Eirene Gentle
Cycle of violence
The teeth rose this morning the with the sun. Pale and gleaming out my window from earth that kept its secrets since the last time. ‘Peace is short,’ my mother used to say sipping tea in the ceramic cup taken from her neighbour’s kitchen after they disappeared. ‘You should marry.’ With my mother marry always followed peace. ‘It’s ghoulish drinking from your neighbour’s cup,’ I’d say but to her that mug was blood was already spilled, no hunger remained in it for us just as nothing hunts in the seconds after a storm. ‘I’ll take it to my peaceful grave’ my mother said, pincering it in skinny fingers and she did but I didn’t marry and the teeth rose today, less than five years after we scattered her ashes. Like her, they couldn’t settle. A broad-backed wind arrived as we shook the can of clumpy grey fragments into the roots of the fruit trees she sat under after she married dad. Before she witnessed the teeth rise and the sky rip its scars. ‘Terrible times,’ she said. The dead in living eyes, the feral in scared eyes, the flickering of the snake in the rest. ‘It becomes epidemic,’ my mother would say to the lip of her neighbour’s cup which heard all her secrets. ‘Something opens in eyes you’ve looked at your whole life.’ Like dad under a distant tree, packed in a neighbour’s car and taken as far as they dared with him slumped in the back all arms legs and malice because they couldn’t lift his body as high as the trunk. Bare and reeking something older than death. ‘Even your father,’ she said and I saw her wonder if I should marry after all, maybe I should just wait and take a neighbour’s cup at the next time of teeth. But she didn’t say it, she spent the rest of her life pointing at bird toes, the flick of toad tongue, the shape of clouds. ‘Choose carefully what you look at,’ she advised when I dug in the garden for carrots and potatoes. We’d sit in the cilantro breeze, my nails caked in the smell of warm, familiar dirt. I used to play in the tilled-up soil of the garden, burying myself until my little arms ran out. I’d swear that earth soft as a whisper had never known teeth but sometimes my mother had a presentiment, she saw me snapped by giant molars, crunched like the shell of a potato bug. ‘Get out, get out’ she’d scream and rip me from the garden bed as if I was ripe.
Skins
It happens sometimes that a room full of people turn into animals in front of me. A normal room until the elegant slim-skirted woman in the corner stretches skinny legs, shrinks her pointy head and she’s a heron. A barrel kind of man, thick, is a bear. A speck of an old lady, all bright red lips and tropical fabrics blooms into a parrot and spends the rest of the afternoon asking after the weather like a personal friend. I was so bored.
Do you think it’s real?
You always say things like that. Isn’t it your job to say? Anyway the point is if I’m losing my mind it’s fucking embarrassing, 1+1= banal. The stocky guy didn’t turn into an egret or the skinny woman a rhino, nothing contrary or imaginative, they just slip their skin like they’d been cosplaying. Maybe we’re all pretending to be human but some of us forget.
Do you think you’re real?
There you go again. I’m just saying some of us don’t peel off human like pants or stand on one leg or sleep upside down or whatever it is we’re supposed to naturally do. Anyway I’m usually in a comfortable room when it happens, a little hot, sometimes there’s wine, sometimes a lot of wine, not enough wine if you ask me and anyway we’re all just sitting there bored saying the usual stupid things and they start dissolving into ferrets and foxes and just once, a frankly spectacular white horse with black patches and a mane like winter wheat. Then I go home and stare at the mirror, cheeks hot, eyes smudgy but still me. I look within the lines of myself to see what I must be inside. A pig? Falcon? An ocean dweller so deep we don’t know its name? Just me. Tragic.
Do you want to be someone else?
Not someone, something, are you even listening? Or maybe you think I’ve lost my mind. Tell me I’ve lost my fucking mind. Give me a prescription, wild drugs, the kind you can’t buy on the street, or a long retreat somewhere in the trees. Is there a tree hospital somewhere, high enough you have to fight to keep your balance like on a ship and the sound of wind through the needles is so constant you can’t sleep when it stops? Don’t send me somewhere deciduous, all that budding is exhausting. Let me ask you something. Would you bud again if you could? Would you be born again or leave it at this life sitting in that worn out chair against the window so I can barely see you? I check 40 times a day hoping for something other than this ridiculous body and your ridiculous questions. Come to think of it this room is pretty comfortable. Anyway it never happens. So I take more pills. Give me more pills. Have you ever been in love?
Are you in love?
Nice try, dear doctor, I’m asking you. If you’ve been in love you know what it’s like to wait. Checking for texts, scrolling social media for what they don’t show you, always wondering if they’re ok, if they’re alive, if they’re having fun without you or plotting to leave. It’s excruciating. I can’t see your face, just nod or shake your head or something or I won’t think you’re human either. Do creatures fall in love? If you were a ferret would you know what I’m talking about?
Lauren.
What? Are you checking it’s still me? Maybe you see something. Look closely. Just under the bones, do I look like a deer? Flamingo? Or something inelegant but cheerful. A capybara? Give me something. Or give me something to black me out. I get stomach aches. I want feathers or to roll around in my own fur. It’s not quite hot enough. Can you turn the heat up again? Can you tell me a story? Start with once upon a time and end before it finishes. End where I turn into the wolf and the sun leaks. You like happy endings, right? Isn’t that why we’re here, to reveal your true nature?
Eirene Gentle writes lit, mostly little. Based in Toronto, Canada and published in cool places like The Hooghly Review, Litro, Jake, Maudlin House, Bull, Leon Literary, Ink in Thirds and coming soon to Flash Flood and Neither Fish Nor Foul.
