Territorial and Routeless
Territorial
It was spreading. Lord. Banding on her skin back there. There. She could see it but could not reach. Tried to unsocket her shoulder to get at it. Skin, unblooded looking. Lord.
The itching, what could she do? Tried rubbing on the doorjamb, but the jamb was too unspecific. No tools near worked: paddle brush, water flosser—almost. The kids, where were they? Their little hands, tractiony fingernails, she would do anything.
The little one she had gotten laid down in the bed with her, showed her back to it. What was that? Movement? A shift in covers toward the itch? A ticklet!? The kid had fidgeted, held its arm in a little crutch made from the other arm.
“No no no.” She squeezed its wrist, its face. As hard as it itched. She brought it to her front for the cry.
“There now. There there, now.”
“It’s not spreading.” The older used words to complain. Slid a leg between her mother’s legs. Rasped the shoulder blade, caused pain. “Better now?”
The mother rolled, pinned a little femur, put weight on bone. “Not quite.”
These bodies were unruly.
Husband said, “Put your shirt on.”
It looked mineral back there. “Might stain something,” was said. “Blow on it.” When was that? Yesterday, a day before? Lord, it was spreading. Looked in the mirror like she should be able to touch it. She could sit up in bed and see the look on her face. Could twist, see it on her back.
Yesterday, the day before, she made words through her teeth. Tried to position them—moving things, these kids, this husband—into the right positions. Positions that might keep them witness. “You have no idea,” she said.
All of them in the bed with the itching. That’s how she needed. Kids in the middle, husband across the way. “Take some skin off?” “Just for a sec.” Covers in the way. Not how she wanted. “Use your teeth.” To the little one, “Come here and bite your mother.”
Grow their nails, Lord. Rack their hands with holy friction.
They were unruly. The husband tried covering. Put udder cream on it most days, plastic over top, gave her his shirts, said, “Get out of bed and get on something.” Or just, “Get on this.” She sat up, most days, looked in the mirror. Saw, through shine or no, it had spread. Was spreading. Lord, she couldn’t do a thing.
“Ago ago,” the little learned words. Learned to paddle soap on her mother in the bath.
“It’s just that I can’t…” the mother tried on the kid. “It’s just that the rash…” She looked in the mirror and looked at her face, turned, looked at her back. It was not a rash. It was wrong-colored. They could all see that?
The best way was to make the most of the teething before the little got older. Best was to get a touch of what she wanted before they squirmed off, to do what she could. All of them in the bed, husband in the middle, kids at the foot. Never quite still enough as her husband raked her back.
Routeless
It was his business to know. Each slope and flat thrust of old ground whittled softer and downward by Whatever Hand does that type of whittling—the man studied it, mapped it, kept a folded copy of it in his coat. He knew that topography. When asked, “Where?” it was his business to answer.
He had known where to step. The man plotted it and marked on paper what to look for en route. His was a trade of pointing a finger. A skill for knowing with the eye what was possible with leg and lung. He traced ridges in circles, each change of relief a higher demand on the body. He drew out massive formations encountered underfoot. And the ravines he shaded until the surface between them appeared truly raised, until his focus on The Whittler’s long work—his hold upon that epochal contouring—was fine-lined and filled in black.
But what was his business now in this mapping and remapping and regraphing and coloring in and hatching—after each August change, after each May thaw, or after each meal cooked or in between them, or before his breakfast even, without coffee as the rain eroded his long night’s work? What he once stumbled upon in topography, could it be restructured into his life?
His was a thwarted wanderlust. This man knew the terrain, and it was personal. Geography broke his back—he dove where the lake was too shallow—and “paralyzed from the waist down” was the answer he got. The condition that stuck, that kept him tracing those lines, his legs unmoving in a seat so far from where he once circled on foot. The mounding bougainvillea in the yard became his answer. The flat water thrust from the garden hose, his answer. And the sharp upward points of grass seen in two dimensions beyond his windowpane became his new and then his old, and his always paraplegic topography. When asked “Where?” the man took to unfolding maps.
“The man with the map is the one to stick by,” they said, perhaps in answer to why they thronged, why they drove to see him, why they traveled along numbered and countried routes. Long troughs of cattleland, ageless outcroppings where the sky was shallower, where the landmarks were more faded, the songs of the thrushes, hollow and flat—from places less mapped, they came. People demanded to see the secrets in his jacket.
Ageless people. Faded people. Runaway kids—he could never be sure where their hands were. Unmoored people of indeterminate stock, the songfilled and the songlost, he pointed at them.
“Relief,” he demanded. “If only for my legs. Out!” But they would not Out!, and the topographer, he could not, because of the legs.
These pilgrims left oiled impressions on his papers. They behaved as if there were magnets in his pockets. Was their presence a blessing? Evidence of hallowed ground? Chins were his answer. They roosted theirs on his shoulder and strained to see like the crow, but their human bodies blackened the windows until the topographer could not breathe in any direction.
“We the people of the land,” they said. “Tell us—”
“Water,” he said, “first get me that.” There were things in the kitchen, perhaps an endless supply. Liquids and solids to send them fetching.
In patches, through cracks of the amassed, the topographer found his bougainvillea. He drew it again, replicating its shadow changed.
“Tell us,” they said, those who did not Out!, those who did not Fetch!. “Tell us where we are.” Their chins up to his neck. “And where we were, and where we should head. Where will we rest? Tell us.”
“We are people,” they said. “Help us. Our eyes cannot see far. Our ears do not hear in this wind.”
“Please,” they said. “We have babies. There are men in trenches. There are rotting places older than we. There are generations of generations of us in the earth.”
“Help us,” they cried. “When we walk, we are followed by dust.”
These people, they got to shoving.
The topographer worked his metal compass. Shadows moved and his lines that were many became more and became thick. Water was brought and he drank, they kept bringing. His piss sack filled. On the lawn, a child took a petal from the bougainvillea, tucked it into her pocket.
The topographer could not keep up.
Catherine Foulkrod is a writer of fiction and essays based in Naples, Italy. Her words can be read in The Believer, New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Bookforum, El Malpensante, exhibition catalogs for Thomas Dane Gallery and CFA Berlin, and elsewhere. Catherine has received fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from BRACT Tricase; Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi, Georgia; the Vermont Studio Center; the New School; and Brown University. She is also a founding Board Member of the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts.