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.