Rus
Literary Essay
Open Land
By Wendy Lewis
Featured Story
Table of Contents
Copyright & Reprint Information
Pages: 200
Published: Jun, 2001 - Sep, 2008
Originally published in Mental Contagion
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Featured Story from Rus
I Feel the Cover Closing
December 2001
I feel the cover closing. Every morning, when my alarm clock goes off at 5:00 AM I move brainlessly to the shower after another night of ungathered sleep. I either rouse after midnight every hour until 5:00, or awake sometime after 3:00 and cannot get back to sleep. I feel shapeless thoughts scraping across my subconscious, leaving me raw but without words. I turn on my side, I lay on my back, my stomach. Where is my heart? My irritation becomes a defeated anger, which lays crumpled on my brow. Sometimes I just get up and do something. Dishes. Laundry. I don't trust myself. I move stuff around the house into different positions or places. The dogs follow me, watch me. I think about my mother in a hospital bed, far away. I stare out the dark windows. Safety is a stupid idea. Winter is here but there is no snow on the ground. I am restless. I think about how much hate and greed there is in the world. I try to write but it doesn't matter. Where is my heart? People's optimism annoys me. Everyone pisses me off. I want to go away but I can't imagine where. I have lost interest in running the dogs in the mornings. I open the door and they run into the darkness with each other, chasing and playing, smelling the rich air. I don't go with them. I hold myself but I don't want to be touched. I drive to work in the dark. The dogs stare out the dark windows, watching me leave. I rub a stiff shoulder, stretch, take more aspirin. I work in the dark. I drive home in the dark. I live inside a small, black box. When I get home, I do and say the wrong things. The dogs run to greet me but I don't care. I feed them. I feed myself. The dogs watch me. When I look at them, I see anticipation. I look away.
November 17. I'm on a raft. By 1:30 AM, I am down river..... I am lying on my back listening to another layer of guitars assault the chorus. It feels so good. My body is light; my throat, thick and supple and spent. I have nothing left to say. Instruments nap around the room on the other side of the glass and soft reflections move across its surface. The lights overhead are creamy and yellow, buried in wood. My belly is warm with whiskey. Dope and cigarette smoke hangs in the air. The people I traveled here with are milling around or sitting and staring into it.... gone and there.... all at once. We gather around the fire. The click of the green button, the whir of the 2-inch tape casting and reeling in, casting and reeling in, fishing for where we have been and where we have been taken. Listen. I close my eyes. I hear a chair scrape across the floor and soft voices and the click of the buttons and the hum of the tape and the room swells with sound.
3:30 AM. I am driving in the dark. I am driving home. What does that mean? My ears open and her music falls in. i'm gonna wear this road like a scarf, let it sail out the window and leave a trail unraveling... I hold onto the wheel. I go with her. I am going home. What does that mean? Where is my heart? 80mph, 85.... 90..... Meteoroids are the smallest particles orbiting the sun and most are no larger than grains of sand. My ears throb with music and my heart throbs in my ears. My mouth is full. Meteoroids become visible to observers on Earth when they enter Earth's atmosphere. They become visible as a result of friction caused by air molecules slamming against the surface of the high-velocity particle. Tiny lights rip through the box cover. They hit the horizon, skydivers soaked in gasoline set ablaze and dropped from invisible airplanes. They surf the edge of a black wave like luminescent fish and then plunge headlong, gasping, into the sand. They burst through the cover and burn their whole life up in a second. They give it all for a flash of glorious light.
Look. There is light inside the box. Lying on the hot hood of my car at 4:30 AM, my back propped against the windshield, the cool air gathering dew, the show in full swing -- a sky bursting with death, the indifferent field a steady, cool blue beneath it. I feel my heart beating lightly in my chest. The dogs are in the house, sleeping. I am watching the show. I am in the show. Utterly empty.... completely filled. Atoms to atoms, dust to dust.
If the animal
coming towards us so surely
from another direction
had our kind of consciousness
he'd drag us around in his sway.
But his being
is infinite to him
incomprehensible, and without
a sense of his condition
pure as his gaze.
And where we see the future
he sees everything
and himself in everything
healed and whole
forever.
R M Rilke
Table of Contents
June 2001
Spring Has Arrived
July 2001
The Whippoorwill
August 2001
Everywhere You Go, There You Are
September 2001
The Fast, Red Motorcycle
November 2001
Lifting Her Skirts Under Which Hundreds of People Huddled Together
December 2001
I Feel the Cover Closing
January 2002
Reciprocity
February 2002
What Is the Meaning of Ian Curtis' Death? Where Is the Line Between the Art Object and the Artist?
March 2002
It All Hangs In the Margins Anyway
April 2002
A Few Ravens Made a Racket
June 2002
Turning the Soil Over
July 2002
That's How Long It Takes to Inhale a First Breath or Exhale a Final One
September 2002
Two Separate Forests
October 2002
A Few Snapshots
November 2002
The Leaves Don't Care Where They Die
January 2003
The Holidays. The Hollow Daze.
February 2003
I Am Standing on the Prairie In the Dark
March 2003
Desire and the Dead of Winter
April 2003
Two Soft Consonants and Two Vowels
July 2003
My Mother Left this World on Ascension Sunday
October 2003
The Puget Sound Was Not As I Had Expected
November 2003
Death Continues to Keep Its Appointments
December 2003
I Have Lost Count of the Ones I Have Loved Who Are No Longer Here
February 2004
Love
March 2004
Rescue
May 2004
Spring Windfall
July 2004
Fog Covered the River this Morning Like a Benevolent Wraith
August 2004
Morning Came as Welcome Relief
September 2004
The Moon Is Up
October 2004
For Now, We Will Live Harmoniously
November 2004
As If They Had Never Been Disturbed
December 2004
I don't believe in anything but I believe anything is possible.
All content ©2020 Wendy Lewis via Mental Contagion. Content may not be copied, reproduced, distributed, or transferred in any form or by any means without prior written consent from the author and with express attribution to Mental Contagion. For reprint information contact Karen Kopacz, former director of Mental Contagion.
