something hurts. i call in sick to work so i can stay home and clean the house. i stay home to unwind my knee-sock from the string-taut roller of the vacuum cleaner, then i stay home to make up words, to read books that make me go to sleep. i stay home to wonder where i can get something better, something different, something i can have in secret with the sun shining in through the window making me feel guilty for staying in, as if i was starting some new religion, as if guilt wasn't the oldest religious trick in the book. i count words, feather-duster, open windows and curtains then close them, and inspect my face in the mirror. my skin looks porous, doesn't seem waterproof, i take hot then cold showers and stay in there with my mouth closed, trying to prove it. i am my own science experiment. the projects that pile up on the desk, the floor, the windowsills, the ideas i keep in dusty jelly-jars with the lids so tight that i can't get them off when i realize how stuck i am.
i stay home scrubbing the cherry-red teapot with comet powder, scrubbing the splashes off. when i'm done, i rinse it and dry it and fill it with water, and it looks like snow white's swollen apple, that witch on her canoe under the castle. i was afraid of that part and of her nose that was so long and knobby and had a wart. i might be making that up, that bit about her nose, but i don't think i am. when my mother was a little girl and thought a witch lived under her bed, she was terrified of sleeping, and my grandmother told her "just don't get out of bed and you'll be fine." if i thought there was something under my bed when i was a kid, there usually was. the cat was in love with me and she would bring me all varieties of dead things to prove it. she wasn't waterproof either, every time it rained she was waiting at my window, sitting on the roof pawing the glass wearing a dead thing like a medal. this year i'll be twenty-nine and one commonality of all my years of bedrooms has been a bed pushed up against a wall. i've finally graduated to a box spring but never a bed frame, the bed sits on the floor and the weight of my sleep squashes any witches that might be lurking underneath it. i don't take chances. i stay home and chew my fingers, balance things on my tongue, talk to the dog telepathically. she wears a psychic leash, we both do, we have big brown eyes filled with sad and curious, we dream of chasing things we can't catch and catching things on accident. we never know what to do about birds.
i keep finding dead birds on the sidewalk. most recently it was a green bird, a sort of bird i've never seen before. the bird was the color of a lime that's been waiting in a pooled glow of sunlight on a white windowsill. i wondered if it escaped from captivity, if maybe it lived at the zoo. maybe it lived in a wire cage by a window in someone's dining room and the cat finally managed to chew through the latch. maybe it flew out the window just in time but was so disoriented when it got outside that it spun around in a panic of electric feathers and flew right back into the window. smack. maybe it would have been weightless in my palm if i picked it up. i used to steal newspapers from peoples' doorsteps to scoop the dead birds up, cradled each one like a dead bird, a self-contained metaphor, but i stopped doing it because i didn't know where to put them. the trash seemed like an insult, and there's nothing natural here, i mean, there are little squares of nature, weird and soft and deliberate, and they checker the hard streets with green, but it's all backwards, like a prank we think we're playing on the ground. i mean, what's a lime-colored bird doing in the city in the first place. when i walk away from the fallen birds, stiff as stones, i feel guilty and relieved at once. maybe that's what religion feels like. maybe that's what it feels like to believe in something bigger than yourself, but you'll have to ask someone else because i wouldn't know.
i think i'm a painter, but i'm not sure. i haven't painted for a very long time, meaning years. i wonder if i've been disqualified for this, but there's nobody to ask. this morning i had the idea of painting a portrait of myself where i'm looking away and the back of my head is a birdcage with its door broken open, and a flock of birds are flying out. that might be when something started to hurt. i keep hoping i'll have a dream where i teach myself how to paint, but i only dream of swimming. i'd rather be a bird than a fish but i don't know how to choose. i'd rather be a tube of paint. i'd rather be a cloud pulling apart like a fish-spine. sometimes, when the clouds look like popcorn. if i'm a bird, i want to be in the forest, because when its blue is cracked open like an aquatic egg, the sky is just as scary as the ocean. i'd rather flit in and out of trees, nesting, singing where you can hear me but can't see me. what i like about birds is how they know where to hide. fish seem to be hiding by nature, so i could live underwater too, anywhere anonymous and quiet. maybe i should get a job at an aquarium. it's always dark and there's always swimming happening, swimming in circles. fish seem to have circular maps in their brains. a circular atlas. there's a possibility that i was a fish in another life. there's a possibility that i am a fish now, in some parallel universe. that would explain a lot.
my mother always cleaned when something was wrong. i've inherited things from the gene-pool that i didn't mean to. i'm reading a book right now about a man who can't stay put in time, he goes forward and backward and sometimes visits himself in the past. it drives his ladyfriend crazy, like when they're cooking dinner and singing "yellow submarine" and then he just vanishes, and she has to eat by herself. i sympathize with her on some level i don't really understand. it's like i'm the man and the woman at once, like sometimes i fly the coop of myself and leave her stranded in the kitchen singing alone where there was supposed to be a harmony. i don't really know what all that means but i think it's important to point out.
comet is hard to get off your skin. it makes your hands feel soft and medicinal for hours afterwards, but too medicinal like the hands of people who work in hospitals, or swimmers who spend too much time in clear water. the cat circles the bowl, waiting to make a new metaphor. the fish falls asleep mid-swim, hoping he has a dream of flying. i wash my hands, then wash them again. the dog waits under a cloud filled with birds, for something, stunned, to fall out of the sky.
ali lanzetta is a woolgatherer, artist, writer, and bookseller who lives between trees, sleeps under blankets of books, and is enamored with giraffes, whose hearts are over two feet long. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Verse, Switchback, Eleven Eleven, Flock, Postcard Poems & Prose,Panapoly, and elsewhere. ali studied Creative Writing on the enchanted electric hilltops of San Francisco, but eventually set sail from the city to love, live, and practice the literary arts in a Vermont valley filled with birds.