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Overview
Through nine searing works of fiction, Melanie Rae Thon looks to the people who live in the borderlands, turning a keen and compassionate eye to those marginalized by circumstance and transgression. Taking us from the cobblestone streets of Boston to a deserted Montana road, from dance halls to hospital morgues, these urgent tales careen between the faults of the body and those of the mind, exploring the irruption of the past through the present, the sudden accidents and misguided passions that make it impossible to return to the safe territory of a former life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497684607 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 12/30/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | NOOK Book |
| Pages: | 168 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
First, Body
Stories
By Melanie Rae Thon
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1997 Melanie Rae ThonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8460-7
CHAPTER 1
IN THESE WOODS
I waited for you in the rain. My tongue hurt. I'd been telling lies all day. Lies to the four Christian teenagers who thought they could save me. My first ride, Albany to Oneonta — they sang the whole way. More lies to the jittery pink-skinned man who took me north. He offered tiny blue pills and fat black ones. He said, It's safe — don't worry — I'm a nurse. He said, I'll make you feel good.
I think I had a sister once. Everywhere I go she's been before me. There's no getting out of it.
When the pink nurse stopped to piss, my sister Clare whispered, Look at him — he'll kill you if he can. I hid in the woods by the lake full of stumps. I didn't move. I let the sky pour through me. He called the name I'd said was mine. Sometimes I heard branches breaking. Sometimes only rain. Finally he yelled at me, at who he thought I was. He said, No more games. He said, Fine, freeze your ass. His voice cracked. I could have chosen him instead of you, but Clare breathed on my hands. She said, He doesn't have anything you want.
You were driving toward me, your blue truck still hours away. Cold rain, cars whipping water — only my faith made me wait. I swear I knew you, your soft beard, how it would be. But you never imagined us together. You never meant to stop for me.
This I won't tell. This you'll never know. Mick says I'm fourteen going on forty. I've got that dusty skin, dry, my eyes kind of yellowish where they're supposed to be white. It's the rum I drink, and maybe my kidneys never did work that well. Mick, who is my mother's husband now, says I'll be living on the street at sixteen, dead at twenty. He says this to me, when we're alone. Once I paid two dollars, let Mama Rosa read my palm to see if he was right, and she told me I was going to outlive everyone I love.
I know I'm strange. I drift. Maybe I'm smoking a cigarette, leaning on the bricks. Somebody's talking. Then I'm not there. I'm a window breaking. I'm pieces of myself falling on the ground. Later I wake up in my own body and my fingers are burned.
Clare says, Just stand up.
She's careless, my sister. She gets drunk. She puts other people's blood in her veins. Her skin's hot. She goes out in the cold without her coat and waits for her lover to come. Wind drives snow in her face. Ice needles her bare arms. Some night she'll lie down in the woods and he won't find her. Some night she'll lie down in the road.
It's November. I know because there are Halloween men rotting in all the yards, snagged on fences, skewered on poles. Pumpkin heads scooped hollow — they stink of their own spoiled selves. One boy's stuck in a tree. His head's a purple cabbage. You could peel him down to his brainless core.
I know some men downtown, Halloween men trying to walk on stuffed legs. Rags on sticks, pants full of straw, foul wind blowing through them to scare the crows. I think they made themselves. They have those eyes. Carved. Candles guttering inside their soft skulls.
They live in a brick house you can't blow down — boards instead of windows, nails in the doors. They tell me, Come alone.
They have dusted joints and I have seven dollars. They have pocketsful of pills and I have pennies I found in the snow. I know how easy it is to go down the steps to the basement, to stand shivering against the wall. Nothing hurts me. Earl says, Pain is just a feeling like any other feeling. He should know. Knife, slap, kiss, flame. He says, Forget their names and they pass through you. Earl has wooden arms and metal hands. His left ear's a hole, his nose a bulb of flesh from somewhere else. He sits in the corner and smokes. He holds the joint in his silver claw. His long feet are always bare. When he whispers in his half-voice, everything stops.
No money the night before I found you. One of the Halloween men said, Come with me. He had pink hearts and poppers. He knew I'd need them. He said, It's dangerous to sleep. I looked at Earl. I thought his lips moved. I thought he said, Nothing lasts too long.
This speedboy with poppers was the whitest man I ever saw. When I closed my eyes he was a white dog bounding through streets of snow. I tried not to think of his skin, all of it, how bright it was, how his body exposed would blind me, how his white palms blazed against my hips. I thought of Earl instead, smooth arms, cool hands, Earl who only burned himself, hair flaming around soft ears, holy angel, face melting into bone.
Clare said, Nobody will find you.
The whiteman was in me, close enough to hear; he said, Not even God.
God doesn't like to watch little girls pressed against basement walls. God doesn't like little girls who swallow pills and drink rum. God's too old to get down on his hands and knees and peer through the slats of boards. Glass broken long ago but shards still on the ground. He might cut his palms. If he ever thinks of me, maybe he'll send his son.
I never slept with the whiteman.
I mean, I never lay down and closed my eyes.
Clare said, There's no reason to go home. She made me remember the trailer in December, a ring of Christmas lights blinking its outline, red and green and gold, the wet snow the first winter she was gone. She made me remember the white ruffled curtains on the windows and the three plastic swans in the yard. She said she hitched two hundred miles once to stand outside, to watch us inside, the fog of our breath on the glass. She said our mother had a new husband and two sons. She said we were nobody's daughters. She said, They all want you to go.
Singing Christians, pink nurse, rain — I waited, saw your blue truck at last. I had a dream once of your body, damp hair of your chest, my fingers in it. As soon as you stopped, I remembered the hunting cap on the seat between us, the rabbit fur inside your gloves.
I surprised you. I'm the living proof: unknown father's daughter. Tall bony Nadine. Dark-eyed Nadine. Girl from the lake of stumps. Water swirling in a mother's dream. His face rising toward her. Shadow of a hand making the sign of the cross.
I pulled the blanket from my head and you saw the holes in my ear — you counted the tarnished hoops, nine, cartilage to lobe.
Later I'll show you: the holes in my ear never hurt like the hole in my tongue.
You were amazed by the space I filled — long legs, muddy boots; you had no reason to let the wet-wool, black-hair smell of me into your warm truck. Moments before, I looked small and helpless, a child on the road, no bigger than your own daughter, ten years old, her impossibly thin arms, all her fragile breakable bones.
I closed my eyes so you wouldn't be afraid. I was just a girl again, alone, but the smell — it filled the cab; you breathed me; I was in your lungs. I was your boyself, the bad child, the one who ran away from you, the one you never found.
Later there was fog and dark, the rain, heavy. You didn't know where we were going. You didn't know where to stop. The lights of cars coming toward us exploded in mist, blinding you. I said, Pull over. I said, We can wait it out.
And it was there, in the fog, in the rain, in the terrifying light of cars still coming, that I kissed you the first time. It was there parked on the soft gravel shoulder that I stuck my pierced tongue in your mouth and you put your hands under my shirt to feel my ribs, the first time. It was there that you said, Careful, baby, and you meant my tongue, the stud — it hurt you — and I thought of the handcuffs in my bag, stolen from the Halloween man, the last one, the white one — he was cursing me even now. I could have cuffed you to your wheel, left you to explain. I imagined myself in your coat, carrying your gun.
But I loved you.
I mean, I didn't want to go.
The rain slowed. The fog blew across the road. You drove. I wore your gloves, felt the fur of the animal around every finger. I stared at the lights till my eyes were holes.
You were tired. You were sorry. It was too late to throw me out. You said we'd stop at a motel. You said we'd sleep. You said, What happened back there — don't worry. You meant it wasn't going to go any further. You meant you thought it was your fault.
I disgusted you now. I saw that. Your tongue hurt. My sour breath was in your mouth. Never, you thought, not with her. Dirty Nadine. Nothing like my pretty sister. Pale half-sister. Daughter of the father before my father. Not like Clare, lovely despite her filth, delicate Clare, thin as your daughter — you could hold her down. You could take her to any room. You could wash her. You could break her with one blow. You would never guess how dangerous she is. You can't see the shadows on her lungs, her hard veins, her brittle bones. You can't see the bloom of blood. Later I'll tell you about the handprints on all the doors of the disappeared. Later I'll explain the lines of her open palm.
Is she alive? Try to find her. Ask her yourself.
Never is the car door slamming. Never is the key in the lock, the Traveler's Rest Motel, the smell of disinfectant, the light we don't turn on. Never is the mattress so old you feel the coils against your back when you fall. My tongue's in your mouth. Your cock's hard against my thigh. Never.
Clare has a game. We strobe. She grabs my hand, sticks the wire in the socket.
She dares me to hang on.
I'm a thief. It's true.
I turn you into a thief. It's necessary. You'll think of that forever, the sheet you had to steal to get out of the motel. You'll remember your bare legs in the truck, the cold vinyl through thin cloth, the white half-moon hanging in the morning sky, face down.
Days now and hundreds of miles since I left you. You wear your orange vest, carry your oiled gun. You follow tracks in snow. I follow Clare to the road. She wants me to find her, to feel what she feels, to do everything she's done.
When you see the doe at last, you think of me. You're alone with me — there's no one you can tell about the girl on the road, her sore tongue in your mouth. Never, you said, no and no, but you twitched under her, blinded by the flickering in your skull. No one will understand. You thought her hands would turn you inside out, but you held on. There's no one you can tell about the wallet she opened, the cash and pictures, the pants she stole.
Careful, baby.
I've got your life now — your little girl smiling in my hand, dressed in her white fairy costume, waving her sparkling fairy wand; I hold your sad wife in her striped bathing suit. If I could feel, her chubby knees would break my heart. I've got you in my pocket — your driver's license, my proof. I'm in your pants. I belt them tight. I keep your coins in my boots for good luck. I wear your hat, earflaps down. I bought a silver knife with your forty-three dollars. I carved your name in a cross on my thigh.
Yesterday I found a dump of jack-o'-lanterns in the ditch, the smashed faces of all the men I used to know. They grinned to show me the stones in their broken mouths. They've taken themselves apart. I'm looking for their unstuffed clothes, hoping they didn't empty their pockets before their skulls flamed out.
It's dark. Clare pulls me toward the gully. She wants me to run down between the black trees and twisting vines. She wants me to feel my way — she wants me to crawl.
Morning again, I saw a deer, only the head and legs, bits of hide, a smear of blood, five crows taking flight, wings hissing as they rose. Someone's accident butchered here, the stunned meat taken home. Before you fell asleep, I said, Anyone can kill.
She's in your sights. Nobody understands your fear, how you feel my hands even now, reaching for your wrists, slipping under your clothes. So many ways to do it, brutal or graceful, silent as the blood in my sister's veins or full of shattered light and sound. Kick to the shoulder, blast of the gun — she staggers, wounded, not killed all at once. There's snow on the ground, gold leaves going brown. There's light in the last trembling leaves but the sun is gone. You follow her trail, dark puddles spreading in snow, black into white, her blood.
You remember a farmer straddling his own sheep. Will it be like this? The knife, one slit, precise. Pain is just a feeling like any other feeling. She never struggled. He reached inside, grabbed something, squeezed hard. I can't tell you what it was.
She won't drop in time, won't give up. When you put your hands in front of you, you almost feel her there: hair, flesh, breath, blood. She wants only what you want: to survive one minute more.
What would you do if you found her now, if her ragged breathing stopped? Too far to drag her back to the truck; you'd have to open her in the sudden dark, pull her steaming entrails into the snow.
I wait for the next ride. Clare wants me to follow in her tracks, to find her before she falls, to touch her, to wash her blood clean in this snow, to put it back in her veins, to make her whole.
You walk in a circle. You wonder if you're lost. The doe's following you now, but at a distance. She's trying to forgive you. If she could speak, she might tell you the way home. She might say, You can climb inside me, wear my body like a coat.
You can't explain this to anyone. Never, no. You need me. I'm the only one alive who knows your fear, who understands how dangerous we are to each other in these woods, on this road.
CHAPTER 22 XMAS, JAMAICA PLAIN
I'm your worst fear.
But not the worst thing that can happen.
I lived in your house half the night. I'm the broken window in your little boy's bedroom. I'm the flooded tiles in the bathroom where the water flowed and flowed.
I'm the tattoo in the hollow of Emile's pelvis, five butterflies spreading blue wings to rise out of his scar.
I'm dark hands slipping through all your pale woman underthings; dirty fingers fondling a strand of pearls, your throat, a white bird carved of stone. I'm the body you feel wearing your fox coat.
Clare said, Take the jewelry; it's yours.
My heart's in my hands: what I touch, I love; what I love, I own.
Snow that night and nobody seemed surprised, so I figured it must be winter.
Later I remembered it was Christmas, or it had been, the day before. I was with Emile, who wanted to be Emilia. We'd started downtown, Boston. Now it was Jamaica Plain, three miles south. Home for the holidays, Emile said, some private joke. He'd been working the block around the Greyhound Station all night, wearing nothing but a white scarf and black turtleneck, tight jeans. Man wants to see before he buys, Emile said. He meant the ones in long cars, cruising, looking for fragile boys with female faces.
Emile was sixteen, he thought.
Getting old.
He'd made sixty-four dollars, three tricks with cash, plus some pills — a bonus for good work, blues and greens, he didn't know what. Nobody'd offered to take him home, which is all he wanted: a warm bed, some sleep, eggs in the morning, the smell of butter, hunks of bread torn off the loaf.
Crashing, both of us, ragged from days of speed and crack, no substitute for the smooth high of pure cocaine but all we could afford. Now, enough cash between us at last. I had another twenty-five from the man who said he was in the circus once, who called himself the Jungle Creep — on top of me he made that sound. Before he unlocked the door, he said, Are you a real girl? I looked at his plates — New Jersey; that's why he didn't know the lines, didn't know that the boys as girls stay away from the Zone unless they want their faces crushed. He wanted me to prove it first. Some bad luck once, I guess. I said, It's fucking freezing. I'm real. Open the frigging door or go.
Now it was too late to score, too cold, nobody on the street but Emile and me, the wind, so we walked, we kept walking. I had a green parka, somebody else's wallet in the pocket — I couldn't remember who or where, the coat stolen weeks ago and still mine, a miracle out here. We shared, trading it off. I loved Emile. I mean, it hurt my skin to see his cold.
Emile had a plan. It had to be Jamaica Plain, home — enough hands as dark as mine, enough faces as brown as Emile's — not like Brookline, where we'd have to turn ourselves inside out. Jamaica Plain, where there were pretty painted houses next to shacks, where the sound of bursting glass wouldn't be that loud.
Listen, we needed to sleep, to eat, that's all. So thirsty even my veins felt dry, flattened out. Hungry somewhere in my head, but my stomach shrunken to a knot so small I thought it might be gone. I remembered the man, maybe last week, before the snow, leaning against the statue of starved horses, twisted metal at the edge of the Common. He had a knife, long enough for gutting fish. Dressed in camouflage but not hiding. He stared at his thumb, licked it clean, and cut deep to watch the bright blood bubble out. He stuck it in his mouth to drink, hungry, and I swore I'd never get that low. But nights later I dreamed him beside me. Raw and dizzy, I woke, offering my whole hand, begging him to cut it off.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from First, Body by Melanie Rae Thon. Copyright © 1997 Melanie Rae Thon. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Epigraph
- FIRST, BODY
- FATHER, LOVER, DEADMAN, DREAMER
- LITTLE WHITE SISTER
- NOBODY’S DAUGHTERS
- 1 In These Woods
- 2 Xmas, Jamaica Plain
- 3 Home
- THE SNOW THIEF
- BODIES OF WATER
- NECESSARY ANGELS
- About the Author
- Copyright Page
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