Amy Bowers
Domestic Garden Eels
Claudia rifled through the piles, the emptied game boxes, the little ponies with matted tails, and the stained and sticky Tupperware; she felt something warm. A hand or, more accurately, a finger. It reached out from a bundle of bed linens. This was nothing special, hands sometimes collided in bins at the Goodwill Outlet; it was awkward, but hands snapped back, quickly forgotten. But this finger touched not by accident but with intention. Next to her, a woman with huge headphones dug deep, throwing rejected items into a growing mound on her right and keepers behind her into a filling cart. Her choreography was tight and impressive. For a moment, she looked like a sandhill crane moving between focused preening and its mating dance, lifting and twisting for a moment before settling back down to earth. Claudia shook off the contact as a mistake, something Dancing Crane did not mean to do and, in fact, did not even notice. Her dance was uninterrupted.
Moving a pilled and flaccid mattress pad aside, Claudia’s hands felt gold or what in her mind equated to treasure. Buttery linen, thick cotton, and knots. Colorful embroidered nests on the back of pillowcases and tablecloths bound stitched images of women in ball gowns, intertwined birds and flowers, and vines tracing the edge of a bedsheet edge. Her hands read the tangle as stories coursed through her. Not intelligible or decipherable, more like little buzzes where a whisper rose to the surface every few seconds. Miriam! For heaven’s sake! ... What will she do? Hands wringing … Will was telling me … Different voices from across time like a radio transmission cutting across the ether. Claudia’s eyes felt heavy, and her lids slid down a bit. She was in a luscious trance, feeling it all.
A finger ran itself across her palm and sent a sick shiver into her gut. She came here to connect with humanity, but only the humanity of the past, not the real people who were here, looking for their own golden ticket to shake the drudge from the day. With consternation and a direct eye, she wheeled her head to the side, but Dancing Crane was not there. No one else shared her bin. She was alone. As she looked around confused, scanning furiously, hoping to conjure a clumsy bin mate who she could blame this infraction on, another touch. This time a fingernail scraped the edge of her hand, the pad under her pinkie with a pressure bordering on pain.
Claudia pulled her hand out of the half-completed, long-forgotten art projects of ambitious housewives searching for a voice. These women, soon after death, suffered in limbo while their creative work was stuffed into garbage bags along with clothes, crochet-topped kitchen towels, and curtain valances. (Their families always kept the wool blankets as they were timelessly useful.) Claudia looked down fast enough to see a finger slowly sliding back into a creweled basket of flowers like a spotted garden eel, swaying at the bottom of the sea, rarely leaving its burrow but always facing the current, hoping to catch a morsel.
She left her buggy and walked towards the exit, the long walk telescoping time with each step. Footfall on the cement floor echoed as if she were in a cavernous space. Her eyes remained on the automatic double doors the entire time, the afternoon sun obliterating the view.
Amy Bowers is a Florida native currently living in Connecticut with her family. Her writing explores art, domestic culture, the insect and natural worlds, and manufactured places and spaces. She is currently finishing her novel about a woman whose obsession with vernacular photography leads to time travel, traumatic reckoning, and agency of self. She holds an MFA in CNF from Bennington and has work published in [PANK], Washington Square Review, West Trade Review, OxMag, Farm-ish, Assay, and LA Review of Books. Her essay Manual is published in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, edited by Randon Billings Noble and published by the University of Nebraska Press.