The String and the Grief Were the Same Habit
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
She found the boxes in the basement on the day the water came in, not from the river but from the sky, sudden and biblical, and as she lifted the first cardboard lid she understood that her mother's habit of saving string and her grandmother's of saving grief were the same habit seen in different light. There were photos of Iowa, pictures of cattle, a cancelled passport with a man's name on it that she knew wasn't her father's. Piles of shoe size, color, price tags from end tables, tables, counter tops of secondhand stores along Broadway and beyond. Copies of grocery lists printed from medical tapes covering allergies, medications, the medications reinforcing the allergies. Tabs and staples and strange logo-ed papers she couldn't decipher. Browning conversions, a laminated paper that read "one-welfare" with wrench marks through the word welfare; pieces of cement he had hand-shaped to test if a post holding the steel framing of their house was doing enough; inked signatures bearing not, in her estimation, all enough caring to share a Xeroxed piece of paper that wasn't even a document. Or Ritual, with individuals named against one another next to phrases that made sense only to individuals named against one another.
Incense bits, floating in bowls of water. A near-two inch long worm in murky water. A blind turtle. A grain of an apparently preserved, golden mustard seed with only a shadowed hint of letters in Kingaky. From a book; which one was it? Three little cabbages lost in a cook book. Little cabbages: boxes. Orange: cardboard.
Boxes filled with months and months of no newspaper or televison.
"What got you here?"
None of them. Their activity. A work of art: what got you here was what finished. I quit doing nothing. Not enough fault to go around, though: the stones I hid behind I lifted.
It was fresh air in the box. Its expensive, luxurious smell. It was the smell of a grandma.
She told her mother she was going to the basement almost three weeks after arriving. She told her mother she was going and then her mother picked her up and carried her down into the basement, one of her mother's feet disappearing with her into the darkness. Linda was still surprised to hear herself say the words one-welfare, made a single time, during a discussion over green onion root uppings: Tx, coma, green. Her mother's hands, which had an increasing habit of strangling her, had led her down into a room filled with people who had chased her down so fast that they opened inside upon themselves and she had been chosen against those too numerous to count as how she'd best help to fill the empty spaces the place had denied existed. She swore to herself that she would not forgive.
She looked down to her feet and saw this brown surburban basement floor upon which her mother was remaining, yet disappearing into, looking up at her from.
How could it also, somehow, be up?
That evening's conversation trailed off when her mother became visibly distracted by scratches near her outlet. Curled wallpaper at the edges of the ceiling and bulbs illuminated by flames that shot like if at all the stove could control the heat around the thing with even a minor suicidal state of mind there would be her mother's tremors over the flame, her her responding to, "oh why do you do this to yourself I mean I'm not saying it's not valid or anything what you're doing I think I'm really authentic with you so essentially that's a lie that I'm saying no such thing as valid I'm telling the truth my great great grandfather went so crazy there aren't any records of him being here."
Her mother's hands were closing like a noose. Heave in. Tighten. Sh◆ About the ending
❧ About the title