Sequins
Susan Nordmark
I met a man at a party. I was wearing a black sequined dress. Tiny mirrors flashed at angles away. Now, off and on, he messages me about things I have written, and he asks how much I am paid. He’s looking across a cafe table, not always at my face. He has a job selling luxury condos. He sometimes posts photos of himself climbing a desert rock face.
Up a lane twilit with trees
I see an opening to a side path.
Branches braid tight overhead
and the trail sinks into a shallow, its banked edges rising
around me.
A root scuds up through the leaf dust.
I leap around it and dodge twigs springing out.
My friend Lynn is in the hospital again. Her heart is sick, and it’s worse this time. Lynn has a daughter, Lily, and Lily has her own child, Luna. Luna has another dangerous condition. A seizure can come at any time. I pick up the girl from school and settle her into a nap. Then we have juice and cheese, and we walk. We notice things—a crow in a driveway, colored scraps of paper in the street. Luna has a sheaf of homework and we move through it. Later Lily comes in from her job, and she eats pizza while watching TV. Lily is purposeful and strong now that she has the child to keep alive. Her face is a blushing plum, her hair thick and long as only estrogen and calories bring. The girl is a fraction of her, round and uncertain in a polyester princess dress. I look at all three and see one woman, slipping time in reverse. Lynn in bed, her veins clogged with scar. Lily vivid and striding. Luna glancing around. This one woman grows backward, tale unstrung, before ruin.
The holloway’s shadows open into a clearing where
green limbs crowd with parrots jeering like gang boys
and close in on a covey of black cats circling the trees.
Sun shards through the canopy and glows the crimson feathers into fire.
I wonder if a parrot nibbles you softly with his beak.
Parrots also have a tongue.
I know a woman whose parrot won’t let her husband near her.
The man with me at the cafe listens as I tell him this. His gaze makes my skin tingle. I like the feeling. It spreads over all of me, my belly and thighs, my neck and wrists. The frisson makes me want to cover myself with a long gray coat, move away to a corner, and watch other people. The man is married. My body appears normal, like others. Damage can’t be seen from the outside. Sometimes not the inside—a doctor gave me a photograph of my hidden center. The tissue was pink and flush, because it was relieved not to be facing the world. But my genome test is pocked with warnings. With human eyes, you can’t see this.
Warmth stirs the forest duff
and it rises in a slow cloud.
A woman in silver walks out of the trees
and I say, do you rescue the lost.
The black cat girls say,
she wove our fur into velvet.
One of them swirls around my legs, starless darkness.
Perhaps I lied wearing black sequins. “Sequin” glints through Italian from Arabic for a coin stamp, a bas-reliefed die that turns a lump of metal into a measure of value. To be sequined is to be armored in a garment of money. Chain mail. I fail a tight dress.
Susan Nordmark's writing appears in Michigan Quarterly, New World Writing, Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Bellingham Review, Five Minutes, Tiny Molecules, Thimble, Fourth River, and many other journals. She loves etymology and lives in Oakland, California with a black cat.