Roughage
“She wanted to dig a square hole in the dark mud, lie down in it, and wait for someone to come along and cover her up. Thank you, she would say, if they did.”
The entire day had been spent unpacking the vase—unpacking the vase, looking at the vase, orienting and reorienting the vase—and should it have a mount, and would it be wrong to actually use the vase, to put flowers in it, maybe dried flowers and maybe just for special occasions, would that be appropriate? Probably not, had been the conclusion. It was, after all, several thousand years old. Vera had, at one point, calculated its value in dollars per decade. She had done the math. The math had been meaningless. But more than that, so had the day. Passed. No flowers, no special mount, just a simple, stone base with beveled edges. Living room table. Facing south, so that the light cast a faint green shadow through its glass. Green like cud.
There had been no spat over the vase. A pleasant surprise. But still, beneath each question, each decision, Vera could feel it. Something churning, rough. Choppy, their back and forth. Bile. Green as bile, the vase, that’s what it was. She could see it now in the light. Despite its age. Age does not always make beautiful. Not always.
Vera was worn out by the day, but Jess was pleased. That was what mattered. Their children would grow up around pretty things. Vera had nodded, hands folded carefully in her lap. You too, Jess said, you too are a pretty thing.
By the time dinner had been finished, and the plates had been stacked up at the end of the table, and the kids had been put down in their twin beds, Vera was entirely emptied out in a way that could only happen when she had nothing important to do. Jess, on the other hand, feet kicked up over the top of their headboard, long hair lazing over the sheets (Fra Angelico would have a hard-on for that bleached halo, Vera always thought) was in one of her talkative moods. The conspiratorial kind that seemed reserved for that particular kind of girl-woman who had been the center of a circle of bright, equine beauties at a Northeastern boarding school. Jess wanted to be a patron of the local art museum. She was saying something now, in the frenzied tone she got whenever there was a new fund at work, about curation, donation. It seemed like the kind of thing one ought to do. Jess asked if Vera thought this exciting. But Vera was thinking about Fra Angelico’s yellows. Orpiment yellow, also called zarnikh. Zar, from the Persian for gold. An arsenic sulfide pigment. Toxic. This kind of talk. They were always talking about money. Even when they were alone.
Vera lay down next to Jess. The sheets were cold on her cheek and her entire field of vision was filled by the upper-right-hand corner of Jess’s face—freckled, slightly open-pored, with microscopic traces of blonde hair. The trick, recently, had been to let the idea of Jess as a young woman wash over her, gently creep on top of the actual face, like a film of dust, Jess, or Jesse as she was then, frozen in time, radiating that boisterous energy that was now reserved solely for their time together. But tonight, it wasn’t working. Tonight, Vera saw only Jess—not that she wasn’t lovable, certainly she was, lovable, beautiful, but—and maybe Vera was just exhausted, but she simply couldn’t muster anything, not even anger, not even hate, just apathy. An acquiescence. And she didn’t want sex, but she let Jess have it with her, because that’s that, that’s the way it is, the way it has to be. Though for a brief moment she did wonder if Jess actually wanted it—or if they both assumed the other wanted it. Churning, something rolling and rolling, pushing acid up into her throat, that was sex now, this vacant consuming thing. But then, Jess, rolling over to face her, placed her palm flat on Vera’s stomach, and they both fell asleep.
Vera woke to the curtains drawn. Not to reveal, but to hide. Dangerous, she thought, her mind just catching the fragments, the sleep-thoughts. A strip of moonlight from beneath the farthest curtain. Too bright. Unnatural. She had been dreaming of a black shape, a rectangular box, floating just beyond the garden. On top of the garden, so that the horizon that should break apart the color of the grass and the color of the sky had been blocked. Redacted. Something darker churning within the black shape too. Her eyes ached. Her hair slicked to her forehead with sweat. She was already almost back asleep. Fingers heavy, thinking: not quite white enough, the curtains. Chipped teeth. A head turned quickly, so just a flash of blonde hair and a green scarf—malachite green, Van Eyck green. A dream of Jess. She hadn’t seen her eyes. No way to tell what Jess is thinking if you can’t see her eyes. Her voice always blank. A voice that had never been bent, in childhood, to pleading. And so remained unbroken.
The hour meant nothing and that was at the heart of the problem. Not to say that nine in the morning was late, but Jess had left hours before, which made it feel like a bigger issue than it needed to be, left in the car for work. Predictable, money-earning work that, sure, was entirely unrewarding in any meaningful, non-capitalist sense, and yet gave Jess purpose, something to structure her days in a way that Vera found at once depressing and entirely enviable. Work. Vera had never known work in the way that Jess knew work. One summer, she had spent six days a week volunteering at a church. She was not even religious. Jess had been furious. But the church was solid. The smell of the crushed green velvet on the pews reminded her of something tucked away in a closet. Stored for better days. After her shift, Vera would sit alone, in the quiet of the stone walls, and trace her name into the cloth. Each letter drawn precisely. Careful. Stiff. These few months of her life. Regimented in a comforting way. She held herself taller, let her neck stretch to its full length. That was the only time she had woken up at a specified hour.
Not that she needed to worry. They were very comfortable. Having married so young and having had the children almost immediately had obscured any sense of disorientation. Now, she told herself, she was getting a PhD. Which, at thirty-six, or really at any age, was admirable. It was the first step towards the reinvention she had so long been seeking. Their friends believed this. Even if she privately sensed her own stagnation, a retreat from the present and into a historical past that, try as she might, she would never have any true access to.
She looked at her books stacked neatly, at the idling desktop. Reflected in the screen of the computer, her other face. Cold-hued and pixelated. She tried to imagine it in a veil of thick lace. Like the veils the women she was researching would have worn. She would look very ugly in a veil, she thought. But these women, these women would have been beautiful. Even the ugly ones. They would have been vessels, beautiful vessels for the dance. The “tarantella.” The dance of the spider. Why these women emptied themselves so visibly, gave themselves over to an ecstatic trance, was still mysterious to her. And then to attribute it to a tarantula. She couldn’t grasp it. She wanted to tremble. People always said that you could tremble like a leaf. She wanted to tremble in a different way, a fuller way. Roiling, she thought. She wanted to dig a square hole in the dark mud, lie down in it, and wait for someone to come along and cover her up. Thank you, she would say, if they did.
The garden was cold at this time of year and most of the plants were small, brown things, huddled in neat rows right up to the back fence. The fresh air felt good and gave her the same tingling goosebumps as a cigarette, which made it easier to not have one. She had tried cheating before, but Jess had the nose of a fucking blood hound, it was unbelievable.
Irving was working over in the far corner of the garden, trimming back shrubs and then wrapping them in burlap sacks, like sad presents, she thought, or ISIS victims. Execution style. Irving had been a problem, at first. Jess hadn’t liked him. I don’t like the way he looks at you, she had said. This, despite the fact that Irving was married, with two kids also, had become a sticking point. You can tell what he thinks of us, Jess kept saying, look at how he looks at you, and—however much Vera told her this was ridiculous, wrong, racist even—Jess stuck to it. Call me racist then, fine, but isn’t it also racist to claim to like him just because he’s not white, isn’t it actually more racist? Jess had insisted. Vera had an answer for this, but she kept it to herself. Otherwise, she would get a lecture on Jess’s donations to civil rights groups and social outreach programs. Spare me the spreadsheet, she thought.
The real issue was that the work wasn’t going well. Not in any unusual sense—at least that’s what her professors assured her. You write a thesis, you work through the obvious sources, and then you hit a wall—it’s not your fault if you exhaust the archive, nor is it a bad thing, in fact it’s a very good thing, it means your topic is original, a rare thing indeed in academia. She should be happy. And yet, this dearth of sources, made her feel almost unreasonably insane. Almost. How could she possibly find anything else to write about? Already she had covered Anon and Rankin and Crompton. She had read Cancellieri, desperately looking for any kind of supplementary information, improbable as that would be amongst the dithering of Sr. Francesco. She had perused all the paintings, the extant tapestries, the sketches, even the illustrations of Athanasius Kircher’s score for “Tarantella Napoletana,” namely every little scrap of paper she could get her hands on, and still nothing. The question wasn’t one of first-hand accounts, she had those, the issue was context. Why this at this specific time and this specific place?
The garden air was sharp with an oncoming frost. Sharp? she thought. She always found it strange when people talked about air having a feeling. She wished she could experience that. Instead, it was the emptiness that always struck her. Air was just an absence that could be filled with other things—smoke, skyscrapers, cars, birds. She had, once, when she was much younger, been hiking in a damp forest and, looking up at the sky, begun to sense something pulling her mind out of itself, conjuring her, and she had cried. She had let her body fill with grief and longing and desire she could not understand, until she emptied herself out and, hollow, could stand again. But that was at a time in her life when she still believed in beauty, beauty and nature. She used to think that the real purpose of humanity within nature was to imbue it, to sanctify it as only human consciousness can. Now, of course, she knows that isn’t the way it works. Humanity, that sense of humanity, was dead. And nature no longer existed either. It was, at best, a place that people drove to for an hour, or a scattered cluster of trees at the merger point of the 684 North, or these trussed shrubs that somehow distinguished her yard from the “urban.” She could barely make herself care anymore. Except during disaster films. She always caught herself rooting for the waves, the animals, the solar flares. Come and take us, she wanted to say aloud, destroy us, please, take us right back to the twelfth century. This was something she never could tell Jess, Jess who loved those movies, Jess who often whispered little encouragements to the human protagonists, “run, run, you have to go now!”
Vera crouched down and dug her fingers into the dirt. She could feel the grain of the soil, silted for better lawn growth, grind under her nails and into that soft crevice of vulnerable flesh. Irving was standing above her with a wheelbarrow like some nationalist mural, a WPA project come to life, and so she looked up, holding her dirty fingers in front of her face as if in pride, and smiled. She wanted to destroy the entire fucking human race. She wanted to shriek anger and frustration and sheer meaninglessness.
“Do you have a cigarette?” she asked.
Back at the computer, there was Galatine and Saint Paul, the supplicants and Spencer’s reading of them. But still no real explanation. Cancellieri argued, in his condescending tone, that the fury of the tarantella dance was specifically an excuse used by peasants to make a festival, to make time for dancing without admitting to slacking off. Yet, there were paintings of noblewomen coming down from their Calabrian towers, green in the face, on the point of fainting, to dance frantically, before the church. Spencer claimed it was a pagan hold-over from the early first century, when the Senate suppressed Bacchic rites amongst the Italian populous. And Fernon cited laughing plagues in 20th century Africa and witch trials in the American Northeast to attribute it to mass psychosis. But none of these explanations fully reckoned with the spider itself, with the tarantula. Why the spider—why not a demon, or a spirit, or…? Why did the spider remain at the center of the dancing cure, eliciting wails of ahiiiiiii and black lips that could only be converted back to health by a frantic jig. The spider had no Bacchic link—dead end. The spider did not correspond to some Christian myth-image—dead end. The spider had no relation to folk fears around politics, marriage, or sexuality—dead end. Sometimes she pictured the black, creeping shapes of Miro’s paintings and desperately wanted to jump from spider to the dark feminine crevice, but there was no direct link. So, what she did, mostly, was stare. Stare until the image on her computer screen began to wiggle and blur and then snap into darkness. She sat at the desk, chair positioned carefully so that, looking from the window and onto the garden, her screen faded into a black box softly overlaying the view. She could just make out the fence edging the property, dividing the green of the woods from the order of acreage, of mulch, of plots. Plots like garden plots. Plots like schemes. Plots like the rectangles of soil in which we bury our dead.
Recently, Jess has been doing this thing before bed. The phone had always been a problem for her, she was glued to the phone, the cold light casting shadows on her face, upwards shadows, bad-ghost-story shadows. But now it was more than just the phone, now it was these short comedy clips about the state of American politics. The comedians rotated, but the content was always the same, alarmist news stories with assuaging jokes, fear and apathy. The videos weren’t even truly what bothered Vera (some were quite funny, actually) no, it was the fact that Jess watched them as habit, before going to sleep, as if she wanted to infect her dreams. It couldn’t signal a good state of mind. The giggling. A gurgling sound that emanated rhythmically from Jess’s throat while she watched. Vera wanted to love Jess for it, this giggling, she wanted to find it endearing, but somehow it always struck her as idiotic, repulsive. As if, beneath it, she could hear a scream.
Maybe that was why, that night, she thought the sound was coming from Jess. Muffled by the windows, it almost sounded like a high-pitched laugh, ahi-hi-ahi, and so, turning over, Vera at first expected to see Jess still staring at the screen, an airpod plugged into her left ear, unable to fully hear the insipid noise she was making. But Jess was asleep, the small curve of her shoulders lifting and falling so gently that, for a moment, Vera was held there. In the quiet of the room and the warm sheets. The sound came again, though louder this time, like a wail. From outside, she could already locate it, across the garden and over to the left of the driveway. For a second, she pictured the scene from afar, the house quiet in the dark night and then, suddenly, lights flicking on, a sense of movement, the home turbulent as an anthill under attack. But this did not happen, nobody else had seemed to hear it. Vera managed to get herself up and creep over to the window, but it was too dark. Inky trees, a hedge, black lawn. She nudged Jess slowly. “Jess,” she whispered, “Jess.” A slight shudder of flesh on her left arm. Vera used her index finger to jab Jess there, quickly, like an incision, hoping that, when she woke, Jess wouldn’t fully remember the feeling of it. “Jess,” she hissed again, and Jess rolled to face her, dumb eyes blinking, mouth working before her brain could. “Stop screaming.” “That isn’t me.” Jess pulled herself up on an elbow, patted her own hair. “What?” “I’m not screaming,” Vera said. “No. Nobody’s screaming,” Jess’s mouth was still dry with sleep, Vera could hear the way her tongue clung a moment to the palate. Suddenly, Jess was present. “Oh. In my dream. You were screaming.” Both women held still for a moment, waiting. From beyond the darkness, like the darkness itself, it came again shrilly, ahiiiii. Jess was up very quickly, pulling a blanket around her. “What the fuck? Vera—” Vera could only hold out her arms, unsure. This is what she wanted, had always wanted from Jess, this directness, decisiveness, this need to find a simple answer and force it to fit into place, but as Jess opened the door, too impatient to even see if Vera would follow, and turned on the hall light, the sharpness of her nose, the idiocy of her beautiful features, made Vera feel repulsed, repulsive. How disgusting, she thought, to love someone who wants to destroy all mystery.
They barely had to look once they stepped into the garden. The noise was that clear. Indisputably from the back fence, by the cluster of sugar maples. It had subsided now to a shallow wail, less sharp, but more constant. Rolling across the lawn. Jess flipped her finger across her phone’s screen, tapped on the flashlight. “Holy shit,” she said. Vera thought she knew, before she saw—in that split second as the light switched on, she anticipated it, her mind matching the never-before-heard sound to some primal memory. The deer looked young, its tiny legs still twitching in the back, trying desperately to kick free. Not understanding. The fence’s metal tip had lodged just above the belly, but, judging from the noise, had missed the lungs. Vera had chosen those fence tips, shaped like little upside-down hearts. Dark, wrought iron. The decorative quality had seemed important to her, not the actual security, not the points. That’s what cameras and alarms were for, anyway. And now here was this creature, leaking itself all over the place. “Wait,” Vera said, stepping forward. A stream of black pellets tumbled out of the deer’s hindquarters. Emptying itself, the body empties itself before dying. Where had she gotten that? The smell of encroaching death, bilious in the early dawn light. “Don’t touch it,” Jess said, “it’s maybe diseased. You’re not going to help.” Not true, Vera thought, and rested her palm gently against the tiny nose, the soft fur. The noise stopped. Neither of them blinked. There was crust at the corners of the eyes, a scrape just above the mouth on the left side. In the quiet, Vera could hear its sharp puffs of breath—low and fast—a complete and utter confusion. A denial. The eyes like blank boxes, but there, in their depths, a sense of something moving. A frantic dancing. Erratic. Vera felt her heart pumping awkwardly, palpitating. “Please wait,” Vera whispered.
And then it died. Just like that, she felt it go. Something horrible and also strangely thrilling in it. She didn’t want to close her eyes. She felt as if she could go on standing there, all through until sunrise. “Vera,” Jess called again, “that’s enough.” And, turning, Vera saw that Irving was there too—having just arrived to finish his work before the weekend, to finish his work in the dark morning. “You better go wash your hands, or, no, take a shower,” Jess said. “I will. Fine.” Jess nodded at Irving and, as if waiting for her signal, he stepped closer to the deer. “I can…” he started. Jess nodded curtly at him. “And…do you, want her…” He trailed off, his tone careful somehow, testing. “Her?” Vera looked at him. “You want me to take care of her,” he said quietly. “I want you to take care of it, yes,” Jess said. “Please.” And she strode away, back towards the light of the house.
“What did he mean?” Vera whispered, catching up. “I think he means to eat. I think he’s hoping he can eat it,” Jess said, the click of her nail on her phone’s glass screen echoing across the empty foyer. Decisive. Cold. Their house in the blue light of the screen. “Her,” Vera said. Jess shot her a look, but Vera could tell she was already back in the phone, her face bathed in its glow. Suddenly Vera felt certain that Irving would not be able to get the deer down. That the deer would remain pinned up there. She would slowly bloom in rot and calcified time. Lips green at the edges. A copper trophy covered in verdigris. “What are you waiting for,” Jess said—a statement, not question—as she pulled the front door shut.
Out on the lawn, Vera imagined the long patch of light swinging shut as well, closing the deer into the dark. Into a black rectangle that stood out from the night. Churning against the threat of the morning.
India Ennenga is a writer, editor, publisher, and actor based in New York. She co-founded the publishing house ISOLARII, edits NAIMA magazine, is a frequent contributor to PIN-UP Magazine as well as The Believer, and is currently at work on a novel as part of her MFA program in Creative Writing at NYU.
@India_Ennenga