Nature repulsed her in myriad ways—psychological and visceral assaults. She needed to be harangued and harassed—everyday and in every way. Her Sisyphean rock would be the nocturnal infrared world she sensed in the water. She would remain in Maine forevermore. She took up residence with a sea urchin in a tide pool. She waited for night to fall.
“I wasn’t convinced that a workshop full of 13 other young writers trying to find their voices was the best place for me to find my voice.”
There is no legacy in semiotics, she thought—nothing to tether to—not land, historical connection, cultural heritage—it was a deep deracination. She found no reason for planting any of her own signs, for setting my own roots, for begetting generations. She expected another apocalyptic deracination—this one global. So why read signs?
“The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.”
Clodomira’s legs are whirring pistons. She’s up over 100 revolutions per minute on her bike. The countryside streaks by her and in these few seconds there is no revolutionary struggle, no ultimate leader, no great leap forward.
The fervor of the People dissipates and all is still. She is frozen in the moment, and the moment frozen all around her. The landscape a stilled blur of streaks. In this instant all of existence becomes the object of her consciousness.
Life in this infinitesimal moment is bearable — worth the battle toward transcendence.
A flash and the moment is gone.
The bicycle, a humble 1956 Rabasa, feeling greatly misused upon resuming at that diabolic speed rebels, and disengages its chain breaking into a dizzy wobble. They jackknife.
Clodomira is thrown into the sugar cane detritus — the edge of the field heaped with the sharp husks of post-Marxist labor. Now in mid-air she pictures herself as the radiant spear point of the vanguard, but as she hits the ground a shard of cane husk pierces her abdomen.
Clodomira rises to a sitting position. Our Lady of Charity hovers in the distance in an alcove of roiling cumulonimbus. All manner of birds and land animals are swept into the funnel and disappear.
Clodomira seethes. Oh, to be swept into that vestal vortex. Then she feels her father’s leaden hand on her shoulder, his grip tightening and constricting the blood flow to her head. Then his other hand under her shirt and rubbing her belly.
She is earthbound.
“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.”
Her amygdala, congenitally small, blew a couple of nuclei. That caused a fiber in her subiculum, long frayed, to brown-out. And down the line, in quick succession, the mammillary nuclei, lateral hypothalamus, and entorhinal cortex all shorted — and finally, her prefrontal cortex went dark.
It was then that Clodomira’s pet seahorse spoke to her: “I order you to make biomorphic art. Today and every day going forward. Make me a curtain for the aquarium out of your used tampons. I love that shade of carmine you make.”
Clodomira had only the current tampon in use, her last, but she carefully removed it and placed it on her manuscript. In the kitchen she replaced it with a wad of Bounty — “the quicker picker upper,” she sang. After a quick trip to the U-Totem-M, she estimated she could have three more used tampons for the biomorphic curtain by tomorrow, but then her period would end. She resigned herself to living with writer’s block for another month until she could make the curtains the seahorse requested of her.
She wondered if she could use ketchup to trick the seahorse, but it quickly cut her off and yelled: “No, fuck you! Don’t you know I know everything that goes on with you. Prepare for stasis and inertia until you build the tampon curtain for me.”
“What if I call my friends and ask them to help?”
“No,” the seahorse said. “It must be your blood… or the blood of Jesus.”
She looked in the White Pages to see if she could find an address for Jesus. She found a Jesus Montero that lived a couple of towns over. Clodomira called Jesus Montero and explained her problem. He was willing to help her out if she would go out on a date with him. She hesitated, then acquiesced. They set a meeting time for seven o’clock that evening. They would meet at the airport chapel — the Chapel of the Sacred Humors.
Seven o’clock came and went and she sat at the rear of the chapel staring at Mary and the infant Jesus cradled at her breast. Abruptly, Mary dropped Jesus. Jesus thunked on the floor and rolled around a bit like a coin.
Then he stood up and said, “I’m sorry I’m late. Mom needed me to do her a favor. I couldn’t say no.” Clodomira walked up front and sat at the first pew and tapped the bench signaling Jesus to sit beside her.
He sat. She took out a syringe and said, “give me some blood.”
He asked where they were going that evening. She said dinner and a screening of Oliver at the Miracle Theater at 9. He said, “groovy, far out!”
Jesus held out his arm, and as he was doing so she took a telescopic truncheon out of her purse and beat him unconscious. She stuck the syringe in his mainline artery and removed 40 milliliters. She injected herself with his blood and nodded out in the blue redeeming light of Jesus.
The seahorse came to Clodomira in the darkness and told her to prostrate herself before him in the aquarium, when she arrived home, and bleed herself in order to create the tampon curtain sooner. “Do not tarry,” he said.
Upon regaining consciousness Clodomira replaced the passed out Jesus back into Mary’s arms but he would not stay in place. She tried fitting him into her purse but he was too large and inflexible; she could not fold him in as he had turned to wood again. She was stumped on what to do with Jesus now. Then she knew.
As Clodomira left the chapel she dunked him in the font by the door. He was momentarily submerged. He floated back up just in time to see her cross herself as she exited the chapel.
“Sometimes my stories thrilled readers. Sometimes my stories bored them. Whatever the response I upheld my part of the bargain. I read, I wrote, I revised … and I persisted.”
the couched girl worked with a story—language angels—wet dashed door never a nobody in terms of feral hair—capitalist lizards—upward themselves let illustrations labor logical—their have is where there’s secret poorhouse—down unwholesome work—shoes in flames—free the working rich beholden to pious subversion—they grow less motivated eyes humble view make strange freedom—they dream this—amoral art naked in clothes—a shoemaker has stopped to dance godly and poor as if reasoned mobility were knowing to earn—that hell being only a suggestion would make beings with such little sense—and they wildly they—the and of from and from of known—or
“You know I love this country. Only thing wrong with it is the folks living there.”
— William S. Burroughs / “Twilight’s Last Gleamings”
thee istsfor manity reader 