A Natural Calamity
by Amra Brooks
Sui Park, Summer Vibe, hand-dyed cable ties, cable ties, tent stakes, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
A Natural Calamity
Amra Brooks | SEPT 2022 | Issue 18
My husband used to sleep on the old gray couch almost every night. He’d stay up late watching a horror film and pass out. Gore before bed. For years, I asked him to go to bed at the same time as me, just once or twice a week. I liked us both in bed reading until we clicked off our nightlights, our rhythms in sync. Once in a while he would acquiesce and inevitably he’d snore too loud, and I’d whack him on the shoulder, and he’d stop and roll onto his belly, and then he’d still snore and I’d whack him, and then our son would come in the room and worm between us. My son would then whack him when he'd snore again.
We got a new couch. It’s soft and golden and he’s not allowed to sleep on it, so he started sleeping in the guest room. I told our son he needed to sleep in his own room, but he still tiptoes into mine in his striped pajamas carrying his pillow, trying not to wake me as he crawls under the covers. I like sleeping alone. Sometimes my body misses my son’s small body when he’s not there. I don’t like surprises in the night. I’m a light sleeper. I’m thinking about putting a lock on my door.
When I was sixteen, my boyfriend used to take the inside of his forearm and rub it against mine. Nothing had ever felt so soft as that skin against skin. I haven’t received touch in that way for a long time. Everyone wants something.
It doesn’t rain this summer. The pink rhododendrons go limp. The blue hydrangeas and lavender asters blacken and crisp. I religiously water the Japanese stewartia I planted in early spring. The water never pools in the berm. The earth's thirst is insatiable. What is left of our grass is crunchy and golden. A scarecrow’s innards. Some counties have banned the use of outdoor water. The man on the other side of our fence runs his sprinklers every day and even he can’t keep his Trump grass green. His flag is still partially visible in my view a year after the election. He yells at his children and dogs in a sharp honking voice.
Every day, I pick cucumbers and tomatoes from our front yard garden bed. Piccolino and Minime with their ever-reaching tendrils. Indigo apple, pink boar, sunrise bumblebee, and Cherokee carbon are all planted too close and must be caged and staked. Some days I pick fifteen of each. I started seeds indoors in miserable March when the earth in New England is robbed of green. Nobody likes March. I covered our dining table with seedlings and grow lights. Soon I had towering plants and vines and there was hardly enough room to eat a meal around the purple lights and green slinking foliage. Each tiny seed bearing unstoppable fruit on a drying earth is a miracle indeed. I planted marigolds in shades of orange, deep red, and yellow around the young plants to attract pollinators and predatory insects.
There’s a kind of light, white-tinged with honey, that warms your skin, even when it’s chilly in the shade. If you sit still long enough, you’ll feel it inside your body. Seventy-two degrees. I think about this place where I live now and how it is home, but also how I pretend I’m somewhere else much of the time. How if I pay attention to the breeze and the light I can transport myself across the country and believe I’m in the small California beach town I lived in as a child. Then I worry about how easy it is for me to travel out of here to there. Where the tomatoes don’t get watered after they bear fruit. Where invasive eucalyptus trees house endangered monarchs.
I water the vegetables each night. The men in the blue house across the street blast music and sit on their porch smoking and drinking nips and beer. They rev the tiny, loud, child-like motorcycles they drive because they no longer have cars or licenses. They don’t seem to leave their house except to ride up and down the street. When the drugs they sell are delivered by more white men on real motorcycles, they have more people over. They yell at each other and blast music from their phones. This summer’s playlist is surprising, with 90s rock and country rather than the hip hop from previous years. I want them to move. To disappear. I want to plant the tallest hedge to block them out of my view. After our garage was broken into and my bike was stolen, we installed a security camera for a doorbell that occasionally shows us coyotes or racoons and postal workers. Never the drug deals. Never the reason the woman is sobbing at two am. Never the men pissing in the front yard. I pick all the cucumbers. We share our overflowing crop with the women who live in the brick house with mustard shutters and two teenage daughters. The next day there are fifteen more ready to harvest. I would like to aim the camera on the cucumbers to see what the fuck is happening in there that makes them grow overnight.
My friend Rachel taught me a Welsh word that means nostalgia or longing for a place or time that no longer exists or that you cannot return to. Hiraeth. I know nothing about my mother’s family. Maybe I am Welsh.
My skin has contracted and expanded with disease, medications, pregnancy, parasites, and menopause. I’m covered with tiny red moles that are multiplying. I have a small cyst between my shoulder blades that a friend tried to unsuccessfully pop at a Korean spa in L.A. My hands get chapped in New England winters. I don’t yet have wrinkles. My hair is thick with wide silver streaks. Hot flashes erupt from my insides and spill out over me. A molten river.
A week ago, I was waiting in the pick-up line at my son’s camp and a flash flood warning showed up on my phone alerts. It started to pour. Within what seemed like seconds, there was a shallow current rushing down the street. The camp counselors were in water up to their calves. Yesterday afternoon, my husband dropped our son off at a friend’s house and we all got an emergency flash flood alert saying to not travel. The sky opened and the rain fell in sheets for hours. The highway closed in both directions because cars could not cross. There was no way to reach my son to bring him home. He was safe and giddy at the forced sleepover. They ate tuna and rice and slept in bunk beds. My husband and I ate dinner on the gold sofa way beyond our normal hour while watching an early Agnes Varda film about a man’s childhood coastal town and his troubled relationship. I went to bed in my room, and my husband in his. When my son came home, his lithe and slight frame thundered up the stairs like an enormous beast. He crawled into my lap and I held him like a sixty-pound baby, his long curls wet from rain, and kissed his damp soft forehead like I did the day he was born.
Amra Brooks was born and raised in Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, California. Her autobiographical novella California was published by Teenage Teardrops in 2008. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Inventory, Printeresting, Ping Pong: A Literary Journal of the Henry Miller Library, Entropy, This Long Century, index, the LA Weekly, The Encyclopedia Project, and other publications. She is the director of The Raymo Literary Series and co-produces and edits The Electro-Library Podcast. She has taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz and San Diego, and Muhlenberg College. She now directs the Creative Writing Program at Stonehill College in Easton, MA where she is an Associate Professor. She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is currently working on a book of creative nonfiction called Your Beginning and Your End and early excerpts can be found in Entropy Magazine and on This Long Century. Currently she lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her family and spends New England winters dreaming of warm afternoons at the ocean, the color green, and ripe tomatoes.
Sui Park is a New York-based artist born in Seoul, Korea. Her work involves creating 3-dimensional flexible organic forms of a comfortable ambiance that are yet dynamic and possibly mystical or illusionary. Park has had several solo exhibitions and public art commissions including Immersion in Black and White at Sapar Contemporary in 2021. She has participated in over 130 exhibitions internationally. Park’s artwork has been acquired by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Oregon and the Saks Fifth Avenue Flagship Store in New York. Numerous mentions of her work and projects have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Vice and Colossal, as well as other publications. She is represented by Sapar Contemporary in New York City. Sui Park’s education includes an MDes in Interior Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Environmental Design at Maryland Institute College of Art. Sui Park also holds an MFA and BFA in Fiber Arts at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea.