Air and Darkness
The moon calf finds Jethra
[Back to the Mad Art Project! This story picks up a few hours after Fireflies ends. It’s Monday afternoon, the day after Tim Teresias meets Grin Watson in Chattanooga. Tim’s just leaving Shady Oaks Rest Home in Bethlehem.
And how about that Tim, scoffing at Donovan Holloway for believing in fairies when Tim has, you know, SEEN fairies? When people tell you they’re cold-hearted bastards, you’d better believe them.
I’m not well able to account for what genre these stories are, but I can tell you this much: The plot’s almost always contained in Day 1. After that we’re just watching the train wreck in slow motion.
I’m giving this a last proofread in the waiting room of a car dealership where I’m getting my Honda serviced. A woman nearby is going off on a son, or more likely grandson: “You are such a mean little boy! You don’t touch him! You have been mean to him all morning. I will smack you right here in front of everyone.” WHAP! Swat with a newspaper. SMACK! Small but sharp flesh-on-flesh smack.
About 15 respectable-looking Chattanoogans continue working on our laptops or fiddling with our phones. The Mean Little Boy, a wiry, sandy-haired fellow of about 6 or 7, blinks his eyes a few times but is otherwise impassive. This has clearly happened many times before. He knows not to defend himself or answer back, and his face betrays no agreement or disagreement with his Mamaw’s assessment of his character. She leads him away.
I suppose I’m learning as I write, or after I write, what assumptions I make about folks that you, gentle reader, may not share. This is probably the most foundational. Almost all my story people have an otherworldly stoicism available to them and can retreat there whenever they need.
I’d been assuming that was just humans, but it isn’t, is it? It’s a particular type of human. But what does that mean? Fey-touched? Monstrous? Disciplined? Appalachian? I can make guesses, but I have no idea.
Mean Little Boy and Mamaw come back from wherever they went. Mean Little Boy is rubbing his thigh. He still has no expression on his face. The rest of us go on about our business. No one says a word.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
They taught themselves to be occult They didn't know its many strategies —Gorillaz, “Cracker Island”
“Tim!”
I paused on the steps of Shady Oaks Rest Home and looked for the voice. Someone laid on their horn.
“Tim! Over here!”
I glanced left and saw a late-model Chevy Suburban, black and mud-splattered, pulled up at the curb. Donovan Holloway stood in the driver’s-side doorway to gaze across the vehicle. His elbows rested on the roof. He waved his arm. “Let me give you a ride!”
I had walked from my boarding house that day; I was on foot and glad to get a lift. I turned at the bottom of the stairs, shouldering into a splatter of wet sleet. Ice was already crusting the forsythia blooms.
Donovan, back inside his SUV, leaned across to open the passenger-side door. I hopped in.
“Whew!” I brushed sleet off my ears. “Could have sworn it was spring this morning.”
“That’s Marion County for ya.” Donovan grinned at me. “Don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.”
I have never known a local anywhere, city or country, who did not make that joke about his weather. Don’t like it? Wait five minutes.
“Thank you for the lift,” I said. “Now where are we going?”
“Nowhere. Your place.”
I lifted my eyebrows. My rooming house was about five blocks off. I doubted Donovan would insult me by suggested I couldn’t stand five blocks of sleet.
“You’ll want to know this,” he said.
“Hm?”
“I had something I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “I found a student who’s been making a zine — you know what those are?”
“We did have zines in the 1990s.”
“Good.” He put one of his dozen long, blond braids into his mouth and gnawed on it.
It took me a second to reconcile the young ruffian and his goblin’s mouthful of teeth tattooed from throat to collarbone with the little boy gnawing his hair in consternation. Somehow the little boy won.
“Quit that,” I said before I could catch myself.
Surprisingly, he accepted my authority. “What? — oh.” He removed his hair and instead gnawed his thumb.
“So this student hit me up online. She’d been chatting with Ma back last year, making a zine about her, you know, her art projects. Then, of course, Ma dropped off the face of the earth. This student — her name’s Zara T — had some follow-up questions she wanted to ask Ma about. I thought I’d talk to Zara T and see if Ma confided in her, gave her any idea where she could have gone.”
I let this settle. Academics, even undergrads, studying Jethra, of all people? But the more I turned it around in my head, the more sense it made. Any women’s studies major would cream her panties at the thought of writing a thesis about Jethra and her mad art project. On reflection, I was only surprised Jethra hadn’t gotten more attention. The semiotics of —
The thought of wading through that kind of drivel is enough to make me bash my head in on my own keyboard, assuming they made keyboards sturdy enough for a good suicide nowadays. As it is, I’d only invalidate the warranty, get the 6 and 7 keys stuck in my forehead, and still have to swim through The semiotics of menstrual blood as medium —
I really must stop.
Anyhow, this student Zara T was an artist in her own right. A cartoonist, writer, or both, putting together a zine about Jethra’s sanguine expressionism. Art about art. There’s a word for that, but I forget what.
Suddenly I was curious to see what Zara T made of Jethra.
“Show me Zara T’s work,” I said to Donovan. “Does she have any zines online?”
“She does,” Donovan said, letting off the brake, “but that’s not why I drove straight here. I was waiting at your boarding house to tell you that much.”
“And?”
“And a sheriff’s deputy showed up looking for you.” Donovan glanced at me. “He said they have your car, the sports car you lost in the river. He wants to ask you some questions about it.”
Of course he does, I thought, remembering the misleading detour signs that guided me into Bad Oak River that stormy Thursday night. In what universe would Donnie Ross not have the sheriff in his pocket?
Donovan didn’t have to say another word. I had it worked out that Donnie Ross planned to make use of me somehow. Only then, as Donovan let the SUV roll forward before putting it into gear, did it hit me that Donnie Ross had already used me.
I walked into the trap when I took his phone call. This was just the door falling shut.
A white hand, pearl-knuckled, russet-crusted and grimy, sank into sleety loam. Another hand followed. Little knees plowed after. Somewhere under the crust of earth and iron, those knees were still dimpled.
The gravel track tore the moon calf’s rice-paper skin open. Fresh blood oozed over blackened blood. By the time the sun set, invisibly, behind the cedar trees, also invisible, on the mountain’s rim, the moon calf’s knees were split to the bone. Wee kneecaps caught pebbles behind them. Grit tore into the patellar ligament and compacted around the ACL.
While the moon calf slept, its delicate sinews and skin knit together again, expelling some grit, trapping other fragments. Earthy arthritis distended its knees and wrists.
You think, we think, humans think, There must be an end to suffering. I cannot bear one more thing.
There is no end to suffering. No kind feather breaks the camel’s back. You can always bear one more thing.
The moon was rising as the moon calf crept down into the high, narrow valley, concluding the five-day journey it began the night the flood washed it into the old mine and away down the aquifer and out the karst spring into Bad Oak River. It had taken all that time to regain ground. Now, creeping across the alleys and weed-overgrown back lots of Bethlehem in Marion County, Tennessee, it made for a destination that called it more loudly than the moon’s invisible heartbeat behind the low-slung clouds.
A man opened the back door of a much-added-onto 1920s bungalow with white clapboard walls. The man stepped onto the stoop and emptied a pan of dishwater over the frozen grass.
The man was left-handed and threw water in a counterclockwise arc. A few drops, glancing left, melted the sleet over the corrugated iron of the storm cellar door.
The moon calf’s eyelids had been flagging with exhaustion. But now its eyes, crimson as oxblood marbles, rolled up under their translucent lids. Its mouth opened in a thin, piercing wail.
The dishwater dripped past the padlock. A few drops sluiced through the crevice and splattered onto the concrete steps below.
Women’s bodies will starve themselves to make and feed a child. Breastmilk strips calcium from your bones. Menstruation sucks your iron reserves dry.
You can starve your periods away, but it takes an effort. And anorexia-induced amenhorrea depletes you anyhow, worse than if you went on as nature intended. It’s easier for young women, whose cycles are less well-established, to hover back from the ledge of maturity. On the whole, though, you were custom-built to sacrifice yourself. No matter how much you imagine you want to thrive, your body exerts itself in that dark quest.
Ask me now why I never transitioned. Biological impedimenta aside, was it because I knew I’d never understand that mindset — or because I was afraid I might?
But my story’s irrelevant. I also have a bigger concern than gender: keeping Nosy Nancies out of my fucking business. Let’s get back on course.
A few folks bleed more than ever under stress. Jethra Holloway, for instance.
Cheekbones jutting, fingernails black — if there was anyone to see in the dark — she used a shard of a Mason jar she’d found to scrape out a hole in the packed-dirt cellar floor.
In her palm she held a blood clot no bigger than a goldfish. The little swimmer kept her body’s warmth for a few seconds, then chilled to the steady 58 degrees of the cellar air.
When the goldfish felt cool rather than warm against her hand, Jethra tipped it into its grave and patted dirt in over it firmly and gently as a woman planting a seed.
She leaned her back against the pile of quilts she’d been given to sleep on. She had a mattress, too — plenty to keep her warm if she burrowed in. She lay in the chill long enough to compose a social media post. She repeated it to herself until she had it memorized, then repeated the dozen or so others stored in her word-hoard.
Jethra’s memory had always been good, and now she had nothing else to do besides strengthen it. She had created a dozen posts since November. Before she crawled under her blankets she repeated the roster through, added the new social media post in its place, started from the beginning, and repeated all 13.
Without medium, without audience, Jethra Holloway’s mad art project went on.