The Ball

"The ball's gonna be flying but don't let it pop ya," she swings at the baseball, she curls in for a nap in the sand. The sun gets through. "You guys get back." Trying to freeload age she turns eight, swings twice and collapses. She misses the ball and follows her swing into a lunge; she waves hello to the girls playing softball down the Ventura coast and ushers the team all blissful and sweaty into the truck with a fruit snack and a drink.

Long off, the sea rocks. "Lil, I want to play you a game now," she adjusts her straps. Lil says "no thanks." She decides on a catch, watches the ball all the way to her back, and ignites a controlled fire in Santa Paula that billows over the 126 static and blanched and smells smoky where the kids are loading into the truck. "Who woulda thunk it," she thinks while hurling the ball towards first.

At some point she confided that she must have seen it wrong, that she thought she was swinging at a sea gull. "God, I fell," she said. Feathers pop. She shakes out the sheets in the window overlooking the beach. People are lying about with hairy spots, some lumped up very mammalian, some all bone and thorax. She had been invited to play a game of pick-up volleyball, and that would have been just fine, just cut a little hole in the hull "yeah" she says "I could consider that, but just because you can see it doesn't mean it'll show up in a picture." She blanches and spreads her legs over the 126, billowing like weird tissue, couldn't care less, is so non-directional.

She says hi to dad who stares straight ahead, ass in a beach chair, circuitry in question. The way she walks past him you might as well turn her wetsuit into an airbrush, or a blanket depending on time and its grievances and all his motley discontents. Oh to be able to hobnob like a seagull, all bop. She can't sleep. She would have so much company just looking outside through the blind, the kind that is both wooden and gauzy and allows light through by ashes, she would have spruces, would have a balcony to tie a string down and into a versified noose. "I am pater familias rex" is a t-shirt from a time when Vermont or Maine still seemed like an option. She rubs up at the bed in it, hitches her toes on the mattress.

At breakfast with her bat she plays at being compositional and sings dad a song before taking one more bite and not having dessert anyway. Dad says, "she's gotten coastally obsessed, making all these statements about New England as if it were something very important." She rubs the bump on the inside of her leg and tries to get it to spread into a cancer. She's sick of fucking, it's boring, it doesn't even make sense, and she closes her sports section, acts an attitude.

The team stands around talking and she itches but can't scratch with a mit on. She's older and more mature so there's a lot of jealously going on.

When her body denies her it does so flat-handed and she rolls over frustrated on the bed and looks out over the beach. She was thinking. She wishes she could have been that sharp. She turned left and got lost, wasn't sure how to keep the ball rolling. Key open the door, drive home, fix a plate, another hundred. She could be that sharp. "Cute kids," she says, she agrees, she says "cute kids." She balks at each pitch simultaneously, rarely swings, and when the wind blows she feels it on her inside.

She throws a pebble at a gull and misses. One of the grown-ups used the word thorax. What is the meaning of or what constitutes something being thorax? There is weird smoke in the air that smells bad and she's sick of playing, it's boring. She swings her bat in a formation. Someone throws a pebble at her and it hits her on the back, and she turns around with a fistful of sand for his face. "Good arm" says dad, with a sharp eye, and she herds the team into the truck. In the driver's seat she tosses the ball up and, by sliding, catches it. All their nooks and arches were getting dainty in the shade.
















Humiliations are Salty

Your baby says Humiliations are salty,
and crustate nicely around bodies
But you don't feel like a cry.
It is a fault.
You had been all for all of it yes
Then got all shrimped out as in gutted
Seeing a toe and wanting to lick it

No, I feel neither fleshed nor
Fleshed out. Your baby shook her head
My baby my best match
Yeah humiliations are salty.
Your baby said throw down
to make use of your tendencies towards love

She looked full-grown, and Oh
God, this is love in a time of meat, I feel so drippy--
Because not even knowing what to call itself,
that's a fault, and other faults too,
Like living between meals
in a crushproof drawer,
You ask about her day like a cryoprobe
Can I get a taste
You shake it over. To gnaw
in private as in gutted
No as in This vulture lag of talking through it
Or not talking through it at all

Isn't it even embarrassing to say hello.
You cultivated a menu for lunch before dinner
It is so good to know what will get eaten
No great cuneal gouda
can outsmart that kind of promise
to make use of your
tendencies towards love, promise,
I hang it she gets to be your
Nasty jerky, can't slurp it
You are for all of it. Yes.
She can fold into your draw here,
yes, she can fit into your draw here, you think.












Allison Carter currently lives in LA, and is an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has recently been included in 3rd Bed, Artizen, The Big Ugly Review, and 400 Words. Her play 'Blazer Suitcase Paxil Exhaust or MATH' is forthcoming with San Francisco's Boxcar Theatre Company.






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