Cover Story: ‘Shape Without Form’

Second place

I. This Is the Way the World Ends

When I was 7, I was a girl who disappeared. Emmy and I were riding our twin pink bicycles down the beach, right by the ocean where the sand is damp and firm and bike wheels make trails, like the mark of a sea creature that has slithered onto land. It was early evening, and the beach was empty except for the cursive of our wheels, and ahead there was only one obstacle. A man and a boy were sitting in beach chairs, their fishing poles stuck upright in the sand, a cooler beside them. They were the only fishermen left, the rest having either caught enough for the day or abandoned the ungiving sea for one of the inland restaurants that advertised throughout the day on banners flown behind small airplanes over the ocean. As we came upon them, the boy stood and gaped at us. I slowed instinctively, and as we approached, the boy pulled his father up by his elbow and said, “Dad! It’s her! Lillian!”

“Lillian!” the man screamed, “is that you?”

The boy began to run after us screaming her name, and I rode faster until he was nothing but a speck of color on a blurred shore. I stopped my bike and Emmy stared at me, breathless. I don’t know why we were so afraid, but to this day I don’t think I’ve been more frightened. We could still see them, but the sound of wind and waves had hushed them. We had promised Emmy’s parents that under no circumstances would we ride on the street. We had promised to be back before dark. We would have to pass them one more time.

I took a breath and turned my bike around, pressed my feet hard into my pink pedals, and rode against the wind. I did not look at them as we passed, but they ran toward me, screaming.

“Lillian, come home! We miss you. We love you, Lillian!”

I had passed them just out of earshot when I was suddenly catapulted to the sand. My bike had hit a rock, and I flew over the handlebars into a heap on the ground. My bike was mangled behind me, a pink skeleton in the sand. I picked it up and ran. I could only hear the wind roaring in my ears, but I knew that behind me a man and a boy were calling a name that was not mine.

II. This Is the Way the World Ends

I listened to the evening news from the doorway. I didn’t want to get too close. My father had the mail splayed on the table in front of him. He alternated between anger at the mail and anger at the news. My mother had her eyeglasses on her head. This is where they always were when she lost them. She came back and forth from the kitchen where she was making dinner. She sat next to my father and then she went to stir something. I watched from the doorway as the wise cabbage of Ronald Reagan’s face hovered in a box over the news reporter’s head. And then they panned to the face of the man who wore the topography of a faraway land on his head, a map of the country that was covered in ice. According to the news, Reagan was ready to build space stations and fire at Russia from there, and the Russian man had armies waiting in the snow. It wasn’t difficult to tell who was winning. The war was cold.

When the news was over, we ate chicken, rice and lima beans and then my father read poetry to me in bed. My favorite was one by Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” because my father would sing the part that goes, “Here we go ‘round the prickly pear.” With my eyes closed, I pictured Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill,” e.e. cummings’ lame balloonman who whistled far and wee, and when he read Frost’s poem about fire and ice — one of which was preferred, and the other, with the cold war looming over our heads, was an inevitability.

My literary parents did not believe in God, unless you count Frost, and so after my father was convinced by my breathing, a technique I had mastered, that I was asleep, he would leave my bedroom and close the door behind him, and I would come out of the shelter of covers and kneel beside my bed. I would fold my hands in front of me and imagine a room, completely white with no walls or ceiling or floor. I was in a red-and-silver spacesuit and God was a booming but kind voice. I imagined he looked like Robin Williams. He would assure me that this cold war would not be the end of us all. Instead of “Amen,” we would end our nightly sessions with a quiet and devout, “Nanu, nanu.” And like Mork, I would return from the stars back to Earth.

III. This Is the Way the World Ends

I am smoking a cigarette. Fire. And deciding whom among the coffee-drinkers would prefer this sort of death to ice. I wonder if any of them ask themselves these questions or if fire or ice is a choice of hot lattes or iced cappuccinos. I am the only one who is alone here. I brought Sylvia with me, but she already chose her death — by fire — and so we could not have this conversation. The book sits closed on my lap, the blue on the cover matches the blue of my jeans and the green is the same as the green of my shirt and so we match like two sad girls who are alone even in each other’s company. I think now that I should have brought someone more willing.

I am the only one who notices the stack of white napkins on an empty table that blow off one by one and follow each other in a line down the sidewalk. They stop when the wind stops, and pile up on each other as if some of them weren’t paying attention to orders.

From here I can see the shop where I bought my wedding dress. Each of them was a different shade of white: diamond, antique, ice. All were indistinguishable in their virginity, in their promises. Wear me and it will be forever. Each one would be a dress for one day and a story thereafter. Some would keep their promises. Some of them would be worn again, this time crossing their hearts, hoping to die. And each one would be shed from its body and drown in itself on the floor of a hotel room while the body, free, would writhe on the bed.

Nearby, a couple sits at a table. They pass an infant back and forth. It is difficult not to stare. Everything the baby does is impossible. He tucks his tiny hands, his fingers little alphabets, explanations of themselves. He grabs anything with them, even the air, as if he can capture and keep it by making a fist, which is how an infant spells willpower. He curls his hand around the finger of his father and spells need. He tucks his hand under his chin and spells safe.

Lately, I have sobbed into my open hands. I have cried because I had an orgasm, over the evening news, an overripe lemon, an argument about happiness. I have cried because I don’t know if I am alive, or because I do.

The man holds the baby. The baby begins to wriggle and the woman leans over, her chair tilting to the front two legs. The man passes the baby back to her and the baby begins to cry, for though he is always in someone’s arms, he remembers only the brief periods when he is let go.

I should have brought Elizabeth Bishop with me, she would have had few words, but they would have been words I could hold in my hand. I should have brought Anne Sexton, who would have made me less crazy. I should have brought James Dickey, though we would have been in a dark bar drinking bourbon rather than this pretentious coffee shop where no one but the napkins seems to know that we are not standing still. I should have brought anyone but Sylvia, who only reminds me of the moon.

As a child, adults often asked me if I saw the man in the moon, as if only some of us have this gift. I saw nothing, not knowing that the moon itself was the bald head of this face. What I looked for was a tiny silhouette, a figure like my brother’s plastic green army men. I never saw him, but I would feign the sort of excitement I thought appropriate for this kind of discovery. I think what I meant to see was more accurate: a lone soul wandering the circumference of his own cold planet, careful not to step off that white line, thin as a promise.

IV. Not With a Bang

Two blue parallel lines reveal themselves on a white stage. They formed out of nothing. I drop the white stick into the trashcan, but then fish it out. Two blue lines stand side-by-side. They aren’t budging. They are a two-man army, dangerous lines, facing each other but staring at me. Here lies the definition of action and consequence. Here lies the imagination facing the truth. Here is where opposites meet and are the same. Here is where they begin and end, but never meet. Where one blue line says life is fragile, the other says it flourishes.

My husband is quartering artichoke hearts. I can never find them. I tell him that I am pregnant. He reminds me that we have made love only once in the past month, as if conception requires, along with sperm and egg, a hot desire.

We are, before she is born, passing our child back and forth across the table.

He stops cutting the artichokes. There are two piles in front of him. One is of leaves, the soft fur that guards the heart, and the other is the raw meat of the hearts, cut into four pieces.

I make an appointment at the clinic that has “feminist” in its name. This makes me feel empowered. It is my right. It is my choice.

I have to go in the first time for a pregnancy test, “proof of pregnancy,” they call it. None of the proof I already have — two artichoke hearts left unquartered, left whole on the chopping board, nor two blue lines — is enough. Their science produces the same result as mine and I schedule an abortion.

The night before my procedure, my husband sleeps next to me. I can tell by his breathing that he is really asleep and not just pretending to be so that he can pray in secret. He does not know there is anyone to pray for. He does not know that with a magic more advanced than fire or ice, I can turn two blue lines back into one.

I think of who should come with me. I would not bring Sylvia. And I remember Frost, who understood that this world must end, unapologetically. It was always just a matter of how.

V. But a Whimper

I have a child in my belly who has an appointment to disappear. My husband sleeps beside me. It is 4 in the morning, 20 years after Lillian disappeared, or after I was found, and I realize I am still looking for her. The man and the boy seemed so certain that I was her that I have sometimes wondered myself. Where had she gone, a 7-year-old blond child, that she might ride up one day out of the sea?

I think of this man now. He is older, grayer. His eyes are worn from squinting at the sun. The boy has grown up. He has a wife, a child of his own. Every summer, they return to the shore, walk out early with a cooler of beer, a bucket of fish heads, their rods and reels, and they toss their lines out into the sea until the sun falls. I imagine them casting into the blackness of the ocean and reeling in again and again. I imagine them tossing in a net, and pulling back nothing. They stand by the water like lighthouses: immovable, resolute. They say nothing now because they have seen so many blond girls ride down this beach, each one looks a little more like Lillian than the last one and each one brings her a little bit closer to home.

I look for Lillian on bicycles, in salons having her hair dyed black, in coffee shops watching napkins unfold themselves into white flags that pass by in the wind. I look for her when I feel lost. Without her, I am a ghost fleeing like mad, leaving nothing behind me but proof that Lillian, again, ran.