Is Mink Hollow - Jana Martin

Mirror

Take a break from the Perforated story. Take a break from the story about having a hole punched through your life and sing backups for the visiting stars making their next something. Take a break from the story about having a hole in your eardrum and a younger boyfriend who is about to leave for a diver and eat a piece of bread. Eat a piece of bread, that nice Italian bread, from Boston, brought by those visitors who wanted to bring something nice, something kind of swank and international. And while listening to the visitors talk about their road tales, about being busted in Berlin for having talcum powder in a vial, about being nearly busted in Dubai just like that youngblood producer, while listening to them one-up each other and reminisce about being big and having a fancy bus, and all those girls, do you remember that one who suddenly appeared with a chest the size of the Matterhorns? Matterhorny one says, tourbus wit thick as smoke, just suddenly notice that the bread is the color of pale skin, the color of an interior epidermal layer, much like the inside of an ear, and this particular slice of bread has a hole in it. Let the hole catch your eye. Notice the way the butter, the fake butter because you don’t eat real butter anymore like you don't drink vodka like you don't smoke, notice that the soy butter, the concocted soy spread product, notice how it wraps around the edges of the hole and clings to the rim of the hole in a liquid, yellowish way that is slightly pus-like. Like pus. The buttered bread looks like an infected perforated eardrum, you hear yourself say, but to yourself so the stories can go on and on until the caffeine wears off (which it won't, since the coffee is espresso brewed as coffee, another international swank-tinged maneuver), and then bolt. Bolt from the kitchen’s tall-star conversation and go outside where it is morning and get into the car. The car is quiet. The motor chuffs on without ego. The transmission understands the profound difference between forward and reverse. The roads are lined with green. Drive up to that road that cuts through the mountain, that curves east and north through the woods and hunched cabins. Drive past a herd of deer munching a garden. Drive past a nickering pony at the fence, begging for a little boy's apples. Drive past the mirror placed alongisde the road, at the peak of the steep curve, a lifesaver in the pitch black of every night, and see her face in the mirror. She is looking at you. She is looking at you with those recently deep-set eyes, the eyes that were trying to escape back into the head, to get away from the tubes and the rooms and the fluorescent concern of the doctors and their passles of students who all feigned concern, the eyes that were trying to look only at good things, at oil paints, tubes of oil paints arranged on the table, the swirled rich deposits of cobalt and ultramarine laid out and waiting for the brush to kiss them again, the spread them onto the whispering plain of canvas. Drive past her staring out of the traffic mirror with the word Why on her lips and slow down, and jam the car in reverse and then drive past it again. She is still there. She is always there. And tell her you'll never forget.

07.24.06 @ 08:36 PM EST [link]

	Is Mink Hollow - Jana Martin

	Monday, July 24th Mirror Take a break from the Perforated story. Take a break from the story about having a hole punched through your life and sing backups for the visiting stars making their next something. Take a break from the story about having a hole in your eardrum and a younger boyfriend who is about to leave for a diver and eat a piece of bread. Eat a piece of bread, that nice Italian bread, from Boston, brought by those visitors who wanted to bring something nice, something kind of swank and international. And while listening to the visitors talk about their road tales, about being busted in Berlin for having talcum powder in a vial, about being nearly busted in Dubai just like that youngblood producer, while listening to them one-up each other and reminisce about being big and having a fancy bus, and all those girls, do you remember that one who suddenly appeared with a chest the size of the Matterhorns? Matterhorny one says, tourbus wit thick as smoke, just suddenly notice that the bread is the color of pale skin, the color of an interior epidermal layer, much like the inside of an ear, and this particular slice of bread has a hole in it. Let the hole catch your eye. Notice the way the butter, the fake butter because you don’t eat real butter anymore like you don't drink vodka like you don't smoke, notice that the soy butter, the concocted soy spread product, notice how it wraps around the edges of the hole and clings to the rim of the hole in a liquid, yellowish way that is slightly pus-like. Like pus. The buttered bread looks like an infected perforated eardrum, you hear yourself say, but to yourself so the stories can go on and on until the caffeine wears off (which it won't, since the coffee is espresso brewed as coffee, another international swank-tinged maneuver), and then bolt. Bolt from the kitchen’s tall-star conversation and go outside where it is morning and get into the car. The car is quiet. The motor chuffs on without ego. The transmission understands the profound difference between forward and reverse. The roads are lined with green. Drive up to that road that cuts through the mountain, that curves east and north through the woods and hunched cabins. Drive past a herd of deer munching a garden. Drive past a nickering pony at the fence, begging for a little boy's apples. Drive past the mirror placed alongisde the road, at the peak of the steep curve, a lifesaver in the pitch black of every night, and see her face in the mirror. She is looking at you. She is looking at you with those recently deep-set eyes, the eyes that were trying to escape back into the head, to get away from the tubes and the rooms and the fluorescent concern of the doctors and their passles of students who all feigned concern, the eyes that were trying to look only at good things, at oil paints, tubes of oil paints arranged on the table, the swirled rich deposits of cobalt and ultramarine laid out and waiting for the brush to kiss them again, the spread them onto the whispering plain of canvas. Drive past her staring out of the traffic mirror with the word Why on her lips and slow down, and jam the car in reverse and then drive past it again. She is still there. She is always there. And tell her you'll never forget. 07.24.06 @ 08:36 PM EST [link]

	Jana Martin's latest collection of stories, Russian Lover, will be out this summer. She lives in the hamlet of Lake Hill in Woodstock, NY. She also plays bass and banjo and was a founding member of the seminal Tucson power trio, Flavor Cage, and indie heavies The Rings.

	Is Mink Hollow is updated Mondays. Images by John Dermot Woods