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Attribute to Gravity
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On our one day off, the Grip and I cruised the street market to buy fresh fruit and fish (our mutual vice). Or at least look at it—we couldn’t bear to buy anything round because we didn’t want to break the symmetry of the piles. That, and the language barrier. The street market hugged a stagnant harbor. We made our way towards a protruding peninsula and picked up the pace to justify it as exercise. Plaques indicated it was a “touristique” trail, but it was contrived. Rich people’s vacant summer homes were all along the waterfront. We never got close enough to the sea to touch it. Even after that, I didn’t know the Grip better than the VP of Induction or anyone else on the crew. The next day was the first day of internal shooting. Lots of time was spent in the icehouse as they set the lights up. The AD chewed on the walkie-talkie antenna and instructed me to lie on a black V-shaped bed, while the VP of induction pretended to saw me in half. This happened over and over until I lost track and fell asleep. I woke up in a sweat under the lights. Everyone else was taking a break, which didn’t feel any different than “working” except they were all looking in different directions with arms crossed. I was looking forward to scaling the fish the next day. After all, that was the real task I was commissioned to do. But because of studio liability issues, they put the fish sideways to trick people into thinking it was vertical. In the end, I could have been anyone else. |
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All I did every morning was lie in my coffin and rule the world. I had a command console that gave me everything at my fingertips. My coffin was half-buried with a window at the level of my parent’s untilled garden. I couldn’t see much out the window except weeds going to seed and the occasional orange-breasted robin pulling a worm out of the sodden earth. Typically you could find me under the covers with a flashlight, reading. On this particular morning I got up before noon and shut myself in our coat closet with the flashlight and a magnifying glass from my bug-collectors kit. The closet was on the landing where the stairs went up or down. The closet doors were shuttered so you could see the silent motion of air molecules in the diagonal beams. In the privacy of the closet I examined the changes in my growth. Then I searched through my father’s jacket pockets for forgotten cash. In the corner of the closet was a nest of daddy long legs. My stepmother taught me that daddy long legs were okay for spiders. It took willpower, but I broke the nest open on my stomach and let the baby daddy long legs crawl all over me. It took all I could muster not to resist. With my eyes closed, I lay on the fallen coats, feeling the tingling pricks spread across my skin until I was used to it and the spiders became the fabric of my clothing. |
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(It hit a gland in my armpit without me knowing). That very spider uses the fence on a manmade pier to extend its web. In the summer we slept on that pier. At low tide we bellied under the razor wire to get to the radio transmitter (that also served as a lighthouse). It didn’t matter what it was (to us). We didn’t do anything except maybe spray paint our names as high in the tower as we dared, or break the cashed bottles of Chivas we stole from our stepparents. One time Miles cut himself on the razor wire because we were pushing our low tide window of opportunity. It ripped through his down jacket to the skin, bloodying the feathers. The scar welted because he didn’t get it sutured by a legitimate doctor. We tried to fix it ourselves using pieces of the spider web—a cure I read about in a Foxfire book my father left me. Miles was scared after that but I kept going by myself. The abandoned pier jutted out from miles of scenic beachfront that people would kill to live on, but this is how I chose to spend my time. |
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DEREK WHITE has other recent or forthcoming work in Post Road, Denver Quarterly, Double Room, elimae, 5_Trope, and Tarpaulin Sky. He edits Sleepingfish and has some publications available through his own Calamari Press, including O, Vozque Pulp from which some of these pieces are from. |
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