Jonah Series, in full

Jonah, Swallowed

When I was a prophet, I wanted to be a sailor. When I was a sailor, I was sick on the rails all the time. Heaving out at the sea, I thought about the tightrope walker from the circus back home, how she glided into the void with her arms outstretched. I wanted to say it was like that, that running away from God was something graceful and calculated. No one ever tells you how much the wire shakes.

God bullied up the water, sent a storm to drag me back. Too seasick to stand, I tied myself upright to the mast, dug my fingernails into the wood. John tore me off, said, You ain’t no sail, said, You gonna sink us all with those sins, boy. My boots were heavy with rain. I could have emptied them, but the men came fast and threw me over the rails. I thought I could find the wire and stick the landing, but there was nothing to hold onto. My hands hit the water, and everything went cold. When I sank under the ship, I could see her giant eye.

My whale, she saved me, like a good wife. She made me part of her body. She hides me under her skin, while he waits out there, hungry.

Jonah, Day 6

For days, Jonah has been talking to himself. Not much else to do inside a whale. He looks like a high school boy nerving up to ask some girl out, pacing the belly, wiping his palms against his thighs. He replays the same scene over and over, how he took her hand and called her by her real name—Lily, not Hattie the Highwire Girl. But she didn’t call him Jonah. Prophet boy, she said. Don’t touch me, prophet boy. Turns out tightrope walking is a one-man act. No room for two in the air.

Jonah had thought God was guiding him to Lily, that her sequin-studded hair and steady legs were his reward for all his prophet wanderings. When she turned away, he cut down her rope and tied it round his wrists and ankles. See this, God? I won’t move ‘til you make her love me. But then the lions got loose and Jonah changed his mind.

Now, he paces the whale, sloshing his boots through the half-digested krill. He can hear the whale’s heart beating loud and slow above him. He knows there are worse places he could be, that God could have struck him on the spot. But that heart, it won’t let him sleep.

Jonah, Day 17

Decided to start decorating. There isn’t much you can do with ribs. God can make a woman out of them, but I’m not like him. There will be no woman. There will only be ribs. Maybe a disco ball. Something to put all these scales to use. Something to reflect the scant light. I just need something to do with my hands. Give me a helm, and I’ll steer. Give me a surgical saw, and I’ll cut out the heart. I’ll make this place a home. A woman would say it needs window treatments. She’d say, You aren’t a decorator just because some whale swallowed you whole and you’re lonely and bored. A home needs window treatments. But there is no woman.

Jonah the Prophet

When God said, Go to Nineveh, I could hear the whale in his voice. I was at the circus, watching the trapeze artist who was to fall that night. God loves the circus freaks, and I guess I did too, until that girl tied her rope around my lungs, hung me thirty feet up and walked over my back. How could he keep asking me to save them after that? Place a cushion here. Speak over his broken rib. Healed, they would stand up with their eyes wide and shiny, like they’d seen the face of Almighty. I hate this part. Falling makes for a better show.

Nineveh was one bad circus. God should have collapsed that tent, caged the people in with the lions. But I knew he wouldn’t do it. I’d prophesy over them, and they would turn back to God, and everyone would eat popcorn and peanuts and nobody would have to be the sad clown that scares all the kids.

God didn’t want to send this whale either. He wanted me to get over my anger, be his little prophet boy again. But when I heard it, the possibility of being swallowed, of hiding from him and his ridiculous plans, I ran straight for the sea.

Jonah’s Whale

She wasn’t hungry when she swallowed him. It was more like the instinct humans have to touch a stingray’s soft body, except she wanted him inside her. She glides slowly through the water, imitating a submarine, those metal whales she’s seen near land, the ones with the men inside. She wants to make a space for him, doesn’t want to jostle him around, the poor wild thing. She can feel his claws growing longer inside her and hear the raw anchovies he bites into. She doesn’t bite, she filters. Only civilized creatures have baleens, she thinks. This man has a row of violence in his mouth. When he’s not chewing the fish, he’s chewing his own flesh: lips, bits of skin around the fingernails. She half-expects him to eat his arm off one of these days, out of boredom, or perhaps out of sadness. She’s seen a lot of limbs lost at sea. Sometimes a tentacle torn from a squid, sometimes a leg bitten off from a sailor. The difference is that a squid has three hearts to make up for the loss, and a man has only one, left somewhere on land.

Jonah, Day 24

Sometimes the whale opens her mouth and strange objects come inside. Yesterday, a red high-heeled shoe. Jonah pretended it was a telephone, pressing his ear to the insole. He prank-called God. Is your refrigerator running? Better send the angels to catch it! He felt like a teenager again, and it was exhilarating and sad. He thought that if God really were a Father he’d be playing catch with him in the backyard right now. He tried playing catch with the shoe, but the heel kept coming down in his palm and it hurt and it’s stupid to play catch by yourself anyway. Jonah sat down in a pile of krill and sulked. He thought about the millions of fathers on land playing catch with their sons and about trees and dirt and all the things that don’t smell like fish. He tried calling God again. He dialed 911, because it was an emergency this time, but nobody answered. Nobody answered the first time either.

Jonah, Day 33

Jonah expects to die today. He’s been keeping track of the days by the light through the blowhole and thirty-three sounds awful to him. He doesn’t know about Jesus yet, but he can feel that thirty-three is a dying number. The whale has been acting strange, too. Her calls are lower and longer than usual, like she’s mourning. He can feel that she’s slowing down. He thinks maybe she’s been separated from her family. He thinks, Isn’t it just like life? A woman eats a man and loses her family and they both go off to die together at the bottom of the sea. Jonah’s become a cynic about love. He’s had too much time to think about Lily, her glittered neck and rope-worn feet. He wonders if he imagined her, if he was lonely enough to do something like that. Not that it matters anymore. Now it’s just him and his whale, and he can’t even talk to her. Sometimes he sings to her, but he isn’t sure she can hear him. And besides, no one wants to listen to their dinner howling away inside them. Jonah lies down to sleep, listening to the thump-thump-thump of her heart. It used to keep him up, that beating, but now it’s like a lullaby, sinking him to sleep.

Jonah dreams that her heart stops beating in the night. He crawls through her ribs to start it up, pummeling his fists against the muscles until she comes back to him. He wakes up in a panic but the beat is still there. He puts his hand to his chest and feels his own heart pumping in rhythm with hers.

Mother

When my mother was younger, she had long brown hair and could list on two hands the number of boys she had kissed. When she got to her ring finger, she took it as a sign it was time to marry. My father was not so careful in his counting, and decided later he needed to add some more. What he didn’t know is that there is no counting backwards in love. His hands kept moving forward, fingers ticking off, a poor excuse for a wave goodbye. My mother took my hand and my sister’s hand. She took our hands in her hands, and she showed us how to make birds of them.

Once, my mother boiled water over an open flame to feed us. The spaghetti tasted of campfire, but my sister and I cleaned our bowls, love hunger rising in our bellies. We have never been without dinner, though there were days I could only chew apples on the driveway, throwing the cores down the road like they were some kind of charm against anyone else taking off.

In my dreams, my mother is a prophetess in the woods, foretelling a forest fire. She teaches the oaks how to grow legs and follow the deer to the clearing. Her eyes are that of an owl: large and brown and forward facing. But when my father left us, she didn’t see it coming, like a tornado with no funnel cloud, no weather channel warning. My mother told me about the tornadoes that tore over our home when I was a child, how they sounded like trains on the roof. In the morning, the lawn was littered with shingles and glass. But my mother, she has always been good with a hammer and nails. She patched our roof right up.

Laying of Hands

The boy she loves has been praying over cars since he was eight years old, palm on the dashboard, willing life into the transmission. She thinks about him after the crash, how, when they were together, he prayed over the red Volvo dead on the country road and it started. She loved the way he said Jesus, full of twang and honey. She wanted to plant him in her yard like a sugar maple, so he could give her sweetness when she needed it, but the thing about a car-praying boy is that his feet love the road.

Now, stranded on the street, she wants him to uncrumple the SUV, fill in the crater on the passenger door right behind where she was sitting when the truck plowed in. She wants him to touch her collarbones again, gently salving the bruises. This is the only way she knows how to heal. She puts one hand over her heart, the other on the hood of the Ford. Arms like jumper cables as she whispers Jesus.

Reconstruction

In the fourth grade, she knows what it is to be a body. Gloveless, she sifts mouse bones from an owl pellet. The assignment is to build a whole skeleton out of what has been swallowed and regurgitated, cocooned in its own tangled fur. She pulls out the ribs one-by-one with a pair of tweezers, trying to make a cage of them. She imagines the mouse’s heart howling when the owl hooked her, the sound overpowered by the heartbeat inside the larger bones. She imagines the acid breaking down the mouse’s skin, her heart pumping blood out of the wounds, that blood becoming lost blood, becoming the blood of the dead. She imagines the owl choking her body back up, the violent yawn of her skull resurfacing after he digested her meat. She imagines the pelleted mouse abandoned on the forest floor, heart left in the owl’s stomach. When she arranges the bones on the construction paper, she draws a red fist between the ribs.

Substitution

She’s never seen a sawhorse used for anything other than a balance beam. Summer of ’96 and the U.S. women’s gymnastics team takes home the gold. She watches every second, tumbling around the TV while her mother stirs Rice-A-Roni on the stovetop. She takes up her own version of the sport. In the garage, she cartwheels off the sawhorse her father left behind when he moved out. She headstands against the walls, uses tree limbs for uneven bars. Other girls learn somersaults at the gymnastics center, their fathers reading newspapers in the hallway, waiting to pick them up. These girls have hand guards and leotards and special chalk. The fatherless girl stays home, stretching around her mother’s ankles. She has learned how to dig out a splinter with a hot needle. She has learned how to tighten the screws when the wood shakes under her.

John Wayne

My father’s name was John Wayne. Like the Western star. Except he had no boots, no spurs. Nothing to kick up the dust. I’d like to tell you that he shot men off their horses in the backyard, that he came inside with his gun still smoking, a stoic hero. I’d like to tell you that we lived in a place where there were horses. A man could show his shine on that street, I’d say. A man could have a wilderness in his heart, and it wouldn’t destroy him.

If I were to tell you that my father, John Wayne, killed himself one night under the Midwestern stars, I could tell you it was a downright shoot ‘em up. That he took guns in both his hands and pulled the triggers like life and country depended on it.

The truth is that he killed himself in a garage, the cars running like chained-up horses. And as he wandered past the rakes, drunk on carbon monoxide, he couldn’t even see the leaves caught in their teeth, or how near he was to the doors—the one leading out into the cornfields, the other into the house where pizza was still sitting on the counter but his girls were gone back to their mother. He collapsed on the welcome mat, his neck swelling against everything he’d tracked in.

Baptism

The sisters baptized their hamster in the sink. The smaller one cupped him in her hands, and her sister dotted his forehead with water three times, then crossed him. Sometimes, the younger sister would shake his water bottle over him until three drops came out, just to make sure. She taped Bible verses to his cage, facing inward. She sang him the songs she learned from Sunday school about Noah and Moses. She wondered if there were hamsters on the ark, or in the pockets of the Hebrews as they marched through the parted Red Sea. She planned to save her hamster by floating him in a wicker basket if the river ever flooded their house.

She found him dead, stiff in his bedding. Her mother placed his body in a check box, and they buried him in the backyard beneath the pine tree. The younger sister lay with her ear to the dirt, listening for his soul rising up. Her sister called her in when it started to rain, but she ran to the river instead, watching it rise and rise.

Sailors Without Water

She hears that Midwestern men make the best sailors, because the sea’s horizon that drives their comrades to gnaw at the railing is just another field to them. When she imagines her father captaining a ship, she sees him in blue jeans, the deck piled with dirt, his crew picking at their fingernails the way men do when they’re waiting for the harvest. He’s never seen the ocean, has never been farther than Indiana. The only boots he has are for trekking over the soil. She cleans the mud from their soles with cornhusks, proud of the battered but clean results. She knows nothing of shoeshine.

In the afternoons she walks through the cornfields, looking for the golf balls her father hits far into the stalks. He never goes in after the corn grows shoulder-high, remembering the time he got lost and had to sleep in the dirt, but she loves the feeling of being swept up in the green. She picks ears of corn and brings them back to the house, piling them in the backyard. Her father yells at her when the raccoons come to eat them, tells her those goddamn pirates will bring disease to the house and steal everything that shines. After that, she stops picking up the golf balls, or throws them farther into the endless fields along with the half-eaten corn. She fills her pockets with pennies and scatters them like seeds, until the ground glistens like water.

Her father doesn’t want to buy new golf balls, and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he starts hurtling his clubs into the field. After the clubs are gone, he throws the patio furniture, parts from the grill, wood from her old playhouse. He runs to the edge of the field, stopping at the first ear like it’s an electric fence. He crumples to the ground, swearing and clinging to the stalks like jail bars. She watches silently, then slips into her littered field. A few rows in, she finds a dead raccoon with its head bashed in. She buries it, along with the clubs and the grill, imagining she’s returning an albacore to the sea and saving the desperate sailor from his own cannons.

Basic Definitions for Living on This Land

Tornado

When a ship is lost on land, it will make its own wind to get home.

Cornfield

In Kindergarten we taught our bodies how to get in lines. I lost count of the sunburns, but those bodies learned how to be dry. We harvested our hearts for their water, so the other would not be so thirsty. Now, we bow low to the earth. Dirt fills the gaps inside us.

River

This is no way to leave, she said. All the sticks inside me already went that way, he said. Here, take my sticks, she said, breaking off a rib and dropping it inside him. She watched it drift toward Louisiana and disappear. She broke off another, and he didn’t have the heart to stop her.

Fence

Because I cannot separate my horses from yours. Because they whinny over the wire.

Flash Fiction!

First, some information: flash fiction is kind of like a hybrid between fiction and poetry (mine definitely leaning more towards the prose poem genre). Basically, it's just a really really short story. And I'm in a flash fiction class now, so that's what I'll be posting. You dig? I sure hope so.

Here's a sample of what's to come, from a series I wrote on Jonah...

Jonah, Swallowed

When I was a prophet, I wanted to be a sailor. When I was a sailor, I was sick on the rails all the time. I planned to marry a tightrope walker so she could keep balance for both of us. But the storm came first, and I tied myself upright against the mast. John tore me off, said you ain’t no sail, said you gonna sink us all. My boots were heavy with rain. I could have emptied them, but the men came so fast and they grabbed me so fast and they threw me over the rails. I thought, find the wire, stick the landing, don’t just fall, don’t just break against the water. My hands hit first, and everything went cold. When I sank under the ship, I could see her giant eye.

She saved me, like a good wife. She made me part of her body. It’s like being inside my mother again, except I don’t remember the last time I was there, so maybe it’s not. I’d like it to be. I’d like to be born again, do the whole thing over. Next time I’ll marry the girl and stay on land. Next time I won’t even learn the word for boat. God will have to flood the earth before I step in his water.

Jonah, Day 17

Decorating is the hard part. There isn’t much you can do with ribs. God can make a woman out of them, but I’m not like him. There will be no woman. There will only be ribs. Maybe a disco ball. Something to put all these scales to use. Something to reflect the scant light. I just need something to do with my hands. Give me a helm, and I’ll steer. Give me a surgical saw, and I’ll cut out the heart. I’ll make this place a home. A woman would say it needs window treatments. She’d say, you aren’t a decorator just because some whale swallowed you whole and you’re lonely and bored. A home needs window treatments. But there is no woman.

Jonah, Day 24

Sometimes the whale opens her mouth and strange objects come inside. Yesterday, a red high-heeled shoe. Jonah pretended it was a telephone. He prank-called God. Is your refrigerator running? Better send the angels to catch it! He felt like a teenager again, and it was exhilarating and sad. He thought that if God really were a Father he’d be playing catch with him in the backyard right now. He tried playing catch with the shoe, but the heel kept coming down in his palm and it hurt and it’s stupid to play catch by yourself anyway. Jonah sat down in a pile of krill and sulked. He thought about the millions of fathers on land playing catch with their sons and about trees and dirt and all the things that don’t smell like fish. He tried calling God again. He dialed 911, because it was an emergency this time, but nobody answered. Nobody answered the first time either.

Jonah, Day 33

Jonah expects to die today. He’s been keeping track of the days and thirty-three sounds awful to him. He doesn’t know about Jesus yet, but he can feel that thirty-three is a dying number. The whale has been acting strange, too. Her calls are lower and longer than usual, like she’s mourning, and he can feel that she’s slowing down. He thinks she’s lost her family. He thinks, Isn’t it just like life? A woman eats a man and loses her family and they both go off to die together at the bottom of the sea. Jonah’s become a bit of cynic about love. He’s had too much time to think about the women he never had. The tightrope walker, the girl who sold oranges near the dock, his childhood sweetheart. He never kissed any of them, and it’s too bad, really, because now he’s dying and they’ll never know how bad he wanted them. Jonah lies down to sleep, because he’d rather dream about the girls than look at the insides of his whale anymore. He wakes up with a piece of whaleflesh in his mouth. He’d being dreaming about eating his way out.