Just Right

We cannot know the silence and the small breaks into that silence as the mice duck their way out of holes burrowed deeply into dark ochre molding trimmed to the pine logs. Their noses twitching, the whiskers simpering back and forth on the tips of their pitched gray heads, sensors on high alert: silence… silence… and then, just as they detect the silence, it breaks into the sounds of their scramble. The mice tucking butt across the room, sinewy tails held aloft and whipping back and forth to maintain balance in their roughshod scamper across the pine floors, through the bedrooms, the bathroom, the living room with its scattered debris (gramophone whirling into its final decline), the kitchen with its empty pots, and into the dining room where the cedar slab perches upon its tiny legs—like a hippo upon high heels, sometimes appearing to tilt, undecided, unclear about the propriety of its selected attire. Up the heels they go, the small patter of feet shifting into long scratches and short bursts, then the scraping of dishware as the cooling leftovers are claimed from the near silence.

This we cannot hear, nor can we hear the breath being drawn in and out slowly and ever slowly as the form slightly shudders, and then wraps itself tighter.

Not the tapping of branches upon the windows, the clicking of the clock machinery in the study, the dripping of the faucet in the bathroom where a small rubber ducky studs the corner of the claw-foot tub, a small circle of mold growing on its underside, sticking to the stained porcelain. The occasional tapping of wind from the attic, which pokes up higher than the rest, just enough to attract owls, bats, spiders, and the occasional squirrel—all of whom pad around the empty window, daintily almost, quick quick slow, shuffling and looking out from the temporary vantage before smelling the down below and leaping to air in a frenzy, leaving more quickly than they arrived, more noisily. Except the spiders. They stick around, find a corner, tuck in, settle down, smile.

Nor can we feel the slight gust that enters through the open door, the half-cracked window, the unpacked lines between limbs. Its odor of moss and fog, the humidity eking from the muddy pathway and its surrounding garden. The white picket fence that has slowly turned dark with mildew, and begun rotting away in some locations, particularly along the east side, where the foliage is dense and a small pond broods and foments with its frogs and mosquito eggs.

The gusts like semi-hidden breaths—circulating mainly in the living room, where the scent of the dining room leftovers comes and goes, the rusty, burning odor—like rosewood with a teaspoon of umber—from the kitchen, and also the moth balls in their crisp crevices, the twig of rosemary tilted within a foggy vase standing firmly on the kitchen sill. From time to time, the gusts make their way up the stairs, past the locked guest room, and into the bedroom, where we do not feel them, but the form shudders again, pulls its knees up tighter against its chest, cheeks sweaty and pink, breath troubled and quiet in turns.

We are giddy in memory, we are sunk into the past. Holding it solid in inaccessible reservoirs, we do not know the shafts of light that slant for three seconds, move over, make room for a new stream, fade, and then starve in the condensing quickness of time, the movement of celestial bodies through leaves, through twigs and branches, moss that clings drearily waiting for its 30 seconds at 9:03, its 43 seconds at 10:17, and then the final stretch (1.46 mins), so perfect, warm and glorious, so precise at 3:22. The blue as well—there occasionally, in its various shades: cobalt, palatinate, periwinkle. It twinkles through, makes motions to invade, then gets shy and never delivers, never lands (only passes). The ineffable brown, nearly black, then damp, lit, misting, gaining, shedding, scratched, rubbed against, churned, and abandoned. We remember them, somehow, although we are always trying to remember—through death, through small rustles, through the mice that occasionally line up and dance about, rolling their eyes in mockery, slipping their hips from side to side.

“How does it taste?” we do not ask. Is it mineral-like and metallic? Musky, flaked like mica with a dash of raspberry, or more like the sluicing juices of the maple? We try not to dream of the variations: thick and tarrishly black, tarnished and black like coal, coagulated and nearly alive clay, baked into shape and formed like gingerbread, gingered, garliced, oniony and wild, poisonous and insidious, unknown but gustatory like mushrooms, the kind of mushrooms that permeate the common into umami, playing upon the palate like an unknown smell, scent, gust, touch, maybe sight that is, in our eternal limbo before rot, just out of reach. At the outer joints of our shorn limbs, our planed and smoothed surfaces. Our fluff and feather, hay and seam. The story.

Nor do we feel sympathy, empathy, kindness, understanding. Nor do we hold or clutch the form to us. Nor do we protect or betray, berate or chide, moralize or wish. It is not simple or complex and the lessons elude us. The collection—which began from the very surface that we once broke open, pried our way through, year by year, gained ground upon and crept through, sucked life from, and eventually discovered death from—began in a cave that evolved to a tent that evolved towards hut and trailer towards cabin (and yes, we do imagine that final frontier as an escape, an insulated and polystyrene, polysyllabic jettison of our tired, thinning corpses), a cave cobbled together of such ridiculous beginnings as feldspar and olivine with a thin sliver of copper like a twist of lemon upon our rims—yes, this, this is when we first felt our future. The bones and ravishes, the screams, dying throes, decaying shrapnels, and ground-down sinews of beginnings and endings we never knew, and never knew we would not know, but find ourselves in the midst of, like sheep grazing upon termite hills: drawn to the blade, not the bug. No, no, it’s true: we do not share nor understand your story, its strange terms, oblique angles, its cryptic colors.

What it’s like to find ‘just right’, or too much or too little or too too too, or fear, not the scent of red on claw—this we do not know, any more than we heard the saw blade. We did not hear the moment when I became We, nor do we feel our size, our contour, the texture of our difference. We do not smell the bones, the boiling water, the cooling morning. Not the sudden shatter as our smallest (chair-shaped) form bursts out across the living room. We do not hear anything returning, nor do we comprehend the trinity—the father, son, and holy mother as she sucks the remnants of her scalding meal from under the droppings of the absent mice. It’s not the shortening of the form’s breath, nor its sudden acrid scent, the shrieks and growls, bellows and grief, pleasure and violence, sun or soil, mineral or nail, last shedded memories, the scratching sound of the record as the needle leaves its vinyl surface. Not even the three forms (our alive shadows)—large, larger, quite impressively large—as they later settle, slowly, and become oblivious of even the smallest scuttle of movement again their silent, matted selves, bedded in charnel. No, we do not even feel that thin strand of gold, locked within a splinter of a body we once shared. Not even that.