In Which We Smelled It In Time

by wendy zhao

An Index of Fears

by RACHEL MONROE

1

Today the girls are updating their index of fears. The previous index is, well, dated: moths, pop culture, earthquakes, facts, ex-boyfriends (theirs, other peoples'). But it’s 2012 and no one is afraid of these things anymore. The girls have earthquake-proofed their home, and they now keep ex-boyfriends as pets. The new index of fears will be alphabetized for easier reference. It will include more relevant, pressing fears: animals carrying other, smaller animals in their mouths; chimpanzees and what they might do to your face.

The smallest girl says something quietly. “What?” the other girls say. (Sometimes it gets pretty noisy in here.)

“But what if I fear having an index of fears?” she repeats.

The largest girl begins to hit her with the pages of the old index, the very large and heavy one from three years ago. The other girls join in. This is a good method for releasing tension, as everyone knows.

2

The brand new disease ravaged the village. "We've never seen anything like it," the elders cried. The disease had no name, and no cure, and hardly any symptoms. When you woke up the next morning, convinced that you'd caught it, I cried and cried and cried and cried. Stop crying, you said. What if it's contagious through tears, you said. Then you'd really be setting yourself up for something.

Like I said, there was no cure, and you lingered on for months. As far as I could tell, the only obvious symptom was that your sense of humor got much worse. You wouldn't leave a man with a disease, you said, You're not that kind of person. Due to the disease, it was unclear whether or not this was a joke. By now, just to be safe, I had figured out not to laugh at anything anymore. You're not that kind of person, you said again, more firmly, and I smiled at you sweetly from inside my quarantine suit.

3

The last time we met, you didn’t recognize me. I was welcomed into the antechamber, and your assistants anointed me. You were sitting in a large chair with your fingers folded. From the far end of the room, I thought you looked sad. Up close, though, I saw that you had just fallen asleep. When I showed you my wedding ring, you began to remember. “Oh yes,” you said. “There was a beach? And a hammock? Frozen drinks with twisty straws?” The acolyte who was washing your feet looked up, confused. “I tried to bring you a twisty straw,” I said, "But they confiscated it, your assistants." You refolded your fingers and your face turned stony. There were people - lots of people - who said that you were the Messiah.

4

I was in a canoe in the middle of a lake with my son. It was evening. The lake was ringed by lesser mountains, the kind that take only half an hour to climb, if you are moving quickly, which I usually do. I am fit; my son, less so.

My son believed that he had a magical talent for fishing - his mother was always whispering to him about his secret abilities, hidden royal lineage, magical gifts, all the ways he was invisibly set apart from other children. Three hours had passed and nothing was nibbling.

My son began to shout. Fish, I am your king. I command you to rise. A shadow of his voice bounced off the mountains, echoed back at us. And the water’s surface began to shiver.

5

My married friend tells me about her husband. I don’t have a husband, so I tell my married friend about my dreams. This week, they are full of small animals. First it was a tiny kitten, perched in my palm. The next night I dreamt of mice in the kitchen: one ran by my foot, a darling little mouse, and then a similarly darling mouse-sized chipmunk. The last small animal was a tinier mouse - he trotted across the dream-kitchen, holding something in his mouth, the way a cat will trot across the kitchen holding in his mouth a mouse he’s caught, and intends to take somewhere for torturing. In my dream, what this mouse was holding in his mouth was an even smaller mouse.

My married friend sighed. “It’s just that you’re ovulating,” she said. I sighed; she sighed. We sat together and considered the small things moving within us.

6

The government said that we should go down into the basement, so we did. Our family was having problems, but we could all agree on one thing: the government knew what it was talking about. We also agreed that the basement was the safest place. We had prepared it that way. Down there we had jars, canisters, casks, kits, jugs, trunks, racks, and other helpful things. Before we went down, we looked out the window one last time: the sky was wide, pale, wispy, innocent. But that's exactly what some threats look like, we decided. The worst ones.

In the basement, we felt it begin. Was the trembling from outside, or did it come from somewhere else? In the basement, we sat among all the things we'd saved, waiting for the shaking to stop, for someone to stop the shaking.

7

The three Russian men were in love. (Not with each other, though.) They jumped in the lake with their clothes on and kicked their way to the far bank; they picknicked on gooseberries, black bread, cheese, kvas. In the lake, after lunch, each one put his hand on his full belly, and pretended - for a moment only - that he was pregnant.

8

The girls were playing chess. Team chess! It involved cheering, extended narratives, emotional blackmail, kicks under the table, quadruple-crossing, the kinds of jokes that might also have been flirting. It was brutal, so the whole town came to watch. A fighter jet flew overhead, a spectating chimpanzee rested his head on his chin: from a certain distance, it was really quite depressing. The audience was sweating from empathy. This was the kind of chess that burned calories. Check! half the girls yelled; the other half cried. One did a cartwheel. The chimp knew something that no one else did: that it would never get better than this. That this was the absolute tops.

9

All day, near misses. The bird barreled toward your car but barely brushed the windshield with his wingtip. I almost drank the sour milk, but smelled it in time. You tripped and felt your body preparing for pain, then caught yourself. Still, your heart pounded. You sat on a bench to calm down, and I walked by, but I was on the phone. On the phone, a near miss: I almost told someone what I really thought, but then I was distracted by your face. Just to be clear: we had never met. When we were introduced two years later, I spontaneously hugged you. We both felt like we had been doing something wrong for a long, long time, and only now were we going to start to figure out what it was.

Rachel Monroe is a writer living in Baltimore. She tumbls here.

"Hold The Line" - Soul Sister Dance Revolution (mp3)

"Start a War" - Soul Sister Dance Revolution (mp3)

In Which We Refold Our Fingers Regularly

by wendy zhao

An Index of Fears

by RACHEL MONROE

1

Today the girls are updating their index of fears. The previous index is, well, dated: moths, pop culture, earthquakes, facts, ex-boyfriends (theirs, other peoples'). But it’s 2012 and no one is afraid of these things anymore. The girls have earthquake-proofed their home, and they now keep ex-boyfriends as pets. The new index of fears will be alphabetized for easier reference. It will include more relevant, pressing fears: animals carrying other, smaller animals in their mouths; chimpanzees and what they might do to your face.

The smallest girl says something quietly. “What?” the other girls say. (Sometimes it gets pretty noisy in here.)

“But what if I fear having an index of fears?” she repeats.

The largest girl begins to hit her with the pages of the old index, the very large and heavy one from three years ago. The other girls join in. This is a good method for releasing tension, as everyone knows.

2

The brand new disease ravaged the village. "We've never seen anything like it," the elders cried. The disease had no name, and no cure, and hardly any symptoms. When you woke up the next morning, convinced that you'd caught it, I cried and cried and cried and cried. Stop crying, you said. What if it's contagious through tears, you said. Then you'd really be setting yourself up for something.

Like I said, there was no cure, and you lingered on for months. As far as I could tell, the only obvious symptom was that your sense of humor got much worse. You wouldn't leave a man with a disease, you said, You're not that kind of person. Due to the disease, it was unclear whether or not this was a joke. By now, just to be safe, I had figured out not to laugh at anything anymore. You're not that kind of person, you said again, more firmly, and I smiled at you sweetly from inside my quarantine suit.

3

The last time we met, you didn’t recognize me. I was welcomed into the antechamber, and your assistants anointed me. You were sitting in a large chair with your fingers folded. From the far end of the room, I thought you looked sad. Up close, though, I saw that you had just fallen asleep. When I showed you my wedding ring, you began to remember. “Oh yes,” you said. “There was a beach? And a hammock? Frozen drinks with twisty straws?” The acolyte who was washing your feet looked up, confused. “I tried to bring you a twisty straw,” I said, "But they confiscated it, your assistants." You refolded your fingers and your face turned stony. There were people - lots of people - who said that you were the Messiah.

4

I was in a canoe in the middle of a lake with my son. It was evening. The lake was ringed by lesser mountains, the kind that take only half an hour to climb, if you are moving quickly, which I usually do. I am fit; my son, less so.

My son believed that he had a magical talent for fishing - his mother was always whispering to him about his secret abilities, hidden royal lineage, magical gifts, all the ways he was invisibly set apart from other children. Three hours had passed and nothing was nibbling.

My son began to shout. Fish, I am your king. I command you to rise. A shadow of his voice bounced off the mountains, echoed back at us. And the water’s surface began to shiver.

5

My married friend tells me about her husband. I don’t have a husband, so I tell my married friend about my dreams. This week, they are full of small animals. First it was a tiny kitten, perched in my palm. The next night I dreamt of mice in the kitchen: one ran by my foot, a darling little mouse, and then a similarly darling mouse-sized chipmunk. The last small animal was a tinier mouse - he trotted across the dream-kitchen, holding something in his mouth, the way a cat will trot across the kitchen holding in his mouth a mouse he’s caught, and intends to take somewhere for torturing. In my dream, what this mouse was holding in his mouth was an even smaller mouse.

My married friend sighed. “It’s just that you’re ovulating,” she said. I sighed; she sighed. We sat together and considered the small things moving within us.

6

The government said that we should go down into the basement, so we did. Our family was having problems, but we could all agree on one thing: the government knew what it was talking about. We also agreed that the basement was the safest place. We had prepared it that way. Down there we had jars, canisters, casks, kits, jugs, trunks, racks, and other helpful things. Before we went down, we looked out the window one last time: the sky was wide, pale, wispy, innocent. But that's exactly what some threats look like, we decided. The worst ones.

In the basement, we felt it begin. Was the trembling from outside, or did it come from somewhere else? In the basement, we sat among all the things we'd saved, waiting for the shaking to stop, for someone to stop the shaking.

7

The three Russian men were in love. (Not with each other, though.) They jumped in the lake with their clothes on and kicked their way to the far bank; they picknicked on gooseberries, black bread, cheese, kvas. In the lake, after lunch, each one put his hand on his full belly, and pretended - for a moment only - that he was pregnant.

8

The girls were playing chess. Team chess! It involved cheering, extended narratives, emotional blackmail, kicks under the table, quadruple-crossing, the kinds of jokes that might also have been flirting. It was brutal, so the whole town came to watch. A fighter jet flew overhead, a spectating chimpanzee rested his head on his chin: from a certain distance, it was really quite depressing. The audience was sweating from empathy. This was the kind of chess that burned calories. Check! half the girls yelled; the other half cried. One did a cartwheel. The chimp knew something that no one else did: that it would never get better than this. That this was the absolute tops.

9

All day, near misses. The bird barreled toward your car but barely brushed the windshield with his wingtip. I almost drank the sour milk, but smelled it in time. You tripped and felt your body preparing for pain, then caught yourself. Still, your heart pounded. You sat on a bench to calm down, and I walked by, but I was on the phone. On the phone, a near miss: I almost told someone what I really thought, but then I was distracted by your face. Just to be clear: we had never met. When we were introduced two years later, I spontaneously hugged you. We both felt like we had been doing something wrong for a long, long time, and only now were we going to start to figure out what it was.

Rachel Monroe is a writer living in Baltimore. She tumbls here.

Wendy Zhao is an artist living in Brooklyn. You can find her website here.

"Dead & Gone" - These United States (mp3)

"Sun Is Below and Above" - These United States (mp3)

"Diving Boards Pointed At The Sky" - These United States (mp3)

The new self titled album from These United States will be released on June 12th.

In Which We Return To Something Like Pasture

Padlock

by RACHEL MONROE

On my birthday I realized the most complicated relationship in my life was a geographical one. This didn't make me feel any better. Baltimore was endearing — there was, for example, the gala I got to attend where the mayor wore stilettos and Dee-Lite played “What What In the Butt” for all the rich grown-ups to dance to. And yet somehow it was not enough. People told me I should stop talking about leaving, maybe take a road trip instead. Feel it out. But the week before I left town, I saw five dead birds, and one that was dying. I regarded this as an omen — I was suddenly really into omens — and told everyone I was in the market for a new city.

In true rebound fashion, I drove my Volvo through places with a similar aesthetic of collapse, but where the houses came in different shapes. This was late October, early November, an ideal time to look at things teetering between the bleak and the beautiful, and to feel that sort of teetering within yourself: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, home. I got oil-painting clouds, a gaudy sunset in Detroit, bleak Ohio rain, the kind of foliage the northeast pretends to have a monopoly on. All the small towns were named after other, more desirable places: New Paris, Miami Valley, El Dorado. It seemed that none of us wanted to be where we were.

Except, that is, for me. I didn't particularly want to be in Ohio or El Dorado or Baltimore, but I did want to be in my car, my own cozy speedy ecosystem, moving between these places. Having the same feelings about different things was like having different feelings, for a while. I daydreamed the Rust Belt still-lifes I'd paint when I got home: The handsome handymen of Pittsburgh-Detroit-Columbus-Minneapolis. Twilight with cows. "Entire block for sale!!" Sincere Auto Care. In Indiana, a gas station named GAS, a liquor store named BEVERAGES, a budget motel named BUDGET MOTEL, all within a mile of each other: the surge of joy this gave me was pure, even though (or because) none of it had anything to do with the clutter of my daily life.

Staying in strangers' houses was like dipping a toe into various potential futures. In Minneapolis, I made pancakes with a man named Waffle, who then beat me at backgammon, and everyone was a puppeteer. In my Chicago future, I was married to a graphic designer, and we used cloth diapers. Pittsburgh-me had fantastic leg muscles from biking up the hills. Also, she had learned how to weld. I was infatuated with all these Rachels, but none of them seemed worth settling on, and I was aways eager to meet another. (Maybe she would have exciting tattoos!) So I took the scenic route out of town and had an eruption of feeling every time a crowd of birds lifted into the sky. If I wanted a place artfully vacant enough to fill up with myself, Detroit seemed like the perfect fit.

The city's appeal and opportunity, people like to say, is in the absence of things. "We’ve got all this empty space in Detroit," a 33 year-old owner of an accessories boutique told the Times last year. Red lights start to seem optional when there are no other cars in sight. Backyard chickens are for dilettantes; in Detroit, they keep goats and pigs. I was sleeping on a friend-of-a-friend's couch, in a house he didn't pay rent on because he was hanging drywall and tending the garden and generally making sure the place didn't get burned down.

Three days before I got there, he had bought the sky-blue Victorian down the block for $500. In Pittsburgh I had bought some biscotti that I planned to give as gifts to people who hosted me, but I was embarrassed to even say the word "biscotti" around this guy, so they sat in my car getting staler. Grand, abandoned Detroit, dotted with wide grassy lots where buildings had been, and burned down, and returned to something like pasture. Here, maybe, was a place wild enough to be worth settling.

I liked how time, too, was funny and open there. When your house cost $500 and you farmed the vacant lot next door, the idea of a career sounded like a relic of that old economy people prayed to in quainter, plumper cities. And besides, there were no jobs.

My host and I took his pitbull for a walk in his bad and beautiful neighborhood as the sun was setting. He wanted to show me his new house, with its backyard sugar maple Even though I stopped myself from taking any photographs of artfully collapsing buildings because I was trying to impress him, I did say that I thought the tall trees lining the sidewalks were pretty, majestic even. He laughed and pointed to a neighbor's van with one corner of its windshield shattered; a majestic branch had broken off a majestic tree and fallen such that it broke through the glass and pierced the van's dashboard. It was stabbed in there so deeply that the neighbor hadn't been able to pry it out. So he just drove around like that, in a Phineas Gage van, although he would have to figure out something better once the serious winter started to set in.

It seemed as clear an omen as anything else, though what it was trying to tell me, I hadn't quite figured out. Once he unpadlocked the front door, we had to feel our way around the rooms (and why had I assumed that the lights would work in a $500 house?). Over the past three years, there had been a foreclosure, and eventually an eviction, and maybe also a squatter. And was it out of spite, or panic, or resignation that these people had left the house so stuffed with stuff? I hovered on the threshold of rooms made impassible by moving boxes full of dirty sheets, cheap plastic toys, enough holiday decorations to cover all the bases. There were dishes in the drying rack by the sink. They'd left their pots and pans in precarious stacks on the kitchen floor, like a booby trap for nighttime prowlers. Or like a booby trap for people like us.

I'm back in Baltimore now, still thinking about that house. I had long car rides to consider its implications, its small human story — something less epic than an omen, and infinitely more sad. Wherever you go, there you are, sure. But that leaves out the other important part. Wherever you go, there is there, too. No $500 house is unhaunted, and all the handsome handymen are alcoholics, and Pittsburgh only has 59 sunny days a year. No city is empty, no whitewashed barn is without its ghosts. Maybe you brought some of the ghosts with you. But most of them were there already, and you were just driving too fast to see them.

Rachel Monroe is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Baltimore. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. You can find her website here.

"Where Have You Been" - Rihanna (mp3)

"Talk That Talk" - Rihanna (mp3)

"Drunk On Love" - Rihanna (mp3)