Author: Kalie Dudeck

I was in line at the pharmacy when the man behind me

mumbled a heavy burden under his breath. He said:

 “Seek fame over God and you will not be followed,”

as if it were a warning, or a

convenient kind-of curse,

and right then,

he helped me write a poem

out of strange pieces.

We’re all holy when you hold us up to the light —

these fluorescent

hall(ucinogenic)elujahs.

I attempted to pay my debt.

The cashier caught my coin before it dropped.

The stranger and I slow-blinked,

preparing for the man behind the counter to call it.

He didn’t.

Instead, he read a receipt-scripture of a woman

who held bottles of alcohol close to her chest,

                                                 who was embarrassed by the weight of it all,

                                who clarified that she wanted to

      “cleanse herself.”

Nothing is pure and it is a privilege to know that.

And it is a punishment to know that –

the trace of booze on the stranger behind me was

the most honest thing about that day,

how I did not know what to call it,

so I called it coincidence.

And how he did not know what to call it,

so he called it Christ.

Sarah was safe. That’s what she told herself.

            New York had felt like a different city the past several days, rendered in grayscale that Sarah couldn’t blink away. Jazz died before it reached the ears of clubgoers. Liquor poured like sludge into glasses. The city crashed around her ears, for the first time since the Great War ended.

            Despite , dawn on Wednesday saw Sarah Sweetland Burke lying peacefully in a bed that was not her own, eyes closed, telling herself she was safe.

 The “Burke” of her name was a new addition; new, but already obsolete, as everything else in the modern age. “Sweetland” was older—as old as the red Alabama soil, her mother liked to say. Years after she’d seen the back of the man who’d lent her his name, Sarah still found it odd to be sleeping next to someone who was not her husband.

In the glowing light of a very early morning, next to the man she’d known only for hours, Sarah began a familiar ritual, her lips fluttering as she mouthed the words.

“You are safe. You are awake. You can do anything you like.” She’d once needed to smoke to achieve the state she was seeking now, was a frequent visitor to Chinatown’s opium joints in the years after she moved to New York. She’d stopped once she realized her dependence. Sarah depended on nothing. 

You are safe. You are awake. You can do anything you like, went her mantra.

            Somewhere between the dirty apartment and the city turning to ash outside, Mrs. Sweetland Burke slipped into a trance.

            A grandfather clock beats in Sarah’s chest, and her surroundings melt into view. Grand piano, burnished gold, in the corner of a wallpapered room. Birds singing from the verandah. Alabama air, that sweet land thick in the air.

Sarah holds her fist out in front of her, unfurls the blossom of her fingers. A bee flies out, then vanishes. She is lucid, yet dreaming. Asleep, and awake, in another world. You can do anything you like. What would you do if you could do anything? If you could not fail; if you could not die? Sarah knew. She’d learned this trick from a mystic downtown, researched it in reputable literature, perfected the magic.

Now she finds herself in a very familiar house, a house that always glowed with the ghosts of a monied past. Footsteps reach her from above, and its cadence betrays her mother’s presence, milling around in her bedroom. Sarah climbs the stairs, every creak and every catch in the wood irresistibly familiar to her. Green striped wallpaper, embroidered with delicate rosebuds, surrounds Sarah. She enters the diffused light of her mother’s boudoir.

Margaret Sweetland is perfectly preserved in this mirror world. White streaks punctuate the dark red glamor of her hair, and her dress is two generations too old. “Sit up straighter,” her mother’s voice echoes. “You are a lady. You disappoint me, my child.” Sarah sits next to the woman who now exists only in this dream, and takes her hand, leathery and stiff.

“You have dreams.” Margaret’s eyes, watery-blue and rimmed with red, pierce Sarah. “Take care not to fly too close to the sun, darling. It’ll burn you.” Margaret’s gaze leaves her daughter, settles on the windowsill, where a bluejay suns itself. That advice is all well and good, Sarah thinks, if you’re allowed to fly at all.

Sarah stands up, takes the stairs again, leaving her mother alone. Just as she’d done years ago. Before Sarah can turn back, Margaret vanishes.

She descends the staircase, touches her hip and finds stiff crepe. Layers of rigid fabric surround her, a corset binds her waist. She reaches out to touch her head, finds ringlets instead of her usual bob. She feels like royalty. Romance personified.

And there, he’s there, like she knew he would be, because she wanted him to be. Thomas Burke, glorious and handsome in his military uniform, well-worn yet somehow sad with faded pride. Sarah trips down the stairs to meet him, blushing, feeling ten years younger in one breath.

“My dove.” His nickname sends the bird of her heart fluttering. A smile splits his face. “It’s just you and I now, here.” He takes her hand, pulls her into a waltz. The piano hums a low tune.

His warm cheek meets hers. She could lose herself here, never go back to the decaying city. “I’m sorry I ever left you, dove,” he croons as he whirls her. “Be an artist. Be a poet. Just be mine.” The words she would have given every penny on Wall Street to turn into reality.

It takes Sarah a moment to disengage, willing herself away from the arms of a ghostly Thomas Burke, once her husband, now a lost stranger. She steps back, watches as his features melt like candle wax, and he dissipates like her mother, like all the ghosts in this house.

Whatever you want.

What does she want?

An art deco monolith rises behind her. The glinting Chrysler, pompous, yet delicate and modern, shadows Lexington Avenue. More, Sarah thinks. I want more.

The sun stretches out and wraps the sky, warming her as she weaves her way through the city streets. It’s quiet, unlike the real New York, Sarah’s heels snapping the pavement as she makes her way uptown. She feels light as air, as warm as the spring and as carefree. On either side of her, men tip their hats in deference, and women bow their heads. She closes her eyes and opens them again, and this time only women dot the sidewalks, smiling at Sarah as she passes. A sigh escapes her; what freedom they would feel if this were not, after all, only a dream. What things they could do! What lives we’d live without the men whose avarice dismantled the city.

Her mother’s words echo back to her from across the distance of a dream: It’ll burn you.

There’s an aspect of dreaming lucidly she’s never attempted. Now she recalls the bluejay as once again, she shuts her eyes, opening them to find herself on a naked steel beam: the exposed skeleton of a modern city, as yet uncovered with stone flesh. In this imagined moment, despite the girders rising to scrape the heavens, Sarah is the tallest thing in New York. She unfolds her wings, and takes to the sky.

It felt like an eternity before Sarah woke up.

The aftereffects were similar to coming down from an opium high: despair, sluggishness, the desire to return to the air. Sarah thought this exchange was more than a fair price, unlike with the drug. The suffused light of the morning spread over Sarah as she slowly rose from bed, restless yet satiated.

            The man she’d left underneath his gray-tinged sheet was snoring rather obviously. Sarah had no qualms about keeping silent as she gathered her sundry garments and placed them back onto her body one by one, a soldier gathering her armor. She wrapped her corsele around her torso, pressing her breasts down into fashionable nonexistence. Next she stepped into her cotton chemise, a rare relic of her trousseau. She pulled up her stockings, noticing how the smooth nylon blurred the blemishes on her legs: a green vein in one or two places, patches of discoloration. Thirty-two years old and already an old woman.

            The man didn’t stir as she slid her dress up her slim frame and buckled both boots. Sarah retrieved her coat and cloche and made an audible show of fumbling with the doorknob, and then she was free.

            New York looked even grayer to Sarah after her colorful escapade. Late October air stung her cheeks, and an overcast, leaden sky offered no respite. She’d emerged onto the narrow Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, a long trek to her Chinatown garret ahead of her. Tucking her cropped brown curls behind her ears, Sarah joined a throng of office-bound men walking north with purpose. She didn’t just imagine their drawn faces and wan coloring. It was, for the first time in a long decadent decade, a bad time to be a speculator in New York.

Wrapping her coat more closely around herself, Sarah crossed at New Street. Shouts and cries captured her attention. Looking up, she saw why.

He was young, Sarah’s age or younger. No more than thirty, she thought, if a day. He was perched on the edge of a financial building, many stories up—Sarah quickly counted at least fifteen. The building rose like an obelisk behind him, straining to touch heaven. A scrum of people had gathered at the base of the building, a dark mass of gray and black. They pointed and sobbed. They swore. They pleaded.

            The young man’s hair flapped its wings in the bitter wind. He shed his suit jacket, let the charcoal skin crumple by his feet. He waited the span of a heartbeat, took one step forward, arms embracing the vacuum. Sarah’s scream joined the symphony. She shut her eyes, spun around, cradled her head. Still she couldn’t block the sound of the young man meeting the pavement.

 It wasn’t supposed to end like that. It had gone wrong. And then she realized why, as she lay trembling, on her knees, on the curb of Wall Street.

For a second, it seemed as if he’d been trying to fly.

i was seven and a surly nurse sniffed my pauper sweatshirt and snarled with disgust. my body squirmed away but men held me down to demonstrate the state must constrain movement.

i was five and the bus kids raised their feet when i hopped on because they were paranoid trailer germs polluted immaculate sneakers. mom made me go despite a bad reaction since daycare is a luxury.

i was twelve and an overgrown boy got on the bus and demanded loyalty from anyone in a seat he once occupied. i ignored him and he smashed my vaccinated arm.

i was fourteen and in the lobby, cable news danced as warplanes extinguished iraqi breath. i said americans think war is easy because it’s three letters long. the nurse said he had trouble finding a spot and stabbed me again and again.

i was nineteen and kim il-sung wrote this poem in a dream. he warned not to stain it with tea or a water ring. poetry has revolutionary veins because radical words circulate through its skeletal page. comrade cupp now exists in both person and poetic form. inoculate letters from this capital plague to resist dustbins that await us.

We can’t place her

to rest in the forest,

as was her last wish.

Evidently, ashes

buried or scattered

are considered

by agency regulations

to be a final form

of illicit squatting,

to violate a rule

that states remains

of a deceased “creates

permanent occupancy”

of a specific place,

which is not allowed;

further, the remnants

once given back

to the gentle earth

fall oh so softly

into the category

of “perpetual use,”

thus not passing

criteria, due to being

“incompatible

with the purposes

for which the land

is managed.” So,

the legal issue is

clearly settled

but not her soul.

All week instead of drafting my screenplay I’ve been Netflix-surfing, lounging half-on, half-off the loveseat. My ‘day off’ has ballooned into a trance without time. At first I enjoyed this sitcom that’s playing. Now I’m enduring its final seasons like a dentist’s appointment, numbed and slumped, waiting to be freed.

So when Santosh suggests that a change will do me good, and asks me to drive her to the nail salon, I can’t refuse.

The preparatory scrubbing of my wife’s trimmed nails takes seventy minutes, an emery board, a chisel, a powderpuff, and other tools I can’t name. I feel sick to my stomach, then realise it’s because it smells like a dentist’s appointment, then realise why: calcium nebulised in the air. The nail technician begins finessing Santosh’s cuticles.

The décor is white and teal. Small bottles stand in military formation on shelftops and ledges. The technician is small, northeastern, and black-uniformed. A writer is never offduty, but there really is nothing else to observe.

I try playing songs in my head, but my internal playlist keeps looping “Kryptonite.” I vow to listen to a hundred new songs every night in my sleep, to proliferate my weapons against boredom. A bored writer is like a pervert priest: a disgrace to the profession.

The technician is scraping at Santosh’s nails again, her motions precise, her head bent. Did Michelangelo labour so over David? Does even a masterpiece merit this insane attention to detail? Maybe art does, art for the ages, but not nails.

I rouse myself and fish for topics of conversation. Santosh responds, but never looks up from the narrow teal cushion on which her hands rest. The heat on her hands from the glue-setting UV lamp seems to have bathed her brain, too, in bliss: immobilised it, as sunshine does a cat.

Under the table my knees quiver, then shake, then earthquake. I picture plucking my eyelashes out, lash by entangled lash, to distract myself from the bloodred murder of two hours of my life.

Back home I unplug the television, dustbin the remote control, and sit down at my laptop. ‘Now or never,’ I mutter. On the blank white face of my future, the cursor blinks and blinks, then freezes in a Mona Lisa smile.