To Pull Away

I fight my way onto the elevator and press ten. “That’s the best floor!” says a boy behind me, startling me. His mother smiles tightly. She puts her hand in front of his shoulder.

“Why is it the best?” I ask the boy.

“It has a lot of colors,” he says eagerly. I wait for him to continue.

“That’s it?” I put my face close to his. “Have you ever had fun up there? Do you know anything about it?”

He hides behind one of his mother’s thick thighs. “That’s enough,” she says to me. If my mother were here she would defend me. She would hold my hand and tell me, You are right. I am always on your side.

They exit on the sixth floor, the floor where the babies are born. As the elevator doors close, the boy sticks his tongue out at me. By the time I stick my tongue out back, the metal doors are shut and I’m sticking my tongue out at myself.

When it finally arrives, I am the last person left on the elevator. Oncology is not the best floor. My guess is it’s the quietest floor in the hospital. Things move slowly here. Paper cranes hang from the ceiling above the silent hardwood. There is never a breeze to make them fly.

The quiet is stronger in my mother’s room. She never watches TV, only dozes or reads if she feels strong enough to hold a book. My mother says they gave her morphine. She says it makes her loopy, and she just wants to sleep.

“What am I supposed to do?” I hear myself ask quietly.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Her room has a view of the Santa Monica Mountains. If I press the side of my face against her window, I can see the ocean in the other direction. Sometimes I sit on the air vent and search for it.

“Don’t lean on the window,” she mumbles into the pillow, as she falls asleep. “I don’t want you to fall.”

“I won’t fall, Mom.”

And her yellow eyes close tight. Just like that. That fast. I kick off my shoes and stand on the air vent. The window is tall and wide enough so that I can flatten my whole body against it. The glass feels sticky on my cheek and palms and I wonder if it would hurt to pull away.

A nurse enters the room behind me. “Please don’t stand on that,” she says.

“Okay. Sorry, I’m getting down.”

“I need to talk to you about the prescription your mother refused.”

“Okay. I’m coming.”

I climb down slowly. It was a lot easier to get up there than it is to come down. She must think I look like a child, climbing, stumbling out of this quiet.

Her Mud

Before dirt learned to oscillate, she hid between the rocks. She lay flat against the buildings, curled her body around telephone poles and left her knees to dissolve into the arid wood.

For years it was only Dirt and Earth. The couple never fought, but Earth kept Dirt on her toes. There were days when Earth lay ambivalently beneath her, ignoring her though she was so near. She ran her fingers through his hair, whispered in his ear, “I’ll do anything you want.” He shook her, leaving bruises on her arms and sometimes causing her to completely crumble. Some nights he softly rubbed her back as they fell asleep, and when Dirt woke up to the sun on her grains, Earth’s arms were still around her. He held Dirt so tight she couldn’t move.

Rain was searching for wind. He was away, chasing Space, who was the woman he thought he’d always wanted. He’d be back, he told Rain, and he was sorry. “Space is just what I need right now,” he said. Rain, who was not used to being treated like dirt, did not accept. She began her search.

“May I use your mud?” Rain asked Dirt. But Dirt had never heard of mud. “You don’t know your own mud?” laughed Rain.

“No.”

“Have you ever been wet?”

“No, of course not.” Dirt blushed at the thought.

“You mean Earth has never...” Rain looked at Dirt’s wide eyes.

“Let me show you,” she said.

She began with a light drizzle across Dirt’s body. Slowly, she dipped her wet fingers into Dirt’s dry, cracked flesh. When they had made enough mud, Rain left Dirt and used her mud for ink. She wrote to Wind on a sidewalk, “I will find you.”

She dipped her fingers again and on a lifeguard tower on the beach, “Move with me.”

“Lift me,” she wrote on the side of a barn,

“Shake me,” on a bridge,

“Come back,” on a rock in the mountains.

“Why have you gone where I can’t follow?” in small letters, on a bench, which held Wind’s unmistakable mark of scattered leaves.

*

When the city was plastered with muddy writing and Wind did not return, Dirt took the puddles of Rain’s sadness and made mudslides for her. Dirt came out from between the rocks and moved with Rain. But Dirt was no Wind, and couldn’t move like him. When Dirt finally tried to hold her, Rain dug her blue fingernails into the coarse skin on Dirt’s chest.

Dirt carried her injured heavy body back to Earth and begged him to be with her again. He looked at the bloody scratches.

“I knew you’d be back,” he said, and went out to meet some friends for a drink.

Late at night, in Earth’s locked arms, Dirt often heard Rain outside. The drops on her roof seemed to say, “I’m sorry, I’ll never hurt you again.”

One night, Earth’s grasp became too tight. She wondered if it would be better to be comfortable, alone, but cramp-less, than held in a secure, but painful grasp. She snuck away while he was sleeping.

Dirt spread herself throughout the world. She stained the buildings, the gardens and the beaches. She covered swimming pools, roads and roller coasters. Her pattern of back and forth between Rain and Earth became like an oscillation. She made it dirtier, unable to escape what the filthy world had done to her.