Maureen McLane

Echolocation

What came back came back changed.  She would often stand at the cliff's edge and call as if her voice would fall into the ravine where god used to be.  It didn't fall and this observed forced her to reconsider the physics of her metaphysics.  Felix culpa nada.  When she leapt she leapt joyfully and laughed.  These days she hears herself ringing like a glass's rim lightly stroked and pitched. These days she sips from herself, doesn't remember the source, doesn't care.

Sanctuary

 

I was angry with my friend I told my wrath my wrath did end.  The problem of violence: human?  In what ways can animals be said to be violent?  Those that have the power to hurt and will do none.  A violent non-engagement?  I was in love and wanted you to touch me and you couldn't or wouldn't.  It wasn't clear which, or whether both -- some amalgam I was too heartsick to separate.  Cut sinews, bones on the floor, holy water.  Here no one can hurt you.  Here you are safe.  The unicycle: miraculous craft; improbable locomotion.  I never could invent the wheel.

The Farmer's Wife

 

"Farmer's Wife Turns Husband into Scarecrow" -- National Enquirer

Reporters asked why and she said there's no need to ask why, there's a need to scare crows and the husband was more than obliging.

 

He stepped out of himself lightly, leaving the skin behind.  As he strolled featureless along the field's edge, he considered what he wouldn't do.  There was almost nothing he wouldn't do.  He liked to watch the wife come out with the straw clumps, liked to watch her stuff the dried grass into each corner of the emptied flesh; he liked especially the way she worked her way up from the feet to the head.  Now she's filling out the chest.  She reaches for more to plump the head.  He knows she likes to fill a man, and he obliges, stepping out of himself by the corn and leaving the skin nightly for her using.

 

Of course the neighbors talked.  Of course they noticed the resemblance.

 

One day she forgot.  One day she was busy and didn't remember in time.  She'd peeled half the apples, she's answered the phone, her sister went on and so she quite simply forgot.  She hung up the phone and looked at the apples, half bald and half red.  She jerked up and ran out the door to the field.  The sun burned high; the corn stood the same, quiet and green.  The strawman stood the same, quiet and still on the post where she'd mounted him.  The coals glinted in the sockets and a few strands of straw extruded themselves through the lips.  She ran to the post and untied the limbs; she ripped out the stuffing but it was too late.  It was after noon.  The emptied skin hung in her hands.  She dragged it behind her as she turned and walked back through the rows of half-grown corn.

 

It was hard living always out of the skin.  It was hard to give up that bound life.  Nothing touched him anymore, and he'd almost gotten used to it.  Some nights he'd contract into a space he thought might be his body, but then he'd remember there was no particular place he had to be, and without that he couldn't much pretend he had a necessary body, now could he?