Hybrid/Fiction by Hannah Rubin
If I have to be an object, let me be an object that screams
The whole of my house seemed like a big piece of glass, blue, held between two fingers by a widow. I felt for a moment that everything around me was the sea. That wide foggy sea. The soaring aloneness that fuses your breath with all of the wind. But this is only when my face is pressed low against the floor, legs tucked underneath me. When it is dark, in my eyes.
Then I open them, and sunlight bursts through.
I miss the sea, the side of my life it belongs to. The chaos of telling a story and lying to you, but happily. I think of stitching garments together, pulling at thread with my teeth, glasses askew as my head bobs closer and further from my hands, from the thread, the needles, the fabric. Forcing things into shape: is this always what a story feels like in the body, as it’s being birthed?
No. But maybe today, when story feels so precarious. So gilded. Everyone wants a piece of story to help keep their financials up. Everyone wants it like a bed. Like sleeping. The buddha tells us to sit and untangle ourselves from story, but the guru tells us that story is the currency of our souls.
Who is the guru—the entrepreneur? The bettor? The media magician? Where is the octopus, where is genuine sweet filth.
My brain, tucked into the upper castle of my body, can’t take it. Wrapped, as it is, in bone. Enveloped yet apart. Wanting to connect to the whole of my body, the whole of the world, but still always separate. Goo as I write. But there are clothes to be made, and I want them to fit someone.
In another world, I had a son. I pinned all my hopes on him—he was this beautiful shining thing, sweet and tall. He had such soft skin, barely any hair, golden eyes, and I kept him from the world because I didn’t want him to become a man. I wanted him like a chess piece: likable and gliding. He helped me move across the board, and I protected him. There was no growing or long motherhood. I never fed him, and he never asked to be fed. He was carved from wood. And I loved him the way that I could—only when I remembered him. I never wanted him to fall in love, and he never did. This truth brings me great ease, in this age, to know he is still there, humble and thinking of me. We never spoke with language, we creatures of movement and habit. He knows when to pour the oil, when to shift the fabric. And I bring him peaches, fermented breads.
This morning, I am a widow escaping from widowhood. What has died is writing. In the beginning there were hot passionate nights, grease and desperation. I was curled around you, begging for care. Notebook after notebook. I was expelling, it was all I had. We had this ability to grind like only lovers can, hips locked together and rocking like waves crashing and retreating through a moonless night. We were moon and stars and everything else the eye can’t see. We were the sheets—the hands tied up in them. I hid you underneath my mattress, pretending that there was no one else—that I was sleeping alone—that I was barely even thinking. I always preferred pen to pencil, black ink to blue. Shifting notebooks with each release, sometimes wanting lines and then sometimes wanting empty. For my part, I wanted all of you in my mouth.
My mother never wanted me to speak very much. Or maybe it depended on the occasion, I should say. My mother loved to tell a good story. I want to tell you more things that mother loved, but the library goes blurry. A soft hand gilded with spikes, a hand holding neck, a whispering and a lash. Mother loved you to know your place in the order of things. Mother loved to tell a good story where you were the punchline.
A break to take a shit, and it comes out clunky and unsatisfied. Leaving a burning feeling at the edge of me, the place where inside meets world. Burning, like menthol. The bathroom window is cracked, and a shiver wraps across my right shoulder, spins down my spine. I feel embarrassed like I’ve revealed something that should have stayed secret. But we can’t help this endless cycle of taking things in, pushing things out. Sometimes in the company of other people, sometimes just absently out to sea.
Most people don’t know how to handle my dispassionate motherhood. How can you nourish a life when your heart is broken? When you don’t have the energy to make yourself dinner? I never knew how to be good at being alive, how to remember myself from one day to the next. I floated between jobs, had a low overhead and found furniture in the street. I needed new pajamas, so I found a pair of soft blue sweatpants in a box. I wanted a bookshelf, and instead I found a wooden piano bench so beautiful, perfect for rows of books. Everything I read said that when it came to the joy or suffering of another, a strength of will would emerge from within my body, propel me forward and into a life of caretaking and presence. I was told that suddenly I would know how to show up. To make meals and clean bedrooms. Remember the paperwork. But the before never became the after. I made shapes out of the shapes I was given—I didn’t seek shapes out or create shapes from strength of character. And often, I forgot the shapes: the ones I was looking for, and the ones I had wrestled into. I felt like an amnesiac spirit residing, fitfully, in a body. I couldn’t always remember what all these bodies looked like or needed. I wasn’t making a gorgeous or abundant home.
And then, a child? A lover? A garden? None of them survived me. I’m not sure why I am the one who’s left, when I’ve always been closest to death.
In the memory castle, I usually shapeshift. Even just thinking about it causes my nipples to prickle, gently, but with an urgent and tender pain. Could you tell me what my body wanted? It’s soothing to scratch my head and find sand. I can tell I want to escape when my toes start to cramp, and my ankle bones roll and roll in slow circles.
hannah rubin is a writer, poet, artist, and educator based in Los Angeles. Their writing about queer ecology and trans relationships has appeared in TAGVVERK, Canthius, Berkeley Poetry Review, Artforum, F Magazine, and many other publications and anothologies. They were a 2023 Tin House Summer Workshop Fellow, and have been supported by Lambda Literary Foundation, The Truman Capote Literary Trust, CalArts, and The Seventh Wave. They work in alternative adult education and somatic trauma healing, and co-host a monthly alt. lit. radio show on dublab community radio with Noelle Armstrong.