FAWN

OCELIA,

something awful has happened. something so awful I cannot say it, can only, around it, get at or into its specked fur, its frayed ribbon of implications, its filth, its brightness. this is what makes it so possible to write to you. so absolutely under the earth, and never real in any way to me, which is the only real there is. and I as well. you, i consider the key to my parentage. a stand in for qualities the matriarchy admires, the quotient I have observed and undergone, been subjected to. fork against my gullet, will continue to, forever, no matter how I would prefer: prying outside the code, the abashed tardiness, the papers spread like hurricanes, the crumpled stature aside from length or width or shoe, the inability of directness, or unwillingness, or fear, paralysis, of being left—and yet here I go just as we have always done. there is no future. there is only what I leave. there is only the curious after. I am your curious after, though curious in an idiotic way, in the way of daydreaming, projection, you are just a positive form in my hearsay-- the only one. I will postmark these to the mailbox closest your grave, or elsewhere. I will be on the highest psychic alertness for your reply. I will look at the spines of birds by the light rail, I will catch a ragged tooth in the back of an acquaintance’s mouth, I will stop speaking entirely.

OCELIA,

I have no idea when you lived, well, I know between 1720 and 1970. that is close enough to imagine a woman. I am in the same sitting, the same letter of the same day. I laid today around in my mother’s training bra from the 1970s. Do you know it? The end of your imagined time. Jockey, white, it makes my breasts look smaller and fuller. I was lying in an apartment that is not anyone’s, though supposed to be, and receiving praise from far far away. It came over me all at once, the decision not to work. or to not be a worker, today at least. What did you do for work? I imagine you in the forest at night, behind the purple air, or under it, trying to get above. I imagine you eyeing hacksaws and outdoor cold sheds and having murderous thoughts. See? I don’t even know the words for your world. I will do better. But I will not look it up. You cannot even know what that means. It? Not towards the sky, the Cloud-- I will not ask the modern technology, or the archives. I will go inward and unlock it. You are helping me practice. Thank you so much.

OCELIA,

I don’t mean to put pressure on you, because you failed at this, but I am using this relationship to stay alive. I will tell you of how it went the first time I did this someday. (The short answer is, it worked! But did not cure.) You are harder, because you had a body and a life. But I am so desperate for a challenge. But but but. My life is torturously boring and simple. I would like to fail, like you, but differently, and remember, I am sick of doing all the talking. I will do my best to make it easy for you, tonight as I fall asleep. I know our side has the ability and practice in learning each other through dreams. Can you remember any of your living dreams in your maggot desiccated coffin? I believe and do not know that a man around you made it, you would have been too poor to buy one and that was not the way of our woods. I will make one for you—a dream-- it might help if you can answer a simple yes or no, or maybe it will prompt you to speak or show me otherwise. I’m explaining so much to you, I don’t know what it’s like to be dead and alive from 1720-1970. But I feel we are closer, even now, that anyone I have on this earth. I wish you could send me a photograph of how black it is down there, or how you swell when it rains. I don’t even mean the darkness, I mean rich and fertile. And it’s because of you. Maybe you will.

OCELIA,

You dream that you wake up in the cabin beside the creek. This is where you live in the dream, because I have been there. In the dream you wake up and you are thirty-one years old. It is night time, and you are not dreaming in the dream. You sit up in bed, awake, and you can see that it is as dark as it is where you are now, and see before you the silhouette of knowing that you don’t have a husband, or a dog. And you can barely make out something hovering before the foot of the bed: a white, gauzy, long-sleeved dress for a child. it was from your childhood, but not yours, not your dress, I mean, and it is unspooling slowly from the bottom of its hem. In the dream, it is for a child, not the dream, but the dress. it is tall and long, sizeable enough for an adult to wear. How tall were you? Let’s say 5’7. Each thread is extricating itself and coming out as one long thread, as though every hair on your head were just the ends of one big central hair beneath your skull. I have always hoped this. You watch and watch the dress unspool and though you did not know the work of Freud, no matter when you lived, you understand, even within the dream, that you must diagnose how you feel about what lay in front of you. You feel footish, fecal, you feel betrothable, horrific, you feel serene and wet everywhere. The end.

OCELIA,

I must confess I have not given any time to wait for your reply, though I cannot wait to go to sleep tonight. I feel so renewed by the dream you had I gave you. Is it true. Either way, I feel replenished. I have had so little water all day and ate everything in the morning before I knew you were who I needed to speak to. I am so glad--was in abject agony before. I must tell you, before I get to the awful thing that has happened, what I have done in response to it. I have kept all my hair on my body. I have left it there, I have let it sprout and spray across my underarms, my calves, and my pubis. I have thrown out all my dresses except one, one that is shapeless and the same color as my skin. I have painted my face in such a way as though it looks I have not done it. And the closest you can know, for now, at least: I have spent all of my spare time learning about sex and torture and God and violence and dolls and rape and pornography and men and women and Bataille and filth and hysteria and withholding and bestiality and withdrawal and transcendence and psychosis and am thinking something might be really really right with me. that is not with other people. I am afraid I will accept this and see that I must go, maybe to you, though maybe not forever, but for whatever time or un-time permits, no, encourages, needs, needs.

OCELIA,

That is why I had to reach across to you, across the ground, the unmanicured grounds, the wild. I had to reach across the wild to speak to you and hopefully hear from you. To be permitted across. I am not crazy. I want to spend time with you. I want to hold whatever is left of your hand. The women you left and brought forth that I have, we are all so lost. We are trying too hard in all the wrong ways. I have begun to stop, or pivot, as I told you in my last letter. Until I hear from you, I will keep extracting the unbeneficial from my program and add in only that which allows me greater access to you. I know this is perhaps a disturbance to your peace, but I wonder if, like the women you have left, you are lonely, or feel that you were not able to get what you needed with another person before you were taken. What is intimacy like under the earth? Is it bigger? Is it possible? Can you know? Is it possible for me? Do you know things about my life that I don’t? Can you tell me of my un-life, the living before and after the living? If I don’t hear from you tonight, despite my preparations, I will tell you tomorrow of how I prepared and what I dreamed instead. Consider this Phase One: a phrase we use today for those undergoing treatment, being trained for combat, or scientific cell replication.