a beautiful story [rated pg13]
disclaimer: please don�t judge a body of work by one story; especially this one.
I�ve been having dreams about natural disasters lately. Sometimes there�s a tornado, at others, a war, or rabid dogs. In these dreams, I am always okay. In my arms, I carry someone smaller, someone weaker, like a baby, or a puppy, or my sister-who-is-seventeen, or even my sister-when-she-was-four-years-old. We�re inside, away from the disaster, except that death is where we are. One time, we were in a bomb shelter, and everyone inside it (except us) had been radiated and were slowly dying. Another time, my neighbors were crushed by the wall of their basement and we were seeking refuge in what was left of their house. There they lay, dead and five feet away. This last time, during another tornado dream, I crouched under a billiards table holding both my dog and my sister-as-a-baby. A young girl came flying in debris from the sky and landed on the billiards table so that the upper half of her body remained swinging in the wind, dangling down from the table top, upside down. Back and forth and back and forth, her long brown hair matted with blood and her long, limp, slender arms poised like a ballerina above her head.
* * *
The four of us were sitting at a white, formica, round table, metal chairs pulled up hap-hazardly. Joan told us about the most remarkable dream. It was remarkable because it seemed so impregnated with what must be subconsciously trying to burst its way out of her skull. She leaned forward, her face showing hesitancy to trust us with what she did not understand. We waited, dragging our forks across styrofoam plates of powdered eggs and making teeth marks in our styrofoam cups, without a word.
In Joan�s dream, she had graduated from our prestigious little private college and was back in her high school room, just as she left it. She looked in her trash-can, and there she found her �old� college I.D. card. She looked at it and saw that it was, yes, her card, but it had the word �murderer� printed beneath her name.
In the dream, Joan put her hand to her forehead, squinted her hazel eyes and began to remember something vague and deeply suppressed. Apparently, her sister had gotten herself pregnant sometime during her college career, and Joan decided to take the baby as a surrogate mother, for some complicated reason (as if that were even possible). After the baby was transplanted into her uterus, she decided for some odd reason to terminate the pregnancy. Afterwards, our college society had found out and labeled her as a murderer. Did she even get through college? She couldn�t recall.
As Joan sat thinking about these events�still in her dream�the I.D. card sitting on her open, upturned palm, her sister walked into the still-packed-up room, and Joan panicked and threw the I.D. back into the trash. Joan�s sister noticed, and retrieved the I.D. from the basket, and questioned Joan about it. Joan started�ashamed�to discuss what had happened to them both. Meanwhile, their younger brother entered the dream-room. After listening in on a majority of the conversation, he took the knife laying on Joan�s flower-printed duvet and relayed to his sisters the fallen-ness of men. He stated he never wanted to do what had been done to his sisters, to a woman. As the two sisters looked on in horror, he cut off his member and discarded it in the clown trash-can.
* * *
We were asking how everyone spent their New Year�s Eve, and when it came to Elle, we were sure the story would be good. It was. It included snow-boarding and learning Thai Chi. Elle was not even aware when the time changed to reveal a new decade. Wandering through the snow in the first hours of morning�her dark glasses framing her face in the bitter cold and Korean food comfortable in her gut�she and a friend came upon a cow in the snow. Laying bloated and pathetic, it was frozen in its death, having died giving birth to a calf. The calf also lay frozen but only half exposed, lingering between its birth and its death. Elle left her little feet in the snow and looked for a long time before moving on.
* * *
I imagine that people are lined up at the casket sometime today. They are each going to look down on this poor, lifeless chap, Elvio. Elvio is a cousin of my father�s, related through marriage. My father used to baby-sit Elvio, but he hasn�t seen him in years. Today he will.
The story goes like this: Elvio was twenty-five and in college somewhere in Northern Arizona. He was on his way to becoming a successful engineer and probably already had job-offers or something. Elvio�s good friend was to be married last weekend. Tastefully, the boys threw a bachelor party for the groom at a decent bar in town. Wanting to go home a little early and get some sleep, Elvio waited like a good, slightly innebriated citizen, for the bus. While he was waiting, a band of not-so-good-citizens were kicked out of the bar across the street. Probably cussing and howling and laughing together over their embarrassing antics, they decided to pick on poor Elvio. They went too far in beating him up for fun, because when they were done, there lay Elvio on the ground, dead as a doornail.
* * *
Elvio is just a phrase in someone�s story. �When Julia went down to Arizona that year�you know she went there for a friend�s funeral�she completely fell in love with the place,� said Mabel, relaying a story to her friend Jan.
Says Hank, �I was completely stopped by this funeral procession at 86th and Main for, like, half an hour.� He was late for work.
People will be tripping over tragic phrases about ugliness all year because Elvio died.
There is a flower growing in the slim carcass of a newly-thawed cow, somewhere in Colorado. There is a flower growing a ways off, in Paradise, no carcass.
copyright by devon, 2001.
