Hayhook (1989) by Seth Wang
Associate editor Z Howard on today’s bonus piece: It's appropriate that this piece is so interested in barbs and other sharp things, as it lodged itself in my brain and simply refused to leave. It's just as captivating, just as full of a certain haunting kind of energy, as the photograph whose title it shares.
Hayhook (1989)
I am sharpening, coming into focus, getting ready to transfix, my favorite word, I like pointy words, I collect them, the other day I was foraging in the dictionary and transfix jumped into my eye like a burr, all at once it became the cursed jewel of my collection, my small mean clique of pointy words which instantly crowned it queen bee, to rule over them with an iron fist which I always imagined looking like a barn owl’s, most words have only one point but transfix has four, as many as the talons of a barn owl, one in the back and three in the front, four ways to open, four hooks, the dictionary says it means first “cause (someone) to become motionless with horror, wonder, or astonishment” and second “pierce with a sharp implement or weapon,” and I don’t understand why it’s broken in two because if you do the second transfix to somebody you’re also doing the first transfix, stick ‘em up!, I’d like that, rip into a room and say holdstillholdstillholdstill, like Mom does when E and V and me are doing something and suddenly we become art to her, so I make it a point to sharpen every day, I used to sharpen the way a knife sharpens, scraping along the rocks at the bottom of the river, hugging trees, rubbing against rough bark like my body is an art-crayon and my clothes are paper, squeezing like art-clay soil full of hurtful things, but all I’d get was dirty, and dirty only earns you the first transfix, so I kept my eyes peeled for better ways to sharpen, what’s smarter than a knife, then I found it, like a barn owl I hid silently in our sculptor neighbor’s rafters, watched him put what I thought was a skinny horseshoe into his forge, he took it out glowing and tap-tap-tapped on the anvil until the horseshoe returned to being a hayhook, that’s what I’m doing now, stretching on the hayhook dangling from a chain just outside the backdoor, head thrown back, throat the highest point after my palms, a slow strong glow in the dark forge of summer, pain tap-tap-tapping me in the shape of transfix, my hands the t on the hook of the r, adam’s apple-bellybutton-knees constellating the s, feet x’d on the floorboards, every second tap-tap-tapping the found-object doll-torso we have hanging in the kitchen knocking against the glass with every turn of the kitchen fan, which doesn’t reach me even though of everyone here on the back porch I’m closest, sharpening here in the open doorway, the only one using the heat to my advantage, the grown-ups have long since given up to it, accepting their fate, delighting in the stew of it like merrily suicidal squirrels, V still a baby so trying to bargain with the heat, trying to sweeten it with a popsicle longer than her face, I smell it, the mean doll smell of cherry flavor, which tastes nothing at all like real cherries, cutting through the dark fermented smell of a day’s layer of sweat on the melting grown-up bodies on the porch and the bag-of-clams smell of the still-wet snorkel on the porch-boards, I hang on to this fake cherry smell like I hang onto the handles of the hook, the smell is a bright red trace of the tension pulling through my palms throat bellybutton knees the balls of my feet, a pain that feels like a returning, as natural as a mold of my body in river-mud, because I have always longed to sharpen, I was born to sharpen, you see, when I was V’s age I was a blade of grass for Halloween, I’m named after my great-grandma Jessie whose childhood nickname was Slats, she was so skinny and tall and mean, an icicle of a woman, sparkling and cutting through the sepia sameness of grandma’s stories, I collect Jessie-facts, “you have her ribs,” grandma told me, “and her steel ways; she could wound air,” and I wonder how could you wound air?, can you skin it like a squirrel?, peeling back the invisibility to reveal dark red meat, I imagine the water cycle in science with blood instead, evaporation precipitation condensation, red mists in the morning, red storms, blood flood, the smell of it being sucked back into the air afterwards, when you say “after rain smell” everyone in their heads imagining the wet side of a squirrel’s skin and nodding, I imagine Slats wounding air, air crossed redly behind her like lasers in a spy movie, I imagine slats wounding air, a shaving of air falling to the floor like a ribbon every time you draw the blinds, yes I would like to wound air like the first Jessie, the world saying ouch!, I imagine my ribs right now sharp as knives, wounds gasping in the air around it like the gills of a fish, ah a gasp is a wound, too, there’s that s again, another pointy word, gasp, g like the tip of a fish hook and s the barb, the other day in school Mrs. Irwin asked for examples of onomatopoeia and I said gasp and she said I’m wrong, if a gasp were “onomatopoeic” (she said, very smug to know more words than a class of third graders) it would be spelled huh, I huhed!, I huhed!, the whole class laughed and I felt very stupid and dull, this was back when I was still sharpening myself knife-style, now I’m older and smarter and sharpen hook-style, and I know she’s wrong because huh doesn’t sound at all like a gasp, it has no points, no edges, and there is an s when you gasp, I have seen how even a very tiny gasp can cut through a very loud room, and it’s all because of the s, like air being sucked through a pinhole like the insides of an egg, that’s how you used to be able to tell something we were doing had become art to Mom, you’d be able to hear her gasp over a whole table of laughter, or the roar of the river, or the drone of invisible bugs, the problem was the gasp would make us jump or flinch or turn our heads and Mom would yell no! holdstillholdstillholdstill her hair very wild, crouched behind her camera but sounding like she’s hopping up and down like Rumpelstiltskin, making us giggle, and we would no longer be art, so she’d give up or spend the rest of the magic hour trying to coax us back into being art again, but whatever magic was fueling what we’d been doing had escaped out of the hole made by that gasp, and having remembered the presence of the camera we’d be trying too hard to be art, putting on a show, performing the moment we thought she’d seen, that works for some photos, the ones where there’s only one person, or the portraits, where we’re not doing anything but modeling, looking straight into the camera, but not for the ones that are Mom’s favorites, the ones that are also my favorites, the ones where we become art for a split second, cloud photos, because Mom says they’re “unrepeatable as a cloud,” to get these Mom has trained herself not to gasp, biting each one back, swallowing them like fishhooks, I imagine them falling like stars inside the dark of her throat when through the lens we suddenly become art, a snuffed meteor shower every time she looks through the lens and we suddenly become art, instead of gasping she’s learned to sigh, to let the holdstillholdstillholdstill in gently, without piercing a hole in the magic, to whisper them and let our ears do the work, picking out the s s s from the serene fabric of noise, at first mistaking Mom for a snake in dead leaves or a breeze in live ones, letting her drone fade in, almost like we thought to holdstillholdstillholdstill ourselves, almost like we realized ourselves that we’d become art, that’s happened a few times now, in fact, us hearing holdstillholdstillholdstill and doing so then realizing it’s all in our heads, realizing we’d become art before Mom does, or when she doesn’t at all, when she’s looking away, when she isn’t there, the shutter sound never snipping through the air, never cutting the tension, all these cloud photos floating away, like E buried in the river-mud except for his mouth, the only hole with teeth, or V smiling like she had a secret before ushering out a wet wasp with her unstung tongue, or me, now, sharpening on this hook in the shape of transfix, my ribs wounding air, the whiteness of me slicing through the shadows on the porch, I can see all this behind my eyelids, my head thrown back, myself like an afterimage, and I do holdstillholdstillholdstill even though all I hear is the breeze in the leaves, or a snake in the dead ones, because even more than the cloud photos I like the ones that slip away, they give me a sad but good autumn feeling, it’s different from the dazzling feeling when Mom’s photos come out and we, too, see the art in what she did, it’s better, it’s a good pain like my muscles pulling on this hook, a pain like a warm skin, and my palms squeeze the handle of the hayhook one last time before I’ll let go, my sharpening done for the day, before I stop being art, and that’s when something snips the air, Mom’s shutter sound, and I am transfixed.
[“Unrepeatable as a cloud,” “hold still hold still hold still,” Jessie’s Halloween costume, and Slats’ childhood nickname are from Hold Still: A Memoir With Photographs by Sally Mann. The dictionary entries are from The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English. The form is modeled after John Keene’s “Acrobatique.”]
Seth Wang’s fiction is published or forthcoming in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, and Passages North. They are a winner of the 2022 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and were a finalist for BOMB Magazine’s 2021 Fiction Contest. Seth is completing their MFA at Washington University in St. Louis (‘22). They are currently working on a novel. Keep up with Seth at www.sethwang.exposed.
