Underwater New York

Division by Elizabeth Pickard

 

Waves lapped at its rust and leaked out the spout.  Tepid where it used to boil.

The teapot had once lived in Brooklyn after it lived in New Jersey after it lived in France after it lived in Germany and so on back to the earth’s iron ore.  In Brooklyn, a woman’s fingers recovered moldy tea leaves from the kettle-sized space on the mantle.  She relit a joint.

Her phone vibrated faintly atop the glass coffee table.  It pulsed from beneath weeks of unopened letters and bills that were tossed there as they arrived.  She stabbed out the joint to smoldering.  Just glancing at the pile of mail prodded her with expectations from the other end of the line.  Tugged at her genes.  A mysterious split of a cell in an egg and then there were two.  Anna and Janna, names hooked by the “j” in their likeness.  Janna limped quickly in the opposite direction.  Past the coffee table.  Past books that would mostly go unread, toward the kitchen, gathering half-empty take out containers on her way.

She placed the containers in a garbage bag and threw in some crushed out roaches.   She scraped in this morning’s coffee grounds and suddenly recalled the used tea leaves dumped in the spot where the kettle should have been.  The realization wrenched an ache like a pulled tooth.  Another haze-induced mistake.  The loss thrust guilt at her through the fog, and she jerked the bag into the hall.  As she did every week, last week just after having tea, she left the garbage bag outside her front door.  The building had no bin.  Her landlord would drive the trash to the nearest harbor as his cheap father had and probably his father before him.  The trash would settle itself in marshes and bays, depending on the current, all along the Brooklyn coast.  Some families’ traditions continued.

The kettle had been her mother’s and her mother’s mother’s.  Passed to the eldest daughter.  Anna was older by seconds. On her last visit to New Jersey, Janna had taken the kettle from under the mirror on her mother’s mantle when no one was watching.  When she was a child, she hadn’t understood mirrors.  She would look into the glass and say, “there’s my sister.” › Continue reading

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Tags: Dead Horse Bay, Elizabeth Pickard, Tea Pot