fiction

by Sarah Blackman

A Huge Arsenical Lobster Might Fall on His Head

". . . intellect is often poetry’s enemy, since it limits too much, since it lifts the poet into the bondage of aristocratic fineness, where he forgets that he might be eaten, suddenly, by ants, or that a huge arsenical lobster might fall on his head . . .” —Frederico García Lorca, “Theory and Play of the Duende”

Evoke, o Muse, but don’t wake up. Your best work is done in dreaming. Like my father who, stung by his better nature, rose to complete household projects in the night. Sanded the underside of my windowsill so smooth the grain ran like a topographic map, oiled with his dry hands the squeaky closet door. And I, sawdust in my hair, made that first fatal error. I awoke.

“Tell me the names, please,” said my father, sanding. “Please tell me who is on the list.”

To preface. To backtrack. There had been some restructuring. My father, a federal scientist, was being restructured. My mother, a federal scientist, was dreaming of other bedrooms: anonymous ones? the bedspreads pink as grapefruit? Myself, testing the effects of too much carbon dioxide on bean sprouts for a poster board on which I would receive a B, was restructuring my time frame—stubbing out cigarettes in Orange Crush cans, imagining my smile if all my teeth were diamonds. My sister: asleep, adrift, unreachable in the furious dreams of childhood.

Which makes me the Muse of his Anxiety? Or he the Muse of My Early Morning Enumeration? It was frightening to see my father in the middle of the night wringing my bedpost between his hands like the neck of a longnecked goose. Because, if he woke up, he might see what he had done. He might regret it.

“Mom is on the list and me and Carla. Your father who I never met. Your mother, your sisters. Maybe your first wife?” I had to stop there. I didn’t know who else my father might know in a way that demanded taxonomy. The Burbs of Obligation are not the neighborhood for the great, dolorous mansion of the Muse. I had never met her. It’s not the neighborhood even for minor muses shedding sequins of light large as dinner plates on Saul who has not yet reached Damascus. More like: the neighborhood of misplaced caution cones. The neighborhood of storm drains clogged with pollen. Everybody grew up blind to each other. Anyone at all might whip a battery at your legs as you walked home from the pool. Someone put a steak on the neighbor’s lawn with a yard sign that said, All American Grade A Beef. I did that. I was someone. There was no reason. The neighbors were pork chops at best. Another time, a different neighbor kept an old gray horse in his house. The horse kicked through all the baseboards. It stuck its head out the kitchen window and whinnied at me and Carla as we walked in the morning to the bus.

“Don’t go over there. He’s got a gun,” my mother said.

“And a horse in the house,” said my father.

Suburban muses live on the rough—under bridges, in sumac tangles behind the park. They’ll sell you something. They’ll stand around with you if you want the company. I smoked my first joint with the pastor’s son in the woods behind the church. He had a thatch of red hair as rumpled as a cartoon fox. Snow wrapped around the base of the pine trees like plastic bibs at a seafood restaurant. “The horse would love it here,” I said, but the pastor and her family had moved to the neighborhood in a different era. The house in which our neighbor had kept both a horse and a gun was now the house in which the owners wore sport pants and stored their kayaks under the carport.

“Yeah, okay,” said the pastor’s son.

Suburban muses show up in shimmy-shimmy light, armored breast-plate light that fantails inside pink champagne. Too-drunk outside the reception, I sunk gracefully to my knees in a ditch. This was my mother’s wedding at which my uncle was resplendent in a purple silk caftan and breathed love into our upturned faces, each sycamore-green with shade and too much fondant on the cake. All of this was so long ago. Half as long as humans live. My father is still asleep. He is still wringing the bedpost between his hands. Who knows what my mother dreams. She knows and that’s enough. Muses on the roof fling roofing nails into the azaleas. They root around in the gutters and flick acorns like marbles off their thumbs. Once, a boy I knew climbed the tree in our front yard and refused to come down. “I’m like a squirrel,” he said, “just like one.” Even then, in the middle of his first psychosis, he was only like the thing he knew he was. Much later, he messaged me to ask who Frank was and what I had told Frank about him. “Frank?” I wrote back, “Frank? Frank? Frank? I told him how lovely you were. How much I missed you.”

“Have you ever seen a muse hanging around this neighborhood?” I asked the pastor’s son. Who doesn’t want to be an artist when they are young? Still agape at how new the sex is, our truest selves as cherry as blow-pops stuck together in the glove box.

“Every animal,” he said, “after intercourse is sad.” Then we looked at the woods. He was younger than me. I was more in need of a bib to smock me in chill. Later, there were so many years. So many many many years. So many many many many many many many years.

Muse of Throwing Bottles at the Train, Muse of Abandoned Places, Muse of Toss the TV Off the Bridge and Watch It Shatter. They were a little muse gang. A muse trio swaggering the streets. My father’s Muse of Sleepwalked Chores and Muse of Being Needed in the Middle of the Night: I did not know them yet.

Now, my father is afraid of death and someone else does chores in dream life. Muse of Prevarication, of Keeping Together the House. Muse of Pillow Drool and Washing in your Sleep the Face of Every Dish I’ve Left Set to Soak ’Till Dawn. I would paint a pentagram on the floor and evoke them all at once, but I’m afraid I’d call the gray horse instead. His mad eye rolling. His furious neck stretched through the window like an arm at the end of which the fist twists, braying.

My father never did finish painting that windowsill. I never learned who was on his list. Muse of Other Darkness, Muse of Rotting Plums. It was a misprint. The Lorca quote. He intended Ironical instead of Arsenical—saffron poison of the soul, rather than the liver. My father once tried to clamber out the window. He opened the door to the closet and shut himself inside. I am an artist, for all the good it’s done me. Too-drunk. On my knees. In a ditch.

Don’t wake up—I’m trying to write you a love poem. Something is hovering over us. It does not wash over the heads of the dead with the sweet breath of children. It does not moan like a horse or blaze like the light of swords and sequins. If it is familiar, that is because it is in pain.

“But the backrow lovers,” said the pastor’s son.

In order to puff the milky breath of love into each other’s faces, first we must inhale such tedium. I know, I know. We were promised roses! We were promised the golden cup! But, what falls upon us as we sleep is a hand that shakes us with tender care. It wants to know who loves it back and where the paint cans are. If it was me that ate the last ice cream bar it was saving for a midnight snack. If it was me that called out to it and needed it to come.

Sarah Blackman teaches creative writing at the Fine Arts Center, a public arts high school in Greenville, South Carolina. She is the founding editor of Crashtest, an online journal for high school age writers and artists; the fiction editor of Cherry Tree; and writes reviews for Kirkus. Her most recent poetry and prose can be found in The Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Georgia Review, and Zoetrope, among others. Her first book, Mother Box and Other Tales, was the 2012 winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award from FC2 and her novel, Hex, was published by the same press in 2016. In 2018, she joined the editorial board of FC2. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina, with her partner, the poet John Pursley III, and their two children.