Read the introduction to this series from editor Ben Libman.
Inside the old portable that smelled of mildew and lost purpose, I stretch up again to reach the top of the chalkboard. My tooshort corduroys, which bear the brunt of my schoolhouse existence, expose narrow, hairy ankles: joints, sinew, skin, bone. Once I met a woman who had fallen in love with a woman after glimpsing her round ankles in a now-defunct department store. She bent down to pick up a hanger that had fallen from a rack of men’s slacks, glanced over, and — when you know, you know. Well good for her. I only feel shame about mine. Generally, I try to cover them up, but this morning the haunting was too intense — the moment I woke up I had to get going. I have two packs of chalk to get through today, all lined up straight-and-narrow across the tops of four desks behind me, each skinny piece abutting the next. The chalk is thin and rolls a little, and it plagues me to no end that they conspire with the melamine to break the line. Benno-can-suck-my-dick’s desk is the worst and I am constantly catching its chalk in the act of departure.
Today I am to write lines from the first four chapters of La Pésanteur et La Grace —
All the natural movements of the soul
are controlled by laws analogue to
those of physical gravity. Grace is the
only exception.
I am haunted, and I look it. No one who is being haunted can hide their bones, and mine are readily apparent, even to my mother, who once said that I looked like flattened Rita Moreno. I am haunted as in, intimated into one action, then another, and another, and so made to live out someone else’s life. It is not so bad. I once had my own life, meager but responsible, but I suppose I was ripe for possessing, for already growing up I felt a stirring emptiness and a lack of awareness about what I wanted. These days, it is a relief to want something, even if it isn’t my own.
One piece of chalk can fill two and a half boards before it wears down enough to grind underneath my rubber soles.
I can then take the next piece —
Obedience to the force of gravity.
The greatest sin.
Today I am feeling curious and bold so I dare to ask some questions out loud.
“What is the hard crust of the moon?”
My voice echoes thinly through the air. While it is making its way around the room I can breathe more easily and I notice the yellow paper sunrays glinting off chalk dust in the air.
“At what angle is the seventh rainbow?”
This last one is answerable. I could work it out. But instead I return to my lines.
—
I’ll tell you how I came to be haunted. A young student lived among others in a railroad apartment some decades ago. For a few months, she shared a bedroom wall a philosopher obsessed with morality and who eventually starved herself to death. Even I see the inanity in that and yet some part of me nevertheless yearns for ability to absolutely commit, to believe so singularly one is entirely transformed, even to worms. Before the philosopher died, she could be heard reciting their work aloud through the thin walls and open windows of the hot and sticky summer. Many hours into the damp, starless, grainy nights, the philosopher atoned and the student, impelled, repeated lines silently, moving words around in her mouth like river stones.
The swallowed stones sedimented into heavy-handed righteousness. The student who would go on to haunt me barely got by in her studies and spent the rest of her time scratching out loaves of bread for the faces that hungered and lingered against the walls of the Gothic cathedral just up the street. So exhausted by the act of giving and the refusal of sustenance, the student fell asleep one night at the small table in the corner of the kitchen and died from smoke inhalation when the bread she was baking caught fire. What a lame way to go. Even she thought so. She hadn’t achieved much of anything. No wonder she hung around and suggested pastimes to me in leadened dreams.
Anyways I do not hold grudges, as a moral stance.
Thus we corrupt the func-tion of
language, which is to express the
relationship betweenthings
Nearing the final nub, a straight line of carbonate turned into the language of sureity, then to dust, I start to feel my body again. My mouth is dry and my feet blistered and swollen. I bend down to finish the last few lines. A quick twist of the ankle and the nub turns to dust, which refracts the moonlight leaking through the selfsame window as the sun.
Series edited by Ben Libman.
Elizabeth Case is a scientist, writer, and artist living between glaciated, deglaciated, and flood-prone landscapes. Alongside scientific research, they make art-science with Glacial Hauntologies, teach on an icefield, and write an intermittent newsletter. Their writing has been published in mnemotope, Eaten, and various academic journals. This is her first published fiction.
minor literature[s] 