in love with a (strict machine)

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Perched oddly beside one another, watching the last legs of a New York summer dwindle down into crisp, brown autumn the two figures were contrasted against a backdrop of brick. Harlen Prior was still the lanky tall prince with an astute nose and skinny limbs, his hair a wild shock and his eyes a new green. Beside him, Lucy Hart, once sharp and sleek, was now curved in new places. Her hips were wider, her shoulders less slouched. The hollows of her cheeks, however, survived the storm. Blonde hair was pulled back with a scrap of fabric, small flyaways whipping in the lazy cross breeze. Fingers reached back to tighten it as the pianist chimed in.

"You look like Michael in that stupid head thing."

"Oh please," she bantered, "You only wish your boyfriend was a freak like me."

"You're barred from listening to Top 40." Harlen announced matter of factly. Between his fingers, a cigarette rested, gray smoke trailing away from her and off into the already heavy city air. "It's going to rot your brain."

"Not as much as that pack of Starburst you ate earlier is going to rot your teeth." Her smile widened.

"Not a word."

"Hey, you know Nicholas Moser from the Village Voice? The guy who writes the Trendkiller article every week?" She asked, propping hands on the flat of her belt.

"The guy who made the tie out of doilies that they sold at Atrocity?" Harlen's nose wrinkled up comically.

"Yeah, him. Guess who's the next subject of Trendkiller?" A skinny finger lifted and pointed directly at her chest, tapping against the flat of bone. "Moi."

"Well, any publicity is good publicity. I start touring soon." The musician reminded her. As if he had just remembered this himself, he took a final drag off of an illegal cigarette and crushed the end under a designer shoe. Smoke wafted off. "I don't want to live on a bus. I want to live in a Parisian apartment. A portable one that they can drive me around in on the back of one of those Wide Load flatbed trucks."

"An appropriate label for your fat ass."

"Look who's talking, you building in couture," he snapped back cleverly. Without a moment to spare, Lucy's fist balled up and thwacked him hard in the shoulder. The pianist gasped and flattened his hand over the offended spot, bottom lip pouting out.

"I'm telling Michael on you."

"There's more where that came from. I could take his skinny ass any day."

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Across the room, Seven sketched like it was second-nature. The television flickered in odd patterns of some channel where no one spoke English. Lucy didn't ask questions. The willowy blonde, still in the loose cotton of her fall pajamas, craned over the paper in front of her, a mug of tea in her hand. The knot of her hair behind her hung low on the nape of her neck, and she squinted eyes at the print on the page.

After finding the article she was searching for, she strummed free fingers over the taut curve of her stomach and read. Green eyes caught choice phrases before the rest of her mind processed the meaning.

...Heatherette imitation...
...bitter divorcee...
...listless, sensationalist Vera Wang headliner gown...

After a few more tactless comments, Lucy could feel the heat rising to her cheeks, her jaw tightening. Her ears heard the sound of shattering porcelain and spilling tea long before she realized she had thrown the mug, but the scream that echoed through the apartment building -- that she was fully conscious for.

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Then the worst happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes ...

...And then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn't I, and I stamped and screamed yes, and he had obligations in the next room, and he was working in London, earning ten pounds a week so he could later earn twelve pounds a week, and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. ... Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists. ... And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.


-Sylvia Plath

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In the other room, the baby slept silently. The crackling static of the monitor picked up the subtle sounds of inhales and exhales, the shift of tiny sheets in a bassinet. Lucy Hart had her sleeves rolled up to the crook of her elbows, her pale arms outstretched, one marred with a pink-silver stretch of skin from wrist upwards, her palm showing subtle lines etched into it. It was her own personal divide, a San Andreas fault line down her body that separated left from right, light from dark, worn out from new.

Behind her, the number artist flipped through sketchpaper and drew as he saw fit. The sound of fingers smearing shadows into paper whispered along with the breaths from two rooms down. This new life was quiet. This new life ran with a bloody undercurrent, veins beneath a silent skin, pulsing to the forefront, blue and angry against the surface.

In front of her, an experimentally blank canvas sat on a tri-legged easel. Tubes of paint lay out, their caps torn messily off, leaving little trails against the brown platter they were set on. She balanced the brush in her hand like a cigarette in its holder, her eyes narrowing in on the threads of fabric ready to suck up color like the roots of thirsty plants.

She brewed and brimmed, the twist in her stomach gurgling and more evidently empty. There were battles to be fought -- a part of her body had been taken away, transported into its own entity, losing the most prominent dependence it would ever have on her. Someone had the idea of taking even that away from her. Someone had belittled the idea that her heart could possibly beat for someone she could not control nor understand. Someone she could not step on with a sharp heel, no matter how hard she would try. Two people, one who complied and cared, stone and stable, and one who came and went like a ghost-shadow, who no matter how tightly she held to him, still felt like he could evade her grip. He was made of silt, or smoke, or something even finer.

Angry hands collapsed the canvas, letting it clatter to the ground before she hunched over it, reaching for blacks and blues and reds. With sleeves wound up, hunching on the floor in something predatory, she painted smears and streaks of open wounds with her bare hands. A heart, blue-veined and beating. There she was, in the middle, organic. A mechanical network of cogs, rusted over and creaking with the effort it took to move, made the heart beat on puppet strings. There was Seven, the autonomist, mechanical and subject to faulty malfunctions. A slithering pair of green eyes, veiled by a haze, watched over both. There was Olivia, omnipresent and goddess-like, watching over them both. The machinery and the looming presence waited to pick up the slack where one might lessen or fail.

Beneath the heart, a gray-blue puddle collected, glinting the reflection of all three, the heart, the machinework, the green eyes. There was Holden. A reflection of all of them, new, clean, promising, growing.

Settling back on her haunches, Lucy buried her face in the crook of her clean arm and screamed as loud as she could.

The breaths on the monitor continued. Even. Steady. Alive.

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I'm gonna tell my son to grow up pretty as the grass is green
And whip-smart as the English Channel's wide
And I'm gonna tell my son to keep his money in his mattress
And his watch on any hand between his thighs
And I'm gonna lock my son up in a tower
Till I write my whole life story on the back of his big brown eyes

When they do the double dutch, that's them dancing

I'm gonna tell my son to join a circus so that death is cheap
And games are just another way of life
And I'm gonna tell my son to be a prophet of mistakes
Because for every truth there are half a million lies
And I'm gonna lock my son up in a tower
Till he learns to let his hair down far enough to climb outside

When they do the double dutch, that's them dancing... </center>

liz phair.

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This was not chance and this was not providence. The hand of God did not sweep down and nudge Lucille Hart in the right direction anymore. She liked to think that he had stopped flicking things into her path as well. She liked to think that God had consented to let her alone for the time being. Things coasted smoothly over the landscape now. She worked. She played. Her son toddled around, pecking like a curious bird and gave things mispronounced names, struggling with motor skills and speech. She read the frustration on his face when he babbled at her and she didn't understand a word. Even children could crease their eyebrows and huff. It was an impossible feeling, to have an emotion and to lack the ability to name it. It was a familiar feeling to Lucy, new, fuzzy-tongued, pill free. She could relate.

Sometimes she wondered if motherhood was just a rug pulled out from under her. She had nothing to show but stretch marks and the new flare of her hips. Across the hall, the paint smear of her not-quite-live-in-but-most-certainly-lover seemed to understand the funny language that her son had created. He understood the oo sound for juice and could materialize it from thin air. He could hoist up the tiny arms that reached for him when he entered a room. He could babble back in a chirping language that she didn't understand, that her son would speak when he was a teenager, on the streets of Amsterdam, a laughing, pleasant language that Lucy would only grasp phrases of.

The hand of God left Lucy Hart alone, and Lucy left God alone for the most part. There were Jewish prayers at her father's house, hands held, heads bowed. She did not pray for things -- she did not want anything she couldn't procure for herself, dug somewhere out of her own body, or molded through lost memory and Seven Thatcher's constricted, twisted hands. As far as she was concerned, she was happy to have slipped under the radar. God's hand was busy elsewhere, following a man she once knew around and giving and taking as best only God could do.

She recognized the flutters in her stomach early, the aches in her arms and legs. When Seven scrambled eggs for breakfast, she felt her insides curdle at the smell. She bought fruit and whipped cream and stashed them away, in precarious hiding.

It had been two months since she had last marked her calendar with biological success. She had kept fearful lips stitched closed. This was her problem, in its fullest, the make and mark of its design. She could want and want and want until she was weeping, but it was the having that terrified her, the getting that gnawed nails down and stiffened her step.

Now, with knees bent childishly inward, she perched on the edge of the couch. In front of her, her son sat simply, hands clapping as he pushed brightly colored wooden cars across the floor. Her thumb punched in a familiar number, tremoring, bold.

"Michael?"

<font color="#000000" size="1">[ January 07, 2007 03:59 PM: Message edited by: midnight radio ]</font>

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Notice how he has numbered the blue veins
in my breast. Moreover there are ten freckles.
Now he goes left. Now he goes right.
He is buiding a city, a city of flesh.
He's an industrialist. He has starved in cellars
and, ladies and gentlemen, he's been broken by iron,
by the blood, by the metal, by the triumphant
iron of his mother's death. But he begins again.
Now he constructs me. He is consumed by the city.
From the glory of words he has built me up.
From the wonder of concrete he has molded me.
He has given me six hundred street signs.
The time I was dancing he built a museum.
He built ten blocks when I moved on the bed.
He constructed an overpass when I left.
I gave him flowers and he built an airport.
For traffic lights he handed out red and green
lollipops. Yet in my heart I am go children slow.

-Anne Sexton

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<center>Hedges
an excerpt from The Brotherhood of Madmen</center>

we are
slipped hands in the night
the rattle of buckles
and zips
the stirrups
the straps
the sedative in our arms
the press of our blood
fifteen minute sleep
my tree-branch twisted man
we count leaves
and hide in hedges

juniper

juniper

water in your veins
we search for locks on doors
my mouth and yours with
the tumblers turning
I attempt drowning
while under surveillance
and get thrown in the clink
for two days

chin above the waterline

chin above the waterline

I am a desert stretched across
the sound of sand on hardwood

i tell you these things hand in hand
red jagged tissue to tissue
we are something more than kin
and less than kind

six months later on a metal slab
red tissue without a match
a desert
the sound of sand

I flood with blood and memory
the taste of warm and hidden
the smell of juniper
and the low roll of your voice
the creaking of a ship's hull
as it rocks in the ocean

<font color="#000000" size="1">[ April 01, 2007 11:14 PM: Message edited by: midnight radio ]</font>