fiction by sydney alexander
Mulberry Literary Fresh Voices Award First Place Winner in Prose

Homebody

It is getting so hard to hold my shape. Lying on my back, I can feel the rug pressing into my thighs and the back of my neck, cross-hatching my hands and arms. When I run my fingers through the fibers, I feel all the hard knits where crumbs have begun to ossify, the ropes of hair that have fallen out. Sunset has exhausted the color spectrum. Purgatorial light muddles through the windowpanes, changing what I can make of the rug’s pattern: navy, gray, navy. I feel like I could just melt into liquid and seep through the floor. Slouching, each bone collapses into the one beneath it. I am alone in my bedroom. I remove my watch, and the cylindrical plane it had cast around my arm falls away, leaving me to my dissolution. Muscles relax, soften. It is all I can do to lie here, prone on the rug of my bedroom floor, compressed under the weight of the air. Idly, I think of its composition, its chemistry. So much to do. So much to do. My desk is littered with paper documents and other editorial business. The thought of doing any of it sours my mouth. My head feels terribly heavy. I don’t think I could lift it off the ground if I wanted to. After an exhale, my ribs fall further down, like old arches caving in. I can feel my eyes shuttering.

It is when I am alone like this that I have come to realize how other people demand shapes of me. I sit up straight. I hold mugs and pencils and sponges in my hand. I chew food, masticate. I pour drinks and feel the paths they trace down my throat. I make shapes and sounds with my mouth, and sometimes they make people laugh, which elicits a good feeling. In times like this, I feel my lungs lighten in their cages. When I go out with the girls, I wear watches, necklaces, and bracelets. I pin up my hair. I squeeze myself into tight dresses or pants that reaggregate my weight. There is such a physicality to it. More often than not, my boyfriend comes over to spend the night. I always think I might melt to nothing before he gets here. I imagine him coming in and finding a strange stain on the rug, or just gobs of jelly, which makes me think of Ralph Ellison, and a quote a professor once read to us in a literature class. I can picture him now, wizened, moon-goggled with reverence for the language, and sweating slightly under the arms: “A beautiful girl once told me of a recurring nightmare in which she lay in the center of a large dark room and felt her face expand until it filled the whole room, becoming a formless mass while her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the chimney.” I think something similar could happen to me if I let it, or even if I just lie here for long enough. 

My boyfriend, he scaffolds me at night, so I won’t come apart while I sleep. He runs his hands down my legs. He presses our backs together. He squeezes my arm, touches my hair. Like this, I become a body again. I can feel all my hard lines. Being held like this, I won’t just dissolve into bilious jelly, into abstractions or approximations.

But when I am alone, sealed up in my dark catacomb of a bedroom, I realize how little there is left to hold me together. I can feel the heavy pressure I’ve been carrying around behind my eyes like gallons of water behind aquarium glass. When I am alone in my room, I lie down on the floor, under the shroud of violet air, and wait for myself to turn to fluid. Around me are islands of dirty laundry. Maybe I will wash them sometime, if I can muster up the energy. Right now, I’m wearing the stiffest jeans I own–100 percent cotton–which helps hold me together. Like this, I can’t watch the marbled fat under my thighs spill over the rug. I wear a bra under long sleeves, subjecting myself to all the structure I possibly can, so my breasts won’t slide off my body like melty ice cubes. I can feel my body resisting these different cages, all the wires, metal, and stiff denim. Somewhere deep inside, I feel my bones scouring like bridge posts as fluids wash around them, the curious fingers of high tide pulling at wood fibers. Juices roll through me in waves, sloshing against the containers which I have cast about myself. Underneath, my skin feels viscous, oozing. I think if I touch my skin my fingers will come away sticky, slippery.

*

I am sitting in an Intro to Architecture class on the first day of spring semester, and a girl with many tattoos sits next to me. She has blonde hair and wears a baby doll T-shirt and jean shorts which reveal an array of blue-black lines recasting her skin into strange shapes. In class, I can hardly pay attention as we learn about space, conceptualizing it with dots and dashes on tracing paper, as we create depth with lines upon lines, using Maylines and drawing boards to ensure they are perfectly straight. We build models out of cardboard, cutting away orthogonal shapes and adding thin dowels and cardboard planes to create space. It is, I realize, space that is not really there, but instead a suggestion of it. We cut up the atmosphere with box cutters and cardboard; we rearrange the molecules of air. I tell this girl sitting next to me that I like her tattoos, and I do. There’s a good place to get them, she replies, as though she is letting me in on some wonderful secret, in the city just forty-five minutes away, on Pearl Street. 

*

That night after class when the sun disappears, I'm alone in my room looking at myself in the mirror, at the shapes I cast. I have been here for no more than twenty minutes, and already my body is beginning to soften like butter left out of the fridge. Cold air raises scales over barren desert skin. I breathe in the night’s violet gas which comes in through the windows, letting it roll through me. Tension leaks from my fingers, my toes. I think of my cardboard models in class, their corners peeling apart, the dark sweat stains of glue where the model strains to hold itself together. I imagine the sides springing apart, undone. I imagine my ribs popping open.

Later, under the covers. I run my fingertips over my body, mulling over all the possibilities. Hibiscus, peonies, ferns and ivy. Maybe, I muse, this body will house a garden. I imagine the clear panes of a greenhouse, of steam filming the windows, clogging the space as pressure builds. I trace new lines over my arms and legs, imagining fractals cast by windowpanes that let in sheaves of light. Maybe I could be something similar. I think of myself cast onto a flat drawing surface, all the different elevations I could make. A body from the front, a body from the back. A body. 

Tattoo Girl has opened up a new world to me. All semester, as our professor lectures on datums and axes and other principles, I pen new lines over my skin, feeling the nib press as I create iterations of organic and abstract space. Each night, during showers I watch those shapes peel away from my body and puddle at my feet. Each day, I enclose myself into new configurations, following the contours I already hold in the universe. I imagine standing under the shower head wrapped in blankets of steam and my lines staying with me, permanent. 

*

Lying on the floor again, I imagine that I can feel the spider-crawl of movement over me, of new growth. Up my spine curl stems, and then ridges of bark. Tree rings radiate up my arms and around my wrists, adding years to my life. Vines will tether me together, a netting through which I can’t melt through. Food chains wind me up; predators and prey lurk through my undergrowth. I can almost feel their heartbeats as though they are my own. Panther limbs sidle over my stomach. Bolts of steam and plant respiration will unwind over my feet, curling like tides pulled by the moon. As soon as I can pull myself together enough to hold a phone, I call up the tattoo parlor on Pearl Street and speak to a lady named Mindy who helps me schedule an appointment.

On the day of, I look at myself in the mirror one last time, breathing deep. Morning light falls at my feet. Closing my eyes, I collect all the fragments of myself which have begun to separate. I imagine vine tendrils crawling out from my torso and gently pulling all the pieces back into place, harnessing them together. I look at myself in the mirror again. Soon, there will be new webs to do this job. I can see it now, in my mind’s eye, how it will all go. 

Mindy will sow ink seeds under my skin while I lie prone on the table. Under her careful ministrations, these seeds will bud and flower. Stems will braid over my arms, around my wrists and ankles. Tall grass will brush my shins; ivy will precipitate over my collar. Tree bark will shell my neck, supporting the weight of my head, which will leave me feeling lighter than ever. There will be space in my brain for thoughts again, for labor. With each needle prick, I will solidify, skin packing like sod under colossal blooms. Muscles over muscles will ripple as animals leap through foliage. Briars will tangle over biceps, and fat will disappear under lines as dark as graphite. New eyes will open up in new places. My body will be alive with movement. 

Afterward, when I come home, red and sore like a newborn, I will feel wonderfully whole as I lie still on the carpet of my bedroom. My bones will hold together; all these new lines will hold me in place. I will breathe in the nighttime air falling in through the window and feel it circulate under this new ecosystem that I have commissioned. Lungs will inflate under leaves and flowers. For once, I will lie on my bedroom floor, and I will stay whole.