Series: Alternate Histories

It was a small moon, scarcely bigger than a thumb. It rose from its nest in the branches of a birch like an bird’s egg that had decided to skip hatching and go straight to flight. It wore a stripe of sunlight thin as the edge of a feather, but as the nights passed it drew more and more of this disguise down over itself until the whole thing blazed like a burglar’s torch. What a ludicrous sight! Poets everywhere ground their teeth at this violation of their beloved darkness, until they noticed how much darker the shadows had grown — and how the moonlight turned everything it touched to silver. A lover’s still face could pass for a statue, & it seemed suddenly conceivable that love itself might outlast the simple satisfaction of desire & take on the trappings of eternity. The small moon was now discovered to be enormous, but very far away. We would have to invent space flight to reach it. We’d have to leave bootprints on its smooth cheek that would last for a million years.

It was Sappho, wasn’t it, in one of her fragments who coined the expression. But who hasn’t felt divided like that? My bleak mood amused another part of me, as if it were a barrel cactus or the word murder written with spoons. I mixed a cocktail of tequila, carrot juice & ash. In the old westerns, the protagonists used to say things like, “Now it’s time for a dose of your own medicine!” Like certain plants, they were toxic to themselves.

I found a road-side tree into which someone had driven over a hundred nails. I stared at it for a while until I realized it must have been a place to post notices: estate sales, lost dogs, candidates for sheriff. In the old westerns, the sheriffs pinned steel stars to their chests, & the same Indian actors kept dying over & over. I looked up: it was a bigtooth aspen. A wind was shuffling the full deck of its leaves, which were pleasingly blank.

A black box originally meant a coffin. A light box was a bed for waking up in or a garden full of unmarked snow. The black box would be opened & its contents subjected to ritual examination — a kind of haruspicy to divine the past. We would stand around making small talk in the presence of the dead & see what made their eyelids twitch. The light box couldn’t be opened because on closer inspection, it turned out to include everything. To examine its contents, you started with yourself.

Thanks to John Miedema and Rachel Rawlins for the inspiration.

Panicked by the headlights, the cottontail turned back at the last second. My two-ton vehicle barely registered the thump under the right front tire. I am become death, destroyer of rabbits, I muttered. The rest of the way home I avoided looking at my hands gripping the wheel, so pale & fleshy. But when I left the car in its dark house of concrete & walked downhill to mine, the crisp night air tasted only of moon.

A few hours later, I was awoken by a slight vibrating of the mattress, followed by the touch of small clawed feet on the back of my head. I had become not death but a speed bump for mice running along the gap between headboard & quilt — a comforter stuffed with the breast feathers of geese.

Just like mitochondria & cell nuclei, genitalia were once free-living organisms. They resembled hydrozoans: the penis a polyp & the vulva & vagina a medusa. They were, in other words, the same organism at different stages. Though it needed an anchorage, joined to its brother polyps by hollow roots, the primitive penis strained for more, combing the currents with a hungry cluster of tentacles. Eventually, a bud would sprout from its side, break free & open like an umbrella in all that water. So while the penis lived from hand to mouth, the vagina, arrayed in glory, neither toiled nor spun, & the music of its transparent bell spread through the oceans & inspired the coral to new architectural heights. And the god of evolution, swaying in the garden, saw that it was good.

The first Anonymous was an albino who wrote a complete novel on his own skin in an effort to disappear into the text. Readers became so absorbed, they mistook his eyes for animated punctuation. In the novel, three sailors vied for the love of a nameless ship’s figurehead, who never unfolded her arms except for storms. It takes a lot of character to reject the comfort & convenience of a handle. You could die & nobody would know who they were burying, or you could live forever, fathering & mothering orphans.

The second Anonymous was less creative, as you’d expect. Sixty percent of his body was nothing but water.