The scene opens on the Rockaway Park subway station. Upstage, there’s a bench and a transit toolbox-- a rectangular metal container similar to the bench in height and length. In the background, we hear seagulls calling and the sound of waves. The station is just a short walk from Rockaway Beach and the Atlantic Ocean. We hear a train pull into the station and then a voice over a loudspeaker.
Read MoreRickie’s got a foot on my head, I’m holding onto a fistful of his hair and he’s pressing my nose so far back it feels like it’s ramming into my brains. Whenever we get together, he beats the crap out of me. I’ve known Rickie since we were little, since baseball camp, when I had thick glasses and a patch to correct my lazy eye. Sometimes, my eye still goes berserk.
Read MoreTom wanted a Cadillac Eldorado but his cousin George said he’d cut him a deal on the Lincoln and when it came to family that was that. Where George had gotten the Lincoln, who knows? His cousin was full of mystery. An entrepreneur, is what George called himself. He loved to lord his vocabulary over Tom, challenge him, stretch out the syllables. On-tra-pri-noo-er.Restaurant manager, realtor, car salesman. Why pin yourself down? George said. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, dabbling his fingers in the air. Master of none.
Read MoreIt rained on and off for several weeks. A canopy of gunmetal grey hung over everything and Bella was gone. The morning after her mother’s funeral she had disappeared and the house on Albemarle Road felt empty without her. Without the red heat from the stoked furnace of her pillowed belly, or the raunchy giggles of her personal perfume it just wasn’t the same. Stanford and Elmer found her room a shipwreck. A violent jumble of sheets and pillows crouched on the bed like a pack of wild dogs. Dresser drawers hung open, their contents spilled. The vaulted doors of the waterfall chifforobe stood splayed. Scarves bled onto carpet, dresses sat in heaps next to hats scattered like lonely life preservers. Only a few keepsakes seemed to be missing; the sliver chain necklace with its St. Anthony medal, her charm bracelet, and the two photos; the one of the baby and the silver-framed picture of the strongman with Bella on his shoulders.
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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.
The circumstances of separation, the severing of fin from torso, were simple. It began slow and subtle. The rot spread from scale to scale, made the iridescent shine of her tail dull. Summer slipped into fall, the rot continued its advance unnoticed. During winter, the cold slowed the process of decay. But as the waters warmed again, spring then summer, she could no longer ignore the rapid rate at which her body altered. How had it started, this change, this disassembly of parts?
1.
It isn’t really a stop, but when I ask him to, the bus driver’s happy to drop me off just before the bridge, right across from the old airfield.
I follow the dirt path on foot. Dry grasses with dun-colored seed-fringes sway in the wind. Low bushes twist knee-height, laden with red winter berries. Everything here is sparse and tight. Salt-stunted growth. The way is turning to sand. I climb the hill and the sky opens to water.
Editors' note: This story was written for Underwater New York's January 24 event at Winter Shack, a temporary exhibition space designed by Alex Branch and Nicole Antebi, who curate a series of site-specific installations/readings/exhibitions that encourage audiences to engage with one another's work and to build community in the darkest hours of the year.
This work was created during the WoW/UNY Governors Island Residency. Rena Priest was in residence on Governors Island in 2018.
This work was created during the WoW/UNY Governors Island Residency. David Andree was in residence on Governors Island from June 25-July 8, 2018.
Drown the bird for luck, she tells me. It will keep him alive.
All right, I say.
The bird is small and yellow and white and grey, a songbird. When she puts it in my hands, I can feel its pulse shuddering against my palm. Tiny thing, I could crush it just as easily.
Read MoreWell then down you go. Spiraling into darkness with the regulator hissing and the funk of the Hudson clinging to your suit like rime, the spotlight held at arm’s length and advancing its bad joke into a slurry of black mud and pollution, the bubbles racing from your mouth toward a theoretical surface as you penetrate deeper into that living darkness which cinctures the earth and makes a mockery of your personal ephemera, of the husband you no longer recognize, of the advanced degrees that belie your fecklessness, of the psychotropic prescriptions that mediate your pain, of her empty crib with its bone-white spindles, of the lewd smile of the young man at the dive shop, of the dappled morning sunlight outside your bedroom window and the ferocious joy it has occasionally instilled, of your fear of spiders and your fear of bridges and your fear of stained glass cathedrals—the darkness making a mockery of love.
Read More“Except for waist-bands, forehead-bands, necklets, and armlets, and a conventional pubic tassel, shell, or, in the case of the women, a small apron, the Central Australian native is naked. The pubic tassel is a diminutive structure, about the size of a five-shilling piece, made of a few short strands of fur-strings flattened out into a fan-shape and attached to the pubic hair. As the string, especially at corrobboree times, is covered with white kaolin or gypsum, it serves as a decoration rather than a covering. Among the Arunta and Luritcha the women usually wear nothing, but further north, a small apron is made and worn.”
— W. Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, “The Native Tribes of Central Australia,” 1899
Read MoreKate was scouting the pan-Asian buffets when she first saw the magician. A few chirpy women were clustered around him, and Kate watched from a distance while he rendered them boneless. They gripped each other’s elbows. They tittered and yelped. She moved to the edge of their circle and watched while the magician folded the nine of hearts into a triangle, stabbed it through with one woman’s lapel pin, an emerald dove, then vanished both from his hand. The card reappeared, unwrinkled, unpoked, in the liner pocket of another woman’s jacket.
Read MoreIt was poker night at the Gowanus Social Club and Jake didn’t want to be there.
He didn’t want to be in the room, which was like a rec room basement, with walls like strips of brown tar, and men with mouths like that, too. He didn’t want to sit at the chipped Formica table, staring at the tits on a ripped St. Pauli Girl poster and the dented dartboard, flipping through a greasy deck of cards and drinking flat beer.