The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel and Rick Moody Page B
Authors: Amy Hempel and Rick Moody
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given to olfactory hallucinations. When my parents’ house was burning to the ground, I smelled smoke three states away.
Now I smell worms.
The doctor wants to watch me because I knocked my head. So I get to miss a few days of school. It’s okay with me. I believe that 99 percent of what anyone does can effectively be postponed. Anyway, the accident was a learning experience.
You know—pain teaches?
One of the nurses picked it up from there. She was bending over my bed, snatching pebbles of safety glass out of my hair. “What do we learn from this?” she asked.
It was like that class at school where the teacher talks about Realization, about how you could realize something big in a commonplace thing. The example he gave—and the liar said it really happened—was that once while drinking orange juice, he’d realized he would be dead someday. He wondered if we, his students, had had similar “realizations.”
Is he kidding? I thought.
Once I cashed a paycheck and I realized it wasn’t enough.
Once I had food poisoning and realized I was trapped inside my body.
What interests me now is this memory thing. Why two days ? Why two days? The last I know is not getting carded in a two-shark bar near the Bonneville flats. The bartender served me tequila and he left the bottle out. He asked me where I was going, and I said I was just going. Then he brought out a jar with a scorpion in it. He showed me how a drop of tequila on its tail makes a scorpion sting itself to death.
What happened after that?
Maybe those days will come back and maybe they will not. In the meantime, how’s this: I can’t even remember all I’ve forgotten.
I do remember the accident, though. I remember it was like the binoculars. You know—two ways? It was fast and it was slow. It was both.
The pot roast wasn’t bad. I ate every bit of it. I finished the green vegetables and the citrus vegetables too.
Now I’m waiting for the night nurse. She takes a blood pressure about this time. You could call this the high point of my day. That’s because this nurse makes every other woman look like a sex-change. Unfortunately, she’s in love with the Lord.
But she’s a sport, this nurse. When I can’t sleep she brings in the telephone book. She sits by my bed and we look up funny names. Calliope Ziss and Maurice Pancake live in this very community.
I like a woman in my room at night.
The night nurse smells like a Christmas candle.
After she leaves the room, for a short time the room is like when she was here. She is not here, but the idea of her is.
It’s not the same—but it makes me think of the night my mother died. Three states away, the smell in my room was the smell of the powder on her face when she kissed me good night—the night she wasn’t there.
Pool Night
This time it happened with fire. Just the way it happened before, the time it happened with water. Someone was losing everything—to water, to fire—and not trying not to.
Maybe I wasn’t losing everything. But I didn’t try to save it. That is what makes it like the first time. They had to lead me out of the house, and not because I didn’t know my way out in the smoke.
The first time, no one said anything. Or we talked about everything but. It was twenty-eight years since the river topped its banks, all that time since a flood skunked the reservoir and washed out people’s homes.
We watched the water come, when it did. From patios late at night, the neighborhood watched the water move. A flash of light like strobe light would go off on the ground as the watery debris snapped a high-tension tower. When the wires touched the water, that part of town went black. This was the thing we watched—the city going dark along the path of the flood.
It was not supposed to reach us.
And then it did.
Evacuation was calm and quick, except for Dr. Winton. Dr. Winton drank down most of his liquor cabinet and stared at the Red Cross volunteers who put their van in
Now I smell worms.
The doctor wants to watch me because I knocked my head. So I get to miss a few days of school. It’s okay with me. I believe that 99 percent of what anyone does can effectively be postponed. Anyway, the accident was a learning experience.
You know—pain teaches?
One of the nurses picked it up from there. She was bending over my bed, snatching pebbles of safety glass out of my hair. “What do we learn from this?” she asked.
It was like that class at school where the teacher talks about Realization, about how you could realize something big in a commonplace thing. The example he gave—and the liar said it really happened—was that once while drinking orange juice, he’d realized he would be dead someday. He wondered if we, his students, had had similar “realizations.”
Is he kidding? I thought.
Once I cashed a paycheck and I realized it wasn’t enough.
Once I had food poisoning and realized I was trapped inside my body.
What interests me now is this memory thing. Why two days ? Why two days? The last I know is not getting carded in a two-shark bar near the Bonneville flats. The bartender served me tequila and he left the bottle out. He asked me where I was going, and I said I was just going. Then he brought out a jar with a scorpion in it. He showed me how a drop of tequila on its tail makes a scorpion sting itself to death.
What happened after that?
Maybe those days will come back and maybe they will not. In the meantime, how’s this: I can’t even remember all I’ve forgotten.
I do remember the accident, though. I remember it was like the binoculars. You know—two ways? It was fast and it was slow. It was both.
The pot roast wasn’t bad. I ate every bit of it. I finished the green vegetables and the citrus vegetables too.
Now I’m waiting for the night nurse. She takes a blood pressure about this time. You could call this the high point of my day. That’s because this nurse makes every other woman look like a sex-change. Unfortunately, she’s in love with the Lord.
But she’s a sport, this nurse. When I can’t sleep she brings in the telephone book. She sits by my bed and we look up funny names. Calliope Ziss and Maurice Pancake live in this very community.
I like a woman in my room at night.
The night nurse smells like a Christmas candle.
After she leaves the room, for a short time the room is like when she was here. She is not here, but the idea of her is.
It’s not the same—but it makes me think of the night my mother died. Three states away, the smell in my room was the smell of the powder on her face when she kissed me good night—the night she wasn’t there.
Pool Night
This time it happened with fire. Just the way it happened before, the time it happened with water. Someone was losing everything—to water, to fire—and not trying not to.
Maybe I wasn’t losing everything. But I didn’t try to save it. That is what makes it like the first time. They had to lead me out of the house, and not because I didn’t know my way out in the smoke.
The first time, no one said anything. Or we talked about everything but. It was twenty-eight years since the river topped its banks, all that time since a flood skunked the reservoir and washed out people’s homes.
We watched the water come, when it did. From patios late at night, the neighborhood watched the water move. A flash of light like strobe light would go off on the ground as the watery debris snapped a high-tension tower. When the wires touched the water, that part of town went black. This was the thing we watched—the city going dark along the path of the flood.
It was not supposed to reach us.
And then it did.
Evacuation was calm and quick, except for Dr. Winton. Dr. Winton drank down most of his liquor cabinet and stared at the Red Cross volunteers who put their van in
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