Page 88 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

An outside hammer force punches my lungs to gasp toward air. Wild wrath rises to counter the

uninvited foreign volts. I oppose, fail, relent, accept and crash back down onto this cold table, to these

humans, these men and women, under cold white lights. I float out and back, too weak to go far. This

time I accept the breath as my breath. Countless tiny bees buzz all over my stinky, sticky self, licking me

warm and clean into clock time. A maternity of bees reminds me to remember what I must now know

and do.

Back Under the Lights in the Emergency Room

For a time, I am noticing the dry blinking of my eyes, and a cataract blur of shapes leaning in toward

me under the dead cold light above us. I am sad to be losing the delicious sensation of all-­‐ over bee-­‐

licking as it fades off my body and as my eyes attach to the Emergency Room clock and my ears turn to

the anxious buzzing of human voices around the repair table where I have been deposited. Bereft.

Bereft is the word that helps my emotions crash onto the sterile benevolence of this clinical slab. They

are caring for me. I accept.

In the next days, I am homesick, forlorn, aggrieved. I can’t remember my assignment anymore. I pray

to remember it. As I learn to pray to the bees, asking them to help me remember, it occurs to me that I

have acquired a secretarial capacity. I begin to notice a rhythmic buzzing in my ears. Standard tinnitus

is not a sufficient explanation. The licking sensation returns each time I bring attention to the sounds in

my ears. At first there is nothing to write down.

Soon I understand that images precede the words. So I begin to paint the first in this series of 8 x 8

inch images. With no interest in their meaning, I copy onto the paper. When one image is done, I know

because I get the licking feeling on my skin. At that point, a rather monotone neutral voice drops a

statement down into my ears and the buzzing stops as I write down the text. All the little messages

arrive in the same capsule form without much tonal inflection—as if they are being droned in a

medieval chapel, or as if I am a nun transcribing manuscripts with quill onto parchment miniatures. In

all of these messages, one voice is speaking both AS the collective and for the collective to an invisible

(perhaps human) audience.