Summer Song IV
by ANNA REESER
Liz Asch, This Way Home, mixed media on oil paper, 22 x 30 inches, 2016. Photo by Anna Campbell. Courtesy of the artist.
After the surgery, Aaron led me into our yard, showed me where the lupine plant sprouted. I didn’t see it. He pointed again.
“Where?”
“Right there. There.”
Finally, there it was, a green shape. It was like every leaf had turned to its thin side and disappeared to me.
The cramps weren’t as bad as the doctor warned, but I still took the Codeine pill and slept on the lawn, a sun hat covering my face. I was apparently myself again, scraped clean. Aaron shook me awake. In his hand were three lumpy snow peas from the garden.
“I guess we missed them,” he said. “They’re kind of old, but they taste fine.”
I put one in my mouth. The pod was woody. Inside, the peas were over-sweet and mealy.
“No,” I said. “They do not!”
I spat the stringy tangle into the grass. It didn’t go far, kind of dribbled out. We laughed for a long time, gulping air. As soon as we stopped laughing, I missed the feeling, so I started again.
***
Two weeks passed, swaddled in television. I slept heavy and woke up without edges. Mornings were overbright, blurry, and coffee made me restless, picturing the stacks of proofs I should have already produced. Aaron had reaffixed the tarp, giving the shed-studio a blue glow. There was the ear, the shoulder curve. Simple shapes sketched onto linoleum blocks in graphite. Flat, rounded, as if a body could be traced in lines. I expected to feel a rush when I opened my bin of materials, the dust smell of my expertise—but it didn’t come. Instead there was a new nausea, a slack feeling in my hands. I couldn’t hold my old gouges, couldn’t pick up the same block and keep carving; I no longer wanted to try. I packed the materials inside the bin, sealed the lid, and stacked the blocks against the wall of the plastic shed.
***
One night, Aaron and I watched a Nova special about the expansion of the universe. We lay on the couch on our sides, his arm across my chest. I felt like a fragment of rock inside my body, floating. We’d barely touched since the ultrasound. He kissed my neck; his hand drifted to the hem of my shirt and met my hip bone. For a second, I breathed through the flinch that was there, felt an echo of pleasure across a distance. But I was afraid to let it feel good.
He said, “Does it hurt?”
I didn’t answer.
“The doctor said it was okay.” He massaged my shoulder.
“I don’t know,” I snapped. My muscle tensed against his hand.
His voice was low, soft. “This isn’t supposed to go on forever.” He kneaded the muscle with his thumbs.
“That hurts,” I said, even though it didn’t, and ducked my shoulder out of his hand. He looked at me hard. I didn’t mean to punish him—it was my body I was rejecting. But when I said nothing else, he pushed up from the couch and walked out. The screen door snapped closed behind him.
Alone, I tried to put my own hand over my navel. The skin felt hot, a sunburn searing. I went to the darkened kitchen and watched Aaron pace the yard in the glow of a streetlight. He hit his fist against his other palm, over and over.
***
That weekend, I met Nina at a bar that served great mock-tails, she said. We sat outside on stools cut from tree stumps, the rough bark still attached. She slid the menu to me. That’s when I told her. I rushed through it.
“Oh, Catherine,” she said. Her face cascaded through expressions, settled on tentative eyebrows of concern. “I’m so sorry. Miscarriage is so common, right?”
I flushed. Common—she was right, but the word hit me in the gut. If this were common, then why had no one told me about the desert, the way my hands would feel too dry to hold a pencil, the way I would see my torso in the bathtub and feel nothing but shame? I saw pain flinch across Nina’s face, waiting for me to speak. I thanked her.
She cocked her head, testing a smile. “You want a real drink?”
We ordered martinis. After a few salted sips I felt wasted. I could sense the moisture in my face evaporating. There was grit like sand between my teeth, an expanse of sagebrush between me and her.
We talked about our show. She was making landscapes—the coast, Columbia River Gorge, Mount Hood. She’d already started the Gorge, a three-by-four-foot woodcut, a massive project.
“My arms are sore,” she said. “What about you?”
“Just ideas so far.”
“You’ll be fine. You always work fast.” She took a long sip of her martini and sun glanced off her bracelets.
And then, maybe it was her slow smile or the heat or the drink—I wanted her to be where I was. I told her I was in a desert. All sand and washed-out sky. I said, “I try to see the lupine in the yard, and I can’t. The trees, the green leaves, they’re not there. You know? You see the house that’s supposed to be yours, and you can’t recognize it anymore.” She narrowed her eyes, not comprehending. I took a breath. “Look, I’m not making prints. Not even drawings. Nothing is happening. You have to find someone else who can crank out big editions.”
Her mouth opened a little. “Wait—are you serious?”
“I think my art already changed.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m dropping out of the show.” I hadn’t planned to say it, but I meant it. I told her I was dizzy, this was my first drink in two months, and I needed to go home.
Nina was silent for a long time, eyes cast down. Then she looked at me, squinted like I was the raw sun.
“I understand,” she said, her voice softening. “You’re grieving.” I felt the words mist my skin, a tenderness of fog.
***
The next morning, I held Aaron in bed, my body curved against his back. I kissed his shoulder blades. We stayed like that, still and close, for over an hour.
Later, the sky was gently overcast, and I walked to the nearest commercial street, several blocks. Thirty-one, shirt tucked into high-waisted jeans, I looked like myself two months ago. My legs felt stiff, muscle clinging too hard to bone. I wandered into an art supply store; a tiny bell on the doorknob announced me. Immediately I regretted it. Everything looked sharp and small—nibs and felt tips and gouges. Clean lines, great expectations.
I had turned to leave when I saw the clay. Rounded cubes of red clay stacked in plastic. Earth-red, like sand. My mother was still taking the pottery class—she texted me pictures sometimes, the lopsided vases. I took a block in my arms, I purchased it. It was so heavy and so cold, but I held it against my hip as I walked. When I got home, Aaron had made grilled cheese and tomato soup. I ate in wide bites, with more force than I had gathered in weeks.
Almost dusk, color draining from the flat sky. I took the clay into the yard, where the lawn had dried to straw, and knelt in a patch of hardened soil. I peeled the plastic away from the clay and began to touch it. The material seemed to grow out of the ground itself. The slip of the surface was like water on skin. Or blood on dirt.
I hit the clay with my fist, felt the cold hard softening, got it under my nails. I hit the clay with my palms until they stung. Until they ached. When I looked up, I saw Aaron through the kitchen window watching me. He tucked his chin down in a nod. Almost a bow. I could tell he was fighting the urge to follow me outside, to steady my stinging hands, but he stayed and turned back to the folds of the house.
I close my eyes. I tell myself to remember this, the way the blood sparks in my fingers, the way my chest is full and straining, because this is the way I will keep going—to feel it, to feel it with my hands. I pound the clay flat, cratered, until it mixes with the dirt that stains my knees. Slippery with silt, I form the bottom of an empty lake. There is no sketch, no matrix, no registration, no alignment. Lines bend in every dimension, humming. Catch in the throat, rising, falling, the opening of a blood vessel, tremble of a song against shower tile. I’m doing what my mother taught me, manipulating material to make something new. But this is different. For the first time, I am making a space.
Soon, the lake swallows the yard. The trees are gone, either disappeared or faded into twilight. Our house is there, but years older, paint peeling from the doorframe. String lights across the porch, a charcoal grill, a scattering of flip-flops, an outbuilding by the fence. I tell myself it is a studio. A white lawn chair catches the moonlight, and I hear the sound of water. The lake begins to fill, slowly as a bathtub. It rises above my knees, warm, meeting the grown-out hairs on my thighs. The water rises to the skin between my hip bones. It feels elastic, possible. A thought vibrates through my spine: I would love my child so fiercely.
A light switches on in the house, yellowing the window to the spare room. I don’t see Aaron, but I tell myself it’s him there, the steady shape moving behind the curtain. Beyond, the horizon stretches to dark land and dulling sky. I hear night bugs, wind, the hum of a car on the far road, its radio trailing guitar. A child runs across the porch. Sound of shoes on sand, voice bright as sage flowers strung together. I hear her, but she’s running too fast to see.
Anna Reeser’s short fiction is published in The Best American Short Stories 2020, The Masters Review, Fourteen Hills, and CutBank. She has lived throughout the West Coast and is now based in her hometown of Ojai, California. She recently completed a story collection and is working on a novel.
Liz Asch is an author, artist, and acupuncturist based in Portland, Oregon. Her book, Your Salt on My Lips (Cleis Press, 2021), is an ode to eros in queer bodies of the global majority. Her podcast, Body Land Metaphor Medicine, is a free archive of somatic visualizations. Her stop-motion animation film, The Love Seat, played in LGBT film festivals in the US and Canada. Liz holds a BA from Vassar, a Masters in Chinese Medicine, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Eastern Oregon University. Liz has published essays, poems, interviews, stories, book reviews, and artwork in a variety of journals and anthologies, earning her a Pushcart nomination, a RACC grant, and several essay prizes. Liz teaches embodied surrealism and salutary storytelling, with an emphasis on earth activism, creative expression, and public health.