Connective Tissue
by Carol Fischbach
Helen G. Blake, Snap, oil on linen, 5.5 x 2.76 inches, 2018. Collection of Ballinglen Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artist.
Connective Tissue
CAROL FISCHBACH / SEPT 2021 / ISSUE 9
September 11, 2001
1. In the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, in Horsetooth Mountain Park, a bird on a branch faces a burning ball in the east, the one that brings light every day over the high plains nestled against the foothills. The shafts of the bird’s long iridescent blue and black tail feathers twitch, white breast feathers tense against her body, glowing blue-green feathered wings tuck tight, all her feathers pulled in to protect the ripple of thin epidermal skin beneath. Her throat wants to release a raspy cawcaw but something stops her. Black bead eyes scan tops of pines, spaces between ragged rocks, trails below her, she looks for beetles, grasshoppers, small songbirds, her usually abundant staples, until finally, black beak down in defeat, the magpie curses the silent emptiness of the land. The stillness of wind. The air hanging heavy from a cloudless sky like a curtain about to fall.
Black feet, black claws cinch around the branch of the pinyon pine. She looks for a place to hide. Before she moves to thick lower branches to roost next to a sturdy trunk, before she tucks her beak under her wing, despite the daylight, before she will feel safe enough to forage for food for her empty belly, she sees a human standing alone next to an object of metal, lined in silver, perched on black rounds. She nods her head. Stops. Watches.
2. My eyes have barely blinked. Repeating images. Hour after hour. Planes crashing. Burning and collapsing towers. Horror and chaos and smoke.
Somehow I break its hold on me, get in the car, and drive to my hiking haven, Horsetooth Mountain Park, where I spend afternoons clawing across rocks, skinning trails, wearing them on my bones, I long to breathe the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, mile high air with less oxygen that fills me in a way nothing else can.
I turn off the car in the empty parking lot. Stillness clings to the windows, the doors, the body of the car. Stillness I’ve never felt there. My park, my solace, now oppressive and stifling. I’m heavy. Overfull with shock and sadness. But empty at the same time. A vacuum for lives lost, things left undone by the dead, things left unsaid, sins left unforgiven.
My own sins. The ones that haunt me year after year. Those days, weeks when deep depression slithered under the green blanket where I hid, when I called in with excuses for why I didn’t show up at work, when nothing mattered anymore. Not the forged signatures on stolen prescription pads. Not the pain pills that never stopped the pain. Not that long ago morning when I placed my hand on my belly, braced myself with valium and codeine, drove to the hospital alone for an abortion I didn’t want. Now, miles of years later, clean and sober and childless, I want to hang those sins with a silk cord on the branch of a silver tree. Hang them in open air. Offer them up to a forgiving sky.
I don’t want to leave the car. When I finally emerge, I stand next to the door, unable to close it, still clinging to it when I look up at the sky. I need to be grounded. How can the sky be so blue? How can there be no birds? No jet trails to slash the sky like the white scars of slashes on my wrists. No breeze rustles the pines. No falling cones. No distant, muffled jet engines. No scurrying of lizards. No gophers popping their heads out of holes.
My chest expands, contracts, but I don’t feel breath. Instead, a crescendo of hushed energy from the east thunders across the land. The fluid inside me roils. Atoms bounce out of rhythm while this outer shell of skin, this shallow epithelium, contains the force of a rotating world suddenly gone counterclockwise, my skin holds it all without a ripple. I’m frozen in place by this turbulent vortex I cannot explain. This towering force rolls across the park, over me, through me, but somehow the air hangs silent and still and heavy. How can empty-still-silent air hold so much?
That is the world in this moment.
I turn from the car, lost on familiar trails. Which one do I take? The one that goes west to watch the sunset. The one that goes north to stay in shadow. Dare I risk going east on narrow trails with stacks of rocks where rattlesnakes perch in the waning sun.
Instead, I stop. Look up into the pines. See a magpie on a branch. Her black bead eyes and my wide round blues connect. Seeing, not seeing. Eyes like containers to hold the empty/full space between us. Containers that gather particles, imprint them on retinas, store them in memory. Psychopomps, this bird and I. Witnesses. Guides for the particles of ghost cells crashing between us in this moment. This reverence for the unseen.
I go back to the car and return home.
3. A woman in a blue business suit, blonde hair short and manageable, not yet gray, walks past floor to ceiling windows on the 78th floor in Tower 1. Damn these heels, she curses to no one. She’s late to a scheduled meeting. She sips the Starbucks Americano, the liquid energy she needs more and more these days, she sips through the small hole and burns her lip. She curses again. She needs to focus but keeps remembering the touch of soft lips and a goodbye kiss that morning. The image of her partner’s full belly. How will their lives change once their daughter is born. The daughter with her partner’s DNA, who might have her partner’s crooked smile and full lips. This career woman smiles and poises her body to sit in the adjustable black vinyl chair when suddenly a shadow crosses her skin and she looks up over the cubicle wall, through floor-to-ceiling windows, wondering where the blue has gone, the blue that was there a moment ago, but instead a flash of silver and a roaring hulk of jet engines and glowing metal wings and faces of people in small windows, their eyes wide, mouths open in silent screams. She witnesses their last moments when the plane explodes into the building fifteen stories above her and a fireball of fuel blasts down an elevator shaft, air rushes in carrying gas fumes and smoke and panic. The building sways, the floor violently shakes, her chest constricts, glass breaks, her belly erupts in fear.
In over an hour, this woman, her career, her friends, her life, her potentiality as a parent, all will disintegrate into particles.
Perhaps an epidermal cell from her lips explodes into the air and takes flight in this raw surging current, a cell that carries the scent of her partner, the DNA of their child she will never know, a cell that floats west over hills and plains and crops and cities, to Horsetooth Mountain Park, to a magpie on a branch, to a woman standing next to a car, a cell that briefly begs their witness, then races forward through history, leaving behind a dark imprint, a kiss of death, grief filled hearts. A cell that carries the memory of that morning when a career woman saw a loving look on her partner’s face when she kissed her goodbye, fingers that felt the gentle ripple of a tiny daughter foot through a belly to her hand, a hand that didn’t want to let go, now reduced to a single cell, a marker, now eternal, now memory, forgotten, remembered.
Carol Fischbach is a writer, nurse, and student archetype—a collector of degrees. At age sixty-four, she became an RN and was the oldest person in her class. She then went on to earn an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Now at seventy-two, she isn’t done yet but limits herself to lifting words instead of people. Writing is the portal through which she remembers, reframes, and releases memories. She continues to challenge herself by taking workshops that defy writing norms so she can find new ways to appear on the page.
Carol continues to add to her writing workshop portfolio with Lidia Yuknavitch and many other writers. She writes with a group of badass women writers and is also a member of Pinewood Table. Most recently, she stretched her creative muscles to include monologue performances in company with other writers and performers directed by Beth Bornstein Dunnington. Carol has been published in Propeller, Nailed Magazine, Oregon East, Tide Pools, the Port Townsend Leader, and has done past performances at ROAR, a platform for fierce feminine storytelling. She lives in Vancouver, WA with her husband, brother, and two kitties.
Helen G Blake is a painter whose practice focuses on colour; engaging with rhythm and formalism, chance and deliberation. Using a working method where process and contemplation are both allowed guide the evolution of the work, she constructs overtly hand-made paintings which record and examine colour conversations within accumulating pattern structures, embracing accidents, flaws and discrepancies within their rhythms. Blake grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and graduated with an honours degree in Visual Art from Aberystwyth University, Wales. Recent solo shows include: Recent Works, The Molesworth Gallery, Dublin (2021, 2019, 2017); Choir, Limerick Museum (2019); and New Paintings, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast (2018). She lives and works in County Wicklow, Ireland.