Synaptic

In a lyric essay, the writer works by art of indirection, presenting the reader with a set of disparate particulars and then writing toward a point of connection. For her final project, Mattie opted for this difficult form as a way of communicating the experience of existential anxiety. Using particulars such as her great-grandmother’s quilt, a pesky hangnail, Jerry Spinelli’s Milkweed, and the skin of an apple, Mattie’s writing invites readers to join in her experience. The particulars are, at first blush, unrelated; however, careful readers will note the connective tissue: picking, fidgeting, skin, fluids, stains, wax, among others. With the “bare-bones” assembled into a loosely connected whole, the shape nudges readers to acknowledge their own fragile and vulnerable bodies. Mattie’s writing is at once beautiful and haunting.

-Dr. Lance Dyzak

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I can’t tell where the plum tree used to be. The year before it died it produced a singular plum. My parents let me eat it. Juice dribbled down my arm and into my sweatshirt sleeve as I mouthed at the soft skin. Delicious. The next year, my dad was pulling its poor corpse out of the ground with a chain and his black pickup. When its roots came up covered in earth and its form laid stretched out on the ground, it looked like a woman reaching above her head.

At the time, my third grade class was doing projects on news stories. Mine was about a man who thought he had a tumor, but it turned out to be a pea plant growing in the humidity of his lungs. If I swallowed the last plum pit, would the same happen to me?

I chew lightly at the side of my thumb. I look at the plum woman’s dry branches. There are dark spots in her bark that look like shocked eyes and a mouth in the middle of a scream.

***

The quilt is suffocating me. I kick it off and rub my hot face into the ridged fabric of my grandparents’ futon. I’m sticky. A bead of sweat trickles from my armpit down my ribs. Dim orange light from the streetlamp filters through the living room window. I poke around for the quilt at my feet. Got it. There’s a hole in the top layer of fabric that I like to pick at. The quilt depicts children playing with a ball and a stick. They all have the same face – big, round eyes and massive foreheads. Some of them are upside down, running towards the ball that matches the fabric of their outfits. A girl in orange gingham might be my favorite. She’s much closer to her ball than the others. Great-grandma must have misjudged the distance. A boy in soft blue polka-dots is missing his head. I pull some of the loose stitching. He is split down the middle now. Grandma won’t like that. I tug at the fabric until the little boy in blue is severed from the ball he chases. Some of the stuffing falls out.

It’s so hot in this room. I’m in hell. I’m burning. I’m dying.

The ceiling fan spins lazily above me.

The bathroom is three feet away from the futon I’m melting into. I extract myself from my wet, scalding cocoon to splash cool water on my neck. I text my parents on the flip phone I got for my eighth birthday: I think I have a fever. Please pick me up. Date night is officially over.

My grandparents are disappointed. It’s nine o’clock at night and they’ve been in bed for two hours. Sleep crusts the deep lines in their faces. I know I don’t have a fever. I just can’t breathe in that house.

Grandpa hugs me. His belly is hard. It protrudes past his belt like he swallowed a classroom globe and can’t get it back out. He enjoys a beer and a nap in his La-Z-Boy after work. There’s a hole in the back of his nightshirt. I tug a little. The cheap fabric gives easily.

I get in my mom’s blue Subaru. It’s December, but I leave my window down even after I’m done waving goodbye.

I’m finally cool when we pull into our driveway. It’s lined with apple trees covered in blankets of snow that sparkle under the white light of the headlights. Deer love the frozen, fallen apples. None are out tonight though.

***

I’m reading Milkweed on the loveseat across from my grandpa’s hospital bed. He took off his seventies style glasses with two wires across the nose. Aviators. His face looks gray and vulnerable without them. His eyes are watery and small. Pink around the edges.

I roll the edge of the page I’m on between my fingers. The librarian might have something to say about that. Any books I checked out in middle school were subject to foul treatment. I wasn’t one of her favorite students. When I let go, the page curls in on itself like a scroll.

Grandpa needs a piss so I step out. I can’t sit on the floor of the hospital. I’ll definitely catch something. I lean against the wall, my finger keeping my place in the book. Nurses in pale blue scrubs rush by me. I blend into the wall. Doctors walk slower. Most of them have clipboards at their sides. I wonder if they actually read what’s in them.

Grandpa calls out that it’s clear now. The whole room smells like his piss. I wish I could open a window. His incontinence bottle sits on the tray by his bed. I can’t let him know I smell it. He’d be so embarrassed. They’re pretty sure he is going to die soon, so I try to give him as much respect as I can.

I resume my position on the floral loveseat, Milkweed in hand. I’m at the part about stone angels. I try to hold my body still like Misha and feel the hard wings sprout from my shoulder blades. I fail immediately. I can’t stop the twirling and folding. All of Milkweed’s pages are curled at the edges. The librarian might have something to say about that. I was never one of her favorite students.

***

I pick at the strands of dead skin around my finger nails. I think it’s past the point of a hangnail. Sensitive crimson caverns line the thin tissue on all ten of my fingers. I can’t stop making them. I rip and chew and shred and taste the loose flesh there. I dig, starting at the bottom of the nail, where most people have pretty pink crescent moons over smooth and undisturbed skin. I excavate the surface until I hit the pink and watery level below. It’s tender. I rub the not-blood around on my thumb. It stings. Whatever I have on my hand, oil, sanitizer, irritates the new wound. Sometimes when I pick my skin bleeds. My thumbs are my favorite. Most surface area I guess. If I bloody it, I put my thumb inside my mouth and suck like a child. Copper. Metallic and slick and disgusting. I wait a few minutes. Check to see if it’s done bleeding. A sting of spit follows my thumb from my mouth.

Everyone in the lecture hall must think I’m crazy. Sucking on my thumb in class. I put my mangled thumb back in my mouth after studying it intently. At least no one is facing me. The girl in front of me must dye her own hair. There is a patch of gray-brown in the center of her head that auburn dye didn’t reach. I wonder if the color suits her. I press my bloody thumb to the outside of my jeans.

I accumulate a lot of stains.

***

I’m nervous she’s not coming. Driving in the rain was frightening. I’m not used to driving in shit weather — my license is only a month old as it sits in my wallet. I haven’t touched the menu. I’m tying the paper straw wrapper into knots as the bell above the door rings.

My cousin, Mila, slides into the booth across from me, her wet clothes squeaking on the vinyl seat. She looks awful. Her dark hair is plastered to the sides of her long, drawn face. She is pale and cold and small. I worry my bottom lip between my teeth. She orders a long island iced tea and extra napkins.

Maybe meeting today was a bad idea. We get Mexican food every week or so. La Herradura downtown has peach salsa we both go mad over. Elaine’s fingers press deep into her eye sockets, so hard it looks painful, before she speaks.

“You think you want the weather to match the grief. So, freezing rain would be perfect. But, it actually just makes burying a child even worse.”

I swallow the bloody spit that had pooled in my mouth after I bit down on my lip too hard. A stain on the white of my sleeve stands out. I can’t tell if I spilled salsa or if I opened my mouth and bloody saliva dribbled out. I rub the red around on my forearm.

She tells me about the way her neighbor boy died. She’d only babysat him a few times. He loved his fire truck and wearing his sister’s headbands as hats. A drunk driver crashed through the family’s living room. He was the youngest of five children.

The waitress brings the long island iced tea, but she forgets the napkins.

***

There’s supposed to be a crunch. The soft flesh of the apple gives way too easily. The inside is grainy like sand. Bleh. I spit. Not far enough. Some of the apple-mush falls onto my white shirt. I turn the treacherous thing in my hands. It’s overripe. The skin is deep red, like blood or a merlot, and it has dark freckles. My mom used to tell me that those are butterfly eggs. If you get close, you’ll see that each freckle is in fact a colony of minute black dots. I toss the apple as far as I can through the corridor of the orchard. It’s always well shaded. Our trees are too tall. Too mature. Their branches tangle with each other. Their roots probably do the same. A disease recently swept through the orchard. The stumps of the infected trees slump like gravestones. The survivors look especially strong next to them. I search for a perfectly ripe Red Delicious. It’s difficult to find.

In fall, the sickly-sweet ferment of our fallen apples perfumes the air. You aren’t supposed to eat them after they fall to the ground. You could get salmonella. But the bees love them.

When we first moved to this house in 2008 I pictured all of our bountiful harvests. Apples, pears, grapes, and plums from trees we didn’t plant. No holes were dug by our hands. All the hard work was done.

Sometimes our apples are delicious. They’re sweeter than the ones in the grocery store. Their skin is thinner and easier to bite through. I’d never cut one of our apples with a knife. I think it affects the flavor. Grocery store apples are coated in an edible wax. That’s why they’re so shiny.

I rub another apple on my shirt. I press hard. When I take it away, its polished surface bares my warped, red reflection. There’s a gray splotch on my shirt now. Dirty fruit. I take a monster bite. Sweet and crisp.

Some flesh tastes better than others.

***

They’re glossy. Pine, walnut, cherry, mahogany, oak. Stacked like bunk beds. I place my hand on top of one whose little name plaque reads: “Congressman.” Another is named “President.” “Monarch.” I walk down the center aisle lined with coffins. My friend wants to be a mortician some day. Odd for a twenty-something. She asked if I’d come with her on a tour of a mortuary she wanted to intern at. I couldn’t tell her no. She chatters incessantly with the short, balding man leading us around. He’s surprised by her enthusiasm. I think he was handsome at one point. He has clear blue eyes that would be startling if he didn’t wear such thick glasses. I feel underdressed. He’s wearing a light gray suit and she’s wearing a long black dress. I pull at a thread on my sweater.

We go through the double doors in the back of a winding hallway. “Staff Only.” In the center of the room is a long steel table with a sink at its head. He talks about how the drainage from the bodies goes into the sewer system. Blood and feces and urine and the contents of their stomachs. It’s not a health hazard, he says. Most dead bodies aren’t.

He shows us the long, pointed tube he uses to pierce the arteries. Then he pumps chemicals in to remove all of the natural fluids that make us rot faster. He jokes that we have a natural highway that makes his job easier. Our arteries and veins help him siphon out our blood.

He takes out the wax he uses to sculpt back on missing body parts. Noses are difficult, he says. They’re the fingerprint of the face. If he gets it wrong, the corpse will be unrecognizable. I nod. This makes sense. Our flesh is not easy to replicate.

I shudder in repressed horror. I should have said no to this tour.

I had a dream the night before about being buried alive.

***

I hear the muffled chirping of birds. My breath is shallow. I feel the hot puffs reflected back into my face. I try to sit up, but my forehead scratches against the rough wood of the pine box. I press my nose against a crack in the wood. It smells like dark earth. Some of it crumbles down onto my chest and in my eyes. I blink rapidly and move to brush it off of my shirt. The box is too shallow. My arms stay pinned to my sides. It’s dark in here. Deeper than nothing.

I pause. I inhale again. I swear I can smell the foul and saccharine soil of our orchard. Did they bury me with a headstone of rotted wood? I know the bark is gray like ash. The stump will crumble like dry sand.

I think about screaming. Instead, I roll the loose skin of my thumb with my pointer finger.