Elena Mauli Shapiro

I was born on a Tuesday, like America’s dying.  It could have been a rebirth and maybe it will be one day, but for now the dying, the dying is taking a long time.

Human bodies hit the pavement, turning into fine red mist.  Human bodies burn up inside, turning into a fine white ash.  In the ash:  pulverized metal, concrete, glass, file cabinets, computers, pictures of the family propped up on your desk.  The clicking of keyboards, conversations by the water cooler, our illusion of safety—a fine white ash.  In the street, human bodies covered in human bodies.  Human bodies breathing in human bodies.  The fine white ash burrows into the inside flesh to wait out the years until it blooms into a cancer.

Below you the floor has turned into fire.  The sick black smoke sears your lungs.  You stumble towards the window.  The movement of air there is strange, that window was not made to ever be opened.  Shattered now, its jagged edges cut your hands.  No matter how far you lean out you cannot get enough air.  You look down and your heart stops.  Below you the gaping wound of the broken tower belches flame, smoke, fluttering papers, people.  Below you they are already falling.  Below you the street receives their bodies, obliterates their bodies before the eyes of the gasping crowd.  There are others up here with you but all of you are alone.  Beneath the roar of the building consuming itself you hear a helicopter.  It is not here for you.  It is only here to watch.  The miracle of your birth comes down to this final choice: burn or fly.

Ten seconds from the window to the pavement.  In those ten seconds a news photographer will snap uncounted pictures of you twisting and tumbling through the air.  One day your family might flip through his images looking for you.  One day your family might not bear to.  In the images you are so small against the enormity of what is behind you.  It is Tuesday and as long as I am alive you will fall forever.

Photo by Nicolás Jaramillo on Pexels.com

I am gestating what may turn out to be my next novel.  Or I may just have indigestion.  It’s very awkward.

Anyway, I just sent what I hope will be the final version of In the Red to my editor.  Or at least close to the final version…  My book contract is sitting on my desk waiting for me to decipher its legalese.  Then I will sign it and wait for my sweet, tasty advance.  I have been signing a shit-ton of papers lately because the husband and I just bought a condo.  This barely a few months after paying off the last of our student loans–I guess we felt bereft not being owned by some bank or other.  Now for the minor nightmare of American adulthood: the mortgage.

The condo comes with a bunch of pretty nice furniture because it was previously owned by a lone old lady who died in it.  So, we get her stuff.  I am essentially inheriting another iteration of Madame Brunet’s box in a much bigger version.  I am one favored by dead old ladies I never knew, apparently.  One of my new acquisitions is a player piano with scrolls!  Stay tuned for a ragtime housewarming party…

RIP, little Corolla. 1997-2012.

Written to my husband, May 1, 2006:

You and I are driving home, reminiscing about those days when we first flirted together.

I remember the first time I looked at you with desire was in the Fall of 1998. You were driving me somewhere then too, and you said something funny. I laughed. Not to be courteous: what you’d said was truly funny, and it was a real laugh, a laugh with surprise in it. In mid-laugh I felt a pang of sadness because I was going overseas and I thought that this was your last year of graduate study, so that when I came back to Stanford, you would be gone. I thought that I would never see you again. I was mistaken.

“Do you remember?” I say. “We were in the same car we’re in now, in the same seats. The car was new then.”

Do you remember? I was leaning against the hood of this car when you first kissed me, on the evening of July 8th 1999, just a couple of weeks after I got home from Europe. It was at Ocean Beach and it was so cold and windy. We had just walked together by the water and you’d held my hand. I’d showed you the scar on my knee from the surgery on my broken leg, and you’d laid your palm on the place where my tibia is still bumpy–where it mended into an unwell shape. You were so close and I was waiting for you to kiss me. There was a bus idling at its terminus near us in the parking lot–it waited with the lights on and the doors open for its turn-around time. You were waiting for the bus to leave because you didn’t want the driver to see us. Perhaps, the driver was waiting for us too.

The three of us there, late on a thursday night.

You body touched mine and we were tired of waiting then. It was then that you put your arms around me and gave me the first kiss of many–leaning right against this car–with the bus driver watching.

In this car, you drove me to the emergency room so many times that they cannot be possibly be counted–you so quiet and worried, me curled up in the passenger seat in blinding pain as always. Some nights, not in this car. Some nights, in an ambulance.

In this car, you drove me to the hospital to get cut open.
In this car, you drove alone to San Francisco to marry me on the morning of June 6th, 2004.
In this car, you drove us home the next day from the honeymoon suite of The Seal Rock Inn–the first place we’d made love all legal-like.

This car is old now. The latch on the glove compartment just had to be replaced–its random small parts are starting to fail. One day we will have to get a new car, maybe drive some kids around.

This car: a 1998 Toyota Corolla, white.
In this car, I first looked at you with desire.
In this car eight years later, you drive me home.

We bought a new car today, a Prius in a lovely ocean color. “Sea glass pearl,” the manufacturer calls this color. In some lights it looks blue, in some lights green, in some lights gray. The ride is smooth and very, very quiet. Accelerating in this car makes a whispering wind-up sound reminiscent of stately space vessels in cheesy sci fi movies. It sounds like the future.