Strange Little Stories

Staple

alysongreenfield — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:47:59 +0000

It was part of the ritual. They had to put one staple in the center of my bottom lip. The staple had to be put in my lip with a witness present. The witness was allowed to hold my hand. I desperately wanted the witness holding my hand. I kept walking around simultaneously trying to find the one who would hold my hand as I tried to avoid the staple– the thin, sharp, gleaming piece of metal waiting to be pressed into my flesh.

Uterus Onion

alysongreenfield — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 05:55:43 +0000

My uterus is coming out of me as an onion. A very large, pear-shaped onion– a uterus-onion, slightly tomatoey bloody. I don’t know if it is actually mine; if I have had a hysterectomy in vegetable form. I am in a dressing room with mirrors, musty carpet, and dresses hanging over the swinging door. My mother is asking me, “Is it yours?”

I don’t know, and I am holding the thing, the bulb with skins, in my right hand and wondering if it is mine how I will ever push it back up into me– into my cavity. She keeps asking, “Do you think it’s yours? Can you feel if it’s missing?”

“How would I feel if it’s not there?” I ask her back in a panic. ”I don’t know,” she says, “but there must be an explanation for what’s in your hand.”

Another person in the changing room starts to talk about the dark place; the cavern you can’t see that holds so many memories, babies, life, injustices, pleasures.

I’m pretty sure it’s going to be hard to tell if my uterus is missing, and I don’t want to search for the dark place either. I also don’t want to have to find a way to stick this huge uterus-onion back inside of me, when the bottom alone seems to measure six inches wide.

I hope it is mine, and I hope it is not mine. As in, how fantastic for my uterus to really come out of me like this, but on the other hand, how horrific that the space I was hoping to grow children in has turned into an edible part of dinner which will make people cry when they cut into it and fold back its layers.

If it is mine, I want my internal human house back.

Combing

alysongreenfield — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:26:56 +0000

I sit combing someone’s hair. I suspect she is my child. Her hair keeps growing like seaweed and I keep combing it. I am yammering about to a witch or a ghost behind me. The ocean is in my ears. The constant movement of it. I should be with it. I daydream as I comb, of being with the ocean– of not being in a constant state of combing. I lift my head to tilt it away from the acknowledgement of the ghost or the witch, or even my daughter. My ears begin to leak and then gush ocean. I can’t find my breath but I am smiling. I am in my own aquarium now. I am a beautiful sea creature.

Fish

alysongreenfield — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 07:00:26 +0000

The fish was a fish. The fish was a beanbag. The fish was covered in a black beanbag version of itself. I could feel its cloth and its tiny beads, and its actual self swimming inside the beanbag version of itself.

I was in a school. There was a fish outside of an aquarium in a big plastic baggie. I left it there for too long. The teacher in the room gave me another fish right out of her aquarium, put it in a bag, and said, “You must take both of them now. That other one has been sitting so long.”

I went as fast as I could to a large aquarium sitting in the hallway outside some classrooms on another floor of the school. I dropped the fish that had been sitting too long out of the baggie and into the aquarium. As it dropped into the water, it morphed into a hard, plastic version of itself, and split into two halves with clear beads spilling out.

I was devastated. The fish had died. It was my fault. I kept it outside the aquarium for too long. Then I dropped the other fish out of its baggie and into the aquarium. When it hit the water it was on its back with wide eyes, trying to gulp water or air like it might not make it.