To Believe in the Ubiquity of Animation
from Vol. 39, No. 1
Winner of the 2023 Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers
Ninety-one days had passed since we had seen another human being. Ana was building a set of twelve dining room chairs. I worked at the upstairs window, looking down at her building the chairs. A repetitive cycle of events happened every day. Breakfast, apples usually. Thespian objects falling to the floor, like coffee spoons and sunscreen. Then we’d settle into the solitude of work. The house moved day and night, audibly. I sometimes smelled a perfume. We didn’t wear perfume. Mid-afternoon, we ate nuts and berries and swam in the pool. Then Ana made repairs. I did chores. At sunset, dinner. Beef and pork from the large freezer. Smoked salmon. Fruits, vegetables, and herbs from the garden. When the silverware was crossed on empty plates, night would fall. Planets, then ghosts. Once a week, we drank wine or had sex. There was a portrait in the attic that interested me. I’d seen it once, when we moved in, and I thought about her as I worked. She was wearing a black shawl that covered her head and body, revealing two blue eyes. Ana’s grandmother, Miranda. We believed in the ubiquity of animation, in thought and object. This kept us involved with the house and with each other.
While I worked, I’d see a white incision in the sky outside the window and remember. A contrail could cut open the world. Outer space might spill in. Other people did exist. But we only saw them in the sky, and it was nice to live this way, reclusively. We were lucky to be young and healthy, with stationary resources. We had no bones here. Only mind. My self-imposed task was translating Ana’s grandmother’s white porcelain dishware that we’d found in the attic. The family lore maintained that Miranda had inscribed the dishware with lettering, in ink, when she was a young girl, living in this house in rural Maine. There were sixty pieces all together, forming individual sets of dinner plates, side plates, bowls, cups, and matching saucers. It was said that if translated and then organized into the correct order, the dishes told a story. Each dish displayed one sentence. The language was made up but retained the Latin alphabet. I’d devised a system for translating it. My Rosetta stone was a loose notebook page that I’d found among other papers in a drawer of the upstairs desk where I sat daily. The page translated a single phrase from the made-up language into English: I wake to find everyone gone. I found the phrase repeated on a dessert plate. I decided the story began there.
Next to my desk was a larger wooden table where I’d organized the dishware for easy access. Above the desk, I mounted the dishes on the wall in order as I assembled the story. At ninety-one days, I had just finished translating. Now I was organizing them in the right order. I was going slowly. I was dragging it out. So far, there were thirty-eight dishes mounted onto the wall. Two plates, then a cup, three bowls, five cups, and so on. The type of dish varied sentence by sentence. And the story itself described a young girl named Miranda who wakes up one morning to find that her family is missing, including her mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, and seven siblings. After checking every room, she goes outside and hears a melody emanating from the woods, the source of which she begins to search for. She encounters a snake, whose eyes are a dazzling blue and whose venom she poetically imagines is made of perfume.
I began to smell the perfume. It smelled like anointing chrism. Ana knew what I meant. We’d both been raised Catholic. But Ana never smelled it in that house. I was the one who sat upstairs all day. On the driveway, she smelled sawdust and cedar.
Measuring wood, cutting, drilling holes, assembling, disassembling, staining, assembling, then the upholstery. I was removed from the chair building process. We were living off five dining room tables she’d made last year and sold for five thousand dollars each. This was her first un- commissioned project in several years, but the chairs would sell online. I admired her work from above. I liked to see the chairs coming together as her grandmother’s story came together in front of me on the wall. This was Ana’s house now. She’d inherited it and needed to sell it, along with most of the objects and furniture in the house. I tried to remember that when I smelled the perfume. I didn’t want to be antisocial by ignoring the perfume completely. I was a guest.
On the ninety-second night of our isolation, I dreamt of snake venom. In the dream, Ana chopped off the head of a snake with a knife, and we used a microscope to examine the venom, which looked like a necrosis virus, but which a letter from my mother determined was codeine.
In the pool the next day, swimming identical breaststroke alongside Ana, I remembered the snake’s blue eyes from the dream. There were leaves in the water. I sometimes fished them out before we swam. I never swam at night. Now, I wanted to. I wanted to swim at night so I could imagine the two underwater pool lights in the deep end were the snake’s blue eyes from the dream and Miranda’s story, or her own blue eyes from the portrait.
We were bendy materials under the sun, but not as bendy as some materials under the sun. We stretched ourselves out on the concrete pool deck. It was late summer now. A chipmunk ran across the deck and into a hole in the concrete by the shallow end. What was in that hole? A family of chipmunks? Ana considered placing a rock over the hole, to protect the pool. Her swimsuit was a black one-piece. She wore all black, even in the country. I showered upstairs while she looked for a rock for the hole, and then she showered while I pressed the back of the knife down onto a clove of garlic. I imagined her swimsuit coming off. The smell of her shampoo. Coconut. My dizzy tongue. There was a disco ball at the center of her glamorous mind. Dark in there, with mirrors. Wine- red interiors. Make me in rapture. Make me mar the already spoiled and save the almost marred. That was sexy. In the city, we went to restaurants and read our books at cramped tables for two. Here, we split.
Ana came down and grilled the steaks, while I dried the sliced cucumbers by folding them into a flat kitchen towel. The half-moon was rising over the tops of the trees. On the deck, we ate across from each other, a plate of meat between us. Countersink the bolt. Level the drill. The cushions were going to be dark blue with white trim, Ana said. She’d decided that at the back of each chair, where a head would be, there was going to be an engraving of an overturned flowerpot. It was important that we never publicly use the word “broken” when describing the engraving of the flowerpot, Ana said. When she put the chairs online, the description would be “overturned flowerpot.”
“It will be a little bit broken,” she said, smiling toward the woods. When would we leave here? The date we’d agreed to leave was in two weeks’ time, at the end of summer. The chairs were almost finished. I’d nearly assembled Miranda’s story on the wall. But neither of us had brought up leaving, had made any preparations. Eventually, the food would run out. I had a teaching job in the city to return to, for the fall semester. Ana couldn’t build furniture in Maine forever—she needed bolts. One of us was going to have to make the first move. But who?
After dinner, I walked through the green gate that alienated the driveway from the backyard. A full, forgotten glass of water in a pink glass shimmered at the edge of the dark pool. Light from the house hit the glass softly. There was something scary about its fullness, even though I knew Ana had probably forgotten it earlier that day. Who swims in you at night? I asked the pool, mentally. The half-moon was in the middle of the water. This was what we had wanted to develop here. Clues. Allegations and inner commitments from the dreamworld, manifesting. Darkness eliminates separateness. At night, several things can become one thing. In our small bed in the city, Ana and I were one thing, twisting in the night. Here, we were two. The bed was bigger. We could sleep on our own sides, dutifully, like the sun and the moon. But the moon’s reflection in the pool was a premonition and a provocation, I thought—it showed where the moon would be during the day, when the sun was out. Under the pool, through the core, out the other side. A resignation that recognized a destiny.
This house. This non-girl girl. These mores. My life. I thought about a roommate in my early twenties who turned to me in the kitchen of our suburban apartment and said: “I guess this is our life.” But I didn’t want it to be my life. Did people have sex in ski jackets? Who had sex on stilts? If the plenum can expand, should we let it? My solar mom believed in centers. She never had insomnia, didn’t believe in it. Sleeplessness was a concept made up by lazy people. But I was interested. I had to move to the city. I had to see for myself if there were other ways to be.
There were. I remembered standing by the water with Ana, three weeks after we started sleeping together. We looked at Manhattan. She talked about psychoanalysis for a long time, how the discipline itself had the power to enfold everything in the world inside it. In memory, that concept is melded to the memory of the way the river looked—I can feel the word psychoanalysis flickering on top of the water. Ideas unglue physical properties. Then they get rearranged.
There was nothing vile here, beside the pool. I picked up the full glass of water. Sipping from it, I stared at the reflected moon. Then I imagined puncturing the moon with a needle, a black venom seeping out of a hole in one side of the milky orb. In my fantasy, the venom filled the swimming pool. It darkened the water until the color of the pool matched the universe.
These things we love. Fabrics. Glass coffee mugs. Fish called mooneye. Dreaming. You are my one true love. You are one of my true loves. Ana. I often woke up thinking about the details. Details in that house could balloon into hours. Poof. I became Ana’s mother’s antique candle holders. I became the bed of mint. Sometimes I wanted a word more than anything. I remember wanting the word sloe. From Miranda’s dishware, I’d learned that a sloe plant could produce a sloe berry, but that’s not what I saw when I thought of the word—instead, I just saw the word. It was luxurious to want a word for the word itself.
Five days passed. I hung up more dishes on the wall, using nails and wire casings that I’d made from old coat hangers. Ana’s teenage grandmother could not find the thoughtful music slicing through the greenwood, no matter how diligently she examined the sloe berries. Ana and I still did not bring up ending the vacation. Instead, at dinner, she brought up running. Could she run twenty miles through the forest? How would her personality be different if she could? She wanted to try. I said it was an ideal time to take up running. I didn’t know what I meant by it. On planet Earth, I thought, I want nothing. But on this porch with this girl, I want everything. If I could cartoonishly stand on top of the earth, like the little prince, meaning would be lost with the specifics. But on the ground…
“I’m sick of the sound of that candle,” Ana said.
The candle was squeaky. It was long and black, nestled into its hole in one of the silver candle holders. It was between us on the table, next to the meat and mustard greens. I used the douter attached to the side to snuff out the flame. Things visibly dimmed. When I was a child, I’d played tetherball in the dark on the recess fields with my brother. We hadn’t been able to see the ball very well. It could’ve been a head, tied to a string, my brother said. He said it to scare me, and it didn’t. The candle, half-burnt, could’ve been a finger in the dark. I looked at Ana, only shadows now, over the top of the finger.
“I’m going to try to run for twenty miles,” she repeated.
The next day, she did. And then she kept it up, unearthing her father’s old water vest from the garage. I watched her come back from her runs, sitting at my desk on the second floor. My monkish tower. We hadn’t been anywhere else for months. I tried to imagine what she saw as she ran. Snakes. Sloe berries. Her plight was her grandmother’s. Why this sudden vitality? And what did she hear?
Three fully upholstered, engraving-less dining room chairs were abandoned on the driveway. While Ana ran for the fourth afternoon, I hung another dinner plate on the wall. For thousands of years, ethics has attempted to award the human being secrecy regarding its own directives. The tree is not allowed to know that it might grow in goodness, and even if it does know, we are not allowed to believe that it might. Miranda, in her story, ignored that. She asked everything in the forest if it knew if the music was good or evil. Then she accepted that, as a human, music, despite history, might not be intended for her anyway. I mounted a cup saucer that said:
The nature of this song is not for me to know.
Me was underlined in ink. Then it began to thunder.
I remembered a time in the city when we had sat on a park bench underneath an aboveground train, waiting for a dinner reservation. The train came around a curve, rumbling from above, and I’d thought it was about to storm. Ana’s forehead was pressed against my shoulder. Ana hadn’t thought it was about to storm; she knew it was the train. I could see each ingredient but misunderstood the whole. She could see nothing yet knew the form.
It thundered again. Outside, the sky was thickening, the green of the trees deepening. I stared down at the chairs. What is more promissory than when the color of the world changes in obedience to sound? And how many miles in would Ana be? Would she make it back? Or would she fall? I went downstairs and moved the unfinished chairs inside the shed, so they wouldn’t get rained on. The wind swirled. The angels were flying past the pool, seeking shelter. I imagined Ana falling in slow motion, her legs forming a wide triangle, then curling underneath her. In the kitchen, I observed a lone piece of massaged kale in the sink. The stretch in my heart. That piece of kale. Thunder, lightning. Then compact hyaline drops, exploding all over everything. Climate, an object, extending its tendrils over our world. I waited for hours.
The night passed. In the morning, I ate an entire lemon, biting into the skin. Then I ate a lime. I didn’t want to eat the other fruit without her. I didn’t call the police. I sat in the kitchen, looking out at the woods. At noon, the only person I could think to call was Bee. But that didn’t make any sense—we hadn’t seen Bee in two years. But Bee would have information, I thought. Information about the way past materials explain the present. No. I called the police. I brushed my hair. Two police officers came to the house and looked around. Then I offered them coffee. They didn’t like that I didn’t own the house. She went for a run and then it stormed, they repeated after me. Then: Are you domestic partners? No.
No, we weren’t legally bound to each other. Or anything.
They looked around the house and searched the forest in the immediate area. At sunset, they came back in and discussed beginning a larger investigation the next day. After they left, I went out to the pool. The moon was hidden behind bandages of cloud. The underwater lights were off, but I could tell that leaves and branches had accrued on the surface from the storm. Retinues for the living. An amrita for the dying. Nothing for the already dead—the dead had indulgences of their own, somewhere else, far from the provisions on this planet. That’s what I imagined Ana was eating, wherever she was. Immortal snacks. But I really didn’t think she was dead. Instead, I imagined she was pulling up vegetables from the ground ten miles from here, sucking on the alien crops she’d planted centuries before, when she visited Earth for the first time.
This image got me through that first full day.
On the second day, I sat in the kitchen. At dusk, I got a text message from the police. They would resume their search of the woods tomorrow. Had I heard anything? They asked. No, I texted back.
Then I called Bee.
She was answering my call from an underground train station in Berlin, she said. She didn’t seem offput by the call. It was 1 a.m. there. I’d clearly caught her at the right moment. She described everything. She was eating popcorn, with a glove on. It was still warm in Berlin, but she was wearing a glove because she had a large burn from elbow to fingertip on her right hand. She’d burnt herself with an iron. It looked fashionable. Both the glove and the burn and the popcorn crumbs on the tip of her fingers, depending on her venue, she explained. But she wore the glove to disguise the burn in case it made her look too seducible. To be a person was to be flesh, to be an object, walking underground in a subway station in Berlin in the 1980s at night, walking past those glass window boxes full of cluttered objects. Violence. Randomness. An oversaturation of being. We will never know what it was like to be a person in an underground subway station in the 1980s, Bee said, because the present is very different from the 1980s.
“Bee,” I said.
I imagined Ana’s face appearing inside one of the cluttered window boxes Bee was referring to. We’d both seen the same documentary which featured an underground train station in Berlin in the 1980s. The three of us had seen it together, four years prior. The objects inside the window box were indiscernible, but they reminded me of the cases for trophies that most high schools had in their entryways when I was young. Bee’s pattern of speech became a recognizable note as she continued to talk at me through the phone, a Tibetan singing bowl. Overlaid on top of the actual scene I looked at, standing in the kitchen, facing the woods, I saw Ana’s face appear in one of those window boxes in the 1980s Berlin underground train station, her face the cartilaginous quality of bare bone, then fuzzy, staticky, as though she was being transmitted as a hologram. Bee’s voice, a sustained note, rang and rang as she talked.
Who do we allow to translate the shadow? I closed my eyes and listened to her voice. I tried to send the message through power of thought. Then I said: “Bee, do you see her?”
There had been a dark knot on the wooden floor of the restaurant where Bee worked that I’d never seen before, five years ago. A knot from a tree. I shivered when I saw it for the first time, sitting above on barstool, thinking it was a large spider. Then I screamed. Marie. Marie had been the first one out of the kitchen, assuming Bee was raping someone, she joked. She spelled out the word: r-a-p-i-n-g. Then Ana, the other waitress. The four of us examined the knot on the wooden floor. They were nice floors. I’d never been there during the day. Darkness and crowds concealed the knot. Only Ana claimed to have seen it before. We were introduced.
There used to be a feeling I got right as I was falling asleep, a long, thin, rectangular shape in the corner of my vision, under closed eyelids, that seemed to hold the key to some revelatory truth about Bee and Ana. Poles. An intuitive feeling, a presence in my chest, telling me, in the form of pre-dream logic, that this shape carried the weight and complexity of our bonds. The Goon? Come in the night not to kill, but to snatch away? First my friend, taken away to another country? And now Ana?
On the phone, I’d gotten Bee’s attention. I explained everything. She walked around the underground train, looking for window boxes. It seemed they’d been removed since the 1980s. But a specific seriousness had entered her voice. The monotony of the note was gone. She asked me to repeat the story of the porcelain dishware.
Up the stairs, I approached Miranda’s creation. The dusk was settling, shooting blue light through the window and onto the dishware, which were lined up in rows on the wall where I’d hung them. The dishes seemed to vibrate in that cool blueness, as though they’d been shot with an antiseptic and microorganisms were visibly dying on their surfaces. Motes. My Iota. My Iotas, I thought, Do not die.
“You have to finish,” Bee said.
But staring at the dishes, I saw the window boxes again. Packed to the brim with obscure, white objects. Then I saw a very, very old sofa, carpeted. The fabric was dark green. It was in one of the window boxes; I was viewing it through the glass. Then I watched the cushions begin to lift, handlessly, as though the Stone were being rolled away, or a magical grave was being opened. Underneath the cushions of the sofa: thousands of dead vape pens, multi-colored, packed against one another, from one end of the sofa to the next. In the presence of this image, I could feel a rapid pulse vibrating through me, water moving through my heart, my body frozen and pounding. But when I actually pressed my fingers to my neck, my heart was beating normally. Full-bodied insomnia. In the formal awakening, I thought, we will not only rise at the right hour, but we will also be lifted from our beds and put in the upright position, as though being handled by angels.
“In the Paradiso,” Bee began, the note returning. “Dante compares a mechanical clock ticking to the rotating circle of blessed souls in the heavenly afterlife.”
Three plates. Five cups. One bowl. Four saucers. I checked the translations.
Who could drink the liquid from that shallow stone pool in the center of the forest? Ana’s grandmother Miranda wanted to know, committing it to porcelain. That pooling black liquid? And did she have to drink it now? Or was it enough to nourish a family?
“Ana knows this better than anyone,” Bee said. “In the rotating circle, one blessed soul is not privileged over the other. The same goes for the numbers on a clock.”
The dishes explained how Miranda used her water jug to encase the pooled black liquid, and then how she walked back through the woods to her home with this foreign, yet ensorcelled juice.
I mounted the dishes on the wall.
“She found a liquid,” I said to Bee, the phone on speaker mode on the desk between me and the wall. “She’s carrying the liquid back though the forest. She’s going home.”
After Nietzsche, there was another philosopher, Bee continued, who thought it might be possible to puncture the cycle, to drop a pin and pop the taut balloon of time’s infinite loop. But if the same events suddenly stopped occurring in exactly the same way, over and over again, for eternity, where would the materials inside those events go? The spatial considerations of objects that were already in existence, but now discarded in the old conceptual model, concerned Bee. Maybe they could get swallowed up. But who would volunteer to swallow up a version of eternity’s cyclical materials? A fourth-dimensional being? But wouldn’t they still exist somewhere, even if they were swallowed?
“She’s setting the table,” I said to Bee.
There were five dishes left. In the first three, Miranda, back at the house, set the dining room table for twelve. She filled each cup with the black liquid she’d found in the forest. Then she sat at her own place at the table and waited.
I mounted a cup onto the wall. Then I waited.
“All we can do in order to predict if an event is going to repeat itself,” Bee said. “Is to observe the objects we have in our immediate proximity. And see if they move.”
Bee. I could see her posture so clearly. Eating a long sleeve of popcorn with a glove, pacing around the train station, flying through the doors as she boarded the train home from a few hours at a café following her graduate seminar.
“But don’t some objects have priority?” I said.
“Ohhhhhhh,” Bee said.
There were things I’d forgotten about. I remembered being in college, nineteen years old, listening to music from outside of a house party, sitting on the front steps of the house with Bee, my new friend. Not the kind of party music we were used to at all. The saddest, strangest, drone music. Life was a swirl of hues and passion, and then it was over, we decided, at nineteen. But there was a twinkling quality down the street, something we couldn’t see clearly, a glaze over the dark space between the traffic light and the road. A woman appearing in it, then vanishing, then appearing again, this time noticing us. Did Bee make that up? Did I? Or did we really both see it? We had now both been in love many times. We had fantasized, and those fantasies had become reality. We had invented everything. But there was so much in the world that was still unexplained.
“Something like a priority can announce itself,” Bee said.
Humans often go into the forest and bring back the things that they find. No one usually says anything about it, unless the forest is protected bureaucratically, in which case someone could, but they usually don’t. My father took a large stick from a national park that was not even a national park in his own nation, and the airport baggage inspection attendant put a tag on it and let him take it on the plane as a carry-on all the same. But feelings will fold. The black liquid in the porcelain cups on the table set for twelve will lose its color when brought into the realm of non-natural objects.
“The black liquid is turning into water,” I said, hammering the nails, then placing the final two dishes onto the wall. “And with it, the family has returned.”
“Sitting around the table?”
“The murky liquid turned to water. And with it, they returned to me.” “So, they returned to the table in human form, materializing concomitantly as the water transformed,” Bee said. “Or they are the water.” Transubstantiation. Cannibalism. Bodies conceived of in space and form, then born into flesh and content. A body’s final dream, really, to be shot back up into the form itself. Then, after the explosion, whatever settles gets to become the life-sustaining liquid that the humans left behind consume.
“I know what to do,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”
I took every dish off the wall, put them into the cardboard boxes I had found them in, and carried each box downstairs to the table on the patio. Then I started unpacking them. Sixty dishes. Twelve sets of five. I set each place carefully. Love reorganizes your visual world, sends new color and texture swarming over every surface. When it abandons you, even temporarily, old colors descend and perch on the sides of things, wondering if they should move in permanently. My eyeballs retained the nostalgia I’d inherited from Ana when I looked at the porcelain dishware, the dainty grooves along the edges, but I was scared of the idea that it might one day leave them. How do we communicate with past sensory worlds? Historians of material cultures, like Bee, know that we grow and adapt to appreciate the new translucency, sheens.
But I didn’t want to forget.
With each place at the table set with silverware and the right number and type of dish, I opened the shed and began pulling out the chairs. One by one, until there were twelve. Only eight were upholstered, and only one had the overturned flowerpot engraved onto it. I moved the one finished chair to the head of the table. Then I sat in it, facing the woods, eleven empty seats surrounding me.
I texted Bee a picture of the scene. Then I texted: there will be a final dream
no, Bee texted after two minutes, no there won’t
The extrapolative technique. I was ready for the fantasy to puncture reality and come seeping in. Moon-venom in a swimming pool. Objects adjusting, then proving their ability to pattern the future.
it can’t be undreamt now that we all dreamt it, Bee texted.
Ana returned at noon on the third day. I was still sitting in my chair, facing the woods. I’d slept there, body folded over the table, the dishes pushed aside. She was smiling and seemed calm in her days-old black running outfit and water vest. Her short hair, unwashed, was tucked behind her ears.
She stopped in front of the green gate, smiling at me.
“What’s this?” she said, pointing to the table set-up. Then she opened the gate. I watched her walk toward me, a graceful line.
“So, you’ve just been having fun while I was gone,” she said.
“You mean you’ve been having fun,” I said. “Are both true?” she said.
She laid a hand on one of her grandmother’s dinner plates, her palm upturned. The sun was bright. I didn’t move.
“I read ahead of you,” she said.
We stared at her hand, upturned on the plate. Meat. I thought of Bee’s burn.
She pulled something out of the front pockets of her water vest, with two hands.
“It’s all I could find,” Ana said.
She put two handfuls of blackberries on the dinner plate in front of her. Then she started using a fork to mash them.
When the jam was made, she used her hands to put a tiny smear of black goo in each one of the twelve cups. When she got to me, she smeared some jam into my cup, and then, laughing, smeared her fingers on my cheeks and neck.
“Oh my god,” I said. But I let her sit on my lap. Then I pressed my jam-stained face into her water vest.
The sun moved around in the sky. At dusk, we rinsed Miranda’s dishes in the pool, one by one, watching the black jam slide, then merge, with the more substantial liquid. Then then we got in with it. Ana’s body, animal and plant and star, moved toward the underwater pool lights, discarding the material she’d accrued from spending two nights in the woods. There is play and there is ceremony. Perhaps if you can practice the end before the end, you’ll be better prepared to forego the special goods when the time comes. Or maybe it’s no practice. There are small endings all the time. We left the house at the end of the week. And it will go on like this, materials from the past dreaming, then concretizing the future, until these objects are unstiffened, then distorted, then subsumed, by an entity’s dream that is much larger, and stranger, then anything we have ever known.
Mary Elizabeth Dubois currently lives in Berlin, where she is a graduate student in cultural studies at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2019, she received her MFA in creative writing from New York University, where she was the recipient of the Axinn Foundation Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Chicago Review, Joyland, American Chordata, and elsewhere. Her research interests include material cultures, the history of philosophy, genre-flailing in political writing, and eighteenth- century Germanic aesthetic theory. She grew up in southeast Texas.