night owl
by AurelEo Sans
Linda Sormin, Mandraguna, glazed ceramic, gold leaf, found string, discarded plastic 3D misprints, epoxy resin, watercolor on paper, 21 x 20 x 14 inches, 2022. Photo credit: Dave Schmitz, courtesy of the Artist and Patricia Sweetow Gallery.
night owl
Aureleo Sans | SEPT 2023 | Issue 27
She had Mami’s face, except her eyes were lights out.
I yelled, “I didn’t do anything. Why don’t you believe me?”
She said I’d been making eyes at Father Tony again. I hadn’t. She said I was becoming the “Bobo” that los diablos with pitchfork tails and pitchfork tongues wanted me to be, that I’d always wanted to be.
It’s hard to convince someone of anything, especially when you live in different realities. Mami’s body is here, but most often she’s away.
The psychiatrist said it was “schizophrenia.” A word with too many syllables and all wrong. Like tuberculosis, which they check you for at the homeless shelter and psittacosis, which is why Mami says you got to stay away from pigeons.
“Their wings carry disease,” she cooed.
She worried a lot, about thunderclouds and thunderclaps, about blue lightning and 11-year-old me getting seduced by a bad man or a loose woman and becoming a bad man myself like it was the Circle of Life, all inevitable como El Lion King. She complained of visions of ghosts and boogeymen, songs of sirens, the smell of patchouli and feathers that no one could escape.
For a long time, I worried that I would become her. They said it was an organic brain disease with a late onset. You could be all regular one day and the next believe the birds and the bees were stalking you. Brains are that slippery.
I worried. If I got sick, who would take care of Mami?
I lost sleep and time, years like whitewater rushing by. I didn’t change, but Mami continued to. After she refused to leave her apartment, finger-pointing at all the street birds, I moved her into a Medicaid old folks’ home. She and the other residents drained juice boxes and watched for death every day in the cafeteria. No one spoke. No one prayed. Sometimes my weekly visits broke the spell. Then the lights restored. Mami’s face shone. Her pinhole pupils registered. Until they didn’t again and her mind reverted to its faraway roost.
I worried about the absence of light, the accumulation of sound. I’d been seeing shadows out of the corner of my eyes and hearing distant melodies of steelpan and timbales when the hour got too late. I’d been hospitalized twice for suicidal gestures, but at least I still knew what was what.
Then Mami died of COVID in December. The nurse called me late. “She’s slipping away,” she said.
Snowflakes landed on the road and melted because this is South Texas and the sky is not supposed to cry ice. I careened down 1-35 in my Chevy Cobalt, sucking on my vape pen like a pacifier. The interior was clouds. The exterior was clouds on cloud. In front of me, the night air stalagtited. A hunk of cumulonimbus was collapsing onto the freeway. I drifted to the median. Maybe it was a tornado. Maybe it was a disturbance in the temporal force. I turned and looked back at the traffic, people speeding by like nothing was wrong, the way they’d done all my life.
The clouds congealed. La Lechuza and her shaggy legs landed on the hood of my car. The owlwoman’s talons ripped into Detroit steel. She stretched out her black wings to either end of the horizon. I got out of the car with my hands up. I don’t know why. She hopped down. Her heart-shaped face swiveled, eyeing me. She opened her beak and bones fell out, all sizes. Hitting the ground, they sounded like maracas. I moved closer to her, to bear witness to the bones and her black plumage, sharp as shame and glittering ultramarine in the glory of the street lights. I examined her face made of hard keratin, her eyes made of green glass. I moved closer. I wanted a hug.
aureleo sans is a Colombian-American, non-binary, queer, formerly unhoused writer and poet with a disability who resides in San Antonio, Texas. She has been named a Sewanee Writers Conference Scholar, a Tin House Scholar, a Roots Wounds Words Writers Retreat Fellow, a Lambda Literary Fellow, an ASF Workshop Fellow, and a Periplus Fellow. Her work has appeared in Shenandoah, Electric Literature, Passages North, the 2023 Best Micro Fiction Anthology, and elsewhere.
Linda Sormin explores fragility, upheaval, migration, survival and change through sculpture and site-responsive installations. She was a 2021 and 2023 participant at European Ceramic Workcentre in the Netherlands, creating new work for three exhibitions: Ceramics in the Expanded Field: Sculpture, Performance and the Possibilities of Clay at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, USA (October 16, 2021 - April 2, 2023), No Boundaries at Messums, London, UK, a solo exhibition at Messums, Wiltshire (March 5 – May 1, 2022), and a two-person exhibition at Peach Corner Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark (September 29 – November 5, 2022).
Sormin lives and works in New York City, and is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at New York University. She has taught ceramics at Emily Carr University, Rhode Island School of Design, Sheridan College and Alfred University. Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Sormin moved to Canada with her family at the age of five. She has a BA in English Literature and worked in community development for four years in Thailand and Laos. She received degrees from Andrews University (BA, English Literature, 1993), Sheridan College (Diploma, Craft and Design, 2001) and Alfred University (MFA, Ceramic Art, 2003). Sormin’s work is included in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC, USA), Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON, Canada), CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art (Middelfart, Denmark), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY, USA), Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), Arizona State University Museum, (Tempe, AZ, USA), World Ceramic Exposition (Gyeonggi Province, Korea), and Schein-Joseph Museum of Ceramic Art (Alfred, NY, USA).