What Burns Toward Center
By Cheyenne Nimes
I
IT'S JULY 2, 1974. I'm in a King of Prussia, PA. parking lot, left standing at the passenger side of our Ford. My mother runs to put the grocery cart back. I don't know what's coming. I am instead put in a van by a man I don't know. There is no one out the window- but cars, metallic sunlight. A blue grass field I sometimes play in. And the sound of a jackhammer-- or locusts. The smell is old. It makes me stop crying. If I obey the man, I reason, mother will come get me. I believe this to be the case even as we drive hours down Route 30. When we get to where we're going, it must be the next place I'll see her. I'll know by a sign... if we pass enough parking lots- one will look like the one we came from. She will be walking toward me. Like she's always been here. By 1976 so far nothing. Something entirely else steps in. It's like being born at four. It doesn't happen like that. It's always the middle of time. I understand, though, the motels, the fitted sheet sense of place, this version of home most known. Just a towel rack to help us along. The wildness of nothing. Standing outside myself at the back of a place I hadn't been. Both the movement & arrival folds back on itself. Silver is the color of van- flatcoat. White the color of motel. White-wash. Played out. Where nothing else went now. I am the place he goes to- something back to before for him. Both the shade & the ghost in the shade. There's not another sound in the hall.
II
I have this place outside of here. I stare at stars, night, think how close you have to be before they're their actual size. Stars cut into single pieces of themselves. As if things burn toward center. When I look at them they divide at the next town over. What faces there finds its own whereabouts. I wake up to a foundry, or fields with lines so far stretched they become hoarse trailing an invisible sky. Everything outside a sliding glass window simply exists. Soles of my feet dark in the dampness. Light becomes a form of itself in the corridor between us as sun makes its way up. Just passing through. Paper maps bled white. Straps. Cuts. I don't know where else to go but into this sheen of being there. I distract myself with things I can't come back for- the tribes of children I see in school uniforms, dime stores, or a carnival locked outside of day. Will-o'-wisps. This missing time. There's no past, present, future. Only everything all at once. I have no recognizance, no epiphany at a post office tearing missing children's pictures off a wall (that gives me the most shame, not what he does to me). Either everything is just the way it seems or the pictures make something allright. I know ahead of myself how things burn toward center. Approach out. My pictures are a deck of tarot cards never leaving my hands.
III
He says we're from the South & no one ever questions us, although we're put together like fiction & it requires everything to be what it is. But whatever place I'm in- I know there was a distance traversed before it. Random act. If only I could remember where I had begun. But which is the thing to be known? When I grow breasts a man in another van tries to take me. He has two girls already. Feral. Worn to a shadow. There must have been names taken on everyone forgot. They are sticks of light waving in wind. Exists yet can't be seen. If this wind shifted slightly I'd be them & they'd be me. Some part of the air changes its mind. I know they are a ghost when they leave. I send a message back to myself to wait for them. Or forward to look for them. There is no place I am not from now. A tree caught in flames becomes a horizon. Dead center into a sky where nothing else goes. It's Hot Springs National Park, AR. where I carve my real name -Sandy-into a stone that will later talk to me. I don't know why I'm doing it. I only know to remember the act. The name. Either on the road or later a jigsaw becomes transparent. I put it in my pocket with pictures. No relevant difference between a & b.
IV
July 11, 1980. We're sitting on a curb in Valley Forge, PA. What is it that snapped- a hair up the back of my neck then another. There's a fine film of sound in the night behind us- where what remains is the thing that stands out the most.... Locusts. Shadows press into all places at once-- I see a picture-- I had kept a picture before entering. There was nothing before this but a field of blue grass & I was waiting for my mother. I am from here, the inside, deciduous. Everywhere darkness has entered, the field's waiting. The sky handing down a step ladder. The birds of the sky there also. I walk to find someone & give them my stone. Him sitting there, on the curb, the last thing he says is don't be gone too long.
- - -
bio: 2009 winner of DIAGRAM’s hybrid essay contest, I just graduated from the nonfiction writing program at Iowa. I was a 2009 writer in residence at the Iowa Art Museum. An e-chap Coming Apocalypse Attractions has just come out on Gold Wake
By Cheyenne Nimes
I
IT'S JULY 2, 1974. I'm in a King of Prussia, PA. parking lot, left standing at the passenger side of our Ford. My mother runs to put the grocery cart back. I don't know what's coming. I am instead put in a van by a man I don't know. There is no one out the window- but cars, metallic sunlight. A blue grass field I sometimes play in. And the sound of a jackhammer-- or locusts. The smell is old. It makes me stop crying. If I obey the man, I reason, mother will come get me. I believe this to be the case even as we drive hours down Route 30. When we get to where we're going, it must be the next place I'll see her. I'll know by a sign... if we pass enough parking lots- one will look like the one we came from. She will be walking toward me. Like she's always been here. By 1976 so far nothing. Something entirely else steps in. It's like being born at four. It doesn't happen like that. It's always the middle of time. I understand, though, the motels, the fitted sheet sense of place, this version of home most known. Just a towel rack to help us along. The wildness of nothing. Standing outside myself at the back of a place I hadn't been. Both the movement & arrival folds back on itself. Silver is the color of van- flatcoat. White the color of motel. White-wash. Played out. Where nothing else went now. I am the place he goes to- something back to before for him. Both the shade & the ghost in the shade. There's not another sound in the hall.
II
I have this place outside of here. I stare at stars, night, think how close you have to be before they're their actual size. Stars cut into single pieces of themselves. As if things burn toward center. When I look at them they divide at the next town over. What faces there finds its own whereabouts. I wake up to a foundry, or fields with lines so far stretched they become hoarse trailing an invisible sky. Everything outside a sliding glass window simply exists. Soles of my feet dark in the dampness. Light becomes a form of itself in the corridor between us as sun makes its way up. Just passing through. Paper maps bled white. Straps. Cuts. I don't know where else to go but into this sheen of being there. I distract myself with things I can't come back for- the tribes of children I see in school uniforms, dime stores, or a carnival locked outside of day. Will-o'-wisps. This missing time. There's no past, present, future. Only everything all at once. I have no recognizance, no epiphany at a post office tearing missing children's pictures off a wall (that gives me the most shame, not what he does to me). Either everything is just the way it seems or the pictures make something allright. I know ahead of myself how things burn toward center. Approach out. My pictures are a deck of tarot cards never leaving my hands.
III
He says we're from the South & no one ever questions us, although we're put together like fiction & it requires everything to be what it is. But whatever place I'm in- I know there was a distance traversed before it. Random act. If only I could remember where I had begun. But which is the thing to be known? When I grow breasts a man in another van tries to take me. He has two girls already. Feral. Worn to a shadow. There must have been names taken on everyone forgot. They are sticks of light waving in wind. Exists yet can't be seen. If this wind shifted slightly I'd be them & they'd be me. Some part of the air changes its mind. I know they are a ghost when they leave. I send a message back to myself to wait for them. Or forward to look for them. There is no place I am not from now. A tree caught in flames becomes a horizon. Dead center into a sky where nothing else goes. It's Hot Springs National Park, AR. where I carve my real name -Sandy-into a stone that will later talk to me. I don't know why I'm doing it. I only know to remember the act. The name. Either on the road or later a jigsaw becomes transparent. I put it in my pocket with pictures. No relevant difference between a & b.
IV
July 11, 1980. We're sitting on a curb in Valley Forge, PA. What is it that snapped- a hair up the back of my neck then another. There's a fine film of sound in the night behind us- where what remains is the thing that stands out the most.... Locusts. Shadows press into all places at once-- I see a picture-- I had kept a picture before entering. There was nothing before this but a field of blue grass & I was waiting for my mother. I am from here, the inside, deciduous. Everywhere darkness has entered, the field's waiting. The sky handing down a step ladder. The birds of the sky there also. I walk to find someone & give them my stone. Him sitting there, on the curb, the last thing he says is don't be gone too long.
- - -
bio: 2009 winner of DIAGRAM’s hybrid essay contest, I just graduated from the nonfiction writing program at Iowa. I was a 2009 writer in residence at the Iowa Art Museum. An e-chap Coming Apocalypse Attractions has just come out on Gold Wake
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