by ALINA STEFANESCU
12
The local weather-mammal describes a heat wave descending upon Birmingham, an ozone alert. I promise ice cream, ducklings, a trip to the park.
At the creamery, the kids debate which flavor to sample first. The small room is crowded, an older couple complains about kids breaking in line. A student outfitted in the local university logo glances down at her wrist; she checks her steps, measuring them against calories. “We are all daily dehumanized in this economy,” she says to another girl, presumably her friend, who is wearing shorts and shiny yellow stilettos.
“If I used the word dehumanization in my therapy session, my therapist would probably dump me,” the girl in stilettos replies. In her description, the therapist resembles a lover, or the lover’s need for agreement on a certain discourse to characterize events.
The ice cream is scooped into cones and eaten slowly. A large black trash can introduces itself as a recycling bin. The sun’s obscene brightness lays a reflection of the shiny yellow stilettos to rest against the trash can. Without legs. Only recycling bin and stilettos. No one feels connected to the perceptions others make of us. An old man carries bags filled with aluminum cans away from the bin, down the sidewalk. “My hands are too sticky!” M. cries.
We head to the park on foot, dripping ice cream. Reflecting back on his own childhood in his diaries, Robert Musil recalls the boxing matches at school, how the matches spilled out of schoolyards and into public spaces, how he once received a blow to his kidneys that put him out of action. He traces the fights among schoolboys to a marital mindset. He stares at the German child’s socialization in order to understand the German adult, the passion among the middle classes for redemptive war that might restore lost honor or pride. “Every life has something of the sort, and in a biography, it is either overlooked or painted in loving detail, harmlessly, as typical of youth,” Musil writes. “But, in the end, it seems perhaps to have shaped the nature of people today, their capacity for boundless indifference in their treatment of their fellow human beings?”
At the park, a small crew of children draw circles in the sand and try to keep their circles from overlapping. This one is mine, a boy says. He uses a twig as both pen and pointer: to create the space which belongs to him, and then to enforce how others relate to this space.
Seven teens dressed like ninjas pause to ask the small mammal-crew for cash. They are thirsty. The children in the sandbox ask their parents for money to save the ninjas. My kids want to go home or play in the sprinkler. “Everyone else in my class is getting a puppy,” the littlest says as we pass the gas station. The street smells like a wound of piss and scorched asphalt.
13
The danger of the lyric essay is clouds – or the emergence of cloudiness which offers semantic meaning without context. The danger of the narrative essay is oversimplification, or to render reductive, linear, overly consequential – it is to pack things too tightly into a form that feels like it follows when what follows is never quite clear. But the problem with any essay is how many people one must become in order to write it.
29
The question of fidelity usually arises in the context of the lover’s absence. Sexual fidelity implies an awayness, a not being-near.
Who are you when I’m not here? he asked me, leaning against an oil painting purchased on our travels through Romania.
And who am I when I imagine you away from me?
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37
A triad of turkey vultures floated in circles above the wooded area between streets; we cannot keep our minds from joining them. When we ask if the scent could be a dead hog, our professional neighbor in flip-flops shakes her head no. Most likely it’s a leak in a gas pipeline. Decades ago, oil company engineers began adding sulfurous chemicals to natural gas, relying on vultures to circle them, making leaks easier to find.
That’s why it would be tragic if they disappeared, the son adds.
Why would they disappear? the neighbor demands. Vultures eat anything. Her cheeks redden; she asks the son where he got this idea. In my dream, they disappeared after the bees, like incandescent dominos: first the bees and then the vultures were gone.
ALINA STEFANESCU was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald(Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina’s poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America’s Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.
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REVOLUTION JOHN 