Here I am Standing in Cinnamon Spring

Here I am Standing, in Cinnamon Spring

She always removed her glasses like that, two hands. She’d take both her hands up and pressure her palms against the sides, forward and down. She’d rub her eyes with the thumbs of her palms, with the rest of her hands angled up in the air. She looked like she was wearing a tribal mask whenever she rubbed her eyes.

But now with her glasses in her lap in front of her and the tribal mask of her hands removed, you can see her eyes though they’re seeing the world from miles away.

And right now those unframed, unmarked eyes are looking across the table to mine.

My eyes aren’t like hers. They hold a spark, a circle of electricity around a dark porthole out to the sea where you can see yourself swimming. That’s what she told me anyway, once in the dark, under the shelter of sheets.

“Well what does the carpet remind you of?” I ask.

She looks down at her feet, undressed with her boots beside the legs of the chair, and to the worn carpet. It was old orange shag, gone dirty like a dog in the rain.

“Planted carrots,” she says.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, like my grandmother used to have.” She pauses and takes a quick sip of water, the cup already in her hand. “The threads are all,” she examines more closely and slips her glasses back on, “smushed.” She smiles. “Like my grandmother used to plant carrots.”

“My grandmother didn’t plant carrots.”

“Did she plant anything?”

“No, not really. She wasn’t much of a grandma.”

“Well yeah, to be a grandma you must plant carrots.” She smiles, but I don’t. “My grandma used to pick up a green plant every time we knelt in her garden. She'd pull it up with her blue gloved hands and put it in mine, rough and exposed so I could feel the dirt and twisting stalks and roots.” She rubs her left palm with her fingers, pushing and twisting them along the creases. My eyes, though she isn’t looking at them, follow every twist and every crease she misses. “She’d say, ‘Marijuana. Just so you know what it looks like. Don't know why anyone would ever want to smoke it. It's just a weed. Who smokes weeds?’ And I can remember I pictured my grandmother smoking a dandelion, taking the almost hollow green stem to her squishy lips and bringing the flame closer to the yellow ball on the end.” She notices my eyes are on her hands and she quickly makes a fist.

She rubs her foot against what she thinks is mine, but then discovers it’s the table leg.

“What about that tablecloth?” Her finger diagonalizes my eyes to the table behind me. It’s just a small table with a yellowed cloth over it, and a vase of fake flowers.

“Church.”

“Yeah, did you go a lot when you were younger?”

“Not a whole lot. But I remember when we did pretty well. I remember a table up at the front, with a white cloth covering some sort of mound. Every few weeks, if we were there, we would take something called communion. But I was too little, so I sat in the back on the red fuzzed pew kicking my feet against the wooden back of the pew in front of me and watching the lines of people move to the front. They'd drink from little cups and tear bread.” He paused and unwrapped his fork and knife. “I still tear bread. I never liked the sensation of sinking my teeth into its soft flesh, but I could handle tearing it apart with my hands. My fingers pushing their way slowly into it and shredding it into some shape. Do you think that’s strange?” I look up to her.

“No, not at all. Animals tear their food, but they just don’t care how.”

“Well, yeah, I suppose. But, something else, I remember that mound under the white cloth. I remember thinking we were the only ones who got to have Jesus’ body. I could see it, imagine it, I guess, under the cloth, all pink and spread out on the table. I wanted to run up and tear away the cloth, showing people his hands and feet and soft stomach. I remember picturing it soft, like a water baby, remember those?”

She nods.

“But I never got to show them the truth.”

“Yeah,” is all she can manage.

“What about you?”

“Oh, we didn’t go a whole lot.”

“No, I mean, what does the table cloth remind you of?”

“Funerals. My great-grandma’s funeral. Been to many funerals?"

"Nope, none."

"Really, how'd you manage that?"

"Lucky, I guess."

“What about the flowers?” she asks.

I look back again to the fake pansies and carnations, an odd combination. “Nothing.” I turn toward her. “They’re fake. They can’t mean anything, can’t have any association, can’t be anything.”

“Yeah, I get it,” she says as she picks up a bread roll from the straw basket in the middle of the table.

“What about these curtains?” I rub the cloth next to them between my fingertips.

“The last hotel I was in.” She tears a piece of the roll and plays with it before setting it between her lips.

“Yeah?” I prompt her. She loves to tell stories, and I know I’m the only one she tells. And I can tell when I’ve found something no one else knows about, something she needs to get out of her head, so she puts it in mine. It is the only way she can talk about anything else with other people. It is the only way she can do anything at all.

"I was with this boy. It was a twenty-five dollar motel, if you can believe it these days, with a remodeled Jacuzzi suite apparently, but I never saw it. Anyway, he got sick. All day he got sick. We stayed the whole day, even when it got time to be going somewhere. We both just lay there on that burgundy flower-printed comforter. He was curled up and facing away from me and I was staring up at the ceiling. Just enough light came in through this small window on the painted cinder block wall to make part of the pink paint not look gray. I remember, the whole room was a soft grey pink, ratty. And whenever I touched him, it was like a trigger.” She pauses and looks again at the curtains. “There was a dark brown curtain keeping the streetlight out. From where I was lying, the light peaked through and illuminated the strings hanging gently down from the wavy fabric.” Her fingertips play with the bottom of the curtain. “It had started to unravel. It looked like a photograph with those evenly spaced, angular and short strings coming down from the brown curves. I didn't have a camera so I tugged on the strings, watched them run along the bottom of the brown or felt them pull out immediately in my hands. I pulled out inches and centimeters and let them fall in the crack between the bed and the wall to the carpet. And maybe this is strange, but I remember a few strings wouldn't keep running along; they got caught on others so I tore them off, broke them and dropped them. Soon all that was left were a few long, graceless strings pointing straight down and a small little ruffle of vertical strings with nothing to hold them together anymore.” She tugs on a loose string and rubs it between her fingers before letting it fall and looking up at me with a smile.

She didn’t tell me she'd slipped out in the middle of the night to hitch a ride away.

The room had smelled like stale breath and sweat, smoke and wine. Rose wine with its good, confusing taste.

“You always think you’re saying something strange. You always give some sort of disclaimer in your stories, like maybe this is strange. It’s not strange at all, babe. You shouldn’t worry so much.”

“Yeah.” She fiddles with her fork. “Why do you think they have forks? This is just a cereal bar, right?”

“No, it’s just cereal night on Thursdays. They probably just forgot. Or, I don’t know, maybe some people eat cereal with a fork.”

“Think any other place has cereal night?”

“Probably not. Eat a lot of cereal when you were little?” I ask.

"No, not really. My parents bought the healthy stuff. You?"

"Yeah, we had all the good sugary stuff. Tell me about your childhood.” She feels guilty that she’s not asking more questions, that I’m getting to know her but she can’t think of anything to ask.

“Well, what do you want to know?”

“Anything," I tell her.

“Well, I was pretty dramatic. We lived on a farm and I had this boy friend. But I liked to play dangerous. I’d pretend to be tied up or gagged and someone would have to save me, but my friend got tired of that. When I explained to him that I was gagged so I couldn’t talk, he’d say at least we got the gag off. You know, like since I was talking, it was off. So I played alone a lot, in the trees where I thought no one could see me and in our old barn with the hole-filled hay bales full of mice or kittens. And in the backyard when snow crunched, the world became ice and cliffs and treachery and I was alone. But my mother’s voice would call me in, and my father would slip the boots off my feet while my sisters ran around the kitchen table and then stood with their long legs straddling the floor furnace grate I slipped my fingers through.” She laughed a little. “That’s probably not the sort of thing most people tell when someone asks about their childhood.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I think most kids are dramatic.”

“Yeah.”

I notice a boy, just a few patches of trampled carrots away from their table, sitting across from a girl with a black shirt. He’s fiddling with a green lighter between rough calloused thumbs. Not wanting to point at them or ask out loud, I tilt my head toward them and raise my eyebrows.

“Remind me of?” she asks, catching on.

“Yeah.”


“Mmmm, the last lighter I picked up. It was clear blue and twenty-five cents from a straw basket in a small town gas station. The town was that gas station, a handful of houses and a railroad crossing. Oh, and this was weird, in the station bathroom I found a laminated sheet of paper with a story about a girl having trouble waxing her privates. A note was scribbled on the bottom that if you liked the story you could ask the cashier for a copy of your own. Dumb, isn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess. But I’m sure the story was important to her, so she wanted to share it.”

“Yeah, but a million middle age women decide to pick up those boxes of wax and strips; a few less than a million stick them on and rip them all off only to be distraught when they find the strip clear and their bunches of dark hair matted and sticky. Pretty common experience, so why write about it? But I guess yeah, surely a few of those few less than a million wander in that bathroom and ask for a copy of their very own. But it was more than that, than the common material, she wrote it all wrong. No one says, I thought or I was thinking. The thoughts just come in your head. There is no introduction. You know? There’s a flash and a thought and a look and then you drop it, and either the flash catches the ground on fire or it goes out, and you keep going. There is no introduction, and there is no conclusion.” Her voice had risen a little. “That’s what I think, anyway. That’s how she should’ve written it.”

She had flicked the flame on before she’d slipped out the door. Its orange glow catching the flyers and bouncing off the glass pane.

“Yeah, you’re right. Sounds like she did it all wrong.” He takes her hand on the table, lightly running his fingers along her knuckles. Her breath slows at his touch.

“Anyway,” she says, hoping to know him better now, “what do they remind you of?”

“The girl reminds me,” I pause. All you can see of the girl across from the rough thumbed boy is her black shirt and long light brown hair. “Her hair. It’s cinnamon. Like burnt grass.”

She looks to the hair, falling over the back of the white chair. Cinnamon like the powder her grandmother had sprinkled on snicker doodles. Cinnamon sugar her mother put on buttered toast. Cinnamon after fire rolls through. Is all of her so cinnamon brown? Maybe the boy with the lighter will get to see and she can ask him tomorrow or someday soon.

She feels a buzz against her thigh and nearly beats whatever stinging beast is in there, but just grabs her phone instead. Home, it says as it buzzes and stings, but she isn’t there and it isn’t here. She looks up to me, swims for a moment, and shows me the screen.

I nod a go-ahead.

She gives me an apologetic smile, the kind you always give when you slip away from a conversation. She slips sideways in the chair then kicks her legs up. She kicks 'em up like a prostitute or a kid playing airplane with a smaller kid. Then she stands, forgetting to put her boots back on and leads her socked feet along the carrot, wet dog carpet.

She takes a couple steps, and there she is standing, her shadow sewn into the threads beneath. She watches her shadow standing and she makes her shadow walk. Makes it skip. Just once.

A morphed smile takes her face, like her grandmother's pinching fingers used to do. She would caress her face in the cold, a rough welcome like salmonella from cookie dough, raw and sticky.

The cinnamon girl is sitting stiff in a white chair across from the rough thumbed boy. Her black shirt has a glowing white bone ribcage that accents her pushed up, firm, lifted chest. She says, "Here are my bones. Ravage them." But she says it without her voice; she leaves it instead captive inside her lifted chest to be silently pumped in and out.

She looks to the girl. Not toward her. Toward her pushed up chest that keeps her voice prisoner inside, beating it with a steady motion and staggered breaths. Come on, just let it out.

But she just looks blankly at her fork.

Her voice will always be captive.

She leaves the black-shirt-white-ribcage-girl behind her, another memory to smash about. The phone in her hand no longer reads Home, but she keeps weaving through the tables of the small restaurant. She can see the paths of the people who'd strolled by before her, piling the thick threads down deeper.

The white-ribcage girl is watching her now, now that her eyes are distracted with her footsteps. Some people wait to look at you until there’s no chance you’re looking at them, until you’re walking away. She lets her feet step on the thread carrots that have already been buried. The others don't stand a chance today, but at least it wasn't her who buried them this time around.

She reaches the entrance of the restaurant, next to the bathroom and leans against the wall. Her thumbs press buttons and she’s in the list of recently received, and she presses Home.

Two rings and her mother answers. There’s the initial lightness in her voice to hear her daughter, but then she switches.

There are fumbled words and soft breathing and goodbyes.

She flips her phone shut and leans against a wall lightly. She can hear her mother’s voice again, hear it ripple with salt water. Her eyes are down, focused on the orange carpet and her socked feet, obviously exposed now on the threads.

Her shadow still stretches out from her and she makes the gray legs move, back on the path she’d just made, through the tables and various lights hanging over them.

The rough thumbed boy is still sitting across from the white ribcage girl, and he flicks his hair back in the same smooth way she'd seen him do everything in the last thousand-seconds. He was the kind of man to read the print on canned coffee. "Real Coffee. No Need to Shake. Refrigerate After Opening." The first warning he would ignore, as he shook all his real coffee. The second however would be a bit more unsettling, she imagines. And she can see him there, ticking away the morning, drinking coffee next to his cold romaine lettuce and Swiss cheese, shut behind the door with light off.

And she can see tomorrow, the double doors in a white building miles away, and she can see what is past them. Her mother’s voice calls her to it. The little desks, the boards and the rooms, and the one blue room with people standing inside. Her mother’s voice calls her in with an echoed sentence of brain injury and yesterday, tomorrow and bad. She can see a calendar with X’s up to tomorrow’s date. She calls her in with Tom, a word she didn’t realize meant so much to her. She calls her in to the cold hospital with ice white floors. She calls her in to going again. And she can see herself there standing. No rough thumbed boys and white-ribcage girls. No smell of smoke and stale breath, of wine and sweat. No brown curtains or burnt, laminated stories. No porthole eyes and gentle fingertips.

146.4, 22.9, blue on a white board, dry erase. 15:49, red digital numbers she’s taking in, not noticing that its the time. Light blue, some sort of design, nightgown. A slowly rising chest and gut, not as big as she remembers. Blue cord. Blue liquid. Blue tube, blue tape just above the upper lip. And there she is standing. His nose, not all of which she can see, looks ragged. But there’s no smell in there anyway.

A soft whishing noise, breath forcing its way down. She places two fingers on his hand, not sure if she should, carefully avoiding the tubes. His hand is warm and soft, sweating underneath the weight of blankets meant to shield eyes from his body.

His ears still work, but she can't speak, and there is no need to attempt comfort with delusion, not this time around.

His movements are involuntary. Any other explanation is a child leaning over the edge of a bridge railing, thinking the ripples from sand they knocked down are those of a recently vanished sea beast.

The people around her begin to talk, telling stories of when his mind wasn't a fistful of mush.

Crosswords and classical guitar.

He stood at a funeral in a graveyard when the rain fell, a million fistfuls of old water splashing against the dirt. Red earth washed into the open grave. And there he'd been standing at the edge looking down at the rectangular hole filling with deep red-sand water. With his hands in his pockets, "Dad never liked to get his feet wet."

And she can see across from her, across the slowly rising stomach, a woman’s sitting, his new true love, her hand brushing his grayed hair from his forehead. Gray from fifty-seven years of standing and sitting and lying down. Gray from the sun and fistfuls of rain.

Earlier in another small room his new true love had leaned forward in the plush burgundy flower-print chair, "Do you want to know what he really wanted?"

And everyone had all leaned in, and across from her came, "Yes, yes we would."

"He wanted a green burial. You know? To be taken into the woods, to drag his body into the forest and let the wolves tear him apart, to be part of the food chain again."

And she'd squeezed her mother's hand.

"And he wanted you," his new true love pointed to her mother, "he wanted you to make the decisions. He knew you had a level head. He knew you'd know what he had wanted."

And she’d squeezed her mother’s hand harder.

Her mother will later tell her it was because of him that she'd made it through her teenage years. And this new true love he'd found too late in life would tell her that she was like a daughter to him, but her mother doesn't know why. She will decide to scatter his ashes in a little tree grove he'd always loved. He will be scattered across the ground in a tree grove he'd played guitar in and shown to his new true love, and brought her mother to when she had needed the shade.

But back in the blue room where she can see herself standing tomorrow, and where the new true love sits, the whishes of breath taking a break every ten-seconds so that she turns quickly and look at the machine. Every ten-seconds, or every five, a compulsive turn though it always had the same meaning. The green line in the middle? It doesn’t really matter. It stays at five. Five might be good.

Tom and his first wife had been married in a Pizza Hut.

She can see, she can remember now, whenever they had come to visit, every morning she waddled through the living room with blue or pink or green hair, "Coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee." Once she asked if anyone wanted to come out to her car. The new brother-in-law had started a bit, pulled back by his wife. And her mother had looked to her youngest daughter in worry, but she didn't understand then, just like she didn’t understand when her grandmother held up the weed. Later the car would fill with smoke. Her great aunt had glaucoma.

Years later in their new house, he would come to stay. It was him or the drugs.

She’d never seen her when she was thin with gray hair, but she imagined you could still see remnants of the pink she'd last dyed it when the light hit it right.

He'd stay and drink and stumble around, leaving bottles of Jack Daniel’s in the couch cushions. He’d go on walks with her mother and she’d fear every passing semi whenever he lost his footing. And one night he’d try to water the house plants with a five gallon bucket of water, but he’d miss. Her mother would find a pool on the oak floor, now the color of milk. And he’d never help again, never wash another dish. And one night her father would decide that was it, he was out. So he’d move to the city, get a job, stop drinking, and find his new true love.

Then a year later, he would fall backward down an icy wooden ramp and hit his head. He'd joke with the paramedics and fall asleep in his bed, curled up on white sheets. His new true love would try to wake him and he'd continue, moved to a new bed in a room filled with blue.

And she could see still, as she leaned lightly against the restaurant wall. She could see, there she would be there standing, glancing up to the red digital numbers, 15:59, still not comprehending what they were. She would just see them, a series of numbers she didn't need to understand. And she would remember the time he'd pulled her aside and told her he had something to tell her later. And with his hand on hers then and her hand on his a year later in that blue room, she would know he loved her and she would know she loved him, but she would never know what he was going to tell her. And she would never knew why.

And she would stop on her way home tomorrow from the ice floored hospital, stop to see her red-sand haired boy, distracting her head with smoke and wine.

"We're gonna have a cinnamon spring," he would say as he wove his fingers into hers, the same red-sand haired boy she’d spent the day with in the twenty-five dollar motel. His left hand would rest lightly at two o'clock on the chilled black wheel, and she would see a red wine sunset in the rearview mirror and in the distance in front of them, a billow of smoke as a stark Merlot, maybe Cabernet, devoured beneath like termites in a barn.

"What's that mean though?" she'd ask, but there would be no reply, not the kind she was looking for anyway.

He'd just keep talking, "Sometime I'm gonna take you to Cinnamon Spring in Montana."

"What's up there?"

"Nothin', but we'll go all the same"

She would look it up later and not find anything in the green topography map online. Well, maybe she'd found it, along the bottom of a butte or hill or mountain, but it's just a name for Cinnamon and Buzzard Creek in Wheatland County, Montana.

Nothin' really, nowhere.

They would keep driving then kiss goodbye, and he would tell her with stars in his eyes, the plastic kind you stick on ceilings, "We're gonna have a cinnamon spring this year. Cinnamon like the prairie turns after the frost has gone." And she would get out and drive some more and keep her eyes on the road, trying to clear the tears and smoke.

She would pass through the town with a handful of houses, that gas station and a railroad crossing, but the gas station would soon be a hollow shell, stuck up in the air like a small burnt coral reef, if coral can burn. Somewhere in the black would be remnants of that white laminated sheet, curled up in the dust.

She would thumb the switch on the clear blue lighter, making the flame reflect back at her in the rearview mirror, a sharp glow in the middle of the station’s reflection.

Cinnamon like the prairie after a fire rolls through.

And she would hear the steady beep in her house when she would get home after she stopped driving. She'd run around trying to find it, desperately seeking it out. Five-ten-seconds, a noise and a turn and a scream. Screaming for it to stop. But it would keep going; you can't chase a sound, a sound like a life support machine ticking away the five-ten-seconds.

And hours after the chase there she’d be standing, in front of the clothes dryer, listening again to the steady beep, smelling the lavender dryer sheets and harsh kitchen cleaner they kept next to the baskets of clothes. She'd call him up with her hand resting on the shaking white machine. She would flick the clear blue lighter and hold her hand up to the orange glow and smell the flame and drop it, not listening to where it landed, and ask to go to Cinnamon Spring.

Nothin' really. Nowhere.

But right now she hasn't heard of Cinnamon Spring, Montana. Right now she makes her feet keep walking on the burgundy carpet, not noticing which carrots are smushed. She makes her shadow turn and sit. But once she sits, her shadow is gone, and she has nothing to direct, only silence and the ripples of her mother's voice. The waitress walks up with another bowl of cereal and sets it lightly in front of her. She looks across the table to the empty chair and struggles to see the porthole eyes again, struggles to swim, but it’s empty so she just plays with the chair leg.

“Anything else, ma’am?” the waitress asks.

“No, thank you. I think I’ll be fine.”