Vi Khi Nao and Jessica Alexander
Ginger & Anticipatory Grief
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt of the novel That Woman Could Be You (2022). It can be purchased here.
The air was brisk when I descended the elevator into the street. A thousand tons of darkness piled on my swollen body & no light peaked through the lamps or windows. The train arrived seconds before I did. At Union Square, rain drizzled on my phone, and the screen sparked like disco lights in an empty bar.
When you sat with your back against mine, your body felt like my eyelid and I was a facemask. A pocket of steam. Your body was a pocket of steam on my eyelid. I spent the last two days in pain. Chest pain. Leg pain. You hung my legs like bats. But I didn't want my body to echolocate like those chiropteran behemoth ruins in any diurnal afternoon. I read an article about a man being bitten by a bat. He refused to get a vaccine and subsequently died of rabies a few days later.
You read a story about a vending machine that sold condoms, cunts, and sex for 5 minutes. The men in attendance wore bushy mustaches and tinted aviator glasses. They looked like undercover police. You’d meticulously plotted out the logistics. The bots zoom bombed everyone, but when you read, they listened. Stolid & unflappable, you dedicated the piece to robots. The wind was heavy on our walk to the grocery and the clouds were stacked like vaporized sardines. You said the air smelled incredible: like garbage, exhaust, and marijuana. I ran in the evening and when I came back you were standing, radiantly, at the vanity in your black and pink pajama top with a safety pin fastened at the opening. Vi, I said, what do you love about me? There was a moment when you kissed me in the night and I was coming freshly from a dream to meet you in the darkness. For an instant, you wore my brother’s face then came into focus and I kissed your mouth. In the crisp, grey day, I ran to the station and up the stairs and over the elevated glass walkway and down the stairs and I did not stop until I came to a crosswalk and stood panting. The wind rocked a red crane and seemed profoundly melancholy and the stacks of thick grey clouds seemed to melt like Twombly globs that drizzled jaggedly down a tap-water canvas—the sky—that Mariam Makeba song my brother loved was rattling in my ears and I wondered if he could, would he miss it—a drumbeat, profound melancholy, anything? That’s when the light changed and I ran under the bridge, where the remnants of a homeless man’s tent lay like a crumpled umbrella and whose red & pink spray-painted walls had been freshly erased in a coat of gray and onto the bus stop littered with empty cups and I jogged between the cars that idled at a traffic light and down the gravelly block to our glass door, which was locked. So I stopped.
Vi Khi Nao is the author of six poetry collections: Fish Carcass (Black Sun Lit, 2022), A Bell Curve Is a Pregnant Straight Line (11:11 Press, 2021), Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019) Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film, and cross-genre collaboration. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute: https://www.vikhinao.com
Jessica Alexander’s novella, None of This Is an Invitation (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) is forthcoming from Astrophil Press. Her story collection, Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest, as judged by Selah Saterstrom. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Fence, Black Warrior Review, PANK, Denver Quarterly, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM. She lives in Louisiana where she teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.