She Sleeps Well

More than five years ago now, when I lived in Elmira (a very poor, very strange city in south-western New York) I thought I had figured it out. I thought I had figured out what it was that I wanted. 

What I learned from living in Elmira shaped my beliefs surrounding the feminine experience. What it is to be a young woman–etc. etc. I’ve been reworking a piece I wrote about this time, and found that, to me,  it reflects the place we currently find ourselves in.

We have to find each other, dear reader. We have to do something. We cannot afford to press our ears to the grass. This’ll make more sense soon.

Mark Twain is buried in Elmira. Nearby remains of a woman are marked with these words: “After life’s fitful fever, she sleeps well.”

Here’s some weird horror–to borrow, or to keep. 

Elmira, New York

–After Life’s Fitful Fever, She Sleeps Well

Mark Twain was buried here, but nobody really asks why. The hills, maybe–they seem close enough to pyramids. He sleeps in the center of Woodlawn Cemetery, under a simple stone with a simple inscription–somehow anonymous despite the signs and advertisements made for his big, bright name. Staked into the ground between the other, less important bodies. This way to Mark Twain.

Twain’s ashes are buried with his wife’s, mixed and without distinction. Hopefully they were in love, otherwise what grows here in two thousand years may be some insidious poison. Dead-eyed dreams say–something like cyanide. 

Stretched and distorted by time, the landscape is just an illusion. The hills in Elmira don’t roll, they bend. It is not a definitive Here, but a kind of graveyard–one with big, iron gates where no one rests. Instead, we lay our ears to the grass and hear our own beating hearts. We call this God, and maybe this is why he stayed. 

It’s romantic so long as one doesn’t think about it. So long as one holds her breath. And she did. 

She wanted to fill the cracks of her body with them–to attach herself as if tethered to death by these words. She wanted to be held. It didn’t much matter by whom or with whose hands–just held here. Filled in and whole. 

Every night, she placed her ear to the grass, and asked to be filled with a ghost–to let them find her, somehow. And every night they came, as young men always do. They ran their fingers through the grooves of her collar bone–carving her skin like water until her edges ran smooth. Feeding on tissue and the notion of staying awake behind her eyes. 

They had names, of course–placeholders for the missing things. She didn’t much mind, having begun to forget her own inside this bended time. 

They would pull her through the bended hills and highways–through doors and up stairs–always to a single, red light. There hung a bulb suspended by something impossibly fragile. She wanted, at once and always, to touch it. She thought maybe Twain had felt this way–that he eased into death like a lover, here, night after night. That the ghosts of this place had shown him how. 

She felt something close to contentment when he sat beside her. He began to speak without sense, and she felt only artificial, red light and the droning from his mouth. He leaned closer, humming in dissonance with the walls. 

His breath in her ear felt like God, but warmer, somehow. More comforting. She no longer cared to keep her eyes open. Tumbling forward off the edge of her body, she took another breath, listening. Sweet and steady. Less of a buzz, now, more like remembering. 

She answered back in his voice. Slow, and though now barely eager, consistent in her wanting. She felt it was okay, here. Twain must’ve felt this way.  

With her ear pressed flat against his chest, taking big gulps of bright red air, she could no longer hear it. She could no longer hear own heart beating.