Housesitting at Lake Superior with Angela Carter and bell hooks: Day Three
by Jessica Hudson
Today I shoveled three feet of snow, then finished reading The Bloody Chamber with its twelve-story moral: wolf, beast, count, king, none survives if the woman dies. In other words, the woman doesn’t die, or sleep. She decides. She bleeds. She loves.
I took a moment to appreciate that woman.
I wondered when my period will start, then climaxed in the shower, spine to porcelain, knees spread, like when I was a teenager. Water falling, steaming, just so.
I started reading All About Love right after, curls gleaming, conditioned. Two butterflies with grayscale wings disport themselves on the cover. I imagine bell visiting New York City a few months after I was born. She watches a pair of butterflies chase one another through Central Park’s array of stems and stamens. She wonders if butterflies love to fly. If they amuse themselves riding the earth’s breath, unaware of their own effect. Or can simply living itself be a form of loving?
My fairytaled mind wonders instead if a butterfly has ever landed on the pointed ear of a wolf. I picture Angela drafting that story at her gardenside desk decades before bell decided to trace the flight patterns of love. Blue cursive at the top of a fresh page: The Butterfly and The Wolf.
A simple title for a simple story. Three pages, maybe less. A butterfly lands one day on the wolf’s warm ear. Thinking it a softhaired flower, unrolls her proboscis, probes for the sweet nectar, deep enough to find a tiny vein throbbing steadily beneath the thinnest membrane, her wings stained bloodred ever since.
It doesn’t have to make sense to be true.
The wolf can simply appreciate the gentle humming of her.
Of course, the butterfly and the wolf end up human, turning the sheets red with their new love.
I answered the phone halfway through writing this to listen to you talk to our cat on the other end of the line and ask me several times if I’m still here. Cruel pause. Again I feel a whiff of my younger self. Yes, I am.
Proof that silence too far and long is also a form of absence.
When I remember to listen, it feels more real slips into my peachfuzzed ear.
How do butterflies eat, I interrupt. As you explain it’s more like a tube than a tongue, I ask Google, then add the word proboscis to the line I wrote above about the butterfly drinking from the wolf’s ear.
Are you okay with this? you ask. Does this make you feel like we’re in the same room? I smile as if we are, though snowpacked shoulders flank the miles of highway between us.
For now, nothing more to say than I’ll be here all night.
My phone sits beside me like a faithful pet during these long pauses, its dark screen reflecting a section of the ceiling like the one in my childhood bedroom. Google tells me it’s called stippled rosebud. I appreciate that I know this now.
The blood in my fingers refuses to flow faster, knuckles arching away from the keyboard’s plastic warmth like ten pale cats. I miss mine, his tufted tummy, twelve-pound cauldron of purrs and acceptance.
Where’s Atlas now? I type before tossing the question through the phone. At my feet, snoring away.
The cat of this house leaves the room every time I enter, swats my fingers when I offer them to her. I feed her and I talk to her, but we do not touch. What would hooks and Carter say about that? You sigh out of the speaker.
I notice the backs of my hands are stippled like the ceiling, but with faint pink veins instead of white paint. My seashell nail polish is chipping at the ends. If it’s ready to come off, why does it still cling to these unkempt beds?
Every blink lingers now. I can feel the corners where my eyelids meet. I tap my phone, check the time. Somewhere to my right,, a metal creature designed for warmth ticks to life within the drywall. My eyes kiss.
It’s been a two-hour phone call of mostly spaces and the last love of my night.
I tell myself I’ll go right to sleep after this.
I took a moment to appreciate that woman.
I wondered when my period will start, then climaxed in the shower, spine to porcelain, knees spread, like when I was a teenager. Water falling, steaming, just so.
I started reading All About Love right after, curls gleaming, conditioned. Two butterflies with grayscale wings disport themselves on the cover. I imagine bell visiting New York City a few months after I was born. She watches a pair of butterflies chase one another through Central Park’s array of stems and stamens. She wonders if butterflies love to fly. If they amuse themselves riding the earth’s breath, unaware of their own effect. Or can simply living itself be a form of loving?
My fairytaled mind wonders instead if a butterfly has ever landed on the pointed ear of a wolf. I picture Angela drafting that story at her gardenside desk decades before bell decided to trace the flight patterns of love. Blue cursive at the top of a fresh page: The Butterfly and The Wolf.
A simple title for a simple story. Three pages, maybe less. A butterfly lands one day on the wolf’s warm ear. Thinking it a softhaired flower, unrolls her proboscis, probes for the sweet nectar, deep enough to find a tiny vein throbbing steadily beneath the thinnest membrane, her wings stained bloodred ever since.
It doesn’t have to make sense to be true.
The wolf can simply appreciate the gentle humming of her.
Of course, the butterfly and the wolf end up human, turning the sheets red with their new love.
I answered the phone halfway through writing this to listen to you talk to our cat on the other end of the line and ask me several times if I’m still here. Cruel pause. Again I feel a whiff of my younger self. Yes, I am.
Proof that silence too far and long is also a form of absence.
When I remember to listen, it feels more real slips into my peachfuzzed ear.
How do butterflies eat, I interrupt. As you explain it’s more like a tube than a tongue, I ask Google, then add the word proboscis to the line I wrote above about the butterfly drinking from the wolf’s ear.
Are you okay with this? you ask. Does this make you feel like we’re in the same room? I smile as if we are, though snowpacked shoulders flank the miles of highway between us.
For now, nothing more to say than I’ll be here all night.
My phone sits beside me like a faithful pet during these long pauses, its dark screen reflecting a section of the ceiling like the one in my childhood bedroom. Google tells me it’s called stippled rosebud. I appreciate that I know this now.
The blood in my fingers refuses to flow faster, knuckles arching away from the keyboard’s plastic warmth like ten pale cats. I miss mine, his tufted tummy, twelve-pound cauldron of purrs and acceptance.
Where’s Atlas now? I type before tossing the question through the phone. At my feet, snoring away.
The cat of this house leaves the room every time I enter, swats my fingers when I offer them to her. I feed her and I talk to her, but we do not touch. What would hooks and Carter say about that? You sigh out of the speaker.
I notice the backs of my hands are stippled like the ceiling, but with faint pink veins instead of white paint. My seashell nail polish is chipping at the ends. If it’s ready to come off, why does it still cling to these unkempt beds?
Every blink lingers now. I can feel the corners where my eyelids meet. I tap my phone, check the time. Somewhere to my right,, a metal creature designed for warmth ticks to life within the drywall. My eyes kiss.
It’s been a two-hour phone call of mostly spaces and the last love of my night.
I tell myself I’ll go right to sleep after this.
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Jessica Hudson (she/her) received her Creative Writing MFA from Northern Michigan University. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in several literary magazines, and her first poetry chapbook is forthcoming from Nightingale & Sparrow Press. Jessica lives in Albuquerque, NM with an experimental artist and a black cat.
Website: www.jessicarwhudson.wixsite.com/poet |
