Joel Katelnikoff: Girl, Gun, Zigzag

Once, the sun disappeared behind a red and yellow circle.
Now there is only a circle and we have never seen the sun.

Anna’s wooden bracelet is adorned with pictures of saints. We play cards in the garden, beneath blue sky. Begin at the beginning and go on till you reach the end; then stop.

She is sitting under the beach umbrella, cross-legged, in a two-piece swimsuit. I am beside her, leaning back on an arm. The beach towel is decorated in sea anemones.

Anna works at the grocery store as a cashier. I am a bagger. She scans cans and we speak to the customers in clichés. We have a contest to see who can laugh the loudest at their jokes. Anna asks: what do you think that love and groceries might have in common?

Robert kicks sand in my face. In the back seat of his car, in the parkade behind the new apartments, Robert touches her neck, slides his hand under two layers. He puts his lips to hers, inhales carbon dioxide from her mouth. Tastes the breath of her first coming.

A telegram from Robert: I have done it! I have traveled into the past and changed the future. Dared disturb the universe, and emerged from the vortex victorious!

Anna’s hair blowing in the breeze, in our convertible luxury sedan. She is writing an article for The Pop & Chips Review (the traveler’s guide to blowing right through small towns). She is very well paid and wears stylish sunglasses.

Robert explains: the most significant changes in the universe are not those dealing with destruction or creation, but merely the ways in which existing objects are allowed to interact with one another. So much depends upon . . .

Droplets of water that gather on a pane of glass: how many are required for the first rivulet to form? Anna, alcoholic, leaving me in the car as she runs in to buy a bottle from A1 and Sons Liquor Store, in the sweat of an induced fever.

Gazing at Anna across the dinner table. Robert demands the salt. Idiot, drunk, claiming to be whatever he claims to be. How decadent Robert is, and how sick it makes me. After having wept and fasted, who doesn’t look upon a delicious meal with disgust?

Oh yes, he says, I have enjoyed her in every imaginable way. In some worlds I spent an entire lifetime in dedication and servitude to her. In others, I simply took her by force. You would be surprised in how many realities I accomplished both.

Lying on my back, waiting for Anna to return. Watching the posters on her bedroom ceiling. Smoking cigarettes on her mattress, lying down in the middle of heavy traffic. Cut to commercial: Anna! New and Improved!

Robert has asked Anna to marry him and she has said yes. She now wears a ring of gold and eucalyptus. Isn’t it beautiful? she asks. Modest, simple, like a kitten’s collar.

Anna, in love, doesn’t see the grasshoppers on the pavement, lonely men in shirt-sleeves leaning out of windows, the loaded gun above the mantle. Black and white turns to colour. She is staring at me and why am I lying like a drunk beneath a pine?

In my bedroom, blazer thrown open, necktie slammed over my shoulder, I knock down a lamp, kick an antique chair. A picture of Anna hangs crooked on the wall, glass half-shattered.

Robert taps me on the shoulder. Expect everything to be different than it was before!

I wake up to the alarm radio, beside Anna, the woman I no longer love. When she steps out of the shower, white towel around wet hair, her nakedness fails to signify what it once did. Now it means practically nothing.

Anna choking on a grapefruit. The bishop and priests quarrel over who will reach his hand around her waist, smacking his palm against her perfect shoulder blade. In the meantime, she asphyxiates and dies.

A skull, buried beneath skulls. When geese and ghosts fly north and south, do they move in the same groups? And with so many possibilities, how come life is only one way?

so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / before the black / skyline. Anna gets drunk and spins tires in a snow-covered baseball field.

I can say this without exaggeration: when I met her I fell to my death, backward down a snowy hill on a black plastic toboggan, watching movies into the early hours of the morning, growing brave enough to touch her hair with fingertips.

Anna caught in love nest with newspaper tycoon! Long days of sexual misadventure and misery, jigsaw puzzles and fireplaces, bottles of liquor. She sings to him like the mating calls of animals at the zoo long after midnight.

Anna on her hands and knees, in a dirty white dress, scrubbing the wooden floor. She is an animal, half-savage, crying and chasing after me as I drive away. If I ever return, she will dance. Little Anna, let her spill things and let her break things.

Anna, assistant to the armless knife thrower. How she cannot stand the touch of a man’s hands! Anna, only thing I love, I will make you will feel the song of my blood. Anna, I have written love poems for your wooden bracelet.

Anna at the altar. I do, my heart I do. Jesus Christ looks on as I place a ring on her finger, my hand through her side. God, what is an atom anyway? Merely another thing to believe in. It occurs to me that one day I will have never seen her at all.

For a long while she does not notice me standing, guts twisting out like a reversible sweater, like a red flannel sheet, blood on my clothes. As she opens her mouth, I escape into the morning (empty street barely drawn in).

I have warned Anna to never get close to something that will one day die. She should rather drink poison. Infinity leaves no trace: it is also infinitely small. Flying has always been easy. Stopping is (will always be) hard, etcetera.

Anna is a flower. Robert is a monster. I am a goblin. The bushes are full of birds like maggots in a corpse.

Anna pulls a trowel, as though to stab me with it. I cover my eyes, and when I let go, she has done this to herself, blood gurgling from her mouth, gasping for air, blade embedded handle-deep into her stomach.

Anna takes the dying cat out on the backyard grass so it can see the sunlight one last time. A map with stars on it, of all the places that I want to be with her. Looking out into the clear blue sky, watching Anna rise as I fall.

I stuff a cardboard panel under my sweater vest and draw circuit boards in marker on my forearms. Why do you draw my nightmares with your own pen? Anna, don’t look at me. Don’t watch me walk away.

If I heard her say his name I’d wince, drink myself unconscious, dissociate into molecules. Anna giggles, squeals, takes it in like fresh air, ascending to heaven on the living room floor.

And Robert will change it again when he tires of this world, living infinitely in this way. Is there a world in which all objects are made up of one fast-moving atom? Could it be the one we are living in right now? A fine dust swells up through me and fills my pockets.

Anna, this is me drawing a heart on a piece of paper. I know that everybody does it, and it’s nothing to look at, but it’s the only way I can express this emotion, which has no words to it, only a familiar curvy outline.

Prank call: Knock knock. Who’s there. Punch in the face. Punch in the face who. Punch in the face you! Tragedies become comedies. Comedies become tragedies. She dies the way she makes love: beautifully, in a vacuum, falling as quickly as a feather.

I stalk my way onto the empty beach, past a dried-up starfish, a sand-bound rowboat. Fists clenched, arms bent at right angles. Robert is hoisting Anna above his shoulder. Her arms spread out against the sky, braceleted and white and bare.

I lunge in with a left cross against Robert’s jaw. He staggers back under the weight of the blow. I pull a gun from my Speedo and fire two bullets into his chest. Anna raises her arms (for what reason, I do not know).

Her wedding ring clamped in the industrial machine. Gold and eucalyptus spill between the cracks. Grey butterflies land on lampposts, build power plants on ancient burial grounds. The filthiest things are culled from the centre of the earth and set ablaze. Anna buys cigarettes for kids.

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Joel Katelnikoff teaches Literary Analysis and Creative Writing at the University of Alberta, where he recently defended his dissertation, SCROLL / NETWORK / HACK: A Poetics of ASCII Literature (1983-1989). He is currently working toward the completion of a manuscript of short fiction, entitled Girl, Gun, Zigzag.