thanksgiving

shattering, transforming

I stand up to assess the damage. My left knuckle is bleeding under my torn glove. My shoulder aches like a twisted rubber band. My left shin has sprouted a golf ball. My scraped knee stings, and right palm is still ringing like a gong from the shock of the concrete—it’ll be a few days before it blooms into a bright purple bruise.

My fault. It’s irresponsible to bike without well-functioning brakes. Gathering speed, rolling down the hill, I watch the delivery truck pull into the bike lane just ahead of me, and nothing to be done. (after my front brake snapped yesterday and I ran out of time to pop into the repair shop and it would’ve taken two hours on the bus and my still-intact rear brake screams helplessly and). . . I was flying. I was going to crash. And so I did.

Afterwards I collect myself on the curb, breathing slowly. The delivery driver comes over, nervous. Are you okay? He disappears momentarily and when he returns he is holding a pumpkin-shaped Starbucks mug. I want you to have this, he says in broken English. He shoves the cold ceramic into my hands. It dawns on me that he is more scared than I am. I’m okay, I say. My brakes were bad. We both stand there in a stupor.

I walk the rest of the way home, balancing the pumpkin mug on the bike’s handlebars. Once my breath quiets, I have to stop myself from throwing the mug onto the pavement and shattering it. I want to hear the moment of impact and watch the shard explode. An echo, a release valve for the collision that is now jammed inside my tissues. I am lucky and stupid and I am not invincible. When I get home, I am hungry. The cast-iron frying pan spatters in protest; egg-whites froth from my ears. Touching the hot iron, I know, means transforming. Touch the bodies of plants to the fire, and they wilt and curl and relinquish their sugars. Touch your skin to the fire and in a single moment you, too, could be transformed, never to be returned to your original state.

The next day, I go to the garden. Texturally, the earth in November is as rich as she could possibly be and you can get drunk on fringes, sheaves, scents. Leaves, dead or dying, surrender their pigment in glorious flame or crunch underfoot. Poisonous, glossy black berries hang like snake’s eyes under bright yellow flags. Spiky seed pods threaten to draw blood. Red, grotesque veins thread over the backs of leaves on a low spreading vine. Everything curls and decays and smells sweet and dark, and it reflects back on me like some kind of mirror. The gory death of the year is beautiful.

Over the next few days my hand hurts, loudly. I watch in slow motion as the torn up-knuckle blossoms with white blood cells, scabs over, grows a new layer of skin, rips it off, grows another layer, succumbs to an infection, fights it away, knits back together. I marvel at this process that I neither control nor understand. I am both flimsy and powerful, and I cannot quite believe that I don’t have to do anything except surrender to time: she just heals.

Harvest season, death season, life season. Thanksgiving comes and with it the collision of European ships with Indigenous America, the collision of winter death and bounteous harvest, the collision of feasting and genocide. This is my body, broken for you, Mother says. She gives me round red cranberries, bulging dirt-streaked tubers, fat crusty bread. Geometric marvels like brussel sprouts, whose enfolded petals bloom like little rosy golf balls on a thick, central stalk. She gives me the flesh of her body and that of her children, fat and dark and rich.

The breasts of birds power my wings. I am hungry; I want to fly. I eat, and eat, and eat. The earth’s life and death shoves coal into the little steam engine of my lungs, and funnels electricity into the buzzing circuit board of my brain, and like a tidal wave and like wine it all spills out into my bending, dancing limbs, my grasping fingers and thumbs, my soaring, lofty thoughts, even my zigzagging pen, and the eventual black-and-white death of finished sentences. I eat and eat, and life eats me back. Everything, feeding and killing, at the same time.

I hold onto the pumpkin mug from the delivery driver. I make tea in it at night, and let the warm steam kiss my face, and drink the whole thing, slowly.