Between the Bones

Between the Bones

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Fragments of language and story extracted from the body

–by Temim Fruchter

What Kept Us Awake

“The use of fingernails for the purposes of divination is a longstanding Jewish practice – one uses the light of the Havdalah candle (used for a ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath) to gaze into one’s own nails. Young girls do so in hopes of seeing the man they will marry, but earlier authorities held that all kinds of omens, for good or for ill, could be detected in the reflection. Conversely, there is a belief that cutting one’s nails can adversely affect memory unless a specific order of trimming is followed: starting with the left hand, begin with finger four (ring) and end with one (thumb), and avoiding doing any two in sequence; right hand two to five. Fingers can be used in magical formula, and, most dangerously, in witchcraft. The careful disposal of trimmings is therefore imperative.”

– Geoffrey W. Dennis, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism

*

Nobody could quite disagree that, when you thought about it, fingernails were upsetting. Strange little interruptions, dirtcatchers, fossils, afterthoughts. But we were the only ones we knew who were actually afraid. We trimmed our nails in corners and over careful containers. Our fingernails, we’d heard, could cause harm. Could curse unborn babies. Could annoy the dead. We whispered prayers in threes, mostly that we hadn’t done anything incorrectly, that we hadn’t dropped any on the floor.

What kept us awake at night: death, eternity, our fingernails. Continue reading →

Between the Bones

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Fragments of language and story extracted from the body

–by Temim Fruchter

Unwinged

 

I was proud of my muscular shoulders, molded by swimming and tennis, and I used to stand facing the bathtub, holding up a hand mirror so I could stare at the reflection of my back in the bathroom mirror. At school, though, I felt like a football player, hulking, musclebound … In my mind’s eye I was a leering giant, gesticulating and capering around the little people, making them laugh, just one jot off a Frankenstein monster.

– Shelley Jackson, My Body, A Wunderkammer

 

Many small birds, particularly finches, have bouncy, roller-coaster trajectories caused by fluttering their wings and then actually folding them shut for a split second.

– www.allaboutbirds.org

 

*

He has meaty shoulders. Quarterback shoulders. Big tough words for arches, first impressions, upended roots. His shoulders dwarf his neck. His shoulders are like hills in both the softest and least soft senses of the word. His shoulders make me want to trust him because, any time I’ve tried to visualize trust, it always looked most like a shoulder. More malleable than any kind of rock, to be sure, but not by very much. His shoulders rounded out when he loved you. They squared like pillars when he walked away. His shoulders were always just close enough to the sky, but not too close. Continue reading →

Between the Bones

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Fragments of language and story extracted from the body   

–by Temim Fruchter

Bloom

 

BLUSH NO
I never saw her blush.
–Anne Carson, “Powerless Structures Fig. 11 (Sanne)”

 MOST PEOPLE
blush before death.
–-Anne Carson, “Powerless Structures Fig. 11 (Sanne)”

 

It’s not a tiptoe of color, nothing gradual, nothing floral, nothing coy. No lace or whisper, no grace or magic, no tipsy shrug. Nothing tiny or subtle or grateful or wanting or shy.

Just heat. Plain red heat.

*

There are so many ways to burn. I burn from the inside and from the outside and from the top. The heat stays on even after the red goes, like a bulb inside a lamp that’s been left on too long. I burn any time I see you see me, my body’s response to taking shape. I burn watching you walk whether you see me back or not. I burn a sudden cloak, a flushed reveal, an unhiding.

You weren’t first, but you were most. So when your eyes locked into mine a whole island somewhere turned pink. Hot onion pickled turnip bite pink. No roses or sunsets. This was an upset, a reddening, a storm.

* Continue reading →

Between the Bones

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Fragments of language and story extracted from the body    

 

–by Temim Fruchter 

Almost A Love Note

 

I wanted it to be you. The first kiss. Mine. But I was afraid. I mean I had played the whole thing out in my mind over and over again from forever. You were a glint of satin. You made my thighs breathe. I willed you to look, like bending at the waist away from the gutter at the bowling alley. I pretended invisible wire, and like hope might hit hard and knock down like I wanted it to. I closed my eyes and imagined I was a proclamation. I wanted it to be you. But I wanted it where wanting was just a shimmer, the idea of wanting.

This is nothing new. Continue reading →

Between the Bones

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Fragments of language and story extracted from the body

 

 

–by Temim Fruchter

 

Questions for Completion

 

Jonathan’s soul had become attached to David’s soul, and Jonathan loved him as himself.

And Jonathan said to David, “Tomorrow is the new moon, and you will be remembered, for your seat will be vacant.”

And the king sat upon his seat, as at other times, upon the seat by the wall, and Jonathan arose, and Abner sat down beside Saul, and David’s place was vacant.

–Passages from Samuel I, chapter 20

 

Does it fit?

The room is tiny with a window pressed against an alley full of pigeons. Like a box, it fills easily with the blue dark all except for one diluted slat of moon through the crack between the buildings. Two people can fit. Two people come in together from the cold. The walls bend with the sudden impact of warm on empty, the newest float of songs on the twin pillows. Two people can fit. Two people can fill this room to capacity. They don’t have to, but they can. They can eat with forks and wine glasses and red pepper and thick brown sauce on the bed between the blankets holding hands because it is the only place to eat in this room, and because it makes the winter rounder and less lonely. Two people can be four hands can be sticky fingers turning inward and then outward, paper bowls, fat steam, sauce. They can finish and lick spoons and fall asleep, full and still humming. And slowly, so slowly, the room will expand to hold them, together, and along with everything they carry. Continue reading →

Between the Bones

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Fragments of language and story extracted from the body

 

–by Temim Fruchter

 

 

What Weighs

 

“Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. “ – Anais Nin

 

*

We were not counting on the weight of the chicken.

It was heavier than a chicken should be, everyone agreed – even for a large chicken, the kind you would be proud to find toward the back of the freezer, behind the smaller, rounder chickens, a muscly misfit back there, too bulky to be on display but perfect to feed the lot of us.

Because we would be eating in a different city, we put the chicken between the clothes in my cloth suitcase, frozen solid, and zipped it up so it bulged around the midriff, heaving it upright and pulling out the handle for easier carriage. It was when I tried to walk that I realized that the suitcase wouldn’t move. When I moved the suitcase anyway, it protested stiff and the handle snapped off, and then there was nothing to do but push the suitcase to where I was going with everything I had from my pelvis up to my chest. Continue reading →

Between the Bones

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Fragments of language and story extracted from the body

 ~by Temim Fruchter 

Nine Other Prayers

 

 

Please let this never stop.

 

Because it’s not like breathing or walking I had to learn to pray. Because I am made of thighs and wine and restless ancestors I didn’t have to learn too much. We were girls modest at school and we swayed, we shuckled, not because they told us to, not because of choreography – though there was choreography – but because the bodies centuries behind our bodies made urgency of singing. This has made it harder for generations since to stand still.

 

Please stay.

 

I can’t stand still now. Born a swish of soft denim skirt, blunt rebound plastic orange chair to the backs of waking legs, yawning big for more air than the day school ceiling would allow. The swing of prayer comes easy and I am not graceful. I think desert wanderers, loop dancers, sea crossers, escape artists. I think irreverent scientists, ecstatic rabbis, clumsy angels, elderly acrobats. I hear the cotton morning voices of girls, some loud, some whisper, some cough and some sigh. One is deep and one is thin like a weedy pond. I hear and I think they hear me back. Continue reading →

Between the Bones

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Fragments of language and story extracted from the body

 

~by Temim Fruchter

 

Salt

 

“Leah’s deep distress at her fate [marrying Esau] results in her crying so much that she makes her eyes weak from tears. According to some, she cries until her eyelashes drop from her lids.” – The Lost Matriarch: Finding Leah in the Bible and Midrash, Jerry Rabow

*

Oh, how she loved. Loved Jacob until she was red-rimmed, weak-eyed, a yarn of felled lashes. She loved from hot membrane, from thick voice, from pillowed cheeks. She loved an echo. She loved by heart.

*

Ladies in sacks, ladies in silks, the quiet crowding and uncrowding of the market gates. Filter in and filter out, the fat roots and the round grapes and the proud bouquets of greens. It’s funny, these moments out walking when you harbor a secret, an ocean, a second skin right beneath the first, a membrane made entirely of salt. Continue reading →

Between the Bones

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Between the Bones: Fragments of language and story extracted from the body. A physical reckoning in pieces. Expressions of aliveness quilted imprecisely along the seam where skin contacts air. An effort to make a story from all these breaths.

A new monthly column, by Temim Fruchter

***

On The Bottom

 

“Feet are alien, like a hoof or a wing. They are more like tools or furniture than like flesh, they are so sturdy and well-crafted and so serviceable. Maybe they are a little too far away from the heart to befriend though at one time I could put my big toe in my mouth, and I aspire to do it again, though without much hope.” – Shelley Jackson, My Body: A Wunderkammer

 

Before we met, I was afraid of my own feet. So afraid I sometimes couldn’t look. I admit that I even tried to forget them sometimes. To forget the very things that held me up.

*

When I was eight, I had pink plastic slip-on shoes that I loved because they shimmered and they were all I could see when I looked down, which made it seem like I just tapered there, pointed and glittered, like I could make up a new name starting from the bottom. The shoes did not grow alongside me, though my feet did, as did a low-hanging shame that waxed with each fattening moon. My blunt grown-up pancake feet, with their no arches, my feet with their chipped red polish, my feet like a golem’s – ungraceful stones, impostors in shoes. Continue reading →