I would’ve been capable of violence, I know it, I was afraid of it.

— Carl Jung

Began with wind tossing dried helicopter seeds willy nilly across the asphalt. It had been a hot July. It would be a hot August. Nothing much had happened. Floods washed out the creek, wide now like hips or ears. Two-ton blocks of concrete to stack. Against eroding, we’d have to see how it works years into the future, but now, plans for mint and daylilies to keep soil together. Keep it sane.

Swallow tail back on the lilac. My mind better for lists. That energy in the air, school yard at recess. Two bees taking a break from hibiscus to mate, other options.

Last few nights dinner had been popcorn, biggest popped kernels you would ever see, fresh from the Amish family down the road. Salted and the slick oiled sides of a steel bowl, on the kitchen table.

ºº

Picks through the stack of mail, says, Well, at least we don’t owe anybody any money. That gifted and talented program had saved my life but I couldn’t tell it. Another night dreaming of the cows.

This time, over 1000, right after seeing the large, wide field I was in. Someone let them loose, aggressive, oversized. I was barefoot, looking around for a place to get up off the ground. My telephone suddenly across the field from me, them in the middle of us. A monster (cow-dino mix) comes out around a corner at me but I wake fast.

Dull from the headaches.

What are you looking for, as he’s rummaging.

Nothing. Nosy.

ºº

I can see he’s drawn plans on paper. The number 30 and the line abbreviating the feet. Right angle of two walls coming together but they don’t want me to know what they are building. [1]

Static. I got bored imagining their actions, and what I like most probably appears static. But I am also asking myself how these invisible things move. What he remembers, for example, or the lack of feeling in her pinky fingers.

I wanna get a stone for her grave, even if nobody’s there.

Sharp look in her direction.

She goes on. I’ve been to the monument place, priced some things. We can take a collection.

What does mutual interdependence even look like?

The noise of tractor passes. At her feet, an ant hauling away a bee carcass. So much carried out in waiting.

Well where would you put it?

By Angela and Joann’s stones.

Lenny walks in mid-sentence, well I see you already started.

ºº

Collections of dishes which would never be together again. And to complicate matters he kept buying the wrong pattern at every flea market he happened on. My cousin sees the family tree in front of her and climbs on it, building higher branches when she can, she’s limber. The POW ancestor during the Civil War, dying in a camp outside Chicago. How did they decide it would be sh and not ch?

My biggest was wanting them to be better people. Than they want to be. A POW, white southern landowner, dying of pneumonia in a camp. My cousin said, I don’t belong to anything except the Dowters of the Amurican Revolution and that’s only to use their online resources.

This time the wind blew the screen door open and the wood door behind it.[2]

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Because of relatives, her old room taken, so she slept in her dead grandmother’s room. I didn’t dream that night.

The next night, I was on the phone with G, her son, my uncle, and I knew he was going to see her and knew where she was. Tell me where she is, she slipping away, or hiding, hard to know.

ºº

She approached the barn, he was turning out table legs, shooting off sawdust in every direction. He didn’t see her; she hung back towards the door so not to scare him. Where else could she go? She said his name three times, then yelled. He jumped and cut the machine off, launched right in to showing her the other three table legs he’d just turned out. It’s really easy to do the first one, he says.

Then he walks her around the shop again, shows her the furniture he’s made from sassafras. A beautiful color.

What’s on your mind?

Nothing, kicking dirt. Just stopped by to say hi.

Well don’t hurry off.

I don’t want to get in your way.

Well. I made a mistake on that one, points to a table leg. I gotta do a lot more work on them, sanding and smoothing.

They look fine to me.

Aw, gotta do a lot more work.

ºº

Conversations went on like this, all illusion and no touching, floating around like a ghost in his woodshop full of homemade furniture he’d seen once in a book.    

I sat in back of his house, outside, to use the internet and be alone. The cat came and cleaned himself on me and his cat voice was hoarse.

A beeping and a backing up.[3]

He used the n-word the first night she was home, in passing, describing candy. She didn’t know what to say and he kept talking, moving to other kinds of food he liked. But you can’t beat fresh popped corn or a good mess of pinto beans.

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She cooked off and on all day. Pork roasts, gravy, rice, green beans, black-eyed peas, cornbread and rolls, and a big green salad with a handful of fresh greens from her garden. Several signs of her anxiety included asking anyone in the kitchen who moved even one inch what they needed, did they have enough of this or that. Another sign was worrying about the hot tub having a leak. Can you check that Danny, nearly 10 times.

I forgot I was to be helping her. It was relieving.

ºº

I have wanted to get beyond this but the wind blowing in here every day from a different direction.

Two years ago, he was doing community service for painting a swastika on the barn wall of a family with an adopted Black son. Now he wants to tell me about the best book he ever read, The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama.

His father quickly interrupts all the sentences of his that trail off at the end. Which is all of them.

What I might say burbling in a large, boiling pot. Forbearance messy and cancer inducing. Do we say then that his de-escalation from hitting them outright to screaming to caged passive-aggressive insults were the stages of his development?

First disappointed with the messiness, the don’t talk don’t look. We had this in common, even not talking about what we didn’t talk about. Everybody could see it but him. Ghosts in the ghost room, shots in the shower.  My mighty deranged believing: tarps. This is the same nylon right here, we made it and tied things up with it. Even that little gesture, pretending to scratch my nose with my middle finger, that tic. What’d you come in her for? Why you need to know, you writing a book?

ºº

Why do they think the worst thing they can say is the truest?[4]

I was away so long, but here I looked like them, and when our relatives came up from Florida, I saw where my hands came from.

The mother explains to her small child that the woman lives in another country [Germany] where they speak another language [German]. She says, why don’t you ask her how to say something in that language? She says, what do you want her to say? The girl looks left, right. The bubbles in the hot tub tickling her back. She says, how do you say, Come over here and EAT THIS CAKE!

ºº

The door in the synthesis, propped open by a bobby pin. Kept tracing patterns with her fingers and couldn’t be still so rode the small 4-wheeler around his yard.

What Daddy say about that?

He didn’t know about it.

Cause he got all upset when his grandkids rode one on his land.

D and his friend J were riding one day, boys you know, and they come through that part of the field on the right side of the creek where it dips up and down over and over again and they had it wide open and jumpin’ around and D was driving, said he turned around and saw J holding on and his legs out behind him like he was flying and then he said to himself I just closed my eyes Daddy and jumped off.

ºº

We take turns lying down where our great grandmother dropped dead. In the garden: here. I done said it. All. Nothing recognizable about the horse he hit. Paid him to go away. Meth all around all these hills, you don’t wanna know. Took her kids away, took her back pay. I can’t tell him anything.

I don’t know if my ancestors had hopes. I know in summers the men drove down south, rolled up their shirt sleeves for gallons of homemade moonshine, shitfaced, scaring the neighbors, four brothers drunk and playing cards but they: was strangers to us.[5]

He leaves the table when the young ones talk about their uncles, whenever they talk about: those Catholics and their ways.

I used to meet them down at the interstate, by the Booby Bungalow, they’d order a gallon a moonshine ahead a time and I’d bring it to them.

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I slept that one night in my dead grandmother’s room and I did not dream. I slept that one night in her room and lights from streetlamps and rush of open mufflers. I slept in her dead room: what dream there.         Slept that one night. Tried contacting her through my cortices, through my dashes. That next night, a man parked his car on the road, got out and lit a cigarette across the ditch, puffed and looked at his phone. That night I woke up and a raspy voice beside me in her house, beside a pallet on the floor where I slept, had I told him I would sleep there, that raspy voice I took care of it. They don’t want to see I took care of it, got in his car or got him out of her house. I took care of it: shielded everybody. They don’t want to see I slept that one night, or I didn’t sleep in his car as he drove me to the place he wanted to show me: meteors, a lie about meteors. I didn’t sleep, slow and alcohol. I said I took care of it. I slept: that involuntary shaking of the nervous system keeping me warm.

ºº

Failing as woman, white girl, failing, falling. Can I meet you there: then: how. A fan of nothing, they about hit me, they about running the well dry scrubbing clothes. I was a matter of taste.

ºº

I was a matter of choice. But a lie there was no choice, only no-ing. That lady and her lost coin, cleaning the house for it, “saved” one way to exclude.

At a moment, a wish to depart. That tic means we got up and early. Don’t worry, they’ll be expecting you.

ºº

These people all jabbing, roots of dandelion, want want want. This morning the hawk flew down in front of the window, accompanied, chased, by blackbirds. Flew into the catalpa tree, half dead with cold. I opened the windows first thing, opened the door. The garbage stunk out back. Nothing could be heard above the wind. But it only reminded of tornadoes he’d seen. Two in a week’s span.

I just went in! To get my sausage and biscuit from the store! When I come out! The brick building across the street was gone! I mean! gone!

Do you know what I am telling you? Believe or don’t. That relative walks in, sits down, gesturing. Years since we’ve seen her, I know there is no way of knowing everything, but the letters she has. [6]

A story we’ve never heard, one of her mother’s sisters, also born in America, got pregnant as a teenager and the family hid it, sent her away, sent news away. In the dream I saw the blood drain from her face. Sitting an outdoor café, across from a young man, in her novitiate’s uniform, hair uncovered.

She knew who I was and why I had come. The lady goes on.

They all left me, she says, they all left, all of them. And she had the audacity to tell me when our mother died, take care of daddy for me. I thought, what the hell! I’m not taking care of him for you! I got married and left. He died on his own, years later.

The man in the photo is working with two elements. In the foreground, two people enact a blessing: I want to come back from being a ghost and put flesh on my body again.

No father, no mother. Went away with the light, casts of herons caught in the hood of a slight moon and looking like language, looking like the book any of us could have read, or are reading again.

ºº

Roam a remainder; suffers there. No dears to speak of. Woke, a bitch in my face, a little sting, then light under the mask. Out of the night: stale air. That body never produced itself again. Went into the element in the photograph: a fire no one tended. Years behind myself, pushing [from behind]. Mole 44 is back. The nature of mind is invisible. The back is a fake. In a certain range. Putting it all away, that house. Before we go. What’s come knocking. House flooded under the floor. You won’t miss anything because there’s nothing to miss.

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[1] Geometry then about sequence, about time, it’s clever just reaching and grabbing your arm, proving every step. These basics that come before believing, not just the tricks but also the user’s manual, I kept not finding the bodies, I kept not finding the basic technique that would make me understand I’m finished.

[2] They always wanted to know why couldn’t X be enough for you?

[3] I lose my place too.

[4] Marilynne Robinson, in her interview with President Barack Obama

[5] In the afternoon she means well; I cannot imagine myself out of it.

[6] We all had the same sense of humor, us sisters. Laughed at the same greeting cards and sent identical ones to each other, unexpectedly.

Laressa Dickey is a dance artist and writer based in Stockholm whose recent projects explore the politics of care, the effects of state violence on the human body, and space junk. Her artistic research has been supported by the Kone Foundation. She researches the dancer’s use of language and the writer’s use to/for dance. She’s the author of Syncopations and Twang.  IG: @ladigogo_00