Breadcrumb #611

DARIA LAVELLE

The storefront is tiny, just the width of its slender green door. 

You’ll have to shuffle sideways through the cramped corridor, like in one of those old railroad apartments, but nothing like that at all. Your back will snag against the unfinished wall and the rest of you will suck in, trying to avoid the baubles, the tinctures, the bell-jars and hourglasses and apothecary canisters and beakers and flasks all glittering down from every inch of the floor-to-ceiling shelves, which will go as far as your eyes can see and then some. 

When you make it through the hall, when you let out the breath you’ll have been holding, you’ll be in a little back room that, every five minutes, will spin wildly about on its chicken legs. 

Each time it stops, a lone window will reveal a new wonder. Sometimes you’ll overlook a great pyramid in Giza. Sometimes, you’ll be on the bank of the Danube in the dark. Sometimes you’ll be staring at a Banksy on a brick wall. Sometimes you’ll be this close to the surface of the moon, craters galore. You could waste time opening the window in front of you and breathing in desert sand or river rocks or Nuts4Nuts or moonbeams, but you’ll only have ten minutes in the place, and you’ll already have spent one shuffling down the long corridor, so tick tock.

Inside the room will be three wise girls, each seated at the foot of a massage chair. The first chair will be copper, the second silver, and the third gold. Each girl’s hair will match the chair she serves, long down to her waist, worn in serpentine braids. They’ll have bangles, too, hundreds of them, up and down the sinew of their arms, the same color as their hair and their chair and the rest of it. And the clothes they’ll wear, red or grey or mustardseed, will glimmer, though the fabrics will be dull and coarse and the back room will have scarcely enough light to make them shine.

You’ll pick a chair and sit down, though sometimes a girl and her chair will pick you.

“They’ll have bangles, too, hundreds of them, up and down the sinew of their arms, the same color as their hair and their chair and the rest of it.”

Each girl has her specialty. Copper for the heart. Silver, the mind. Gold, the soul. 

The girls will offer you a massage, even though they stink at massages and their chairs are just for show. You’ll say you’ll skip the massage, but that you’ll take the Happy Ending Special. 

“Payment up front,” your girl will demand, one hand on her hip, her fingernails tapping. 

You’ll nod and fork over several years of your life.

She’ll tuck them inside the wide sleeve of her red or grey or mustardseed tunic, and nod, and hold out her hands, into which you’ll place your story.

You’ll watch her eyes swing left to right, reading your words, consuming your pages. She’ll read very, very fast; she has infinite practice and she’ll not want to waste any time. You’ll notice the corners of her mouth twitch, and you’ll wonder whether that’s a smile or a frown. You’ll bite your tongue so hard you’ll taste blood. 

“Yes,” she’ll say at very, very long last, “I think we can fit you in.” 

And she’ll beckon you through a door that won’t have been there a moment ago, was perhaps never there and will never be there again, its beaded curtain jangling as it tongues you inside. 

This next room will be darker, smaller, lit by the light of a thousand candles and still too dim to see your own two hands. Your wise girl’s hair will glisten, copper or silver or gold, and that’s how you’ll be able to follow her through this room, into a crumbling passageway, and beyond to a dense forest. You’ll hold your arms out in front of you, grasping at shadows and shoving away brush, as you try not to trip over roots and brambles. 

“I’m Ariadne, by the way,” she’ll say in the dark, her voice pealing like a bell. 

You’ll tell her your name, and she’ll sound unimpressed when she repeats it back to you.

“Where are we going?” you’ll ask in a spell. 

“I’m taking a shortcut,” she’ll reply. 

You’ll walk for what feels like decades. You’ll wonder how much time has passed and remember the hourglasses you saw in the entry, the ones that didn’t seem to move by any gravity you could follow, the sand flowing up instead of down and winding itself into question marks. You’ll be ready to scream right about then, but just as you open your mouth to shout, Ariadne will turn around and press something into your palm.

“It’s ready for you,” she’ll whisper, her words making sparks in the dark, phosphorescent as fireflies. 

“How does it end?” you’ll ask, breathless with equal parts exhaustion and anxiety.

“Oh,” she’ll laugh, “I can’t ruin the surprise!”

“Surprise?” you’ll panic, “It’s not that kind of story.”

She’ll say your name softly then, and put her small, hot hand on your shoulder.

“Does a thread really care what the tapestry looks like?” She’ll ask this as though it is some sort of answer.

And you, not wanting to sound stupid in front of so wise a girl, will mutter something noncommittal like, “I guess not.”

And then a great gong will sound, and Ariadne will vanish into a ball of light, and the dark forest with its thick brush will lift around you like so much smoke. 

You’ll be right back out on the street again but in your hand will be the vial, inside of which will be a curled slip of paper, upon which your perfect ending will be written, the thread distinct from the tapestry, because that’s what you just chose without knowing you were choosing it.

The green door will never be in the same place twice. 

The only way to find it is to follow the white rabbit out from a magician’s dream. You’ll know him by his pocket watch – the casing made of copper, the chain silver, the hands gold – and the sound it makes as it counts down, each tick and tock the beat of a tale-telling heart. He’ll be checking this watch constantly; he’s forever running late. And Destiny hates to be kept waiting.

• • •

Breadcrumb #598

LUCY ZHANG

Among the phytoplankton and kelp forests, a group of people lives in the ocean. Their hands graze the soft coral, and without calcium carbonate skeletons, the invertebrates flatten and branch and erect like fans billowing in the wind. The coral evokes a distant memory of autumn trees dressed in purple and red and yellow as the wind blows the colors down. The sea people sometimes head toward the surface of the water, where the sun best warms skin, and as they swim, they pass floating waterwheel plants that seem to glow green under light, whorls enclosing stems like ornaments untethered to the obligations of pretty small things.

It is said that these people used to live on land like the rest of us. It is said that some of them owned beta fish whose red and blue tails wilted behind their bodies like the end of a scarf hanging out a window on a more-rainy-than-windy day. It is said that some of them lived in houses with cedar slates for wall finishes, each horizontal course one continuous piece to create a boxy, minimalist form, allowing for clean window openings, clean door entrances, clean exits, so it’d be like no one ever came; no one ever left. According to legend, some of these people hid bookshelves beneath their staircases, the shelves irregularly patterned in polygonal shapes–from triangles to rectangles to scalene trapezoids. The shelves supposedly housed all sorts of titles–the kind of book you’d read for a few minutes and then look up to check for pairs of eyes gazing at your page, the kind of book that you’d open and let your eyes skim the first sentence before pausing and returning to the first capitalized letter of a word so you can reread the sentence over and over again until its meaning is backed only by Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions, the kind of book that’d house a bookmark stolen from a library no one visits anymore. 

“The coral evokes a distant memory of autumn trees dressed in purple and red and yellow as the wind blows the colors down.”

The people under the sea braid strips of kelp into their hair as a tribute to the habitat. They whisper pleasantries to the fish and the sea anemone and the whales, and when they hear a response of uniquely cadenced bubbles, clicking sequences, whistles, pulses, purrs, grunts, drumming through sonic muscles, they smile to themselves. As the saltwater slips through their teeth, they forget how to tell each other about how blessed they feel–to hear a song not spoken in human language.

It is said that these people got tired of listening to the same words, their piggy banks and coin jars heavy with pennies for every mention of the word “money” and “work” and “I”. So they returned the books lying around their houses to the asymmetrical bookshelves, closed the tempered glass windows, placed their keys on the kitchen counter below a calendar marked with blue-sharpie x’s, and left their homes, shutting but not locking the door behind them. They followed the sidewalk to the shoreline, where they watched the waves chase away sandpipers only for the birds to follow back to sea as the waters retreated. The people slipped off their flip flops, stacking them on the edge of the boardwalk next to a paper sign reading “free shoes” in scribbled words connected by light lines of ink, the work of someone who couldn’t be bothered to lift their hand for spaces between letters.

It was too much for them, people will say of those who turned back and ran to shore when the water level rose to their necks. They were too scared to leave everything behind. A breaker submerged the heads of those brave enough to descend. 

The sea people know the truth: they were too scared to stay.

• • •

Breadcrumb #594

CHASE GRIFFIN

Holger spins on his heel and stops in the direction of the arched wooden door leading out into the windy field of tall grass. The phantosmia, the smell hallucination, of Stetson leather wafts before Holger’s nose, an off-kilter mix of milk, fish, sulfur, and laundry exhaust. Holger spins again and goes through the next door, the one leading to the suburb.

As he strolls away from Marcel’s house down the sidewalk staring at the contraction joints that cut the concrete slab into squares, Holger imagines himself as a piece in an oversized board game. He heads back to Grandma Vern’s house where he’ll sit and wait for her return.

Scout and the rest of the many children of John B. Stetson catch up to him. Sap and Billy snatch his arms and hold him back, readying him for their grand leader’s punch to the gut.

“Don’t move asshole,” Sap says.

Holger sighs and rolls his eyes. “This is like the twentieth time you’ve played this game today. It’s getting really old. Like, the first two times were funny. Third through seventh times were annoying. Sixteenth through Eighteenth were so funny that I thought I was going to piss myself, especially because you guys were somehow replicating every body movement and vocal intonation to a tee. These last two times have been lacking though. You guys lost your pizzazz.”

Marion asks, “You’ve been counting?”

Skip and Dotty part, and Scout marches through them, his angry face a growing oval in Holger’s field of vision. Scout removes his hands from behind his back and shows Holger a pocketknife. As he opens it, the sun reflects off the sharp weapon into Holger’s red eyes. 

An old man sits eerily on his porch across the street from Vern’s and cackles as he watches the blade get so very close to Holger’s eye.

The man reaches into his pocket, retrieves a large battery, and throws it at Holger’s face. He misses, but Holger still feels his pride get bashed by the D battery.

“I’m going to get that devil out of you,” Scout says, holding the knife to Holger’s eye. 

Holger closes the threatened left eye, and a couple moments later closes the right eye in a sort of glitchy-blink.

Holger feels as though he will never be able to open his eyes once this affair has ended, but there is hope sparking in the background of his signal machine just behind the fear of blade and question of his eyelid’s new possible fixture and dysfunction. For a brief moment he thinks of himself as fully realized Thom Yorke, but without the musical talent or delusion of grandeur. In his mind he sees the aesthetic bridge connecting the gradations of eyelid-related facial changes. Fully functioning eyelid, Thom Yorke lid, dead lid.

    “Please don’t hurt me,” Holger says, almost cracking a smile.

    A group of edgy Tampa goths romping down Fennsbury Lane takes no notice of the altercation.

    Scout doesn’t stab Holger in the left eye. Blood doesn’t spurt onto their faces. Scout doesn’t scream at both Holger and himself. He doesn’t then stab Holger in the right eye.

    Holger merely imagines all of this happening. He cracks and laughs at the game devised by Scout and company. Scout and company laugh too.  

    Sap and Billy let go of Holger and scurry away, heading west down Fennsbury past the edgy Tampa goths. Susy, Dixon, and Marion follow, leaving behind a plume of dust.

    The concrete square below them drops and Holger, slipping from Scout’s grip, falls into a swimming pool.

He peers at the shimmering surface as he sinks to the floor of the pool and watches the tiny bubbles rise. Holger imagines that he is sinking inside a giant glass of soda.

    Holger lands in the lotus position. The chlorine feels good on his corneas, and he lets himself sit there for a moment and enjoy the muffled glug-glugging. 

The pool floor stretches away from him and bows upward like a ghost-white photography background, the kind of superposition-white that induces vertigo. 

Holger slowly rises out of the water and strains when the warm fart of air hits his skin. He grabs the edge of the sidewalk and pulls himself out of the pool. 

    He collapses and lands on top of the contraction joint, his hip crossing the groove between the squares, two squares over from Vern’s house.

    Scout stands over Holger, letting out one long sustained scream at Holger’s soaking wet body. The pool of water grows and connects with Scout’s shoes.  

    Scout’s scream morphs into a guttural noise that wavers and tapers off as he sprints after Susy, Dixon, and Marion’s dust cloud: swirling into a spiral, it looks like it will never settle. 

    A shadow grows over Holger’s body. Vern bends over and snatches the little lord, carries him to her house with a small smile on her face. 

    There is nothing inside the house. No chairs, no tables, no couches, no television, no beds, nothing. There are no kitchen cabinets; just the clean, white spaces where cabinets should be.

    Vern sets him on the tile floor. In the kitchen, she pretends to pour herself a glass of red wine and sips on the nonexistent fermented juice. 

    Holger giggles to himself, eyes closed, tongue now hanging from his mouth. He imagines that he is asleep and pretends that he is dreaming, dreaming about all of the gorgeous artwork that should be hanging from these walls.

    The tiles shatter beneath Holger’s limp body and Bermuda grass pops through the cracks. Vern’s house crumbles to the ground. The rubber is sucked into the grass and the reconstructed house shoots out of the ground twenty feet behind him.

    Holger sleeps on top of a stolen chainsaw. The light cuts through the empty space in the sky where the mighty oak had just stood and hits the boy and the grass and the fallen chunks of the tree. All forms and materializations are cut, nipped, and hewed with a brush that is connected to a master painter who is brimming with passion and opium. The light gives the contents of the yard hard, neoclassical edges. 

Holger wakes and inspects the idle chainsaw with compost crust in his eyes. 

“The light cuts through the empty space in the sky where the mighty oak had just stood and hits the boy and the grass and the fallen chunks of the tree.”

After wiping away the fertile soil, he stands and clomps over the moist grass and slashes with his arms, pretending his appendages are built-in machetes, through the shrubs of Marcel’s side yard. 

Marcel is sitting in his yard. In his lap is a Bell and Howell 16MM projector projecting the classic film, John B. Stetson Goes to Ybor starring a young Jimmy Stewart.

At first glance, Holger thinks the view of the Stetson manor facade is an establishing shot for a classic horror film. He loves the way old houses look in horror films.

“These old houses are always so worn and dirty,” Holger says. Marcel nods without turning in his lawn chair, focusing on the film produced by Intercede Network, but acknowledging both Holger’s presence and opinion. “But they also look so comfortable with their furniture and clutter.”

Marcel takes Holger by the hand and walks his friend to the front door. Marcel’s gabby, excitable parents are sitting in their breakfast nook, both Mom and Dad screaming so loudly about their excitement that Holger swears that the high-pitched double-toned parental pandemonium crosses an irreversible decibel threshold. 

As Holger and Marcel stand in the doorway, mouths agape, Mom grabs the mustard and ketchup and Dad grabs the mayo and butter, all four condiments in squeeze-top bottles, squeezing the every loving hell out of the bottles as they scream about their excitement – the vintage yellow, horror movie chunky blood red, the spoiled white, and the creamed corn yellow spray like one part string theory confetti and one part edible fireworks all over the nook.  

    Marcel says, “See? Eat.” He nods.

    “The fuck are you talking about?” Holger says. “Is everybody on cough syrup?”

Vern, shaking her head at him from across the room, snorts and laughs loudly.

    Holger’s eyes shoot open as he remembers that the chainsaw is waiting for him. He jumps to his feet and runs past Vern out the front door. 

“If you and your friends make me play that damn pocket knife game one more time today,” Vern yells after the little lord, “I won’t let you fill this house with your homemade furniture.” 

Holger wields the chainsaw and shows it off to all the neighbors lined up across the street. 

They cheer. 

“That’s our little lord!” the old man who’d thrown the D battery at him says. He cackles, pulls another D battery from his pocket, and throws it. He misses again. 

Holger takes no notice as he smiles proudly and waves the chainsaw at his people. He revs it.

“You the man, Holger!” Ms. Dempsey yells through cupped hands.

“Fuck Trey Andrews. That’s your chainsaw, Holger!” Vincent shouts.

“Build the furniture! Build the furniture! Build the furniture!” the residents of Fennsbury Lane chant.

    He spends the rest of the day hacking the chunks of oak tree into smaller chunks and nailing them to the other chunks. The furniture looks less like a couch, dining room table, and bed and more like outsider art.

    One by one, the neighbors return to their homes. They return to their cats and oatmeal and croquet sets collecting dust in their foyer closets. They grow tired and fall asleep at the same exact time, 7:30pm. That is how Holger likes the game to be played.

    Trey Andrews, his adjacent neighbor and reclusive Intercede Network founder, pulls into his driveway. He steps out of the car and breaths deep with a hopeful smile on his face as he scans the neighborhood, the neighborhood he believes that he and he alone lords over. Trey takes a sip of his cherry soda and from over the edge of the can, notices Holger screwing around with his beloved chainsaw. Trey spits his pop and darts across the property line into Holger’s front yard.

    “Holger?” Trey says. “What are you doing with my chainsaw?”

    Holger laughs.“Can I, like, pretend to chase you with it?”

    “Is this a variation of the pocket knife game?”

    “Of course.”

    Trey spins around, his back now facing the little lord. 

Holger revs the chainsaw. 

Trey slowly turns his head, pantomiming a scared Homer Simpson. 

Holger shows his teeth through his angry red face. The boy hyperventilates as he wobbles back and forth while swinging the chainsaw.

    Mr. Andrews holds up his hands in surrender. “Easy there. Put it down.”

    Holger screams as he revs the saw once more. 

The blue jays flutter over their heads at their scheduled time, 7:45pm. The boy and the man take no notice of them. They know the drill. 

Holger cracks a smile and breaks into laughter. 

So does Trey Andrews. Mr. Andrews collects himself and clears his throat. He lets out a high-pitched scream and runs across the property line. 

Holger follows closely behind and chases the man into his garage past the empty spot above the work table where he had found the chainsaw.

    Trey screams again. He kicks open his door and crashes into the foyer wall, knocking himself out. 

Holger halts his chase, turns off the chainsaw, and grimaces at Trey’s unconscious body. He puts the chainsaw back and returns to his furniture building.

As Holger hammers the last nail into the chunks of wood representing a TV stand, Trey’s shadow grows over the boy. 

Trey says, “I was only pretending to be unconscious.”

“I know.”

Trey and Holger spend the rest the evening carrying the outsider art into the house.  

They set the bed where the TV stand should’ve gone. They set the wooden item that looks nothing like a toilet in the middle of his bedroom. They set the dining room table in Vern’s room. The moonlight splashing through the sliding glass doors of the southwestern ranch style house give the contents soft edges like an impressionist painting.

• • •

Breadcrumb #590

JOE DEMES

With the hand not cased in honeycombs of plaster and bandage, my sister takes pictures of herself crying in our bathroom mirror. This has been happening regularly: crying, capturing, choosing, posing, editing, captioning, waiting, responding, repeating. My parents say it’s hormones; they think this is a good sign. Recently it’s become audible—her crying—hence their now knowing she is crying, hence thinking her body is recalibrating, hence a good thing. She has been gaining weight again but her bones are still frail; this is the sixth break in a few years since she left the pro circuit, or the let her go—depends who you ask.

When I pushed open the door her face was streaked; along her jawline, tears hung like cherries. I was caked with sweat and whatever the grey stuff on my legs from puddles I couldn’t avoid was, and said I needed the shower, that it wasn’t a rush but could she come knock on my door and let me know when I could use the bathroom, because I needed a shower and to stretch. This was my second workout of the day; I was looking to hit 120 this week, which meant two-a-days of at least ten miles. My shorts and shirt stuck to me grossly, wet scabs that needed to be peeled away. 

“You rot,” she said, leaning at me, “Like drain water and horse shit.” She turned back to the mirror and click click click went the artificial noise of an aperture snapping shut. “I hope you left your shoes outside.”

“It’s some kind of farm animal, yeah,” I said, peeling off my socks.

“Run on the pavement instead of the trail then.” Click click click. “Don’t bring that in here.”

“It’s slick. I’d slip. That’s how that happens,” I said, pointing at her arm.

“Then don’t.” Click click.

“Right.”

“At all.” Click.

“One more time?”

“It’s gross, the smell, and if it’s too dangerous to be out on pavement, then maybe just don’t run.” She turned to me. “At all. Do you really need to hit one-twenty? What are you trying to prove?”

I fiddled with my watch, the plastic band slick with sweat and ridged. I looked through my mile splits, each time another reason why I’d be going pro once I graduated. Our parents were out somewhere, probably taking my grandfather for another doctor’s appointment. I looked gross, but I felt high from the pace I’d kept. It was cool out, finally; the dry season had passed, and pushing myself this hard didn’t feel like a workout. It had been fun. It had been fun and I had been having a good time, and now I was home and here we were, doing this little dance. “Check out mile six,” I could say. “That’s where I broke your indoor record, again.” 

I heard it in my head, coming from a voice like but not mine, its tongue near my ear. It spoke in the way I wanted my voice to sound, not the way it came out in interviews and video footage. It was an easy voice to listen to and I knew it, so I turned around and grabbed the head from which the voice came and held it under mental water while its arms thrashed and slapped until it wasn’t slapping and thrashing any more, and then I dragged its body to a deeper part and pushed it off to let it sink away. I reminded myself of the word amenhorrea. I reminded myself that this was the sixth time she’d broken a bone and that it doesn’t hurt any less the more times you break them. 

“It was cool out, finally; the dry season had passed, and pushing myself this hard didn’t feel like a workout.”

There, barefoot, in an oversized hoodie and track shorts, her hair in two tight braids, my sister looked more like the girls I ran with than someone twenty-five and living at home again, indefinitely resting, taking record of what had happened to her, had been done to her, and trying to recuperate.

“Can I have this?” I asked.

“I’m leaving, I’m leaving.” She tucked the phone in her sweatshirt pocket and made a sweeping gesture. “The shower is yours.”

She went to leave but I stood in her way. “If I sign with a team, will you hate me?”

“Oh sure, let’s unpack all this while I’m in short-shorts and my face is a balloon.”

“And even if it doesn’t happen, even if I keep working for it—”

“And why do you want it? Why would you, after what it did to me?”

“Why is it bad to want it?”

“The same reason it’s bad to wear their gear, like you do, and let sites profile you, like they do, and consider letting them pay you to wear their uniform, let them pay you to use your face in ads just like they did mine—”

“You know I’d send money home. Home includes you.”

“—which what does anyone do with so much of it? What must that be like, to know you can’t be touched up there in that castle you’ve built because that’s what a castle is: a money fortress. And the king’s crown is made of gold—”

“I can’t follow—I—look I just ran really hard and—”

“—and gold shines and shine distracts, it grabs our eye and soon we forget to ask who mined that gold and who forged that crown, whose hands made the castle—”

“Seriously, I can smell myself and I can feel my stomach eating itself.”

“—no one’s talking about my hand, this one right here,” she said, shoving the cast in my face, “or the other parts of me that they broke, because you’re the one they can focus on now, you’re the heir apparent, the future sub-4 miler they can call their own, to call away attention, when all I want is for attention to be called to this, to me, and everything you’re doing doesn’t make it seem like you’ve ever cared.”

The part of me I thought I’d drowned bubbled up from the surface and stared at me across the lake.

“Say that part one more time.”

She stops. “Say what one more—”

“Say the part again where you think I’ve never cared.”

“Easy: I don’t think you ever did.”

It glided along towards the shore, towards the forefront of my mind, no trace of a wake, no arms stroking or legs striking the water.

“Please let me shower before I really say something to wreck you.”

“Oh,  I want to hear.” She got her face right up in my facespace but her eyes couldn’t focus on one thing, couldn’t hold my gaze. With siblings born close it might be uncomfortable, but besides her being so much older, this is athlete posture. It’s easy to read: the one who initiates is always compensating. Getting in your face is tryhard and sets you up to really look as small as your dick seems. She’s just another body at this point, another sack of meat that I can outrun. 

Soon that part of me was swimming faster, serpentine, but when it reached the shore its stride was calm as it stepped out of the water and lay next to me on the rocks of the shore to dry. “Remember when she told you when you were twelve that she wished you had been twins?” it asked. “How she would have taken the chance to eat you in the womb? Taken all your life for herself? You remember.”

I asked her if she remembered, and it threw off her posturing. I could see the same part of her inside shrinking back into its own lake, trying to find something to dredge up from the bottom, but I started before it could get itself underwater.

“You knew it then and you know it now so I’ll say it now: I’d have eaten you. I probably already did eat a part of you. Maybe that’s why I’m so close to sub-4 and you only ever set that indoor record, which guess what? I fucking crushed on mile six today.” And this was too much but I said it anyway because it felt good, because I was heated and a hundred yards ahead of her and still had gas in the tank to kick: “Maybe that’s why your bones are frail.” 

And I knew I’d gone too far because she didn’t say anything back. She went to leave the bathroom and I all but just stepped aside to let her. The tile was colder than I remembered it being when I got home and my sweat had already dried; the salt felt like a second skin, and I a snake ready to shed it.

I turned the water too hot once I had gotten in, then adjusted it to just south of room temp. I figured this must be what the lake in my mind felt like. Thick steam like a city crowd left runs of condensation all across my body. 

I understand what has happened to her, and all the damage it has done. No one should have to work so hard just to have their body fail them and their feelings publicly executed on repeat, their career brought back down to square one because of it all.

“Except no one sees this” the voice I want to sound like mine said. It finished drying and began heading back towards the lake. On the shore, I was drenched. “No one sees how she is. And from day one she’s seen you as competition.”

When bad things happen to good people, sympathy comes easily; when they happen to bad people, the thing that comes easiest is to turn one’s back, or mock. My sister isn’t a bad person, but she’s become like this ever since she came home. Arrested development isn’t a good look on anyone, and gone are the days where I couldn’t keep up with her pace in workouts and in thought. We are more each other’s rivals than we ever were; I no longer look up to her, and she looks down on me for being guilty of wanting a thing at someone else’s expense, which is exactly what it means to want, or at least is a consequence of it. 

Her door was closed. It sounded quiet, so I didn’t risk anything by knocking. The room to my door was loud as I opened and shut it; medals hung from the knob and clanged like cowbells. On the wall there was a poster that her old sponsors sent me ages ago, when I’d started making news in the junior circuits and she’d just gotten signed. Prefontaine stands in front of a trailer made of corrugated metal, looking past the camera; his shirt reads in red, USA MUNICH TRIALS, EUGENE OREGON; in blue, underneath the arch of MUNICH TRIALS is the year: 1972. The trailer’s curtains are red and its door is open but not inviting; the car next to the trailer is powder blue, and I wonder if it is the car in which he died. Pre’s hair is blond, his skin tan, his body fatless like mine, his mustache thin. The caption in the lower left reads NOT ALL CASTLES LOOK LIKE CASTLES and I thought Welcome to my castle as I stood naked in the middle of this bare room, just a bed and desk, a small closet to hang clothes in and my poster the only decoration, the only thing I’d thought to bring to this room while our grandfather stayed in mine, our grandfather whom my parents take to doctors every week, whom we have not seen in years, whose bones are also frail, whose mind is frailer. I thought of owning my own trailer and living somewhere where I could train year-round and not be in anyone’s way, and this makes my stomach feel less empty as I start my stretches.

• • •

Breadcrumb #586

SANYA KHURANA

While I worked at my loom, pedalling methodically, two bare brown feet on my right pedalled not mechanically, but rhythmically. They moved buoyantly and seemed to dance. But the hands — the hands, which weren’t at work, were surprisingly festered with fresh open blisters, tender white skin trying to form over them in vain. The hands looked like they had been scrubbing, slaving, scraping. But the feet were beautiful. Although they had corns and hard, cracked carcasses, they were strong with beautiful rippling muscles.

As I was observing this pair of brown feet, I heard the clicking sounds of master’s sandals nearing and all the white feet began to pedal faster. But not the brown feet. The two brown feet began to fumble in their dance, like a graceful aerial dancer whose ribbon tears, sending them spiralling to the floor. Along with the sounds of master’s sandals came one more pair of new white feet.

Master came directly to the brown feet and ordered them to walk to the other room and work with hands so that this new pair of white feet could work with the machine. I glanced up and saw the tender, dry brown lips try to protest by fluttering like paper. But before the lips could part like two pages that engulfed words of promise, master slapped the book shut.

“I glanced up and saw the tender, dry brown lips try to protest by fluttering like paper.”

“GO,” he yelled. And the two brown feet scurried out.

I saw through the glass partition between the machine and handiwork rooms: two brown hands and two white hands working on a king size bedsheet. It didn’t look strange that brown and white were working together like one pair of hands, grappling together at a web of threads in myriad colours. The needle in the clean and soft white hands nodded sturdily. They were beautiful hands, like the hands of a piano-player. And the two colours of the hands looked beautiful as they danced together, like the juxtaposed keys of a piano creating graceful music. But the brown hands seemed to be dancing to a different music. The needle in the sore brown fingertips trembled like a leaf, dancing like the shivering brown lips. 

Brown hands, white hands, yellow and cracked nails, clean and trimmed nails were working on the same sheet. Within a few weeks, it was ready. I could see it through the glass door. It was resplendent with an intricate, kaleidoscopic all-inclusive Persian border and a prosaic, western center. It was scintillating with a spectrum of colours. Seeing this the smiling white lips said, “in this bedsheet’s design, your thread is wound up in mine.”

The brown and white hands began to shake out the imprints of their palms from the bedsheet. And although the bedsheet had already braided the brown and white hands in such a tight plait, the brown hands continued to quiver. It was easy to smooth out the imprints from the sheet, but the matter of the mind different. The brown hands had hand been whipped and slashed and crushed by so many white hands that the mind was much more creased than the sheet and a gentle white hand’s pat wasn’t enough to ease it.

If only those brown feet would return to the loom at my right and I could point out to them that our pedalling was parallel. If only I could show them that although brown hands, white hands, brown feet, white feet in semblance seem apart, their temperament, their nature and their skill have the same heart.

• • •