Lesley Howard
Decomposition
The sheet is a flat sheet, not an elasticized-corners fitted sheet. It is one hundred percent cotton. It is white. It is hanging out on the line.
The line is strung between the deck rail and the buckeye tree in the back yard. It’s a plastic-coated line strung on a pulley. She’s brought the laundry up from the basement, her clothespin bag on top of the damp mound of sheets. She affixes the sheets to the line and pulleys them out to dry.
It is a warm day, not too humid. There is a firm breeze that pushes against the sheet inconsistently but frequently enough that she guesses the sheet will be dry before supper.
White reflects all the known colors. White sheets bear mute witness to dreams, death, sex, birth, illness, tears, sleep. White sheets for ghost costumes, for shrouds, for nuptial beds. Bleached clean for a fresh start.
The white sheets for her bed and the white sheets of paper for her words are both composed of cross-woven strands—cotton threads for the sheets, wood pulp for the paper. Cross-weaving results in a flexible, sturdy surface, one that can bear the weight of lovemaking, of truth. Other compositions she thinks about are compositions of bones, poems, teeth, earth, wood, limestone and music, compositions of bodies, of spirits.
***
The composition of ghost stories follows a formula. Unfair or untimely death, creepy atmosphere, no gratuitous bloodshed (this distinguishes ghost stories from horror stories), and no explanation or trickery. Bottom line: those of us who have seen or felt a ghostly presence aren’t able to reproduce the phenomenon. If we sense a ghost as children, we’re told we’ve made it up. If we sense a ghost as adults, we tell ourselves we’ve made it up. Either way, after the first time we don’t tell.
***
She likes to watch the sheet’s belly swell with the breeze, and then flatten again as the wind ebbs. She likes the way the bottom edge snaps back in a reverse curlicue when a gust pushes hard. She likes how white the sheet is: lily white, snow white. Bone white. Ghost white.
***
There are multiple explanations for our experiences of paranormal activity, including electromagnetic fields, infrasound, mold, and carbon monoxide poisoning. Not least of these is our own simple desire to believe in ghosts. We do not have any way to determine whether or not dogs see ghosts, but we do know that occasionally, for no apparent reason, dogs growl and/or their hackles rise and/ or they whimper, tuck tail, and run.
We also know that dogs’ noses take in far more information than our own, and thus we can guess that their behavior is informed by more olfactory data than we have ever experienced. It is therefore not unreasonable to believe that if there are ghosts among us, and they have a scent, dogs would be more likely than we are to sense them. It’s estimated a dog can detect traces of a substance present in the environment in as little as one part per trillion. This is because dogs not only have more scent-processing capacity in their brains—forty times the capacity of the human brain—they also have a flap of skin inside their noses that directs air into two passages, one for breathing and one for smelling. Plus they have something else we lack, “Jacobson’s organ” at the base of their nasal passage. Its sole purpose seems to be detecting pheromones, those chemicals that announce an animal’s fertility status.
Even the long-dead must carry some odor-leaching atoms on them, if only because they shimmy in the treetops after they lash themselves to the highest branches as the storms arrive. Come on: you know you’ve seen them, even if you quickly rationalized them away as mist or fog or a trick of the light or a low-hanging cloud.
***
When the wind bearing storm clouds whistles through the upper branches, the woman who loves the way wind shapes sheets does not walk with her son and the dog, Dog, in the woods. The woods, fifty years ago, served as the woodlot for the adjacent farm, now bequeathed to the town park system. No one has tended to the woodlot and its trees fall regularly, unpredictably. Limbs hurtle to the earth and bury their sharp points six inches deep. Such a limb would kill her or Dog or her son, all of them soft temporary composite constellations of flesh and bone. There are so many ways to die in the outdoors: drowning, exposure, dehydration, freezing.
Thus, on windy days, she walks with her son and Dog on the old farm road connecting the woods and the abandoned pastureland. Sometimes, when she steps on the remaining flat stones that line this road, she feels a young woman beside her, a young woman heavily pregnant, a young woman scared of gravity’s pull on her belly but who doesn’t show her fear and who’s working steadily until her labor. This presence feels like a haunting, but since it occurs only at this location, she pushes the implication of haunted, of disembodied yearning, of ghosts, out of her mind, out of her self. Even though Dog presses close to her legs at these times, and tucks his tail and looks positively terrified. Unsurprisingly, she tells no one.
***
At the University of Virginia, in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, there is a bona fide research lab devoted to parapsychology called the Division of Perceptual Studies. Professors there study and document cases of Near Death Experiences (NDE) and Out of Body Experiences (OBE). These aren’t ghost stories that follow a formula, but they point to the very real possibility that the world is filled with phenomena we don’t understand, just as for a long time we thought dogs smelled “only” one part in a million—because we didn’t have technology sensitive enough to measure one part in a trillion. One could suggest this indicates that myths and creation stories shouldn’t be dismissed just because their details seem improbable. Many people have never shared their NDEs or OBEs before coming to UVA to tell their story. They’ve had to make up alternate explanations for their experiences. Rearrange the pieces of their lives to make sense of what’s occurred.
***
Let’s imagine that the young pregnant woman (call her a ghost for the sake of efficiency) lived in the once-upon-a-time cabin in the woods and planted the daffodil bulbs that bloom there each spring. The woman who loves white sheets has woven this story, sans the ghost bit, for her son on their walks. They embroider the story along the way. A foundation of the story is the assumption that the tumbled down collection of limestone rocks and leaning chimney fifty yards up from the creek in the woods comprised a cabin.
Before poetry overtook her, she studied geology, and she knows that water seeps through limestone every which way, and furthermore, that limestone is made mostly of once-upon-a-time lifeforms like coral and mollusks. The dead creatures made rock, the rock made the structure, the structure made the home, the home sheltered the humans from the wind. The wind howled for itself alone or carried the howls and yips and moans of life outside the cabin, the foxes and bears and wolves and god knows what else.
Once a month, her husband and son brave the wind and wildlife and go camping. Dog accompanies them. She does not. In those morning silences she drinks an entire French-press worth of coffee and thumbs through her black-and-white composition books, highlighting the word-crumbs of a poem’s trail.
***
The most direct path through the woods is not on the trails the humans have laid out, switch-backing from east to west. The most direct trails are those the deer follow, north to south. You see these trails most clearly after a snowfall, when human boot prints intersect at right angles with the delicate tulip imprint of a deer’s cloven hooves. Their prints travel straight up the steeper parts of the woods where you would surely twist an ankle.
***
The cabin’s chimney stands taller than a man, taller than her husband with their five-year-old son on his shoulders reaching to explore the nook halfway up the chimney, a hollow that is an accident of decay or an intentional indentation. With his soft pink starfish hand their boy felt inside the niche last fall and found half a leaf and an acorn laced by a squirrel’s teeth—burr oaks all around them—and grit from the rock. The grit sprinkled into her husband’s hair and later drifted onto the white pillowcase beneath his head.
***
The stories she tells their son are long-winded and winding; truth and fiction, fact and fantasy drift together in them. They decide daffodil bulbs were precious for that long-gone mama. How precious, he asked, and after some discussion about what might be precious for a mama living in a cabin, they decided more precious than white sugar. Because there was honey and there were apples and blackberries for sweet, but no alternative for daffodils, for their sunny-side-up yolk of yellow.
***
For a while when she was pregnant with her boy, she craved white sugar beyond reason. She wanted it sludging her coffee, blanketing her cereal, crusting berries and muffins. Her husband dubbed it legal cocaine. For ten days her body demanded it all day every day. Just as suddenly, the urge faded to nothing.
***
Daffodil blooms withstand wind and cold rain. Their cheery heads emerge from hardy bulbs that can be trusted to return yearly, to increase their numbers, to produce sturdy flowers. Sturdy but not overly fragrant. Not fragrant enough to distract a dog busy with springtime pheromones.
***
Today it is early March and the dog is snuffling with rigorous, religious attention along the path. Yesterday’s sheet-drying warmth vanished overnight and now it is cold again, the cold of wild, white-haired old man winter dying in lengthening daylight, the snow melted away save for shrinking patches of the deepest drifts. Her eyes are watering in the cold, leaving the world a bit blurred. She unleashes the dog and he runs ahead on the trail to the cabin ruins to continue-extend his worship there; her son follows. Something is glistening between the leaves in what would have been the main room of the cabin. The sun hitting dew, maybe. It’s more glint than glare, hint than happening.
The brown leaves eddy in a pocket of wind and the glint flickers. The leaves are dull brown, like a plain little mouse. But that’s not right. The nerves and muscles of even a plain mouse are exquisite cellular loops and weaves, electrical impulses waltzing between it all.
***
Once, your time in these woods overlapped with a migration of millipedes. Hundreds of their glossy brown segmented bodies. Their bright yellow legs a blur of activity on a day the cottonwood trees’ white fluff floated through the air like a dream. All moving toward the creek, an astonishment of joints and purpose. The reason for their movement, or the circumstance of the multitudes, you could not say, nor did you care to know.
***
Her boy scrambles onto what would have been the hearth of the fireplace, tilts his head back, considering, she thinks, the distance between himself and the nook, contemplating, she thinks, whether or not he could climb that high, reach into that dark hollow without his father’s height. Dog peers upward as well and she can see that her boy is talking to Dog. Sometimes she thinks Dog understands. Certainly her boy thinks Dog understands.
The glint disappears as she walks closer. A poet’s compulsive list of glint-able objects brook-babbles in her head: the lens of a telescope, of eyeglasses, the rounded edge of a wine glass, water glass, champagne flute, a beer bottle, whiskey bottle, medicinal brown bottle. A marble deposited by a crow, or a scrappy sliver of mirror.
***
In mid-summer, in the rotted spiked circle of a fallen tree, you found a ball of tin foil, three golf balls, a pocked marble, and a shiny child’s necklace, faux silver with a glass emerald. You checked the spiky circle periodically thereafter. The shiny lid from a travel coffee mug appeared, more golf balls, their bleached white dimples distorting the shadows. Crows gathering their treasures.
***
“Mama, lift me up,” her boy demands. Dog has wandered off for his own scent-inspired exploration.
“That’s Daddy’s job,” she says. Her son is too heavy for her to lift anymore. Her hip, subtly misaligned to begin with, was almost ruined by her pregnancy, her labor, her delivery of her son. She shifts the leaves with the toe of her sneaker, looking for the shining thing. Nothing appears.
And now where has Dog gone? She whistles for him and her son adds his choirboy’s voice to her call.
With snowmelt running high and loud in the creek, Dog probably can’t hear her whistle. Her son’s cheeks are roughening in the cold. “Dog!” she yells, exasperated with herself for letting him off the leash.
There’s a thrashing in the distance, the rustle and cracking wake of all animals on the move, save the snakes, and it gets louder and nearer and then there is Dog: dripping panting snorting soggy sodden, ears, snout, belly, legs, paws and tail soaked. The tip of his kinked tail glinting, solidifying to ice, the outermost softest feathery bits of his fur going solid like a glass sculpture.
“Dog!” she cries, and to her son, “We have to get home lickety- quick, and warm him up,” gathering up the dog who is shaking, then putting him down again and opening her coat and hoisting him up again and putting him inside, and closing her coat around him as best she can, then stumbling along the trail, awkward, her hip protesting, Dog going alarmingly slack and heavy in her arms before she crests the hill where she can see their house, her son hesitating and looking back at her and her yelling, go, run home, get a towel and put it in the dryer, go, now!
***
We know how to treat hypothermia nowadays. We’ve learned a lot about how the world around us works, and we press that learning into good service, at least some of the time. We can weave beauty out of our knowledge. We can ease suffering. We can open the translucent white door between this side of existence and the other side. Often we’re more willing to do this for pets than for people. Their mute suffering moves us to compassion. We are more likely to gift morphine’s white oblivion to our dogs than to welcome its numbing drip for our own kind.
***
She lays Dog down to open the door and her son is there, sober- faced, with the sheet off his bed. “I put the towel in the dryer,” he reports, “and this is my favorite sheet.”
“Go get the towel,” she says, pushing the door closed behind her and his little feet run thumping down the basement stairs. She cradles Dog’s inert body in her son’s offered sheet, and begins gently rubbing him, he’s entirely cold, he’s entirely slack, he’s entirely silent. She massages the wet from his fur. Don’t die don’t die don’t die don’t you dare die don’t you dare.
Her son hands her the towel, hot from the dryer and she wraps Dog in it and takes him into the bathroom and turns on the in-wall heater and closes the door and fumbles for her cell phone and calls the vet, her son sitting and weeping on the slippery edge of the porcelain tub.
***
All this she describes to her husband while lying in their bed on the good sheets that have the five-year-old stain from her forty-eight hours of effort at homebirth before the midwife bundled her up and they drove too fast to the ER. They are luxurious sheets, fine flannel but ruined for looks. No matter how long and hard she’s scrubbed, the blood’s ochre shadow remains, lopsided angel wings. Not lovely white like the cotton sheet she’d hung yesterday, but still too nice to use as a burial shroud. “We won’t need a burial shroud,” her husband murmurs. “You did everything right. The vet said he’ll be none the worse for wear. We’ll get him tomorrow.”
And she feels the long-ago mama pressing against her, again, sliding her cool breath along the collar of her jacket, trying to claim Dog for herself. Her efforts have worn her thin as the finest veil, the chiffon between the arrangements of this world, where the spirit is stitched with the finest of white threads into made bodies, and the next world, where the thread dangles, the spirit loosed, homeless. She couldn’t get in.
***
If loneliness were quantifiable, like the rate of core body temperature change, things might be better. The lab at UVA has documented so many cases of children under five reporting experiences of different eras, with details there is no rational explanation for their knowing, their birthmarks aligning with injuries and wounds from that previous lifetime, that it seems as likely as not that transmigration of souls is possible. At least, it’s not impossible.
And you wonder: if our souls can transmigrate into new human bodies, why not into new tree bodies, or crows, or millipedes? Or why not linger in fiercely-loved places? And once there, why not try to force themselves, by sheer dint of yearning, into the places where they may dream dogs’ dreams, cozy by the fire, another hiccup of life? You’ve seen them hovering above the lakes as mist, you’ve seen them fogging the windows.
***
The sheets will billow and swell, flap and hang, all through the coming summer. In June, when you walk in the woods just as the eastern horizon lightens, you’ll hear the crashing and thrashing of an animal in the brush and fifty paces later, your dog pulling the leash taut, there beside the path will be a fawn, glistening, shiny. You would have walked past it without noticing, its white speckled back invisible in the shifting light-dark of early summer’s forest floor.
***
The woman will hang sheets on the line all her life, and take pleasure in how warm and dense they become, folded after a day of sun-soaking. This mundane pleasure will bring her a broad, unnamable satisfaction similar to the sensation that unfolds when she practices the white skeleton meditation.
Imagine yourself dead, and then the rotting away of your flesh and organs. Now visualize your skeleton, shining white. Glimmering. Breaking into its component molecules and blowing away on the wind, maybe to the water, settling on the bottom of the creek- bed, like a clean sheet lifted and smoothed and tucked and folded under, a place of peace, seeping down through the limestone rocks. Parts of you will dance through the leaf litter on millipede feet, rise to the treetops in sap, bud on the branch tips.
At the end of the meditation, imagine yourself shining and shining and shining. So white.