Honestly?

To be honest, I didn’t understand everything you said. It's hard to understand you with that peach pit in your mouth. And honestly, I forgot what it was we were talking about in the first place, I got so caught up in wondering how you’ve managed to get any juice from that thing all this time. I mean, honestly! Then I thought, well, I do understand the desire to chew and chew. Honest I do. I get that it satisfies something deep and internal, and I see now that honesty is not always the best policy, though at least it is a policy. And quite honestly, we could use a little more policy around here. In all honesty I am tired of watching you gnaw on that thing. I'm beyond wondering what you're getting out if it, and I've forgotten our point. I think it’s really gross by now, what you've got in your mouth, even though you'd say it's "as honest as the day is long" (in quotes). I'd say it's pushed me into a hole of disgust. Yes, no seriously. Honestly? That is not an exaggeration. I mean let's be honest, "pushed me into whole disgust" is exactly what's happened here.

"Pig-Pen"

Thunderheads of ancient dust carrying soil once trod

by Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar or Genghis Khan or

a preteen girl and a preteen boy from the Middle Ages, 

stealing time in a church nave. Or the hidden meadow. 

Just mystical dust that billowed up and fell in 

line with breath. "Pig-Pen", you could stay dirty 

in a snowstorm, and you did, in an apartment 

where empty bottles go to die on top shelves. 

Home to you. Home no matter how you tried to 

clean your feet, walking as you did to the point of 

no return. What was once destiny -- Ithaca's dirt 

lifting, engulfing, defining you as you flailed 

inside its center and shouted loud into real time --

now shame.

Time Travel

At first, there were the eight long years lived in the old house where my mother had died. And then the four years in the big house with the stream out front, and the tall trees. Then, the school in the city on the east coast. Then the drive cross-country with the cat named Molly.

Threatening to escape her cage, Molly writhed and spit. My sister and I took her to a vet hospital in Tucumcari, New Mexico to get her on tranquilizers. It was there that we heard the legend of Tocom and Kari, two young Native American lovers who died by knife after Tocom had fought bravely for Kari's love. When the Indian chief was shown the tragic scene of a dead Tocom and Kari, it is said he buried Kari's knife deep into his own heart, crying, "Tocom-Kari!"

The cat, asleep in the backseat, snored all the way to L.A. I stayed one month on a tasteful pull-out divan in the living room of my sister's lover's home until I found a basement apartment in a guest house in the Hollywood Hills. It was there that Molly blossomed into full-on huntress, where she brought her catch into bed (a futon I pulled out every night and retracted every morning). Once, there was a one-legged lizard found under the blanket, pleading with his bleeding eyes as he scratched me with his one remaining leg. My cat was vicious. There was little to be done aside from putting bells on her collar and hoping for the best. She wouldn't hear of staying inside.

Then, I moved to the former artists' colony in the hills, behind which was a statue of the Virgin Mary where my neighbors and I would climb to smoke at its foot, to look out upon the City of Angels with a certain sense of beingness and aliveness that we normally did not feel in our lives of clerking and second-assisting. The Santa Ana winds pushed and shoved dried carob tree husks around our feet, shifting and jabbing, scythes made alive by the winds, their power ghostly and haunted. I was reminded of home, of my years back in the Midwestern town where my friends and I snuck into the quarry and climbed the gravel dunes, where the insects crawled upon our laps once we settled in with a twelve pack and the storytelling got quiet. The air was thinner up there and the settling darkness made the world alive and our selves nothing more than the muscles that pumped inside our raw bodies.

The cat was afraid then, during the Santa Ana winds, and made wilder still. There was no means in the new studio apartment at the former artists' colony for her to let herself in or out, she was reliant on me to do the honors. I worked long hours as a production assistant on a television show where my main point of duty was to make sure I'd ordered the writers' lunch right. Often Molly did not come home. I walked at night calling her name, pathetically shaking a bag of her favorite treats thinking anything I had would or could entice her from the natural world. My sister warned me she'd get eaten by a coyote if I kept letting her out, but my sister didn't understand my cat, and that I doubted she would ever die. One neighbor who entertained himself a filmmaker, his entire apartment packed floor-to-ceiling with every horror film known to have been produced, who moaned of Quintan Tarantino's success in the same breath that he took credit for it (they had worked together at the same video store back in the day), hated Molly for the sounds the bell on her collar made. Sometimes, when I came home from work and she greeted me at my front door, I saw the bell on her collar had been removed. The horror filmmaker wanted to make my cat quiet. He wanted to make her deadlier still.

One morning I woke to a squawk, a shriek, and then weird quiet. And then, a Molly scratch at the door. I opened the door to find Molly's tail flicking and a half-dead bird placed at my doorstep. Molly pranced into the apartment with nothing more to say or do while I was stuck with the moral dilemma of having been given a half-dead creature. Its eyes were terrified. Precision: its eyes revealed terror. It was gray and its left wing was half tore off. It must have been in a great deal of pain. I knew the thing to do was to kill the bird to put it out of its misery, so I walked back inside to grab a pan. I would beat the thing with the pan, I would. I would kill the bird. Molly mewed from inside the apartment for food. She wanted from my bag of treats. The bird. The pan. The pan. The bird. Molly's cry from inside. Carob husks like scythes and Santa Ana winds. Tocom! Kari! The woman had died inside my home and for eight years we lived there still. She was never a story I told upon a rock pile in the old quarry, no matter how much beer I drank.

I couldn't kill the bird. I set down the pan. I walked back inside. I fed the cat. She couldn't help that she was a cat. I grabbed a towel. I walked back outside. I shut the apartment door. I scooped up the still-live bird with the towel and sat on a bench near my front door. Everything was alive. The wind was alive, it was, and the skittering leaves and the piles of dried pine needles and the bird in my palm. What precious weight. I sat with it on my lap and with my clubbish forefinger I pet its perfect head. In my left hand I could feel its heart careening through the towel. It was so scared at the very end. "Shh," I tried, until it died.

Next Big Thing Blog Chain: The "Self"-Interview

I was recently invited by writer Sari Wilson for The Next Big Thing blog chain "self-interview." Here's Sari's post. And here's mine (questions revised from the original by Quintan Ana Wikswo):

I know you've had this mysterious manuscript going for a little while now, and I'm curious: Can you tell us the name of your book?

Point of Departure 

I just got accidentally dropped on my head by the underpaid and terribly exploited assistant of this hotshot Upper East Side literary agent. Great - now I have a concussion. I can only remember one sentence at a time before my mind goes blank. Tell me about your book in one sentence. 

I can't explain it in one sentence and I sort of hope I never can.

From what I understand, this book has experienced a series of evolutions in its development. How would you describe its path from original idea to what it has now become?

Growing up I felt I couldn't speak about my mother who died by suicide when I was five. That event, and the never speaking of it, enriched my inner world and made me get wild fantastical ideas that she wasn't really dead. When I was 35 I went away to Morocco on a grant to write a book about her. When I was there I started getting fantastical ideas again and that led to the first hundreds of pages of what is now an unruly manuscript. 

That sounds like a really compelling journey, both for the writer and the reader. Let's say I'm wandering the shelves of the most delightful indie bookstore in New York. On what shelf do I find your book?

Memoir-slash-contrafactual fiction 

The elephant in the room for many writers is this whole admittedly lucrative and seductive - if a little bit embarrassing - adventure called "optioned for film" or "movie rights" or "dear god, don't let hollywood steal my soul." Do you think you're writing the kind of book that would want to take on a second life in Hollywood? If so, who would play your characters?

An as-yet-unknown smart and wildly attractive woman would play me, Juliette Binoche would play my mother, and a young, as-yet-unknown North African actor would play the character of my doe-eyed friend Abdel.

A lot of writers in New York are talking about the tremendous new variety of ways for adventurous writing to make its way out into the world of readers. E-books, art collaborations, traditional corporate publishing, limited editioned series - what do you think about that? Do you think you could find a home in any of them in particular? 

>Shrugging my shoulders<

Are you a compulsive drafter who labors over a body of work until it's absolutely perfect, or are you one of those types who loads up on pills and booze and self-indulgence and just pops out a fat-sassy manuscript into the toilet after a nice three-day Monday?

Um. I've drawn countless crazy-lady geometric diagrams to understand its structure. The writing and drafting and diagramming and applying for money to support the work and drafting and writing have taken about four years total, and then I put it all aside for three years to work on a narrative nonfiction-slash-reportage about women and prostitution in Morocco (a collaborative work with photographer Tiana-Markova-Gold). Tiana and I are putting together a book proposal now, and the long-form essay I wrote is out to magazine editors. I'm also finishing up a children's chapter book called Wilma Moves to Brooklyn, which is about cats set in a totally cat world (the book will be illustrated by Aurora Almendral and self-published). With these projects almost finished, I'm starting to get back to the mother book again. Well, these are some concrete reasons I've been waylaid, but others have to do with time, money, jobs, sanity, money, relationships, and despair.

If your book decided to run away from home and go ride the rails, who would you hope would be the other pee-soaked bums in its boxcar? 

I don't know. Maybe that new book by Francisco Goldman or The Lover by Marguerite Duras.

You could do what all the other nice girls are doing: knitting, running for senate, saving up for expensive fertility treatments, stockpiling weapons for the feminist revolution, and so forth. Why are you sweating tears of blood over a manuscript? 

My sisters have inspired me, and my father, whether they intended to or whether they know it or not. Also the millions of people who've had to swallow their grief in order to survive in a world that doesn't give a shit.

Is your book the kind of book that would have to car-jack a reader in order for someone to want to read it, or would your book be the kind of book that people will follow down the street like cash is falling out of its back pocket? I think that's the conversation we mostly have about books and readers, right? If your book is one of the nameless faceless hoards on the F train, what is its little secret glorious glimpse of self that will steal away the heart of its seatmate? 

It makes contact. It's real.

***

Next up on The Next Big Thing:

Nicole Callihan, formerly Nicole Hefner, writes poems, stories and essays. Her work has appeared in, among others, Painted Bride Quarterly, Salt Hill, New York Quarterly, North American Review and cream city review and has been translated into German and Spanish. A finalist for the Iowa Review’s Award for Literary Nonfiction, she was named as Notable Reading for Best American Non-required Reading and awarded Best of the Net 2010 for fiction. She has received grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and from the Rockefeller Institute and is a founding member of the Brooklyn Writers Collaborative. Her book, Henry River Mill Village, which she co-authored with Ruby Young Keller was published by Arcadia Press in July 2012.

Night man dives into
forgotten river into
ribbon of gone unsaid

A narrow light
ongoing elegy
continuously
how continuously
the brain vein stretches
how continuous my open mouth
opens to form a hole a hole
is a hole a hole

The outline of my body
seen from below
concrete overpass
tagged by night thugs'
bubbled lettering

Ask me anything you want
Anything you want, just ask

I said, I want to know
how deep these holes go
I want to know how deep
the dead holes go
how continuous

I said, You move too fast

It was cold
and the blanket stank
and the night man could reach
into February
always into February
until February

Turned into internal
information
intonation
interned

The light was a blue light
it was and how continuous
this how continuous this
night man this hole this
river mouth opened
into open sea

Tan Tan Plage

Each morning I watched a man emerge from his tent, then walk to the cafe directly underneath our hotel balcony, then walk back out to his tent, pinching the rim of an espresso glass. He sat on an industrial-sized paint bucket turned upside-down while he drank his coffee and watched the waves roll in. He meditated on the sea while I meditated on him meditating on the sea.

Tan Tan Plage, a coastal town in Morocco near the Western Sahara, was not the vacation my friend and I had imagined it would be (and not, I might add, what the guidebook said it would be). We were the only women donning bikinis where very few women were present. The other women there were locals dressed either in blue jeans, even on the sand, or Saharawi style -- long swathes of fabric called malhafas wrapped round and round their bodies. Some might say that after 18 months of living in Morocco, I should've known better than to wear a bikini in a coastal town in Southern Morocco, but saying so would mean ignoring the fact that Morocco is an incredibly diverse country where bikinis are not by definition taboo. It is true, though, that at the very least I should have known that I could only comfortably wear a bikini if I were with a man. 

Some boys threw food at us. Old chicken bones flung while we tried to sunbathe on our blanket. They ran close circles around us, then lay nearby throwing handfuls of sand. Every day men played soccer on the beach. Apparently they needed the entire beach to play, so every day my friend and I were asked to move our blanket. It was an extremely large beach. There were dozens of soccer games and there were hundreds of men. Every day. It was the man who lived in the tent who came to us once to apologize for our having to move.

We walked to a place called the Korea House once to buy beer, a random side-of-the-road Korean restaurant about five miles from our hotel, maybe four. It was closed when we got there, but still we banged on the door until a Korean woman came to answer. She didn't say a word to us, only opened the door and then sold us as much beer as we could carry. We drank most of it on our way back to our hotel until we were two wild women wasted out in the middle of a desert.

Seven days like that, maybe eight. Then we were to take a 22-hour bus to Dakhla, in the Western Sahara. There was a Moroccan guard in a shack on the way, and wind and only a candle lit while he checked our passports in middle of a cold night. He asked me if I was a man's wife.

But we were still on the edge of it now, still in Morocco. In the early evenings, after unbearable hours on the beach, we watched the sun set from our hotel balcony. We drank the Pastis we'd packed with warm water, no ice. I watched the man hold a long fishing pole with the bucket turned right-side up now, next to his tent. Six, maybe seven days. It appeared his job was to fish. I was thinking like that, thinking like a Westerner. Thinking, his job must be as a fisherman but what does he eat, how does he survive, does he have another home besides the tent, did he have a family who lived nearby, yes, perhaps he only sometimes slept in the tent. Like that.

His name was Ali. My friend and I, we kept insisting with our bikinis on the beach. There was nothing else to do. We took lunch at a restaurant, we walked to the public cyber, we insisted. A teenaged boy leaned into me when we were walking through town, then snapped his fingers not two inches from my crotch. I grabbed the boy by his shirt but didn't get a good hold and he ran and I chased after him screaming in Arabic, "Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame!" Then I cried. This is what you get for insisting, I knew. 

The man in the tent, the fisherman, his name was Ali. He had to ask my friend and me to move our blanket so the menfolk could play their games. Twice he asked, maybe three. So. He was the nephew of the hotel owner, that was his connection to the hotel. Ok, so he must eat at the hotel for free, I thought, and drink coffee for free and maybe sometimes sleep in the hotel. Yes. Each morning I watched him. He walked to the cafe under the balcony. Waved. Hello, Ali. Hello. 

I didn't want him to hear how I'd made a fool of myself with the boy who snapped his fingers not two inches from crotch, how I cried. There had been a group of boys who'd been sitting on a stoop not ten feet away, they laughed and called me names. Eight days we were there, or was it seven. Then we were packed and ready to go to another town called Tan Tan where we would catch a bus that would take us further south into the Western Sahara to Dakhla. It was Ali who helped us with our bags from the hotel to the grand taxi station at the top of a hill in Tan Tan Plage.

He came into the taxi with us to Tan Tan. Just like that he was with us in the taxi. We drove through desert, desert like Nevada desert, desert flat and desert tan. There was the Korea House with a pagoda roof. We must accept not insist that we were in a fairytale exiled in a desert where we were not wanted where we would find a woman in a Korea House who gave us an elixir and the man who fished on the beach was with us now in the backseat of a taxi.

In Tan Tan we had to wait for the bus that would take us further. Ali sat with us at a cafe. We spoke in Arabic, he and I. He said he'd lived in the Cayman Islands for two years. I didn't ask how he'd made it across the sea to the Cayman Islands, it was too private of a question, like asking a Mexican how he made it across the Arizona border. Ali said he'd met a Spanish woman in the Caymans with whom he'd fallen in love. He said he worked at a restaurant there. He and the Spanish woman worked together and then were engaged to be married. She came to Morocco with him and went back to Spain. He had to stay in Morocco for reasons he didn't say and the woman was supposed to come back, only it had been three years ago already. 

She might come back, I said.

I was drinking a cold Coca Cola from a glass bottle. There were flies and a billboard of His Majesty King Mohammad VI looking down upon us; the writing on the billboard said "Nam" ("Yes"). Propaganda for the upcoming vote on the King's constitutional reforms. 

Sure, maybe she'll come back, he said.

There were only fifteen more minutes now in Tan Tan. Fifteen, maybe ten. She might, I said again. He said nothing. Well why don't you go back to Cayman? I asked.

It's too hard, Sarah, too dangerous. The coast is heavily guarded by military. I looked at my watch. I could have imagined Ali's story. It wouldn't have been hard to do. Five more minutes now, maybe six. Check please. Ali said, I have to marry a foreign woman if I want to leave Morocco again. I knew that. 

But the Spanish woman, I said, she'll come back, I said. I knew what he was getting at. Didn't she love you? I asked.

It's been three years, he said again. He'd accepted she wasn't coming back. He was looking me in the eye. 

But, I said. He was the only man on the beach who'd been polite to my friend and me. And now he needed me to help him. I'm going to Dakhla, Ali. Right now, I said. 

But you'll come back to Morocco?

God willing, I said. And then he helped to put my bag in the bus. 

And then there was a man in a shack who checked my passport by candlelight. Then there were flamingos in Dakhla and white sand and white water and wind and men who let the wind take them who let the wind take them because they were rich men who could let the wind take them who could.

Tunneling, II

I am in my sister's bedroom closet. There is the chest there where she keeps her precious things, including a cardigan sweater that was our mother's. I am running, running, trying to get out of the basement. I try my sister's fire escape window but it won't let me out; I try our other sister's fire escape window, but it won't let me out, either. I run through the rec room over our dog's petrified shit and pools of pee, past Mom's sewing machine that's still there and suddenly I can see her at it, then I can see me and my sister playing air hockey, then my knuckles hurt from the puck ramming them, then Dad and his friends and our relatives are in the rec room drinking at the bar decorated with staple-gunned beer coasters, and I'm still running, trying to find a way out. Well there are the stairs, duh. I run up them and forget there is an accordion door there that shuts with a magnet. I don't even try to open it. I know that on the other side I will be faced with the garage and the rest of the house and the yard and the neighborhood and the city and the state. I don't want to be out wandering. No, I need to go back downstairs and find a way out somehow.

I go back to my sister's bedroom closet, to the chest and already I feel better in her room -- the theater posters on the walls, the smell of Love's Baby Soft perfume. From her space there must be a way out. I open the chest again and remember the hatch door at the bottom of it. I pull it open, like a storm door of an old country house, the kind Dorothy and Toto never found to enter when the tornado came. I push my face in. It's a small hole but I am a small person. I've been afraid of what's on the other side of the door for a long, long time. Once I had imagined my sister getting lost down there. There is a tunnel made of cold, wet earth. I go and go and go and go.  I have no idea where it will take me.

And then I am delivered to a seashore. Sun and crystal-clear sea. Space -- so much space -- and me. But no people and I feel afraid, a little. I think, I can't stop. So I swim into the water. I float out there like I did on my birthday -- and I am weeping, knowing that although I have escaped the basement, I can still remember it, and I still fear it, so it is with me out here in this water even though all these years have passed. I can't float here and think about these things, I think -- I'll shrivel up to salt and die. I must keep going.

And then I see my friends on shore. They've thrown a rope out to me and are yelling to me to take the rope, Sarah, take the rope, we'll pull you back to shore! They want me to be fine but I know if I take the rope, I won't be fine. They don't know that, but I do. So I go under water instead. And I swim and I swim and I know that I will die out in the open sea, but I go anyway.

I see huge octopi with glowing tentacles and a sunken ship so old it looks like it's covered in fur and a 20-foot shark and I am still swimming. I swim forever.  I am a woman who can survive under water. Maybe I am a mermaid, maybe my tail is one huge muscle. Oh, the water feels so nice on my bare breasts.

I pass a hole in the ocean floor and decide to poke my nose in. I peak in it to see a family of tiny otters dancing in their kitchen. They're holding hands and the fire is lit in their tiny fireplace and they're spinning in circles and dancing and singing. They're a miniature otter family and they are so happy with what they have.

I pull my head out of the silty floor and keep swimming. I am a huge mermaid in comparison to their tiny otter selves -- and I swim alone. I think, This is when I should turn into a seal, a black seal with long black seal eyelashes and a pointed nose. I do. I come to the ocean's surface. I have no ears, they're only holes and my eyes are so big. I see an island not too far away. It is a small island. I walk onto it to find my people.

I am a human woman again. The people there teach me how to survive, and we dance near a fire.