tara stillions whitehead
the body looks like a horizon
Mommy and Daddy are off barely managing their own lives when the Stories find Lee. The Stories are everywhere—mostly in screens. But they are in books, too. And newspapers. The Stories are full of all kinds of instructions, like what to want, how to prosper—oh—and how not to die.
*
Listen—Stories are supposed to look like simple answers. Stories should pacify. They soothe like a marble between two fingers. They should appear symmetrical when flipped upside down and invisible when turned inside out. Stories should not smell like almonds or reverberate across unfinished floors. They should not be used to calm arrhythmias or disturb settled dust in an empty house.
*
A mother sets her daughter up to be victimized. Marks her in red and then sends her out to the wolves. Be invisible, she says. Be obedient, she warns. Do not be the child we have read about in the papers. And when the daughter, set up for failure, fulfills the fatal prophecy of the Stories, the despairing mother rages. She weeps over the body of the dispatched wolf, banishes the huntsman, curses a god she has never knelt to, and publicly reaps the agony of her righteousness.
*
In the toy aisle, Lee surveys the possibilities. Pink, periwinkle, and violet. Black, red, and blue. There are toys and there are colors. Fluorescent lights casting a shade of green. White graph paper floors and metal bullseyes on the ceiling. Shapes and colors to be looked at. Nothing separating the right things from the other things. No construct—no axis carrying more responsibility than it should.
Mommy watches Lee, holds steady, wrangles curious arms and elbows. Touch here, not there. Don’t you know the rules? Let me teach you how to desire.
The store windows darken as a summer storm settles into the parking lot.
Lee picks up a firetruck. Mommy puts it back.
Lee picks up a spaceship. Mommy puts it back.
Inevitably, rain turns to hail, and everything becomes louder than it has ever been—red, black, periwinkle, violet. The store lights flicker. Green and then gray. But they do not go dark.
Lee reaches for skirt, summons a hand.
The store lights flicker. Green and then gray.
Lee’s fingers strike something smooth and angular. Mommy pulls hard, beelines for the exit. The sky is falling, washing away all color. In the car, Lee studies Mommy’s face in the mirror. It is square and gray. Note: These are the dimensions of agony.
*
A young woman is rescued from a deserted island off the coast of California and forced to wear a dress because cormorant feathers are indecent and women have wayward hearts. Now civilized, she begins the painful process of vanishing. Moral? It is better to die alone. But only if you speak otter.
*
Lee skips school on picture day, gets a crew cut, and coifs the front with pomade from Daddy’s drawer. Or—it might have been Mommy’s mousse. It is one o’clock on a Wednesday, so there is no having to make sense of the mirror with no one else around. Edges clear, peripheries unintimidating, Lee strikes a pose the photographer would have protested. Lee smiles, recognizing the reflection, the gray wall. Because all of it is so simple.
*
When a girl comes of age, she erupts in dark magic. She becomes dangerous. Listen to your father, child. Fear is obscene. Despair is fatal. Hold it in. Hold it all in. Turn your ice curse inside out. Bury its frozen chrysalis below your belly button. But what if I can’t hold it in? What if I explode? What if they all find out? Then you will become a woman and you will know too much.
*
Lee places an eye against the television screen, tries to figure out how the Stories are getting in there. How small does someone have to be to fit inside of one of those pixels? Am I small enough? Maybe some very tiny person is in there right now, writing Stories about the other things, things that Lee knows are in hiding because, just like Lee, they are a little too afraid. But Lee wishes they would show themselves—just a little bit. Because Lee has thought a lot about those other things. How they curve like cerulean and startle like thunder.
*
There’s no time to talk about this right now. Daddy has one foot inside the house, one on the brick stoop. We’ll take care of it later. He makes this promise out of love, but he doesn’t mean it. They both know how tired everyone is all of the time. Trying to keep things together. Trying to do the right thing and stay out of the gray. Daddy balks. There will be no more sick days, no more missed classes. And when the deadbolt sounds, you will feel the strange peace that aloneness brings. You will feel the room forgive, the ceiling exhale, the cabinet and window edges soften to a paste. When you are alone, everything will become simple. I promise. Everything will appear safe.
*
An articulate sea child copes with puberty by prostituting her voice in exchange for the body she always wanted. Once silenced and ready to be taken as a wife, the child swears off her well-meaning father and surrenders her body to a stranger, with whom she has only had a catastrophic chance encounter. After a few days of failed courtship with this stranger, the child’s voice is returned to her, but she can only give apologies and say her wedding vows. Remember: This is a Love Story. Remember: Defiance is an interspecies luxury. Also remember: Hormones are the destroyers of single-parent households.
*
Walk around the neighborhood counting houses and crossing intersections. Six blocks in total. Twelve per block. All evenly spaced and facing East or West. All parallel and symmetrical and orderly.
Except for Lee’s house,
which sits at the end of the shallow cul-de-sac across from the eraser factory, the only stretch of development without a sidewalk because the roots from a strand of oaks lie too close to the surface.
*
Lee falls in love. When this happens, the senses dislocate. A kiss tastes like feathers. A promise scalds the inside of the palm. Initiation and abnegation are equally deafening. And then there’s desire—
an asymptote that tortures like graphite, its curve aching downward, intermediate in color—close to black, but not exactly so—reaching for intersection, summoning the impossible.
*
You’re amazing. You know things no one else knows. You have seen colors no one else has seen. You’re like no other human I’ve ever met in my life. You love hard. You waste no breath. You are a beautiful protest.
Which is why I’m so sorry.
*
The Stories say someone like Lee will break. But that won’t happen. Lee is not a mirror.
*
Lee, lying down, stretching: The body looks like a horizon from here, infinite but sturdy. Lee watches the sunlight cross the landscape, evaporating fear, synthesizing hope.
*
No more Stories about other people’s childhoods. What did yours feel like?
The school children played games. Boys against girls. Girls against girls. Girls against me. Me against the wall. Girls and me. Boys and me. Sometimes, all of them. Always me. Always the wall. Mostly the boys. Sometimes the girls. Always the wall. Which was hard to make out with my face against it. Some days it looked red. Some days, brown.
Color felt like everything until I closed my eyes.
When I closed my eyes, I forgot the color of the wall. With my eyes closed, the wall felt forgiving—it felt gray. Confusion slipped away. People slipped away. Boys and girls. Mommies and Daddies. Sometimes me.
*
Yance Ford won an Emmy, and Laverne Cox, too.
But justice still looks like Harvey Keitel in Thelma and Louise. Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. Matthew McConaughey in A Time to Kill. Gene Hackman in The French Connection. Justice feels immutable. Like a fingerprint on the trigger.
*
“Who touched you?”
No one.
“Who hit you?”
Hit me?
“Which parent?”
Neither. I was loved.
“If you weren’t touched, if you weren’t hit—how did you end up like this?”
How do roots know that they are stronger than pavement? Why do grayscalists use color to enhance its absence?
“Explain to me what you are.”
You mean who I am.
“What are you confused about?”
Nothing. Except—where are all of the Stories about the other things?
“Everyone has a story. What’s yours?”
My story is vertical. My story is uncalculated. It is inside out and raptures by moonbeam. My story uses all five senses and begins with an ancient pause. I will tell it to you if you can hear me. Can you hear me? I thought so. Okay then, I’ll start—
Tara Stillions Whitehead is a multi-genre writer and filmmaker. Her writing has appeared in many journals, including The Rupture, r.kv.r.y., Fiction International, and Chicago Review. She has received both a Pushcart Prize and AWP Intro Journal Awards nomination and is the recipient of a Glimmer Train Press Award for New Writers. Her scholarship focuses on monsters and otherness, and she recently authored a chapter for McFarland Press titled, “YAL and Otherness: Empathy as a Rhetorical Tool." A professor of film, rhetoric, and creative writing, she is currently producing a web series for acclaimed playwright and producer Mark Roberts.