Anomaly: The Cost of Honesty

One night on my way home from work, I found myself pulling off the road and parking behind the old Church in town. My little red sedan tucked away nicely within the massive shadow of the building, out of sight from the trafficked road. 

It was just…way too pleasurable to sit there quietly. Protected for just a moment from the horrible charades of work and home. I felt my spirit in the distance, rushing toward me. I really hadn’t meant to leave her. Quietly, I encouraged her to catch up. 

Please, come back to me. 

This spot became a habit. Whenever I could spare a few moments I found myself there. One day I noticed a subtle part in the brambles abutting the parking lot— a narrow path. 

I left my car in its hiding place and descended the dirt corridor through the trees, emerging into a green field speckled with uncanny, manmade fixtures. A pit of tan rocks. A patch of dirt halfheartedly disturbed by a backhoe. Wooden stakes, spray-painted high-vis orange, stabbing into the earth at seemingly random points.

And yet, swaths of inviting verdant grass remained undisturbed.

As I walked farther into the field, a rushing river emerged at the far end of the lot, flanked by flat, smooth gray stones. 

And then I came back. And then I came back.

My visits to the church parking lot inevitably began to spill over to the entirety of the lot. It was my special spot, a room of my own.

Not once had I seen another person there. I carefully avoided my spot on Sundays, afraid the congregation might burst my bubble. No, I didn’t want to see my spot that way, overrun by churchgoers. I was diligently protective of my one luxurious space of privacy.

Something wounded and shrewd began to climb out of me as I returned here.

At first I just laid in the patches of grass to sob. I rolled and cried out like an animal. 

I clawed into the ground until my fingertips were raw.

I perched on the grey stones facing the river and wept. 

I let my legs and arms hang limp over the edge to be pulled by the cold current.

I ate the wild raspberries on the outskirts of the lot and zoned out, chewing with my eyes fixed on the trees. 

I started bringing a notebook. I wrote startling poetry and truthful notes to the people in my life. I drew pictures in red and black ink.  I listened to music and posted whatever I felt like on social media. I paced around and talked to myself. I laughed and danced like a leprechaun.

 I photographed the ice and the changing light, the giant raven’s circling above, and my own face. The rocks and the sky matched my grey eyes.

I put my hand in front of my face, and stared for a very long time. 

Here, in this spot, I was surprised to discover there was more to me than all the crap piled on top of me. Here, where the outside influences melted away.

I was climbing out from under a dead carcass.

There was one problem, though.

No, not with my spot. This place held me so gently as something beautiful unfolded. Something I might not have been able to survive on my own.

The problem was how I had changed. The changes had weakened me in the outside world.

I could no longer do the things I once did, or play the parts I was expected to play.

The changes happening inside me felt alien and monstrous. As if the animal turned around and suddenly killed the hunter. 

Very much forbidden.

And yet, they made me giddy.

I quietly observed them at work within me. Instead of feeling alarmed, I felt calm.

Deeply satisfied and delighted, even.

An air of curious mischief and purpose encircled me.

For one thing, my core had grown stronger. Literally, even. Before I started visiting the spot, I was like a wispy twig, easily toppled by the slightest resistance. Now, I was solid as a tree trunk. I could feel it in my body. It would take some real effort to push me over. I mean, someone would really have to work at it.

My husband began to suspect I was cheating on him.

He stared at me with deep mistrust as I slunk home from my time at the spot, as though I were a nefarious intruder. A terrible green goblin disturbing the sanctity of his home. His genuine horror made me want to cackle and writhe around.

I had a hard time denying his suspicions with a straight face because, in a way, I was.

We had gone to high school together and started dating when we found ourselves in the same community college photography class. In the beginning, we connected over art and music. We traveled to strange places together to take photographs for our assignments: historic graveyards, dilapidated mill buildings, or the woods, where we searched for the coordinates of a notorious mine shaft rumored to conceal a body.

It felt as though the stranger the history, the more aura a photograph might contain.

I coaxed him into this kind of thinking, and he seemed to like it when I did. He wanted me to take him there. 

The first few times we fucked, It felt like we were exchanging the gift of the world. Blue poured out of me for weeks. Some kind of multi-generational seal was broken. Blue was all around me. 

I began to recognize him as a man who enjoyed my curiosity and appreciated my growth, perhaps because he was cultivating those qualities in himself, too.

About seven months in, something shifted. He had a conversation with his father that seemed to leave a deep impression on him. His dad told him it was time to stop fucking around. Time to get practical and serious.

He stopped taking art classes with me and began taking classes to become a software engineer instead. A shell hardened around him. When I spoke about art, emotions, and life, he scoffed at me as though I were childish.

This was when I made a choice, too. I shed pieces of myself, one by one, to follow him into his life of adulthood. 

I noticed, when the blue stopped pouring out of me, but he did not seem to. 

Eventually, I found myself living with a man I merely tried not to upset. 

In our last conversation, he said, “I thought I married a nice woman,” shaking his head in disbelief.

He felt duped, and I couldn’t blame him. Because, well, he had been tricked. We both had.

He did not survive my presence for long.

Now we communicate through the lawyer his father hired for him.

After the separation, the truth started falling out of my mouth. More and more, to my fascination. Both the beautiful and the ugly. A strange air was emanating from me.

I watched as it ripped tiny holes in the fabric of reality.

One afternoon, during my shift at the diner where I waited tables, the owner stumbled in on one of his usual drunken episodes. He was an alcoholic ex-Marine in his sixties, with tan, weathered skin and gray hair clipped into a buzz cut. Terrible personality. Bad temper. An angry, creepy drunk. The air always stiffened when he came around.

He haphazardly patted the backs of the regulars hunched over their meals at the front of the diner, a huge grin plastered across his face. Then he wandered into the kitchen and began badgering the fry cooks about the unsightly state of their workstation. His words slurred together. They struggled to keep straight faces as he rambled on.

Later, on my way to the back to restock the butter pats, I stopped short.

The owner had cornered one of the new waitresses—a shy young girl fresh out of high school—against the walk-in cooler. He was mumbling something creepy about “being ticklish” and, to my horror, had actually begun tickling her.

Her face was red and panic filled her big eyes as she tried to swat away his hands. She glanced toward the fry cooks, who were looking over their shoulders and pretending not to notice what was happening. Then her eyes found mine.

Our faces mirrored each other's revulsion.

Without another thought, I reached for the giant stainless steel salad bowl from the dish rack and strode across the room. I delivered a seamless WHOP to the owner's big head. The bowl continued to ring in my hands. 

My accomplice was able to sidestep the owner at that moment, and beeline out of the room.

The owner turned to me, bewildered.

I tilted my head. The words came out as though a grizzly bear were speaking.

“YOU DO NOT DO THAT.”

Confusion and fear flashed across his face. Then anger.

The fry cooks were staring now, stifling giggles.

I turned on my heels and sprinted out of the building, pumping my arms. 
“THIS PLACE IS A TERRIBLE SHIT HOLE”  I managed to squawk on the way out, loud enough for all the dining customers to hear. 
The salad bowl clattered to the floor behind me, ringing out a second time.

I caught a glimpse of my accomplice in the parking lot. She was sitting in her car, iPhone pressed to her cheek. She looked tense, but gave me a half-smile as I approached. 

In the short time we worked together, she struck me as an observant young person.

She asked so many questions during our shifts that she sometimes tired me out. But she charmed me, too.

Of course, she more or less fit the cookie-cutter mold that so many young girls here in this small town are encouraged to grow into. Pleasant, agreeable, willing to smile.

But there was something a little spiky about her, as though she were eyeing the edges of her confines. Perhaps even planning to take a step outside, and run. 

I leaned down to her open window, still out of breath.

“This place is truly a shit box. Nothing is worth working here. I, for one, don’t think either of us should ever return.”

“Yeah, I fucking hate that guy,” she said, shaking her head and staring off into space.

I liked the fact that there were no waitresses left to serve the dining room full of guests.

Table 3 hadn’t even received their drink order yet.

In the dark, I thought I saw her grow long, angular green ears. 

Her face changed sharp and clever.

I nodded and retreated to my own car.

We drove away at the same time, in different directions.

Without a job or a husband, I had nothing keeping me from my spot, or from doing everything I loved to do there.

And yet, I was surprised to find that the spot kind of lived inside me now. The place itself felt as lovely as ever, but maybe… redundant.

The peace and curiosity I had learned to feel there was at my core now, wanting to push outward and reach into others.

People had certainly noticed a change in me, and everyone had their own way of acknowledging it.

The last time I saw my sister, she laughed nervously at my questions and observations, dodging them with acrobatic precision and thinly veiled sarcasm. Her eye twitched when I asked about the intricacies of her relationship with her husband.

I pushed further.

“Is there something you long to do, but feel you don’t have permission to do?”

For a moment, I thought I glimpsed a flash of curiosity in her eyes. It was quickly followed by sadness, and finally, a heavy blanket of disdain for my inconvenient question.

She was tall and slender, with dirty-blonde hair and a symmetrical face. From the moment her first child was born, she was a devoted mother. I admired her for that.

Much of our adult relationship lately has been spent with me trying to show her that I don’t mean to terrorize her, but to connect with her.

Please, come back to me, I said behind my teeth.

My history of making my sister uncomfortable is nothing new. When we were young and played outside, I had a tendency to take things too far.

When we played “town,” I micromanaged her every move, instructing her on how to conduct a proper transaction with a store owner. I expected her to play her part perfectly, exactly as I had envisioned it in my mind’s eye. I pushed her to the edge with my intensity until, finally, she stormed away.

“NO, LEAVE ME ALONE” 

Bringing our game to an end.

When we parted that night, I hugged her for three or four seconds longer than she would have preferred.

In the days after losing my job, I found myself taking long, meandering walks alone with my camera, venturing farther and farther from my house in slightly different directions.

In my mind, the aerial map of my walks formed a pointy sparkle, with my apartment at its center. Every mile I traveled outward added another spike.

One day, as I rounded a corner, I spotted my neighbor Helena in the distance. She was waddling across the road, holding something large between her legs.

It was a snapping turtle, actually.

They were shambling toward the river through the woods.

Without thinking, I moved to the side of the road nearest the trees so I could see their silhouettes more clearly. I snapped a picture of them on the dirt road, the autumn afternoon sun beaming down.

Immediately, I felt a little creepy. But I was just so happy to see them. To know they were out here with me on a Tuesday afternoon was deeply comforting.

I didn't know Helena well. She was a Latina woman with strong features and a dignified yet opaque presence. Her husband had died in a car crash five or so years earlier, I'd heard through the grapevine at the diner. She kept to herself, but I saw her frequently enough around the neighborhood to know she was a walker, like me.

I liked how she always dressed in layers of black or red.

After she and the turtle disappeared into the tree line, I walked past quietly.

My ex-husband was preparing to fight me for the house we used to share, but I didn’t want it. It had always felt more his than mine.

My monthly alimony funded my new, modest lifestyle.

The middle-aged couple who lived down the road, whom I’d known for several years, offered to rent me the space above their garage. It was a studio apartment where the husband’s mother had lived before she passed away two years earlier.

I jumped at the opportunity.

It was a strange little space, clearly the result of an amateur carpenter’s experiment. Everything was quaint and miniature, with sloped ceilings and charming compartments. Shiny, off-white paint had been slathered over the paneled walls, giving the place a clean feeling. Sunlight poured into the center of the room through a single skylight.

The whirr of the refrigerator was the only thing that bothered me. The frequency,  texture and tone of it was viscerally imbued with sorrow. 

It had a way of bringing me to the floor, in tears. Taking me apart. Worse than a mourning dove. Like a song I held heavy in my soul, from another life. 

Even this became charming to me, the grief ballad kept me humble and feeling throughout the day.  

I was amazed by the simple choices of creating a space for myself. The house I lived in before was a caricature of normal adulthood. What you might imagine. Untouchable.

Now, I made decisions and watched their consequences unfold. The space was me and we mirrored each other's states. 

The most calming, deep brownish-orange salvation army couch went neatly into the cozy corner of the room. I cut out a skull and a bear holding a heart from a seltzer and pancake box. I used double-sided tape to stick them to the kitchen cabinets.

One day, on a walk, I came across a pile of treasures marked FREE at the end of a driveway. There was a commercial dumpster in the lawn.

I scampered away with three long, elegant white candles, each in a pewter-silver holder, and a dreamlike painting of an albatross flying over the ocean at dusk. I staggered home awkwardly, thinking someone might be after me.

The albatross went above the bed, the candles on the mantle.

I made sure to light one each time the refrigerator brought me down.

At night, I enjoyed editing, cropping, and printing the photographs I’d taken on my walks. I arranged them all on the one big wall in my apartment, adding drawings and poems, too. I liked seeing how they went together.

Standing back and taking it all in gave me the chills.

The sunny yellow photo of Helena and the Turtle was streaked with moody bluish purple incandescent sun spots. It was one of the most beautiful images on the wall. 

Each night I ate the same dinner: chickpeas, tomatoes, onions, and a piece of rye toast.

I went to bed by generating a green cloud around myself, in accordance with the sound of the crickets.

A few weeks later on one of my daily walks, I looked up from staring at a worm on the ground as I passed over,  to find Helena striding towards me.

Before I had time to get nervous, we were standing face-to-face on a secluded back road.

Her presence was striking up close. It was clear she'd been going through changes, too, since we'd last spoken a few years earlier. Her face was a rugged mixture of beauty and question. Open warmth, guarded by shadows.

Her eyes settled on the camera at my side.

“Ahh, you are an artist?” she said, as if she'd finally understood something.

Artist? I thought. What?

She went on to explain that she'd been spending her days painting, and that every day she'd find herself running out the door just before she was about to go mad from working.

“Walking helps me return to the work,” she said matter-of-factly. “It renews me.”

I suddenly realized I was experiencing this conversation as though she were offering me water while I was dying of thirst.

My eyes narrowed.

Paintings?

“Can…I see your paintings?” I managed to ask.

At that moment, the holes we'd both been tearing in this town collapsed in on one another. 

The pitch dark wove us together.

We were inside a black hole, ripping through.

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