Utopia

Fourteen years ago I fell to my death before a live

audience while acrobating.

I am an adept person, and quite flexible, so it

wasn’t difficult moving from that to this.

body is awfully pliable. So is the substance

of most things. You find here, eventually, a lack of you,

but also that nothing can really be destroyed. New

shapes. Old shapes set down somewhere.

To make ends meet—and I suppose I never did,

nor do any of us, I think—I waitressed at a place

downtown whose business model was centered around

the minimal, tight-fitting uniforms of their waitresses.

Lots of the customers would remark on the

artistry of my shape, a fortification of the human form

afforded to me by the rigorous training and performance

demanded by the circus. My human body was a prize I

hunted for my entire life, and I fell past the limit of all

limits for it, which many people regarded as quite

romantic of me. I didn’t even mean to.

In the next room after the ending of all endings, I

encountered the remnant stuff of all those preliminary

endings. Like, some-here, I ran into a former lover who

had strangled herself with her silks after being laid off

from her circus troupe.

She told me she had found a pleasant gig here

and was doing better. New silks in new shapes.

There was one point in the universe where one of

my regulars offered to take me home for some extra

funds for rent. I obliged, desperately needing to keep my

place. The circus is stingy.

In bed, he requested all the tricks and flexibilities

I had acquired. I showed him everything the circus taught

me, and I was able to pay my rent. We fell into a pattern

of this, which I only half-chose. His human shape was much bigger, much wider than mine, and he felt very sure of the need to possess things

in that life. That life…I think he still lives…

but it ended for me, and like I said, I couldn’t

make ends meet, can’t make them look each other in the

eye.

When things ended there, the first person I found

here was my twin sister who I absorbed in the womb. She

looked entirely different, and she assured me that she

wasn’t mad. It was only a new shape.

She said:

And also she said:

And so I could finally drop that guilt I carried

with me that unwhole human life. They might have

found it beside my body.

My regular customer took me nearly every night

before this. Like I said about the old shapes set down

somewhere: I remember his hand gripping the collar of

my waitress uniform, I remember the word rape, but I

don’t remember

I was supposed to fly in from the right-stage bar,

flip twice in the air, then receive the hands of the

incoming body from stage left. My body had never

fumbled that trick, but for some reason that isn’t given, I

missed the hands of my incoming partner.

We worked a really hardcore circus, which prided

itself on never setting out any safety landing gear for the

performers; we didn't need it.

I flipped two times and never met the hands of

my incoming partner. That human body that was mine

plummeted a hundred feet down towards the dark wood

of the stage. The usual soundtrack of cheers became

screams, and eventually something irreparable happened

to my body.

No one saw this, but in truth, I fell for years,

quickly remembering and forgetting thousands of

things. I was actually air, like a vessel, receiving and

losing the universe.

In the time of falling I saw my sister as she

would have been had I not swallowed her. I saw my

mother’s organs, her suffering. A foxglove bleeding.

My first menstrual cycle. Learning language. Losing it.

My hypocrisy here. I saw angel blood sputtering out

from someone’s genitals and my regular, Robert, and

shame and the word s-h-a-m-e I heard it so strongly I

saw it. When I was a child I was so afraid of sameness

that I decided to be someone different every time I

woke up. I decided I would not be upset about the

prospect of the apocalypse. I would take anything. I was

always a flexible thing…I wasn’t meant to be pressed

so still. Wasn’t meant for that. I needed to kill Robert

somehow. Four days prior I had seen the neighbor’s

pear tree suffering blight. Thought of Misty and the

silks around her neck, us dying in those spaces friends

said we would have loved to die in. A single tiger lily

one year rising up from a crack on the front step of my

father’s house. Something not dismal. Something new.

When I was and as I am dying it was the end of daylight

saving’s time…we were losing an hour. I forgot the

word…and the word

I remember weak light playing on a kitchen

counter as the sun came in from the west.