Dogville

Wrote this like 2 years ago. Going to probably delete and rewrite this entire chapter so here's a part of it that I like.

When me and Pups were seven, we once made a pile of Ma’s clothes on the carpet and buried ourselves inside. We ripped her sweatshirts and dresses and jackets from the hangers and raced them out of the room, flung them down in front of the couch. We emptied her dresser full of underwear and socks and soft shirts and threw them into the mix too, and I remember the thrill of it, our hands working quickly and cleverly like forest creatures, the flush of joy on our cheeks and our breathless giggles as we told each other everything, everything, that one, this one, everything out. We looked at the mound of softness on the floor and it wasn’t big enough, not by far, so we dragged the blankets from her bed and flung them down as well. The look of the closet, plastic hangers haphazardly stripped bare, the wood of the empty dresser drawers and naked mattress filled me with such ecstasy that my head felt like it was spinning and floating three inches above my neck.

We surveyed our good work and were giddy with joy. The mound of Ma’s things was enormous and nearly swallowed up the entire carpet, we looked at it with hunger and awe and looked at each other with sweat glistening over our lips and our mouths wet with excitement, it was humongous and the most beautiful thing we had ever seen. We fell into it together, ravenous with bliss. The soft smell of her things smothered us. It was the best day of our lives. We wriggled around in it, the darkness, swathed ourselves around each other and felt all her things touching us all at once and breathed greedily, we shouted and laughed, we needed more, more softness, more noise, more mess, more feeling. We yelled and threw things into the air, watched the clothes and scarves flutter down and caught them with our faces. Ma’s underwear went round our heads, our silly hats. We laughed and laughed, we shrieked and said naughty words and tied everything together in knots.

We waited for her to come back home, and when she walked through the door, we jumped out from where we were waiting crouched in her clothes and yelled SURPRISE!!!! The prospect of it was the funniest thing we could ever imagine and we collapsed in giggles seeing her shocked face, mouth hung open in such a perfect “O” that we thought something might fly in. We clutched each other and beamed at her, her perfect bored children. Look what we’ve done! Isn’t it wonderful???? we shouted at her, but her face did not move, and the grand praise we so wanted seemed stuck inside of her, so by the time her mouth had closed we shook off our confusion by flinging ourselves back inside and were little animals frolicking in our mess again.

She said nothing, just walked the three steps towards the big pile of all her things and collapsed face first into the wadded abyss. She fit right in, disappeared even, and the soft folds made a satisfying poof with the magnitude that we wanted to achieve but were too small to. Our lingering trepidation vanished, we laughed louder and pounded her back with our fists, as she said, Oh you little dummies, my little dummies. What have you done? We looked at each other with our hearts swelled in our chests. We’re dummies!!! we screamed. We’re yours!!!

That was a day unlike this one, a morning pale and treacly green with particular light that I imagine only existed surrounding the days in this part of the world. A light, that once descended, made everything feel like it had just congealed into existence. Suspended in the half-light, I feel like I could be anywhere, or nowhere, all at the same time, like the veil between myself and my tiny experiences and the meaning somewhere between flaps gently in the wind blowing from beyond a door. The trailer is muted and ashy, not quite corporeal, and I am waiting in the silence for a moment of reality, hoping, maybe, that it won’t quite come. The world is still blurred at the edges, like a photograph patiently revealing itself under the sheen of chemicals.

Puppy is still asleep. The quiet sound of his breath struggling through the saliva in his throat is a familiar comfort, holding me within the dreggy lure of sleep on the cusp of consciousness.

The woman in the picture on the fridge is full-cheeked and beautiful, barely an adult. Her pale arms are stretching across the space, forearms plump and shining, cradled around the pink and febrile thing that looks up at her with a kind of blank, suspicious awe. The thing that might be me, or Puppy. There’s no way to be sure.

In crystal mornings like this one, I liked to pretend that she was sleeping soundly in the room next to ours and the booze would be put away, that she would wake up and move about the kitchen in her messy, limber way while cooking breakfast and talk to us, the way she used to sometimes. That the mound of clothes on the carpeted floor was still there now, slowly flattening and strewn out and disappearing back on Ma’s body and into her drawers over the course of what seemed like an eternity. In my memory, we had never cleaned it up. Things like that, like mess, like childishness, had never bothered her. She simply dressed in the living room, methodically picking up her things from the floor as if picking through the aftermath of an explosion, cycling her clothes back on her body until everything had found its way back in its place. It thrilled us. We giggled and squirmed in the doorway as she stood in her underwear, surveying our mess with her hands on her hips and shaking out her shirts one by one. In my memory, she gifts us a knowing smile, as if there was a secret between us, and even then we held it close to our chests like a jeweled treasure. Even then, young as we were, we knew there was something special about Ma, she existed in some place on the cusp of ugly and beautiful, the way she wasn’t afraid to show us her brokenness, get close to our joy.

Now she was just gone, in every sense of the word. She rarely looked at us, and when she did, there was either a blankness or an intensity that terrified us. When she came home, she would be needy and then cruel, flipping between faces so unexpectedly, a twitch the only separation between her love and her anger. And then she would sleep for days. Sometimes we would crack open the door and watch her just to make sure she was still alive, witness the rise and fall of the blankets as she breathed, the curtains that stayed closed beating back the cycling sun, her dark tangled hair that pressed into the pillows, listen to the thickness that settled around her and pinned her in place. And then we would shut the door. We’re not children anymore. We leave her alone because we don’t know what to do except throw ourselves against the world, we need coldness and open space and water and sky to get rid of that suffocating feeling that follows her everywhere.