1640 c/o Ben Brooks

On Yixing Tea Pot and Loaves of Leaves

Zhou was my Grandfather’s Springer Spaniel. She liked the orange leaves. My Grandfather liked bean curd, and I liked white chocolate. Zhou grew like a raincloud in Autumn. She pulled herself across the carpets and sparks leaked from under her tail. Me and my grandfather are determinists. We believe that when you turn on the light, the light gets turned on.

Me and my Grandfather live on the hill of Perspex Dolls. That isn’t part of the story, just we don’t get many visitors.

The moon was rocking and the air was a cactus. Me and my Grandfather were in the garden watching each other breathe. He was wearing eight scarves. I was topless. I was building my chest up so that I could climb a glacier if there were floods in the new year. There was a bonfire, which was really just a small tree, covered with hay and firelighters and matches.

Be nice to your mother, my grandfather said.

Okay, I said.

Bean curd, my grandfather said, and he lifted a fistful of it out from his left breast pocket.

What is Limnic Eruption, I said.

Lie down, my grandfather said, and flecks of bean curd jumped from his face.

We lay down in the mud and dead grass. My grandfather started on one of his coughing fits. His spine became a skipping rope.

Are you okay, I said. Do you want me to bang you on the back.

No, he said. Don’t bang me on the back.

I rolled over and fell asleep.

In the morning I thought I could hear steel drums but I couldn’t. Zhou was inbetween me and my grandfather and I could tell she was dead because she doesn’t sleep. She used to but she came home from her dreams daubed with bruises the size of lilypads. It made us upset. We fed her dandelions for breakfast. I like white chocolate. We live on the hill of Perspex Dolls.

She’s dead maybe, my grandfather said.

Yes, I said.

Bang her on the back, my grandfather said.

You bang her on the back, I said.

My grandfather kicked his Springer Spaniel and her body moved. We saw a large swelling in her stomach.

Leaves, I said. Loaves of leaves.

No, my grandfather said. Fetch the scissors.

No, I said.

Marry a girl who can jump, he said. Like really jump. Whole flights of stairs.

I wanted to hit him but I didn’t. I sat down and itched the insides of my ears. My grandfather pulled Zhou apart. He climbed inside of her. It sounded like large men beating horses with pickaxe handles. There were candles in my ears. I vomited a little.

When my grandfather reappeared he was holding a clay teapot filled with Oolong. He says that was the first time. He says that is how it happened. When we’re both on our rocking chairs, looking out at the floods rolling in. He likes bean curd, I like white chocolate. The sky is blue, the air is mud. Zhou liked the orange leaves. I’m tired. She was a kiln.

1639 c/o Carolyn DeCarlo

Sakoku

She stands by the front door, right on its edge, her toes pointed toward the threshold, not touching but very close. She’s very near to the door even though she knows she shouldn’t touch it, wouldn’t dare to touch it, her palm up to greet it although the greeting will never reach it. This feeling comes and goes and sometimes she has to get as close as she can, as if to tempt his rage. Outside, she hears the familiar grainy vibrations of a tricycle, the burgeoning voices of children racing past and she has an impulse to join them or invite them in that she must suppress and she feels the cool, varnished wood on her palm before she can react or stop it.

Impossibly fast, the voice descends from the stairs What were you doing? and he is upon her, rushing upon her too fast it’s impossible, one hand twisting in her black hair, pulling down sharp on her neck. Ah! she cries and the sound is quick and high. He pulls harder until her knees clip the tile. What did I tell you? he yells but his voice is suppressed and she knows she is going on a journey, her calves bite the grout as he slides her toward the stairs and up, the turning key a familiar sound then blackness.

He doesn’t touch her any more, his fury has changed—it is quieter now but always there under the surface—and she often wishes he would, just to break the hopelessness of it all. In the beginning, when everything was heightened, he would push into her room after her, his pants around his ankles, pushing into her and rough. In the beginning, when she still had the confidence to leave and he still had the sexual drive to force her submission. Sometimes she misses that, the harder actions, the deeper burn that is over now. She is afraid of this feeling, but it is there and she will admit it.

It has been too long since she first crossed onto this suburban plot of land, since she last saw her mother or felt the unexpected thrill of a stranger’s face nearing hers or invited the mailman in for a drink. In the darkness she counts the seconds the minutes, the time he leaves her growing longer as the years accumulate. He is able to forget about her when she is in there and she thinks that must be a pleasurable feeling and sometimes she wonders why he doesn’t just release her but she remembers the deepest hunger is for power and he will never let her go. All that remains now is a routine without feeling, a routine built out of force that will continue until death, which she assumes hasn’t happened yet, and may continue after. She pulls her dress down and pushes her breasts up and hears him approaching on the stair and hopes at least he will hurt her a little.

1638 c/o Becky Lang

Moone

1638 began on a Friday. Greg was lying on the ground outside, staring at the earth. What was he supposed to do tonight? He took a knife out of his pocket and took a slice of the ground, rolling it up to make a mock telescope. A piece of gray, clay-like substance fell off and he put it in his mouth.

Emma had said she was busy, looking away while she took out her ponytail and started weaving it into two small braids. She didn’t have any binders so they just kind of tapered off in the ends and soon they had fallen out altogether.

What was she doing? Greg wondered. Maybe she’s visiting that crater about a mile away with Oliver, and the earth will move away from the sun and crater water will go purple and he’ll say Come in and she’ll get down to just a white cotton bra and panties and they’ll swim and throw mud clay at one another and laugh.

Greg got into a crab-walk position and stuck his knife into the ground. Slowly, he walked on three legs, twenty feet one way, and twenty feet back, cutting out a rectangular slice of ground with the knife. He took his piece of moon and then spun it like a lasso around his head until it grew miles long, and then he whipped it down to the earth.

It hit a man named John Wilkins in the head while he was running down a hill, chasing a quill pen that was rolling away. He picked it up by its end, thinking that it looked like a sandy gray cat tongue. It was hot and strange, with a few beads of the substance crumbling off the end. He put one in his mouth and it tasted like burnt marshmallow and rotten limes. He tugged at the rest and was surprised to find that it tugged back.

That night, John Wilkins was laying on his stomach and digging out loose bits of tobacco from his bed cushion when he heard a noise outside. He looked out the window and saw a brunette girl with dark circles under her eyes. She was running the other way and then suddenly stopped. She looked over her shoulder and then walked toward the house.

She looked about 14 and she was mostly naked. He opened the door and saw that she was bleeding in her elbow.

“That bird bit me,” she said, and her voice was thin like the holes in bread.

She was covered in gray mud. John went inside and wet a towel and then told her to come to the creek that was down the hill from his house. There was a small pond next to the creek, and they got inside. He cleaned the blood from her arm slowly and asked, “Why are you here?”

“Because it’s so boring up there,” she answered.

She motioned for John to come to her, and as he approached, she leaned her head to the right, exposing her neck as her wet hair fell. John touched her skin with the tip of his tongue and it tasted familiar so he gave it a big lap. The gray stuff crumbled off and it was the same sweet, scorched taste as before. He kept licking it until she was clean, and then she ran out and jumped into the creek.

He ran after her, but it was too late. He sat on the bank of the water and ate some grass from the ground, blade by blade. After a while, he walked up the hill and saw his pen. The next morning he woke up and threw up seven times, until he was just dry heaving. In his dizzy state, he poured some lemonade and began to write a book about building a bird-like contraption that can take you outside the sphere of gravity, after which you will float up to the moon. He called it The Discovery of a World in the Moone.

1637 c/o Len Kuntz

A Place Called Mistick

My brother rips off a strip of deer meat and chews while saying, “We should kill them all. Woman and children, too.”

His long brown hair is tied in a ponytail and he’s shirtless. Wisps of wood smoke curl behind his back where a breeze twirls and the effect of this sight, mixed with Running Boar’s smoldering anger, makes me grin.

My brother kicks me, his toe as sharp as an arrowhead through the moccasin. Running Boar’s eyes are black holes, each with a center flame of red. His face twists and contorts. He has finger-painted two blue slashes on either side of his high cheek bones. War paint. He is too eager. Even Father tells him to settle down. “We are so many. They are but few. This is our land.” Still, my brother is a fuse, an angry coil. Once upon a time, though, we played with pet squirrels and swam streams. We used to chase mountain goats when we were younger, trying to out run them, but now we are men and my brother is all about decimating the white man, greedy to make their blood soak through the sun-baked soil of these rolling hills.

“If you are Pequot, you will not stand by and watch these invaders steal our land,” Running Boar says. “You are a fool with your happy ways.”

I have not told my brother that I am in love with First To Dance, she with eyes as blue as turquoise. Running Boar once loved her himself, but now the white man crushes his heart.

First To Dance is pale for a Pequot but her smile is ripe. I see her raising our strong sons. I see myself loving her as an old man, loving her all the days of my life.

Running Boar says, “You are too comfortable. You stare into the sky and spin silly thoughts.”

“Yes, it’s true,” I say.

“Someday the snake will draw your blood.”

I make a phony motion as if my hand’s been bitten. I jerk it to resemble spasms of spurting blood. Running Boar has no choice but to laugh. “My brother is crazy,” he says, shaking his head.

I believe we are no different than the white man. We have dissimilar skins, yes, and different customs, but our bodies and minds are composed of the same chemicals. We should be able to coexist. I am thinking this in my hammock on a morning when a few tiny birds chatter atop a bushy tree.

Today I will tell First To Dance of my feelings for her. She knows them already, but it’s better if I say these things with words to her so-pretty face.

Afterward I will ride into the settlement which sits in a valley fifteen miles from Mystic. I will ask to meet with Mr. John Gardner who is chief of the white men there. I will broker an agreement to ensure peace. I am certain Mr. John Gardner wants this as much as most of our people. If he resists, I will go to our brothers from the Mohegan and Narragansett tribes and gain their heavy muscle. But we will not make war. Fighting is what animals do.

I’m about to lift my body and start my day when I feel the air tremble, the ground shuddering. Birds squawk and scatter. I can hear hundreds of hooves pounding like thunder. In the distance, a dust cloud hovers over the peak of a hill.

Running Boar screams. He is the first, but the rest of us follow. Bullets and arrows. Metal and flame. One by one, we are erased from history.