”
Their mom sat down with her second plate of pasta and chicken. At every dinner, she made sure Madalyne was next to her on one side, their father on the other. He’d keep her glass full of yellow wine that came out of a dark green bottle that always went on the top shelf of the cupboard with the others.
“I do. And it’s not that people keep thinking there’s a future in people changing, no. It’s a future in which things change and we’re forced to change with it. This isn’t communist Russia where we have rows and rows and generations and generations of people stuck to one menial task after another, screwing tiny bulbs into radios no one buys but everyone in the country has, where no one has to read books because they burned them all, no. We like to think the 1st Amendment means you run crap on people for the sake of running crap on people but think newspapers are bull because they’re owned by a few major companies, but god forbid we ask guys to interpret the 2nd goddamn Amendment any other way but literally and they crap themselves, but the truth is uglier than that. Complex things are ugly and the world’s complex.”
“Is the world crappy, dad?”
“Madalyne.” Her mom touched her daughter’s shoulder: Mad, a line.
“She’s onto something.”
“You led her there, Tommy.”
“Guess what one of those high school boys said to me while we were clocking out, kept complaining that he had no say in being born. He was born without permission, he says. I said there were few permissions he had when he was an infant who can barely control his bodily functions, couldn’t spell, couldn’t read or write, had only the slightest interest except for the glittery things hung over his crib, who’d only take liquid as food for weeks. He couldn’t drive a motor vehicle, be trusted with open flames or metal blades or alcohol, vote in an election, serve in the military.”
“Uh huh?”
“Point is I had a point and he didn’t have anything until the next day, when he floated what I said around on the internet so other nerds can feed him bullet points. The hell happened to being smart on your own.”
“Right.”
“The point I was making was that even if he had those permissions he didn’t have the mind to understand them in the first place. But we do. So, the shoe falls where whoever wore it first drops it.”
6.
Denise poked her head in.
“Meeting at two.”
“So right after lunch then?”
“Depends on when you take your lunch.”
“For me it depends on when we’re meeting.”
“So take your lunch at one then.”
“I thought everyone took it at one.”
“The industry standard’s noon.”
He looked around for his mask only to find it tossed in the garbage. He wasn’t liable to invest in a cloth reusable one like half the people at Marchan & Dodger did. Entire throngs of Pikachus and Batman logos. The black mask Denise was wearing had a pair of cartoonish red lips across it, like the tongue logo the Rolling Stones used except its tongue was in repose out of consideration for professional, in-office decorum.
She held out a disposable mask for him to use.
“I was hoping we could grab a bite to eat around the corner.”
They were sitting in a street-level bistro embedded into a tower consisting of $550-a-night business suites.
Denise ordered coffee brewed from Ethiopian beans, the profit of which went to Ethiopian farmers, she said. She wasn’t as perspicacious when it came to her toasted bagel.
The most he could get here was a cucumber-chicken wrap with an in-house Caesar dressing and it cost more than a steak dinner at Outback.
Since there wasn’t indoor seating yet, the two took their lunch back to the office.
Denise pulled up a chair and sat with him.
“I heard about your sister,” she said.
Mad, a line.
“If I could work from home, I would,” he said.
“Not everything can be remote.”
“As long as Madalyne’s along my work route, that helps.”
He didn’t know how else to talk about it. About his mom and his brother and now his sister dying of the same genetic disaster, interconnected the way a haunting of a house tended to consist only of distant history, outside immediate memory, shadowing the concurrences and admonitions of life forever perpetuated in its midst. A ghost wasn’t a ghost unless it was felt, and missed, even if the ones who may have carried those names and mourned the vacuous space which once possessed that warmth, that aroma, and that steady beating of a single chest full of heart and life, like that heart and that life, was now gone from that homestead once shared. The lack of regard on our part of the temples and shanties—the gems and grains—with which we constructed our meaning and our affects felt like a disaffected and dismissive shoulder had been turned on what rendered each of us personable and considerable in the first place. We no longer had the grace and the temerity to become ghosts ourselves, if not to those who held providence over our names and our corporeal essences as memories and histories, then to those hapless strangers who treat our absence with a vainglorious, condescending sense of novelty. There was no telling which was worse for him, as a brother and a son, now alone in that expanse in which a dire need was reduced to various recounters of one last recollected evening, one last remembered autumn between siblings, to people who may or may not have cared otherwise for its existence. Or to have sensed its augury, as bleak and creosote as phantom wings coming down from the sky large enough to cast a pall over an entire metropolis. The augury of those who leave us, and the grief caught in its fuming wake like a lone boat in a squall. He did his best to explain as much to Denise, about as much as he could understand himself, but as time progressed, as it always had and will, the futility of his attempt was soon apparent.
Denise looked down at her food. There wasn’t a quick way to remedy how she was feeling now, which was regret for even bothering asking him to share their lunch hour.
“When I was graduating, and this was after my mom and brother both passed away, two years apart, we went to get new furniture. A heavy task but we got rid of a lot of the things. It was tradition. And it took most of the day and we were tired but we were standing in line. Then this white guy my dad’s age came along, getting agitated with a clerk about the long line at all five registers. He demanded they open a sixth one, he didn’t care who, as long as when it opened he went through, and he didn’t care if they kept it open for anyone else in line or not. This white guy kept shrugging his wife off when she tried to rein him back but he wouldn’t let up on it so my dad stepped up and faced the guy, and this older white man wasn’t having it from my dad either. My dad’s Yakama, right. But he could’ve been any number of things to this man that didn’t have a place to tell him anything. He just wanted to hear someone giving him his way and my dad wasn’t having it.
“He knew this white man didn’t like sharing a line where there were Mexicans, Arabs, Filipinos, blacks, whites, all ahead of him, who were there ahead of him, who were waiting just as long, more patiently, than he was able to. There were plenty of other white people but there were these other people as well. My dad told him to stand in line, wait a few minutes, and look behind him, and he’d see the same thing. Plenty of whites but plenty of other people as well, who will stand in line a hell of a lot longer than he was, considering he’d been there before they were. Suffice to say, the white man shrugged my dad off and threatened to use violence at which he kicked away the cart his wife was holding, almost knocking her over, and grabbed her by the arm, violently, and dragged her with him out of the building talking about tearing the place a new asshole on their customer comments online. The people behind me shook their heads, asking if any of what that white man did was necessary. A few people asked if anything my dad said or did was necessary too. Then everyone stood in line quiet again.”
Denise sipped her ten-dollar twelve-ounce coffee, wide-eyed.
“This happened twelve years ago, last week. My brother’s been gone that long. My mom a lot longer. My sister’s symptoms started showing up as well. He wasn’t in the brightest of moods, I understand. But I think about how things in this country have turned out. I get aggravated when I see people, especially white people, shrug it off as one of those things that passes. I don’t think all things come only to pass. Even if all of you want it to.”
It looked like Denise was finished with her coffee. She underhand pitched the cup in the trash.
“What’s a Yakama?”
“The tribe.”
“So…you’re half-Native American?”
“Only the right half. The left half I’m not too sure.”
She gawked at him before saying: “Huh.”
She got up and dusted off her lap the imaginary food she’d ordered.
“Meeting in Room B, remember?”
He nodded as he turned away, back to his desk, unsure and uncaring if she saw his response or not.
7.
Matt stood out on the path looking at the house. Madalyne and Cross were hunched over a mole cave, holding a cat over the opening—one of the cats Madalyne found behind their neighbor’s tool shed living on scraps. His mom and dad were on the other side of the house where the guests kept showing up with bowls and translucent plastic boxes covered with saran wrap and loaded with food.
Very few of the other people’s kids were invited to this particular gathering, but they knew their mom was low, and that their dad was short-tempered with them, so they spent the rest of that fall huddled together, staying out of everyone’s way. Looking up at the eggshell clouds and the watery sky, he saw the amorphous globule of particles against the sky hovering and shifting like a spacecraft one moment, smoke the next. He realized they were birds, hundreds of them, if not thousands, moving as one, as if programmed by computer. The teachers talked about the old printers that worked by deciphering a picture point by point, one on top of the other, until it solidified into a representation everyone recognized as President John F. Kennedy or Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. They operated by computerized coordination, matrices of information collating into one singular purpose.
He concentrated as hard as he could but couldn’t see the message the birds were trying to send down to the earth, and its people. One moment it was a pair of hands almost touching. Another, it turned into the symbol for Eternity that morphed into a gordian knot that morphed into a bow tie.
Then, finally, as far as he could tell, it became a pair of eyes before the birds either disappeared behind a canopy of bronchial trees on the horizon, or the sky grew too dark to see them; he never could remember which one happened first.
However, he did remember that, when his mother called his name, he ran up to the house before his mother was forced to call his name again.
Brian Washines was born in Toppenish, Washington, a member of the Yakama Nation. He studied art, music, and literature before moving to the Seattle area to earn a degree in Digital Media Production where he worked on several independent productions as a co-writer.