Oracles

Excerpt

She hurries down the half-flight to the Grove Street basement and lets herself in. She kicks off her pedal pushers and stands in her panties pouring a handful of seed in the cage where a Javanese Temple bird called Ginsberg scolds from side to side. The advantage of this one room, a half-story underground, is that if you adjust the blinds at an angle nobody can see in. The disadvantage is that car exhaust and the slightest breeze waft in the airborne detritus of New York. The guy she sublet from said, “You get more air below street level.” Now she sees that the air in question contains body ash, glass, concrete, carbon dioxide, lint and pulverized dog doo. Everything she owns is overlaid with wasteland.

Not her clothes. She has tacked a burlap curtain over the cavity that serves as closet. Now she slings it over her shoulder to dig out the Merry Widow bra, a pair of pale stockings, the new drop-waisted linen on which she spent the weekend sewing and over twelve dollars, if you count the zipper.

She showers in the cubicle, leans into the Merry Widow (another extravagance, but also armor), and reaches back to hook all thirty-five miniature fish hooks from wing blade to base of spine. Putting it on lets you know what it feels like to have your hands tied behind you. But when the hooks are done, when she bends and settles her breasts into the underwires, she has a handspan of waist and lifted globes. It’s hard to breathe.