In his youth the director designed a motorcycle based on a drawing of an octopus killing a man. I cast my arms behind me and moved them in diagonal lines. I buried a shard of tourmaline under a rosebush. Julieta showed me how to shut the door by placing my hands parallel and folding them to face my chest. Six of us sat in Petra’s bed while she translated a notebook the sect had left behind. Sharing the bath hours later seven of us asked if anything had changed. We laughed and took turns having our hair washed. Late into the night I wore a baby blue apron dotted with batter and I told everyone, one day I’ll look back on this time and I’ll be like, that was the year I lived in a castle. A bat circled over my bed. A voice in my head said, you will look back upon this time. Hiding under the blanket I heard the wind its wings made. Even the sound was such a circle. Watercress seeds gelatinized in water covered my skin. I led Oksana upstairs, dragged by a spell. He pissed in our laundry. The sauna caught fire. I learned the word circlusion with Jane’s hand around my wrist. I scratched her tooth with a fingernail. A mouth is always bone, and meat, and water.
In the wall of my bedroom there was a door that opened onto the chapel. Joan of Arc in stained glass cast rainbows on the tile. A century ago, a nun needed that door. Sick in her bed she needed it. Watching from her sick bed. Watching compline through the door in her bedroom wall, the nun’s body a host to sickness.
History transferred from the walls to my back while music rose through the floor, can’t feel anything, when will I learn. Bent over a bucket in the courtyard I sliced the guts from one hundred mackerel. Lucia hung a cigarette from her grin and said, you are not a good person. We cooked fries in the hangar. I gave tours. I said things like yes, a convent, and no, not anymore. In a basement underneath the basement a girl drew a circle in the dirt with a metal rod. Jessica asked me to dance but decay got her so excited she had to scurry into a bedroom. Well why wouldn’t a director be the devil, she said, but that doesn’t mean you need to be an angel. Her teeth made shadows at my ear. A pheasant flew into the clocktower and landed dead in the grass. An opera singer plucked its feathers and served it for dinner. There was an egg inside, whole and fresh and cooked by radiant heat. We picked nettles. I spun them into sugared cream. We traded with the neighbour for pigeons. We ate from vats. Ebba told me to look up. Light burned a circle in my vision. Living with yourself is only the accumulation of a set of practices, she said, painting my mouth pink, coating my eyelids in grease.
Behind the chapel there was a room made of windows. When the groundskeeper bought a mate for the peacock the birds were locked there for ten days. The first seven they squawked morning to night but by the eighth they were quiet. Once freed they wouldn’t leave each other’s sides. Maybe that’s all it takes, I thought, maybe that’s just really all it takes.
There’s this video from that first summer of me and Ebba sitting on either side of him. Ebba and I are in matching hot pink Mickey Mouse hoodies with the word dream drawn in glitter. He’s in a white bathrobe. His hair is knifey–dull oiled silver–and he sticks his tongue through the black hole where he lost a tooth as I go, it’s a video? and a voice offscreen says, oh I’m making a video! Years later when I show it to my friend, she scrunches her nose, he looks like Killer Bob. When people laugh out of nowhere, they’re said to erupt. Keep my glass full until morning light. I’ve never seen a volcano.
By now he’s fixed the tooth and cut the hair and given an apology on TV and yeah, I do look back upon that time. I was holding a scoop of strawberry ice cream in my throat the whole year long, reminding myself never to let it melt.
