Erin Osborne
Mother and Daughter Should Meet
in the North Atlantic, southeast of Nantucket Island, where 40 meters down there exists a dense salt river beneath the ocean. The women will take giant strides off the boat. They’ll be able to speak to one another through military grade masks equipped with microphones and receivers. Scientists will have explained that this place is a phenomenon called a Cold Seep; the river that looks like water is actually a brine that is heavier than the sea.
Jody will like the way the word “seep” sounds, and she’ll repeat it while hovering above the mussel bed that acts as the bank of the river. She’ll sweep her hands through the colony of red tube worms that act as the flowering shrubbery and repeat seep, not in the staccato manner of a chickadee chirping, but in a manner in which to lull the tubeworms to creep out of their fragile shoots. Susan will think that “seep” is a good word to describe the feeling of this place. There is no sunlight here, and so she’ll imagine the cold and the dark seeping into her blood and her bones and her eyes. She is alert with her chilled blood. She feels precise with her frigid vision.
While Jody is tickling the tube worms that could be flowering and retreating buds, she’ll notice what may have been a tree; curvaceous, stony and gray. Above the sea, she would never think of straddling a tree branch over a river because the rivers are rushing and wide and deep; the branches large and rotten. But here, everything is dwarfed. The river is short and narrow, contained by a clumpy mussel shore on each side. The tree branch is springy in its turgor and comfortable between her thighs. She bounces on the branch. She dangles her feet above the brine river.
Susan will be sure not to graze any of the mussels. She’ll not wish to disturb the tube worms. She’ll tread. The river’s water is anoxic; devoid of oxygen.The scientists explained as much, in their own terms, when she asked if the brine was lethal to touch with her gloved hand. The salt squashed the oxygen out is how she’ll put it to herself. She’ll think of the day Jody phoned from the small town down south in which she had sequestered herself with her husband, and her two, soon to be three young children. She received the call as the dishwasher hummed, the furnace kicked on, the snow fell in bunched flakes outside her kitchen window. It wasn’t the strain or breathiness in Jody’s voice that squashed out the oxygen in her own lungs. It wasn’t an instantaneous squelching like a hastily rung out sponge or a chest compression. It was a slow, increasing pressure that occurred over the course of the conversation: the oldest, a girl, had taken to pacing hallways, clinging to the walls with her tiny chest and ear. The younger boy latched on just above her daughter’s pregnant belly when he had the chance, stroking and pulling at the hair at the base of her neck. Jody, herself, could not keep on weight, even though she was six months pregnant. It was all the fighting, the yelling. “They’re too afraid to hear, Mom.” He had committed the one act with which Jody could justify a divorce to the outside world. He slept with another woman, and she was coming home. Most of the oxygen left Susan’s lungs then, but more followed when she thought about her sewing room converted to a bedroom, the dirt on the hallway walls, the holiday decorations and souvenirs and fake potted trees she’d have to clear out of the basement. “We’ll have to paint after you leave, whenever that is,” she managed to say. She sat down on her cream colored recliner; breathless and afraid.
Jody will notice a dead white crab close to the brine river’s shore. She’s only known red crabs. She is unaware that all crabs in this little ecosystem are white, so she’ll assume the color has leeched out of its body over time through the tips of its pointed legs. She’ll wonder if the red floated up to the surface like ribbons, or if it left in singular grains. She had seen red leech before. She was eighteen years old; her first baby an infant in cloth diapers. She had put her to sleep for the night on the mattress they shared in an apartment with hollow doors and wax-stained carpet. The evening brought its usual visitors: kids who had just graduated high school with her, the older man who lived below her with his long, gray beard and sunburned forearms, and her best friend since junior high, Sheila; skinny and scarred and snide. She was a mother as well but to a toddler, and not two weeks prior the mothers searched through the shag carpet for missing doses of speed that spilled out of its reused prescription bottle so the toddler wouldn’t find it and eat it. The visitors did what they’d normally do: they took long swigs of beer during lulls in the conversation, and passed around a crumpled box of Marlboro Light 100’s and a gas station lighter that the boy Jody had her eye on would tip back and forth on the diagonal, moving the fluid from one chamber of the lighter to the other. Jody got drunk fast. She felt hollow and silly and light, and managed to get a few chuckles from the old man when she shimmied around the living room to “No Matter What.” She paraded down the hallway, and announced “I shall return,” as she opened the bedroom door to check on her baby. She saw that her diaper was red and soaked, but that she was still asleep. She stripped her, startled her awake, turned her over and again in her hands to locate from where she was bleeding. It wasn’t until she noticed her stained skin that she realized what had happened: she had peed, soaking her diaper, and the red dye from the sheets on which she had lain her had leeched into it. The blotches on her skin looked like a disease or welts. Jody puked on the mattress. She marched into the living room and kicked out every guest except Sheila who stood over her later that evening, berating her as she held her naked, stained daughter in one arm, and ate from a sleeve of Saltines gripped between her thighs. Looking at the white crab now, she’ll flick it farther into the brine with her toe.
Susan, from her elevated vantage point, will observe concentric lines drawn on the mussel bed as far as six feet inland. Six feet, and then at four feet, and then at two feet, giving the mussel bed the appearance of a topographical map. Is this evidence of how far the waves rolled over the shore? What could have caused such a disturbance as to splash the brine river up and over? She’ll think that maybe there was something outside the river, an especially strong storm up above that disturbed it. But perhaps the brine river floods itself from below; from a deep cavern with a narrow entrance that she, or any person, couldn’t squeeze into without being lacerated or mashed by volcanic stone. And then she’ll think of herself wedged into that entrance, knowing of the vast pool below and the river above, wishing for the pool to jerk and spout, to push her up and out, to relieve the ache from the rock digging into her arms and thighs; to relieve the waiting and the wondering and the worrying. But she’s not stuck in an imaginary entrance to an under-undersea cavern. She’s above the concentric lines, treading water with her body, arms spread, legs kicking. This will be a profound thought to her, and she’ll think she sees those lines lift away from the mussel bed and float up.
Jody will get bored. The mussels, the tube worms, the branch, the crab. She’ll decide there’s nothing else here. She’ll want to see what is beyond but she’ll know it’s not possible. She’s tethered to this place. She’ll invent a phenomenon to her liking; wisps of what look like glowing smoke or an elongated jellyfish, curling and bending in accordance with the slow, loping current without dissipating, just rolling and stretching until they are no longer visible to human or sea beast eyes. They are like a loosely tangled net, she’ll imagine, these wisps that could be organism or chemical, thatching across each other in loops and spirals across the whole of the Atlantic Ocean, sliding to and fro and over and under as a shark unknowingly barrels through them somewhere off the coast of Virginia, or perhaps they, the women did, plunking straight down to the sea floor just moments earlier.
Susan will feel the warmth behind her and won’t believe it, or more precisely, won’t believe it could just be. The hood of a car, a tanning reflector, a furnace vent; these images will flood her brain to explain what she feels. The warmth will sheath her from behind, like a shower curtain or a scrim, all at once, and though she is already floating in the cold water above the brine river, above the mussels, she can lie back in this warmth with even less effort. And it will look as though she’s splayed on a coffee table, or a sacrificial rock.
Jody will notice Susan’s change in posture. She’ll panic herself out of her daydream. “Hey. Hey,” she’ll say into her mask. “Hey,” she’ll yell as she flaps up to Susan. “It’s all right,” Susan will say. And Jody is enveloped in the warmth just the same, and now she’ll think of a blanket, her dog, warm sand. And Susan will say “It’s all right. Lie back. Hold my hand.” Jody will do as she’s told, and she too, finds that lying back is easy with this mass of warmth behind her. And they’ll stay that way, suspended, hands linked, for a subjective while, under the sea, above the brine river, at this clement point in space no one knows exists but the two of them, until Susan will say, “I’m ready to go somewhere else now,” and Jody will reply, “Yes. I am, too.”
The Witness
Inspired by Lydia Davis’s “Jury Duty”
Q:
A: I was on the East side.
Q:
A: I’m sorry, the East side of the river. You see the river splits the city in half from East to West the long way? Vertically?
Q:
A: I live on the West side of the river.
Q:
A: Farther than that, but not as far as the ocean.
Q:
A: Well, like I said, I was on the East side, and the East, you know, it’s just a little more gritty than I’m used to seeing, being from the West side and all. I really don’t mind the grit, but I guess you could say I notice it. People there have sunburn wrinkles, have you seen them? They have sunburns on their faces, but the wrinkles around their eyes are white, so it looks like their face is surprised that their eyes are there. I just don’t see that on the West side.
Q:
A: There are lots of green trees on the West side. People cut them so they don’t look too wild. You know; spheres, squares, spirals. And there are well-dressed runners. Everybody’s running.
Q:
A: I was on the East side, and the grit, and I don’t mind the grit, you know, I just notice it. I like the grit, you could say. It lets me know someone is living some sort of life. I have a scar on my back, and I don’t mind it being there. A doctor took a scalpel to me and removed a birthmark that was all clumpy and veiny, and now I have this long, sensitive scar. My sister used to bite the birthmark that used to be there when we fought. But I guess that mixes up my logic. I had this thing that was a weakness, and now I have this other thing that is less of a weakness, but it shows I had the first weakness.
Q:
A: Yes! Thank you. I was on the East side because I had to go to work.
Q:
A: I wouldn’t call it mundane.
Q:
A: Mundane is sameness; the same thing all the time. I worked in this poster-rolling plant once. For one day. No machine is complex enough to roll a poster and stick it into a plastic sleeve, I guess. The posters weren’t actually made there; there was no machinery. And it looked more like an industrial party tent or a hollowed out warehouse than a factory. I was the new girl, and I rolled the poster of Michael Jordan because my supervisor refused to roll an n-word’s poster. Her word. She kept talking about how she was gonna get fucked up after work on some Malibu and pineapple. “That’s my draaank,” she’d say. And she talked expecting people to crane their necks and open their ears, cartoon style. She’d talk to the space right in front of her mouth, and I thought that was funny. I mean, did she really expect that much? It’s six in the morning, and we’re all standing on these rubber mats in this open air warehouse, and we all have our own reasons for landing there, you know? We’re all somewhere else in our own heads, I think. And the only things that set her apart from the rest of us is having to get more boxes after we fill them up, and getting to choose before everyone else which poster she rolls. And what are we supposed to do? Hear what she has to say? And I think that’s funny until I look around. This scraggly blonde woman, a wisp of a thing, is trying to listen and roll at the same time. I mean, she’s shaking and she’s obviously splitting her attention between her unicorn poster and what the supervisor is saying, which is nothing, really. And it’s an unnecessary burden for the blonde woman, but she doesn’t know that. Or maybe I don’t realize that somehow it is a necessary burden. Anyway, I volunteered to roll Michael Jordan’s poster because it was all the say I had, and then it was just the same sideways glances, the same rolling, the same sleeve, the same cut in between my pointer finger and my thumb, the same tongue wagging out of his mouth, the same arm cocked back behind the same sweaty head.
Q:
A: Boy bands.
Q:
A: I’d really rather not say.
Q:
A: I was going to work and I had just crossed the river.
Q:
A: The only bridge I take. It’s newly refurbished. It has wide sidewalks, and you can see from one end of the bridge where it’s going to take you. The other bridges, oh my goodness. One is so high in the air that if you screw up your eyes it looks like you’re flying. One is covered with all these steel beams, you know, like an erector set? One twists and turns all over the place like you’re taking an off-ramp that spirals down into the river, and then another one is so old, sometimes I think big chunks of concrete just crumble from underneath and splash into the water.
Q:
A:Let me think about that.
Q:
A: I have been diagnosed with depression. It wasn’t so severe that I quit functioning, or anything. I watched this documentary about depression, you know, when I was depressed. It was supposed to make me feel better. This woman. This poor, poor, woman. She lost her child. I mean, her child died. The loss of her daughter slowed time down, like she went into hibernation. She spoke so slowly and so thickly that you couldn’t understand her without subtitles. She needed help getting off of the couch after the interview not because her body was broken, but because her body didn’t move fast enough to fight gravity. She wasn’t anesthetized, she wasn’t a drunk or a drug addict…
Q:
A: Anesthetized.
Q:
A: A-nes-the-tized. Anyway, that hibernation was her natural reaction to the event of her life. I can’t say without speaking metaphorically I’ve experienced that. I mean, her body actually stole time; her being took time out of the equation for her. And all these doctors are buzzing around, trying to understand what she needs to bring her out of it, which seems helpful. But she needs that time for something, you know? Like, did she slow down to conserve memories? I have this picture in my head of a picture she has in her head. She’s looking at her baby girl, who’s looking out the window. And the light is soft and her baby girl’s eyes are clear, and she’s happy to be watching what’s outside. And that’s just one picture out of thousands, probably millions that she needs to remember. And what if she has pictures that she didn’t even know she had? Like, it just pops into her head one day that her daughter had a mole right in the middle of her back, or that she sucked up macaroni noodles one by one. That’s important information! And so why do they need to bring her out of that? What’s the point? I mean, I’m sure it’s painful. There’s a degree of pain she’s feeling, and I’m sure they want to alleviate that, but at what cost? What does she lose in that transaction? Why can’t they just take care of her until she comes out of it on her own? She obviously needs that time. Her body said as much.
Q:
A: Yes, I’m sorry. Back to the bridge. I had crossed over to the East side of the river, and the bridge is busy, you know? Lots of cars going back and forth every day. At the first stoplight there’s this little patch of grass to the left. I look for the pigeons every time I pass it. Sometimes they’re there, and sometimes they’re not. When they are there, there are tons of them. I mean, you never see just one or two. And they’re all different colors; brown, rainbow, pink, and grey, and they’re pretty, you know? And they’re cooing all over the place, and that’s pretty to hear, too. And sometimes they all get spooked and fly off at once. But when they stay, it’s nice to see them all huddled up together.
Q:
A: No, it’s not about the pigeons. I was looking for the pigeons and they weren’t there, so I was a little disappointed. And then two blocks down from the pigeon grass, while I was stopped at the light, I saw it. Right in the middle of the street. Right in the middle of the street in the crosswalk.
Q:
A: Yes.
Q:
A: I’m positive.
Q:
A: What do you mean? I did some research after I saw it. It takes months for it to get that
developed. Like, three to six months.
Q:
A: Yes, luck, sure. I’m sure that had something to do with it. I’m not religious, if that’s what
you’re getting at.
Q:
A: Maybe it was in a sweet spot in the road that never gets driven on, in between where all four tires hit the pavement. Maybe it was closer to the outer edge of the crosswalk, where people wouldn’t walk anyway.
Q:
A: But of course someone had to notice it! A lot of someones had to notice it! It’s one of those things that just cuts right through. I mean, your brain can’t compute that picture, you know? Some crabgrass, a crack in the asphalt, a squirrel standing by, sure. But I don’t think the brains of everyone who went by could let them ignore it. That seems impossible to me.
Q:
A: Think of it this way: say someone who has no good news to tell anyone, they see it. They see it and they leave it alone. They want it to stay for the next person. They don’t take it because they know it just wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be fair to the next person who needs something good to tell someone else. Some people maybe even go back and forth about taking it. Like, they really struggle over it. They deserve it after all, and they’ll keep it safe, and when it dies they’ll preserve it so they’ll have something good to tell for a long time. They get close to convincing themselves that they are the only person who would keep it and care for it, you know? And by that time, they’re across the street, standing on the corner, watching it quiver every time a car blows by. And that’s alarming to witness; it may even call them to action. A little step off the curb and back into the street. But they can’t ignore the proof that they aren’t the only person who noticed it and were glad about it because the proof is that it’s still there. And of course, someone else left it for them to see. So, they leave it alone. And I left it alone, too.
Q:
A: I think everyone who left it alone felt the same thing I did.
Q:
A: Well, there’s this lift in your shoulders. So much so that you notice you were hunched over. And then, there’s this warmth all over. It starts in your chest, and then it moves to your arms, if you let it, and it moves to your stomach, and your pelvis and your legs. And it’s not fleeting, you know? It stays as long as you want it to stay. You have the urge to tilt your head back and face the sky. You’ll want to stretch out your neck and open your mouth and let it out. Not to get rid of it, but to give it to someone else.
Q:
A: Yes…thank you.
Erin Osborne
Erin Osborne is a writer and Library Media Assistant living in Beaverton, Oregon. Her fiction has appeared in NOON Annual, Elohi Gadugi, and Habit. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives with her daughter.