Five Attempts

The first issue of Elastic magazine was published last year, a brilliantly inventive interpretation of psychedelic art and literature. If the cliche of psychedelia is all bright colours and trippy graphics, Elastic takes a more subtle approach, playing with space, time, and repetition to reflect, “the ordinary, only slightly, weirdly, off”. I love this story for its strangeness and its humour, and also for its simple humanity. I’m really pleased that we’re able to share it on The Mortar, and I hope you’ll love it too.

My key didn’t feel quite normal in the lock of my front door, a subtle stubbornness in the familiar motion, and it took maybe five or ten seconds longer than usual to unlock. I hadn’t had an easy day. I had said the wrong things and as I walked home from the train I was overwhelmed with the repetitive shame of being myself, with my mind and in my body. There were things I could do to soothe myself out of myself, and I was planning on doing all of them as soon as I opened the door. My dog, at least, wouldn’t scorn me.

The instant I entered, I saw my sister and my dog, side by side on the blue couch, both gazing at me with knowing eyes. My sister had been dead for eleven years and my dog knew he wasn’t allowed on that couch.

I got the distinct feeling that the two of them had just been discussing me in great depth for many hours, though neither of them could speak.

“Hi,” I managed to say. I was trying to take it in stride and prepare myself for whatever might happen next, but the second I spoke, my sister vanished and my dog leapt off the couch, leaving not even an imprint of his body, as though he had never been there at all.

My key didn’t feel quite normal in the lock of my front door, a subtle stubbornness in the familiar motion, and it took maybe five or ten seconds longer than usual to unlock. I hadn’t had an easy day. I had said the wrong things and as I walked home from the train I was overwhelmed with the repetitive shame of being myself, with my mind and in my body. There were things I could do to soothe myself out of myself, and I was planning on doing all of them as soon as I opened the door. My dog, at least, wouldn’t scorn me.

The instant I entered, I saw my sister and my dog, side by side on the blue couch, both gazing at me with scornful eyes. My sister had been dead for eleven years and my dog knew he wasn’t allowed on that couch.

When she was alive, my sister had not been capable of sitting on a couch. She had a severe neurological condition that caused weak muscles and scoliosis. Back then, she had been unable to walk or speak or make focused eye contact. She wore diapers all thirty-two years of her life. My mother always dressed her in colorful sweatsuits and pastel pajamas.

Now she sat on my couch with impeccable posture, staring directly at me. Her spine was so straight that I straightened mine in response. Her dark hair gleamed. She was well dressed. A gray designer sweatshirt and small neon geometric earrings (her ears, of course, weren’t pierced when she was alive). There was no room for a diaper within her black pants.

It was my dog’s habit to rush over and greet me whenever I arrived home. He would throw a party with his body. He would put his front paws on my knees, then nuzzle his head into my foot. He wanted my hands all over him. What he loved most was to have his hindquarters rubbed, but once I found some dried little brown bits down there, so now I was no longer willing to do that for him.

Today, though, he stayed on the couch beside my sister.

There was an unfamiliar but intoxicating smell in the room. It took me a moment to understand that this smell – woodsmoke, cut grass, musk, nutmeg – was emanating from my sister. I couldn’t imagine how rich the scent must be for my dog, whose sense of smell was 100,000 times better than mine.

I would have preferred to keep my eyes on the dog, but my sister’s stare was so penetrating that I had no choice but to meet it.

Her gaze frightened me. Her eyes were perfectly focused on mine. Her eyes – which I had never truly studied when she was alive – contained a golden ring around each pupil.

In our gaze there was only one memory: that night when her diaper burst (she was ten, I eight), and in the morning I woke gagging to the smell of it, and tiptoed down the hallway to her room, where my parents were cursing quietly at each other as my father gathered up the sheets, as my mother ran a damp washcloth down my sister’s leg. I could have helped, I could have entered the room, I could have said something. I crept back to my room and hid my nose in my pillow.

My dog stepped into my sister’s lap and curled up. My dog is like a cat and does not permit people aside from me to touch him. I had never before seen him curl up in anyone else’s lap. My sister had never before spoken a word to me, but here she was, opening her mouth.

“So his shit bothers you, too,” she said with a cool smile before she vanished.

My key didn’t feel quite normal in the lock of my front door, a subtle stubbornness in the familiar motion, and it took maybe five or ten seconds longer than usual to unlock. I hadn’t had an easy day. I had said the wrong things and as I walked home from the train I was overwhelmed with the repetitive shame of being myself, with my mind and in my body. There were things I could do to soothe myself out of myself, and I was planning on doing all of them as soon as I opened the door. My dog, at least, wouldn’t scorn me.

The instant I entered, I saw my sister and my dog, side by side on the blue couch, both gazing at me with pitying eyes. My sister had been dead for eleven years and my dog knew he wasn’t allowed on that couch.

“How did you get in?” I said. I knew it wasn’t the most hospitable thing to say, but I wanted to ask her a question so that she would have to reply.

“Oh,” she said. Her voice was low, sophisticated, intelligent, even in that single syllable. “I’m always here.”

“Wait, what?” I said.

“Just kidding,” she said.

“What do you want from me?” I said.

I assumed that she was here for an apology, and I couldn’t blame her. Still, I was scared to have it demanded of me. There were so many moments when I had failed to love her in the right way. And, disgracefully, so many moments when I had used the fact of her to lend unearned depth to my life story.

My mother once said that every new skill I acquired as a child – the ability to walk, to talk, to use the toilet, to read, to write – just reminded her of all the benchmarks my sister had missed.

“I want you to find the dog,” my sister said.

Only then did I realize that, in my astonishment, I had left the door wide open behind me.

The dog was no longer on the couch or in the room.

I ran out into the street, calling his name. My body felt outside of itself. I was above myself and trapped in myself at the same time. I couldn’t breathe. He knew nothing but me. He was vulnerable and I was strong but I had left the door open. I ran toward the park, his most likely destination, across seven busy streets where he could easily have been hit, though I saw no roadkill. There was a red information booth at the entrance to the park. I ran up to the window. The man inside had a friendly face and a bald head. I had an instinct even before I spoke that he would help me. That he knew where my dog was.

“Have you seen a small black dog with a tan moustache?”

“Yes,” the man said, and I was so giddy with relief that I didn’t hear the undertone in his voice. “A twenty-pounder?”

“Yes!” I screamed with joy. “Yes! That’s him.”

The man stepped out of the booth and led me around to the back. There was a card table set up behind the booth and in the middle of the card table was my dog, curled up as though in someone’s lap, bloody and unmoving.

I picked him up awkwardly. I struggled for seven blocks, my face wet and my gag reflex activated, my voice unhinged and my throat releasing soft howls over which I had no control, his body sometimes almost slipping out of my grasp. By the time I got home I was covered in blood. My sister was still there, waiting on the couch. When I came in the door, she stood up. She reached out and took the dog from me. She held him close to her, at ease, as though he was still alive.

My key didn’t feel quite normal in the lock of my front door, a subtle stubbornness in the familiar motion, and it took maybe five or ten seconds longer than usual to unlock. I hadn’t had an easy day. I had said the wrong things and as I walked home from the train I was overwhelmed with the repetitive shame of being myself, with my mind and in my body. There were things I could do to soothe myself out of myself, and I was planning on doing all of them as soon as I opened the door. My dog, at least, wouldn’t scorn me.

The instant I entered, I saw my sister and my dog, side by side on the blue couch, both gazing at me with intent eyes. My sister had been dead for eleven years and my dog knew he wasn’t allowed on that couch.

I sat on the couch beside them.

Once and only once had I noticed the golden rings around my sister’s pupils. It was hours before she died. I had traveled a long way to see her, using many different modes of transportation. When I arrived, I put my face very close to her face, and she stared directly into my eyes as she never had before. Her eyes, I realized then, were portals.

My whole life I could have done it. I could have put my face close to her face. I could have noticed the twin golden doorways and I could have stepped through them into her.

Now, on the couch, my sister was looking at me steadily, inviting me in, but I cast my gaze away: toward the floor, toward the door.

My sister was dead by sunset and a nurse came by to close her eyes. His fingers were long and weathered.

My father couldn’t bear to see her being loaded into the van, so I took him for a walk among the strip malls, but we came back to the facility too soon, right as the bag that contained her body was being loaded into the van.

My key didn’t feel quite normal in the lock of my front door, a subtle stubbornness in the familiar motion, and it took maybe five or ten seconds longer than usual to unlock. I hadn’t had an easy day. I had said the wrong things and as I walked home from the train I was overwhelmed with the repetitive shame of being myself, with my mind and in my body. There were things I could do to soothe myself out of myself, and I was planning on doing all of them as soon as I opened the door. My dog, at least, wouldn’t scorn me.

The instant I entered, I saw my sister and my dog, side by side on the blue couch, both gazing at me with soft eyes. My sister had been dead for eleven years and my dog knew he wasn’t allowed on that couch.

There was something eerie about my dog’s eyes. I was accustomed to his eyes, his black moist dog eyes, but now his eyes were the intelligent eyes of a human.

I collapsed on the couch beside them.

The moment I sat down, my sister stood. She was barefoot. Her legs were long and strong. Her posture was better than mine. She walked across the room. Her first few steps were unsteady but then she got the hang of it. She turned around to face us.

She jumped up into the air and my dog let out a single bark. As she landed, her long dark hair resettled on her shoulders. Then she jumped again, a spreadeagle, almost the splits, and again my dog barked once. On the third jump I noticed that both of her middle fingers were extended. Perhaps they had been all along. She was giving my living room or my home or the world or me the finger. She jumped again, and gave the finger, and my dog barked once. A ritual.

After thirty-two jumps (I counted), she stopped. She looked at me, breathing hard. One jump for each year of her short and difficult life. She rejoined us on the couch, settling cross-legged beside me.

“Come here,” she said. She placed her hands on my cheeks, cupping my face as it had never before been cupped, a gentle yet solid pressure that was almost too much. Her hands were warm and slightly damp. I couldn’t look away from her eyes, and she didn’t look away from mine.

When at long last she broke eye contact, she brought my head into her lap, into the nest she made with her legs. She wove her hands into a pillow so that I could stare up at the smooth underside of her chin with my legs extended the length of the couch.

She said my dog’s name and he obeyed her instantly as he never obeyed me, settling right where she wanted him, on top of my stomach, the movement of his breathing pressing against the movement of mine, and my head went limp in her hands.

Elastic is a print magazine of psychedelic art and literature. It publishes visual art and writing that bend time and genre and perspective, blurring waking and dreaming life, finding sublimity and absurdity in the everyday, magnifying the senses, multiplying and distorting the possibilities of narrative, and interrogating power by breaking form.

Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum. Her novel The Need was longlisted for the National Book Award. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and she teaches at Brooklyn College.

Silvia Sardellaro is an Italian artist, illustrator, and animation filmmaker based in Berlin. Trained in animation at Central Saint Martins in London, she loves working with handcrafted, textured visuals and blending traditional and experimental techniques to create illustrated and animated stories in delightfully unexpected ways. Her work often explores emotional states and inner worlds through a poetic, narrative-driven approach.

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