Onion Songs Read online

  Onion Songs

  Onion Songs

  by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Chômu Press

  Onion Songs

  by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Published by Chômu Press, MMXIII

  Onion Songs copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 2013

  The right of Steve Rasnic Tem to be identified as Author of this

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Published in March 2013 by Chômu Press.

  by arrangement with the author.

  All rights reserved by the author.

  First Kindle Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. If your life resembles these stories we would be quite puzzled but interested to meet you.

  Design and layout by: Bigeyebrow and Chômu Press

  Cover image by Jessica Fortner

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Internet: chomupress.com

  “Steve Rasnic Tem is a school of writing unto himself.”

  Joe R. Lansdale

  “Tem’s stories are written with an enviable precision of language and the hallucinatory candour of the true visionary, but with all the signature notes of a keen and compassionate intelligence at work. Consistent in quality and diverse in content, as impressive as it is impressionistic, and spanning thirty years of the author's career, Onion Songs is the strongest collection of short stories that I've read in the last year.”

  Peter Tennant

  Contents

  Onion Song

  The Sadness

  The Messenger

  The Hijacker

  Out Late in the Park

  Picnic

  Doodles

  Strands

  Night: the Endless Snowfall

  Archetype

  The Hunter Home from the Hill

  Shoplifter

  Brain of Shadows

  Attached

  The Rifleman, the Cancerous Cow, and the Swedish Memorial Hospital, A Western

  Jungle J.D.

  Cats, Dogs, & Other Creatures

  How to Survive a Fire at the Greenmark

  Minimalist Biography

  Sometimes I Get Lost

  The Changing Room

  Charles

  The Figure in Motion

  The Glare and the Glow

  Slapstick

  Strangeness

  Off the Map

  Unknown

  Saturday Afternoon

  A Visit Home

  The Multiples of Sorrow

  Fish

  Merry-Go-Round

  The Green Dog

  A Dream of the Dead

  Saturday

  Aphasic World Syndrome

  December

  The Mask Child

  Shuffle

  12 Minutes of Darkness

  An Ending

  Publishing History

  ONION SONG

  Only as the changes unwound toward a kind of conclusion did I realize they’d begun much earlier than that weekend of peeling sunburn almost ten years ago. It’s possible, I suppose, that these startling transformations began immediately after my birth, and that my life has been a slow series of reveals leading up to some final truth, some ultimate me.

  Of course these revelations have been subtle, otherwise I would have noticed them right away. An overnight change in the texture of my hair, the way it lay against my scalp, or a new highlight when I looked at myself in the mirror, may have in fact been because the fuzz native to another creature had manifested itself in my scalp without my knowledge and blended in with my own.

  Or a difference in the way I walked, shook someone’s hand, and mounted a chair at meals may have indicated that some ancient, time-released gene of alternative movement had finally made its effects known. Sometimes awkwardness made me appear barely in control of my own muscular and skeletal systems. Is it possible such awkwardness came not out of a congenital incoordination but out of attempts to control an alien nervous system?

  From time to time I would recognize that the images in my dreams were obviously from someone else’s life, but I was always reticent to complain, neither did I recognize that there was anyone I could safely complain to.

  These were some of the seemingly ordinary sensations I noticed from my early experiences in the world. But it was only after I had reached my fiftieth birthday, and fell asleep on the beach during that disastrous vacation in Mexico, that I realized their true significance.

  I woke up with my wife Janet crouching over me. “Harry, get up! You fell asleep—you’re going to have a terrible burn!” She wore so much lipstick her lips looked like two bloody flaps of skin. I raised myself on my elbows to get a better look at her. No, this wasn’t my wife at all, not any wife I would ever have had. “Janet?” I said.

  “Janet? Who’s Janet? What’s wrong with you? It’s Betty!”

  Betty’s hair was perfectly black. Obviously she’d colored out the gray streaks. My wife Janet had beautiful gray ribbons of hair woven throughout her imperfectly balanced hairdo.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, quickly getting to my feet. “I’ve mistaken you for someone else.”

  “Harry? Lie back down. You got too much heat, Harry. It’s Betty—just listen to me.”

  But I couldn’t lie down—I had to go find Janet. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I don’t know you.”

  “Harry, we’ve been married over thirty years!”

  I started running down the beach. But before I got very far I fainted. At least I think that’s what happened. All I remember is my face hitting the sand at a high rate of speed, and burning, like an asteroid hitting the sun.

  I remember the way my father became old. He had always been an active, vigorous man, much more focused, more determined, than the younger men who surrounded him, who looked up to him. I’m not sure if I ever looked up to him. I was never really able to know him all that well, and I resented it.

  Then one day he fell down the concrete steps in front of his house, the house I grew up in, and broke his leg. I remember how he laughed about it. “Always in too much of a hurry,” he’d said. “I’d want to be early to my own funeral,” he’d said.

  But the healing had taken a long time, almost a full year. And even after that he never walked properly again—he walked like someone else. And there was something about being forced to slow down like that, having to take it one step at a time instead of two, that changed everything, that seemed to shift him into another stream of time so that he began to lose color, he began to pale, to slowly fill with white, even the scant evidence of his thought processes filling with white, so that when he tried to talk it seemed that all he could talk was nonsense, this white, sleep-inducing noise.

  People stopped paying attention to my father—they no longer cared what he had to say. I saw layers of confidence fall away from him, layers of vitality and layers of sense. I don’t know when he quit his job. I’m not sure it was ever even official. He simply stopped going to work. His speech could no longer be heard by normal people, and shortly thereafter he was overcome by a creeping transparency, as his last few layers began to float away like tissue dissolving in sunlight and wind.

  But before my father lost the power of audible speech he was constantly murmuring in a sing-song voice. I never could quite understand him—but it was something like, Daddy peel the onions, Momma peel the onions, chop them up, spice them right, feed all the children the onions.

  The last time I visited he was like a newborn, shrunken up and asleep on one end of the old couch. He had peeled down to some sort of infancy, but there were no signs of the fresh vitality of the newborn—he was simply the remains of some depleted seed. I spent a few days in the old home place with
him, then left having forgotten why I had come in the first place.

  After my fall into the hot Mexican sand I woke up in a strange bed. I thought at first I was at the hospital—the bed was stiff and uncomfortable and there was too much white in the room—it hurt my eyes. But I quickly realized it was my own bed in my own house and it was me who had changed.

  Betty or Janet came into the room then, carrying a tray with a steaming bowl of something on it. There were also large towels on the tray and a variety of metal instruments. “So, mister-can’t-remember-his-own-wife,” she said with a mocking smile. “Are we feeling better today?”

  But I didn’t know how to answer. “We? I don’t understand. I can only speak for myself, and I really have no idea how I’m feeling. I was hoping you could tell me. My memory isn’t what it used to be.”

  “I was afraid of that,” the woman who may or may not have been my wife replied. “We’re still not ourselves, are we?”

  “No, no, I’m really afraid you’re not,” I replied. “I’m terribly terribly afraid you’re not.”

  She put the tray over my lap. I stared down into the large bowl of clear steaming liquid. “Oh, I forgot the salt,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” This disappointed me. I was quite aware that I never wanted her to come back.

  I could tell that something had been dissolved in this liquid, but I couldn’t tell what. The steam felt quite soothing against my face. The shiny metal instruments were obviously medical in nature. And the towels looked fluffy, absorbent, and, in their own way, as welcoming as the steam.

  I had no idea what was expected of me and this caused me a great deal of anxiety. My face felt dry and itchy. By raising my hands and feeling with my fingers I could tell how very rough it was, how damaged. There were cracks, and here and there the top layer of skin had completely separated from the layers beneath. I remembered how hard I had fallen into the sand, and how much the hot sun had burned my already sunburned skin.

  “Onion skin, onion skin, I have such beautiful beautiful onion skin,” I heard myself spontaneously uttering in a sing-song voice.

  I picked up the tray and carried it awkwardly from my bed. I was still pretty shaky and congratulated myself for not spilling anything. I carried the tray into the bathroom and set it down over the sink beneath the mirror.

  I examined the instruments—they looked vaguely familiar. They were obviously designed for lifting, separating, peeling. A gentle tune issued softly from my throat like a purr. I quickly realized it was the onion song. With an instrument in each hand I raised them to my face intending to debride the dying layers.

  I have often awakened with the sensation that I have forgotten something essential to my happiness and sense of well-being. It’s a sense that some important event has been forgotten, some terrible reality from the past or some promising happening from the future. Around the time I turned forty I realized I had forgotten a number of important people in my life—frequently their names, and less frequently their faces with all connected associations. As if I’d shed their very existence from my memory. I could imagine my experience of them floating slowly away, no longer tethered by any immediate need for them, traveling for miles before catching in the highest branches or plastering themselves like worn-out leaves against buildings in distant cities.

  Perhaps this perennial discarding is merely the mind’s way of unencumbering itself in preparation for the difficult new work that lies ahead. That would certainly be the positive view. But being a less than positive person I can only grieve the valuable relationships that have been lost. Some days it feels as if I have lost everyone.

  Spontaneous song erupted from me as I stood in front of the mirror and began removing the now-useless layers of skin. I was careful not to lose any of the pieces, allowing skin and drippings to gather in the steaming bowl.

  “Oh onion, sweet onion, I love peeling onions!” I sang, as my imperfections dropped off, as inexactitudes curled away in my search for my perfect sweet heart.

  I wasn’t even halfway done when I realized the face being uncovered was completely different from the face I had worn before. It wasn’t a better-looking face, especially in the initial stages of the reveal, but it was far more interesting.

  “Harry! What have you done?” she asked from the doorway. And it struck me that her question was strangely similar to a distant whispered plea issuing from beneath my many layers. My beloved Janet stood in the doorway, her long, gray hair flowing and beautiful against her pale, shocked skin.

  Many an evening I have sat in front of my fireplace thinking of the paths I have chosen in my life. Of course there is no fire in the fireplace, nor has there ever been—local ordinances deny us both the comfort and the drama of fire.

  Movies and books and all such products of the imagination are terrible things for most people because they make them believe that they can be other than what they actually are. Terrible and beautiful things. People sit and wait for the transformation, which never comes, as if they might arise from their chairs or depart the theater as other people entirely. Instead all that is left to them is to gather their addictions around them and to sing their onion songs.

  But I have been lucky enough to be born an onion in a long line of onions. Every day I stare into the mirror for yet another glimpse of the one I am becoming.

  I understand none of this because, although I can glimpse the one underneath, my senses are so distracted by the layers still remaining that I have no idea what I am truly seeing.

  When my wife is not whom I expected I begin to imagine that she is someone else.

  Now and then I burst into spontaneous song and it is like praying.

  Every day I find new language in my mouth. I spit it out but every night it returns. It creeps into my head and changes the landscape there.

  Sometimes I call the people I once knew but have since forgotten and I tell them stories about who I imagined them to be.

  Sometimes I whisper into the mirror the dreams I will be having tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.

  And when I peel the onions I weep.

  THE SADNESS

  It creeps up on you out of the North, like some dark and suspicious groundwater, risen through the lost ruins of forgotten basements. When finally it takes form it is too tall, its folded hands too soft. It waits patiently beneath the dark trees: this malaise, this disappointment, this sadness.

  You have waited for your family at the station for days. Their train has been delayed, you have been told it is the earthquakes in the Midwest, or the floods, or the wild fires. A storm has settled over the eastern seaboard and the birds do not know where to land.

  Your youngest daughter cannot travel without nightmares. Your son cannot live long without the medicine a specialist provides. Your wife says she loves you but you are never sure. The waiting room is full of people who look at you with faces paled by fear.

  At the edge of the platform a small boy tosses dead mice out onto the track as if seeding a sacrifice. Behind you the windows of the station have filled with weeping. Overhead the birds glide by in slow motion, still reluctant to land.

  You make yourself smile and tell jokes to an old man with a cane. He taps it so rapidly against the planks you imagine some nervous disorder. Out on the platform a conductor collects tickets, tears them apart and tosses them out to join the mice. The wind blows several pieces back toward your face where they land and twitch. Gray moths, you think, as a number gather to make a beard across your chin.

  All night long a distant train wails its distress but comes no closer. During the heat of the day the people who wait on the platform stretch out on the warm boards and sleep.

  It is too late to be surprised, you think. It is too late to devise a backup plan. You have made so many mistakes, you think, when the sadness embraces you with its empty sleeves, an unspoken dread in the hollow of its mouth.

  THE MESSENGER

  Morgan staggered to the door half-asleep. Then he opened
his eyes. Then he opened the door. The Western Union man was there.

  Still dark outside; it was three o’clock in the morning.

  “I’m... I’m really very sorry,” the messenger said, fumbling with the piece of paper in his hands. “I don’t know what brings me here. I...” He cleared his throat. “But I’ve really terrible news.”

  Morgan frowned at the little man. “This must be difficult for you. But we all have our tasks to perform. You have your duty.”

  The little man’s eyes darted about nervously. “But you don’t understand. We don’t deliver these by hand anymore. I don’t understand why I’m here. I’ve been behind a desk for years; I’m not even a messenger anymore!”

  “You know, in the ancient world they put to death the bearers of bad tidings.” Morgan smiled grimly, then chuckled.

  He let the messenger in. The man’s clothes were disheveled, his cap awry. Apparently in his rush to get dressed, the messenger had forgotten his tie.

  Morgan clucked to himself softly. “Such a mess...”

  The messenger was beginning to weep, wringing his hands, crumpling the paper, wiping his bald pate beneath the front edge of the uniform cap with trembling fingers.

  “I’m really very sorry,” the messenger said.

  “Oh, that’s quite all right. Have some tea? Perhaps some cake?”

  “But I’m afraid I have quite bad news.”

  “Well then, by all means, tell me. You have your duty, remember?”

  The messenger cleared his throat. He looked small and vulnerable in his too-small cap and baggy, wrinkled uniform. He stared at the paper in his hands, as if for the first time, then back at Morgan. He lowered his eyes and began to read.

  “Your wife and children have been killed in a fiery car crash.” He paused. “Wait... there must be some mistake. The rest of this... no responsible official...”