Curled in the southeast corner with thin skin sticking to faux-cheetah acrylic, she crams bits of my manuscript into cracked lips, spitting bits onto cement. An amber bulb, cobwebbed and sickly, swings overhead as she guzzles Merlot I serve her. She dials the phone with her crinkled digit. It’s me on the other end, the recipient of her list of demands. She is feeble. Helpless. Abandoned. I stand in front of her but she can’t see me, and continues to rattle off commands, her blue eyes crane-like and blank. I fix things as she shreds my manuscript. The washer, the dryer, the leak in the wall. Her broken Facebook account. The years of unanswered submissions. I forward her mail, manage her social as she lounges on the musty couch in her robe. I do it all. She is talking about suicide. How she left the car running in the garage. “No accidents,” she says. She is crawling into Virginia’s pockets. It’s romantic and a bit lesbian I must add. Virginia is at the 7-11. It’s good Virginia knows when to take a walk. Yesterday she was a purring kitten. Today she is a trapped bee, upside down in squalor, her wings damp and tiny legs wriggling. I begin to lose my sense of time. Is it 2020? 2021. She’ll publish my book, she says. My voice is necessary. She is my advocate.
Her husband dies. She curses him as he gasps his last breaths. Everyone leaves her. They take his body out and she writes me a note. And I carry bails of water to the back door. She can’t see me, but we are in the same room.
I hear the rain pounding and it leaks through the walls. Fortunately, she’s too drunk to make it to the lake, but through the window bars, I see Virginia lurching along the Ouse. She says I can be the daughter she never had. I tell her I don’t need another bad mother. Yes, this is harsh to say to a pale-eyed, prone crane, but she never hears what I say anyway. Her words slur beyond comprehension. She changes the titles of my poems. A week later, she claims they’re stupid and attributes them to me. The next day, she says I’m a genius and my words are important. She will publish my book. I will manage things for her. She’ll pay me in books. She is a champion of grief and lesbians. She is a heroine of the highest order.
Water continues to seep into the basement. My feet and legs are cold. The floor drain has stopped working. Two years have passed, and publications come and go. Not mine. I do things. I help writers. I fetch things. I say “yes.” And sometimes, “maybe that’s not a good idea.” Wading through the stench and slime, I catch my foot on an underwater chain. My ankle rips open and cracks as I pull it away. The drain opens and the water is sucked into the blackest of holes.
This is the second draft:
One Room: Basement, the editor
Curled in the southeast corner with thin skin sticking to faux-cheetah acrylic, she crams reams of my manuscript into cracked lips, spitting bits onto cement. An amber bulb, cobwebbed and sickly, swings overhead as she guzzles Merlot I serve her. The air reeks of cheap perfume and musty socks. She dials the phone with her crinkled digit. It’s me on the other end, the recipient of her list of demands. She is feeble. Helpless. Abandoned. I stand in front of her but she can’t see me and continues to rattle off commands, her blue eyes crane-like and blank. I fix things as she shreds my manuscript. The washer, the dryer, the leak in the wall. Her broken Facebook account. The years of unanswered submissions. I forward her mail, manage her social as she lounges on the musty couch in her robe. I’m her recruit, her new best friend, her savior. I do it all.
She is talking about suicide. How she left the car running in the garage. “No accidents,” she says. She is crawling into Virginia’s pockets. It’s romantic and a tad lesbian, I must add, a literary suicide. Virginia is at the 7-11. It’s good Virginia knows when to take a walk. Yesterday she was a purring kitten dripping love bombs everywhere. Today she is a trapped bee, upside down in squalor, her wings damp and tiny legs wriggling.
I begin to lose my sense of time. Is it 2020? 2021. She’ll publish my book, she says. My voice is necessary. She is my advocate.
Her husband dies. She curses him as he gasps his last breaths. Everyone leaves her. This is yet one more abandonment in a lifetime of losses. They take his body out and she writes me a note. And I carry bails of water to the back door. She can’t see me, but we are in the same room.
I hear the rain pounding and it leaks through the walls. Fortunately, she’s too drunk to make it to the river, but through the window bars I see Virginia lurching along the Ouse. She says I can be the daughter she never had. I tell her I don’t need another bad mother. Yes, this is harsh to say to a pale-eyed, prone crane, but she never hears what I say anyway. Her words slur beyond comprehension.
She changes the titles of my poems, scrawling letters with her free claw. A week later, she claims they’re stupid and attributes them to me.
She is sick of my book, my grief book, my grief, her grief, and wants to publish her own book, she says.
The next day, she says I’m a genius and my words are important. She will publish my book. I will manage things for her. She’ll pay me in books. She is a champion of grief and lesbians. She is a heroine of the highest order.
Water continues to seep into the basement. My feet and legs are cold. The floor drain has stopped working. Two years have passed, and publications come and go. Not mine. I do things. I help writers. I fetch things. I say “yes.” And sometimes, “maybe that’s not a good idea.”
Wading through the stench and slime, I catch my foot on an underwater chain. My ankle rips open and cracks as I pull it away. The drain opens and the water is sucked into the blackest of holes.
Thank you for engaging this and thank you for your edits. Yesterday a purring kitten, today a trapped bee. Yes indeed. And the speaker, adhering to the responsibilities they’ve agreed to. Both parties in need. Both parties needing each other. “She is a champion of grief and lesbians” really should be my bio moving forward. I loved that. 🙂 Consider: what you know vs what you want readers to know…about the speaker, about the person the speaker cares for. And what structure would best communicate those things. Thank you for writing this.
The weight of this piece, what is carried, the entrapment, the lowest of the low (level, emotion). I felt it. Virginia intrigued me and as a trapped bee, the image struck me as this “ … she crams reams of my manuscript into cracked lips, spitting bits …” reminding me a wasp building a nest. I think this is brilliant!
*Reminding me of the editor as a wasp building a nest.
Koss! This is brilliant and mesmerizing as I tred through this flood with her, this tragedy, as her manuscript is eaten away by the lesbians in need. “My voice is necessary. She is my advocate.” The caregiver, the one who needs to save the others. OMG! TRuly a masterpiece of how one tries and one really can’t! LOVE LOVE LOVE!
Hi Koss, there is only so much one can do. For anyone. And this is heartbreaking, and lusciously, delicately written. Bravo, Koss, for taking such risks and strides, too. And thanks for exposing the depth and weight of pain and loss.
Koss,
This was magnificent and mesmerizing throughout. Every line shimmers and feels like a gut punch. I love how every so often you throw in some choppy sentences. It adds to the anxiety and pulls the piece along. So many amazing descriptions. This one really knocked me out–I tell her I don’t need another bad mother.
Just wonderful writing.
Brava.
I agree wholeheartedly with what everyone has said…really brilliant! And I love how the water motif mirrors the build-up, then the draining.
This is incredible! It felt rather hallucinatory to read, in all the best ways. So many amazing lines and images in here. The piece is disorienting at times (are the “she” and Virginia one person or two different ones? How is the speaker both inside the room and outside at the same time? Are they a ghost?) but this disorientation also struck me as so vitally necessary and important that I don’t even know how much clarification I actually want. Basements (and attics too) are supercharged spaces, places where artists go to loose their minds. I just love how on the brink this is…
Thank you Julia. The speaker has been rendered ghost like by the narcissist. “She” likes to be dramatic and identifies with Virginia Woolf, using suicide as a kind of emotional extortion, but I let Virginia be a real live character, who may or may not merge with “she.” It made sense to put the unseen speaker in the dank basement with the sightless editor as a sort of suffocating compression. I thought having them talk on the phone in the same room was just funny… I appreciate your reading and that it was somewhat disorienting. Thank you.
Koss, I love the energy and disorientation of this piece. It’s so raw and honest and mesmerizing. Really incredible work!
Koss, first my apologies for commenting so late. There are so many things to note. So first yes this is a truly complex and multi-layered, shifting time within time place you have created. Claiming and reclaiming and just getting through it. And Virginia. I may be way off here, but I also read it as a very honest and remarkable capturing of the caregiver’s presence in the lives of the editor, Virginia, and anyone else reading this who needs to believe in such a person/presence. The one who shows up in the flood of it all in the dankest of places, and does the things, is visible and invisible, to the others sets the limits, “I tell her I don’t need another bad mother… I say yes and maybe that’s not a good idea.” Tries to get their needs met, but still goes on. Thank you.
Hey Karen. No apology needed. Thanks so much for your read. I think it’s okay if people think Virginia and the editor are one. I intended the text to be open. Nice to workshop with you and look forward to more of your wonderful writing.
Hey Koss, apologies for the confusion! I do see Virginia as separate from the editor. Virginia is ever-present to many of us.
Cool!