After reading Rachel Cole's recent short story, Drowning Down Dora Brown, with a cup of chamomile tea and Gucche at my feet, my mind wandered with the flow of her emotive writing, pulling me back into the childhood imagination I sometimes forget existed. Rachel is a good friend, a highly talented writer, and most definitely deserves 3 blog posts dedicated to her most recent short story. I decided to split the story into 3 parts, so come back or subscribe to this blog so you don't miss a word!
Drowning Down Dora Brown
I’ve been sentenced to death by hanging or electric chair. It will be a coin toss five minutes before. I won’t even get to call heads or tails. The warden, a pale, asexual thing with a small mouth says I might try to manipulate the outcome. I’m not sure which I’d choose: my torso tossed as if a rag doll on a string or my brains toasted to sweetmeat.
Until I’m executed I must reside in a white-marble palace, not to ensure my last days pass pleasurably, but because according to cutting-edge research, a condemned murderer needs to get her anger out.
An angry heart is particularly muscular though not biologically superior, beating in 4/4 musical time instead of the anatomically correct measure of a waltz, thus emitting electromagnetic waves like those channeled by an alarm clock. The crimson bouquet surges with infrared fury at the moment of death and fucks with television signals. No one likes to think, There goes that guy who stabbed that other guy, while watching the evening news.
To pacify those final fearful ticks, a dead-woman-walking must be given fancy lodgings where she will perform murderous activities slowly expunging the culprit heart of it’s enraged thumping. State nurses announce when the aorta begins to atrophy and execution is scheduled for the next day.
My memory tilts here, unable to form a mental map of the prison I swim my index finger along the glittering streaks in the walls to find a fridge, the bathroom, the bed I slept in last night or one that is untouched.
Like talking to the friend of a friend who recounts her most private hurts on first acquaintance: an anorexic mother, the long-distance relationship that failed, a nose job to shave off an unsightly knob, I’m waiting for a turn to tell my side of the story.
It wasn’t a tea party or voodoo. We never dressed for funerals. Hot-blooded and old-fashioned, my Family wanted things shredded and absorbent. That’s why we threw old bodies to the
steady clock of fins. The dumpster, your soup bowl, a pool of ink, the sink. You can find a shark anywhere. No one ever asked why: we needed to eyeball and pet the remains. The nauseous observation of leaky planets wobbling in a lava lap. Reincarnations of beefsteak and ham slices for dinner. How far to Dallas? St. Louis? Chicago? My bones still shudder from those brassy, cold webs drizzling between the antennae of our car and a tightrope of highway.
I am going to my Grandmother’s house.
How to get to your Grandmother’s house: Fiddle bedrooms at night for homemade maps and elderly palms. Wear fur, cover your head, bury your books, and don’t look at clocks. I always played the eyes, a messenger with big green Venus flytraps buzzing from my skull. Daddy called me, Lady Face. The happiest I’ve ever been was when we performed the face trading game. I became my dewy sister, a symmetrical nosegay, or my Gladiator brother, an iron action figure. I put on my father’s motorcycle-blown visage and ran around grunting. Frequencies of split-second personal histories bloomed from a lodestone then rotted into bubbles of rosy pulp. Dora Brown committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, I saw it. A statuette clinging gracefully to the bright crimson streak of metal. When her banana-split mask, damaged and exaggerated by impact washed on shore an hour later, I wore it for two weeks trying to see as she saw and hear as she heard.
Plum-gray rain falls and does not stop. I haven’t rested my eyes on that kind of water in years, there aren’t any windows. But no matter which corners of my palace I prowl, I hear the sound of plum-gray particulae bouncing. Visitors come cold and drenched, smelling like current jelly. My palace is a rat trap. Hallways wind around, stairways lead back to where they started. I am required to wear a red hoodie and skirt so my figure is easily distinguishable on security cameras. There are a few cases of murderers who learned how to camouflage with the furniture and escaped by blending in with a musty couch donated to Good Will. Never met a guard and haven’t seen the warden since I was admitted. I smile politely at the people visit, hoping I won’t have to beg. Maybe a former lover will lean forward and with what appears a nostalgic embrace, is really the whispered secret of how to escape. Neither reprieve, nor compassion. Not even from my mother as a birthday present.
I coolly mention to her while licking frosting so glossy my temples throb, that I would like a death cake too, that is if she can’t bust me out of here.
“Where would we hide you?” she shrugs, “You better behave yourself and keep your trap shut.”
A caravan of gypsy-vardos will be necessary to transport my scraps plump-on-theoretical-last-words out of the execution chamber to a soggy cemetery. Dora Brown taught me how to sketch a family portrait in summer hot tar before we left town. Homunculae wringing bulbous hands, motionless and exasperated. A ruby blush of shadow inside a cabinet is where I hid until my mother found me scribbling on the walls, three pencils arranged to poke between the spaces at my knuckles like long fingernails, trying to understand urgency. Concavities were sticky in our rickety wagon with my father’s folk music, sweet rolls that smelled like plastic, a wad of tens in the potato chips, open-mouthed breathing five inches away from my closed-mouthed-through-nostrils version. We dropped our charms (bubble gum children in assorted colors) and abandoned gravesites (chicken legs, a few tire tracks). The first sensations of pain are pure color, shock that the interior of the body isn’t really opaque. This thought fattens until a needle-thin cut weighs forty pounds. Skeleton dizzy with the groan of a typewriter, how to carry the rest away?
Evidence I Buried in the Forest: Exhibit B, Testimony of the Body of the Deceased
“There are four, clearly visible lacerations across my chest, which were probably the cause of death. As you can tell, the xygomatic structure was once inhabited by a small pack of wolves which evacuated the ravaged bone, leaving pale skid marks and further prove that the blade had time to stop before colliding with my person.
“I blame my untimely death on the bad weather we’ve been having. The unfortunate combination of heat and moisture make it necessary for one to carry a sharp object for seeing with. The day of the murder, I saw my breakfast, health insurance agent, and a flat tire with a six-inch steak knife.
“My final think-spasm was, ‘I am open-mouthed at the bottom of a chasm, hungry for a whole house stuffed with candied-bullets and stray cats.’”
Plum-gray rain falls and does not stop. A team of computer technicians check my vitals once a week. Did I call them nurses before? I meant computer techs dressed like nurses. Regular visitation of a lonely criminal requires an interest in malfunction and not animal preservation.
Anyway, one of them, an intern, is quite attractive. There was a time in my life when I believed that I could seduce my way out of any situation. But nobody ever makes eye contact with me. Every week we play the same game. I smile while two nurses listen to my ever-robust sugar beat, one pressing a stethoscope to the left of my chest, and the other to my back, while the intern takes notes. I twitch my eyebrows slightly at him, an act of precision honed during many years of successful coquetry, but no one responds. It’s moments like this that I wish I had a twin to talk to.
“Here I am,” I say. “Anybody else thirsty? The cupboards are full.”
Sometimes I talk about what I’ve done since they’ve last seen me, or what I would have been doing if I wasn’t trapped.
“Went sky diving last weekend. Landed in the Sierra Nevada and was almost eaten by an armadillo-cat monster.”
Years pass. I know because the intern isn’t an intern anymore. One of the old techs stops coming and the intern gets his job. He has a ring on his left hand now. My pulse: a barracuda thrashing on meat hooks. Closing your eyes ignites hurricanes of dirt and tinsel. Family is a game of wooden dolls with human organs squirming inside. I’m beginning to wonder if my blood will ever weaken or if they’ll notice when it does. I get so nervous every time I put on a paper gown, they’ll nod and that’s that –that my heart pounds.
Death, according to Dora Brown, is continuously swimming circles inside the Internet. Pinpricks of teeth tug at your skin but you’re careless and deaf. Humans have not replicated consciousness with the invention of the computer, but have unknowingly replicated death, a vacuum of stimulated sensation, odorless and stagnant. Curving skeems of cartilage ripple beneath the screen and we reach for them with an arrow, fishing for the breaking point, where a nose rubs the surface, a maroon tear in the glass, practicing what it’s like to not be alive.
In the amorous arts, I have been known to make quite an exit. I told one guy that I had cancer of the ears and it was contagious-via-oral-communication, he shouldn’t even be listening to me dump him, it was best if he left right away. I convinced another guy that I was really a ghost, which had the unintended consequence of creating an obsessive infatuation that lasted months, during which foreplay consisted of banter using an ouiji-board. When my own chest-of-bricks-and-blood was finally broken, I slept. Cocooned in bed, chewing plugs of toast and butter, flexing my throat around coffee and pills. When all the food and medicine disappeared, I suckled a piece of charcoal until it fuzzed and waking life froze into sound gently echoing through the catacombs of a radio.
Reader, I confess the last person I kissed before going to prison was neither my Grandmother nor my boyfriend. I wander the empty halls, remembering with every bone in my skull the slip and knot of lips. A fist puckers around the pen. What would other famous killers do in my situation? Masturbate toward the camera. Smear the walls with shit. Carve obscenities in my skin. Perform typical criminal kitsch. Then what?
Sometimes I kick the furniture pretending it’s the neighbor who kicked his dogs. Sometimes I get genuinely pissed-off. One night I find a bedroom identical to the apartment where my Family lived years ago on the worst block of town. Everything languorous in its place, even the sketchpads I’d kept. I tear the room apart: throw coffee cups, rip the fan from the ceiling, punch the walls. I grit my teeth and let go of precision, whip the room into a snow globe of ragged quilts, gnarled furniture, and crumbs of paper.
A few days later, I discover a balcony on the top floor, the only opening in the entire palace. I can’t quite remember what the moon is for, so I spend the night throwing objects at it: bedding, plates, books, a Christmas tree, tampons, the house plants, the washing machine, a globe.
“I am kicking myself out!” I shout. “I can’t come home like a lost dog to me anymore!” Then I spit for good measure.
When my aim and pitching velocity improves I will crack the melting orb in two so gallons of batter fall to the earth and when the sun rises everyone else will be baked into marble cake which will skim the edge of my balcony. I’ll step over the railing and tunnel to my kaleidoscope of jagged things where I’ll live in a cake tomb, burning black candles and waiting for some cosmological pendulum to spoon my body out and shoot it frosted across the chain-link fence of sky.
**All images are by Allison Brady. She is a phenomenal artist, and her beautiful photographs seem to compliment Rachel's story perfectly!
Reader read my lips: plum-gray rain falls and does not stop. Drawing lopsided hearts, over and over, is how to patiently acquire rage that paper doesn’t pound. I am Red Riding Hood. Pupils loaded, mouth meat-coated. See my tracks like cigarettes burn the splattered ground.
I’ve been sentenced to death by hanging or electric chair. It will be a coin toss five minutes before. I won’t even get to call heads or tails. The warden, a pale, asexual thing with a small mouth says I might try to manipulate the outcome. I’m not sure which I’d choose: my torso tossed as if a rag doll on a string or my brains toasted to sweetmeat.
Until I’m executed I must reside in a white-marble palace, not to ensure my last days pass pleasurably, but because according to cutting-edge research, a condemned murderer needs to get her anger out.
An angry heart is particularly muscular though not biologically superior, beating in 4/4 musical time instead of the anatomically correct measure of a waltz, thus emitting electromagnetic waves like those channeled by an alarm clock. The crimson bouquet surges with infrared fury at the moment of death and fucks with television signals. No one likes to think, There goes that guy who stabbed that other guy, while watching the evening news.
To pacify those final fearful ticks, a dead-woman-walking must be given fancy lodgings where she will perform murderous activities slowly expunging the culprit heart of it’s enraged thumping. State nurses announce when the aorta begins to atrophy and execution is scheduled for the next day.
My memory tilts here, unable to form a mental map of the prison I swim my index finger along the glittering streaks in the walls to find a fridge, the bathroom, the bed I slept in last night or one that is untouched.
Like talking to the friend of a friend who recounts her most private hurts on first acquaintance: an anorexic mother, the long-distance relationship that failed, a nose job to shave off an unsightly knob, I’m waiting for a turn to tell my side of the story.
It wasn’t a tea party or voodoo. We never dressed for funerals. Hot-blooded and old-fashioned, my Family wanted things shredded and absorbent. That’s why we threw old bodies to the
steady clock of fins. The dumpster, your soup bowl, a pool of ink, the sink. You can find a shark anywhere. No one ever asked why: we needed to eyeball and pet the remains. The nauseous observation of leaky planets wobbling in a lava lap. Reincarnations of beefsteak and ham slices for dinner. How far to Dallas? St. Louis? Chicago? My bones still shudder from those brassy, cold webs drizzling between the antennae of our car and a tightrope of highway.Evidence I Buried in the Forest: Exhibit A, Bread or Broken Cake
Several partially consumed wheat rolls smeared with pink frosting and laced with cherry-flavored cough syrup. Memorial supper for children of gangster families. Brightly-colored candles decorate the top. With tiny booms the tongue glides and shudders. Spit-damp, slender, and yellowed. Siphon sugar from the fire. Chew carefully for hidden nickels.I am going to my Grandmother’s house.
How to get to your Grandmother’s house: Fiddle bedrooms at night for homemade maps and elderly palms. Wear fur, cover your head, bury your books, and don’t look at clocks. I always played the eyes, a messenger with big green Venus flytraps buzzing from my skull. Daddy called me, Lady Face. The happiest I’ve ever been was when we performed the face trading game. I became my dewy sister, a symmetrical nosegay, or my Gladiator brother, an iron action figure. I put on my father’s motorcycle-blown visage and ran around grunting. Frequencies of split-second personal histories bloomed from a lodestone then rotted into bubbles of rosy pulp. Dora Brown committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, I saw it. A statuette clinging gracefully to the bright crimson streak of metal. When her banana-split mask, damaged and exaggerated by impact washed on shore an hour later, I wore it for two weeks trying to see as she saw and hear as she heard.
Plum-gray rain falls and does not stop. I haven’t rested my eyes on that kind of water in years, there aren’t any windows. But no matter which corners of my palace I prowl, I hear the sound of plum-gray particulae bouncing. Visitors come cold and drenched, smelling like current jelly. My palace is a rat trap. Hallways wind around, stairways lead back to where they started. I am required to wear a red hoodie and skirt so my figure is easily distinguishable on security cameras. There are a few cases of murderers who learned how to camouflage with the furniture and escaped by blending in with a musty couch donated to Good Will. Never met a guard and haven’t seen the warden since I was admitted. I smile politely at the people visit, hoping I won’t have to beg. Maybe a former lover will lean forward and with what appears a nostalgic embrace, is really the whispered secret of how to escape. Neither reprieve, nor compassion. Not even from my mother as a birthday present.
I coolly mention to her while licking frosting so glossy my temples throb, that I would like a death cake too, that is if she can’t bust me out of here.
“Where would we hide you?” she shrugs, “You better behave yourself and keep your trap shut.”
A caravan of gypsy-vardos will be necessary to transport my scraps plump-on-theoretical-last-words out of the execution chamber to a soggy cemetery. Dora Brown taught me how to sketch a family portrait in summer hot tar before we left town. Homunculae wringing bulbous hands, motionless and exasperated. A ruby blush of shadow inside a cabinet is where I hid until my mother found me scribbling on the walls, three pencils arranged to poke between the spaces at my knuckles like long fingernails, trying to understand urgency. Concavities were sticky in our rickety wagon with my father’s folk music, sweet rolls that smelled like plastic, a wad of tens in the potato chips, open-mouthed breathing five inches away from my closed-mouthed-through-nostrils version. We dropped our charms (bubble gum children in assorted colors) and abandoned gravesites (chicken legs, a few tire tracks). The first sensations of pain are pure color, shock that the interior of the body isn’t really opaque. This thought fattens until a needle-thin cut weighs forty pounds. Skeleton dizzy with the groan of a typewriter, how to carry the rest away?
Evidence I Buried in the Forest: Exhibit B, Testimony of the Body of the Deceased
“There are four, clearly visible lacerations across my chest, which were probably the cause of death. As you can tell, the xygomatic structure was once inhabited by a small pack of wolves which evacuated the ravaged bone, leaving pale skid marks and further prove that the blade had time to stop before colliding with my person.“I blame my untimely death on the bad weather we’ve been having. The unfortunate combination of heat and moisture make it necessary for one to carry a sharp object for seeing with. The day of the murder, I saw my breakfast, health insurance agent, and a flat tire with a six-inch steak knife.
“My final think-spasm was, ‘I am open-mouthed at the bottom of a chasm, hungry for a whole house stuffed with candied-bullets and stray cats.’”
Plum-gray rain falls and does not stop. A team of computer technicians check my vitals once a week. Did I call them nurses before? I meant computer techs dressed like nurses. Regular visitation of a lonely criminal requires an interest in malfunction and not animal preservation.
Anyway, one of them, an intern, is quite attractive. There was a time in my life when I believed that I could seduce my way out of any situation. But nobody ever makes eye contact with me. Every week we play the same game. I smile while two nurses listen to my ever-robust sugar beat, one pressing a stethoscope to the left of my chest, and the other to my back, while the intern takes notes. I twitch my eyebrows slightly at him, an act of precision honed during many years of successful coquetry, but no one responds. It’s moments like this that I wish I had a twin to talk to.
“Here I am,” I say. “Anybody else thirsty? The cupboards are full.”
Sometimes I talk about what I’ve done since they’ve last seen me, or what I would have been doing if I wasn’t trapped.
“Went sky diving last weekend. Landed in the Sierra Nevada and was almost eaten by an armadillo-cat monster.”
Years pass. I know because the intern isn’t an intern anymore. One of the old techs stops coming and the intern gets his job. He has a ring on his left hand now. My pulse: a barracuda thrashing on meat hooks. Closing your eyes ignites hurricanes of dirt and tinsel. Family is a game of wooden dolls with human organs squirming inside. I’m beginning to wonder if my blood will ever weaken or if they’ll notice when it does. I get so nervous every time I put on a paper gown, they’ll nod and that’s that –that my heart pounds.
Death, according to Dora Brown, is continuously swimming circles inside the Internet. Pinpricks of teeth tug at your skin but you’re careless and deaf. Humans have not replicated consciousness with the invention of the computer, but have unknowingly replicated death, a vacuum of stimulated sensation, odorless and stagnant. Curving skeems of cartilage ripple beneath the screen and we reach for them with an arrow, fishing for the breaking point, where a nose rubs the surface, a maroon tear in the glass, practicing what it’s like to not be alive.
In the amorous arts, I have been known to make quite an exit. I told one guy that I had cancer of the ears and it was contagious-via-oral-communication, he shouldn’t even be listening to me dump him, it was best if he left right away. I convinced another guy that I was really a ghost, which had the unintended consequence of creating an obsessive infatuation that lasted months, during which foreplay consisted of banter using an ouiji-board. When my own chest-of-bricks-and-blood was finally broken, I slept. Cocooned in bed, chewing plugs of toast and butter, flexing my throat around coffee and pills. When all the food and medicine disappeared, I suckled a piece of charcoal until it fuzzed and waking life froze into sound gently echoing through the catacombs of a radio.
Reader, I confess the last person I kissed before going to prison was neither my Grandmother nor my boyfriend. I wander the empty halls, remembering with every bone in my skull the slip and knot of lips. A fist puckers around the pen. What would other famous killers do in my situation? Masturbate toward the camera. Smear the walls with shit. Carve obscenities in my skin. Perform typical criminal kitsch. Then what?
Sometimes I kick the furniture pretending it’s the neighbor who kicked his dogs. Sometimes I get genuinely pissed-off. One night I find a bedroom identical to the apartment where my Family lived years ago on the worst block of town. Everything languorous in its place, even the sketchpads I’d kept. I tear the room apart: throw coffee cups, rip the fan from the ceiling, punch the walls. I grit my teeth and let go of precision, whip the room into a snow globe of ragged quilts, gnarled furniture, and crumbs of paper.
A few days later, I discover a balcony on the top floor, the only opening in the entire palace. I can’t quite remember what the moon is for, so I spend the night throwing objects at it: bedding, plates, books, a Christmas tree, tampons, the house plants, the washing machine, a globe.
“I am kicking myself out!” I shout. “I can’t come home like a lost dog to me anymore!” Then I spit for good measure.
When my aim and pitching velocity improves I will crack the melting orb in two so gallons of batter fall to the earth and when the sun rises everyone else will be baked into marble cake which will skim the edge of my balcony. I’ll step over the railing and tunnel to my kaleidoscope of jagged things where I’ll live in a cake tomb, burning black candles and waiting for some cosmological pendulum to spoon my body out and shoot it frosted across the chain-link fence of sky.
**All images are by Allison Brady. She is a phenomenal artist, and her beautiful photographs seem to compliment Rachel's story perfectly!
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