INTO
by Mark Mayer
Professor Mött, author of a four-volume study of beauty, has a recurring dream in which he has to pee into a teacup. All his female friends are assembled. Some voice encouragements, but all are skeptical and secretly delighted to see him fail. The teacup is the kind that sat on his grandmother’s shelves on display: bone china, gold leaf, rose glaze. He can hold it at any distance he pleases, position it on any surface of the parlor, but it’s impossible. If he aims for the center it bounces and splatters, but if he aims for the edge it slings up the other side. Held too close he has to contend with exit force, too far he has to contend with the acceleration due to gravity. He tries to explain these dynamics to the women on the settees and divans. They munch cucumber sandwiches. They are having a fine time. His chinos are a mess.
Professor Mött says to his audience: “I believe I know why you have called me here again. It is because I misspelled corset in my study. It is c-o-r-s-e-t, not c o-r-s-e-t-t-e as I wrote. That is why we’re here, is it not?”
They refill and smile in silence.
”A corsette, I suppose, would be the diminished form of corse, archaic for corpse,” he says. “A corpsette.”
His splatter is everywhere—on the art books, on the toes of their kitten heels and mules. The sandwiches are spotting.
“I am sorry,” he says.
His mother and sisters are there too. His ex-wives. They can hear when he is lying.
“I admit,” he says. “It wasn’t only corsette. There may have been one or two other little corpses.”
The four-volume study is pulled from the shelf and brought to him on a tea cart. With a tremble, he opens the first volume. He startles back, spraying everywhere. Each letter in it is a delicate corpse. He remembers now he’d laid them out with tweezers. Every letter in the four volumes. He’d laid them moaning, half-anesthetized, then squeezed and held the covers shut. Six hundred thousand words, three million characters, seventy-two million cracking ribs.
They smile at him now and sip to show what his tears are worth to them. They don’t want tears. What they want is for him to pee into a teacup. Nonetheless he can’t stop crying. After all, he wrote those volumes so he, so any educated reader, would never be short on tears. He is equipped to cry for centuries. Nothing brakes his flow.
Author Bio:
Mark Mayer writes fiction and nonfiction. His short story collection, AERIALISTS (Bloomsbury 2019), won the Michener-Copernicus Prize and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. He has been published in American Short Fiction, The Kenyon Review, Guernica, The Iowa Review, The Colorado Review, Best American Mystery Stories, and The New York Times. His academic scholarship has appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature and LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory. Mark has taught creative writing as the R.P. Dana Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Cornell College and as a Faculty Fellow in Creative Writing at Colby College. He teaches in the MFA program at The University of Memphis.
Artist Bio:
Ners Neonlumberjack was born in a tiny town in central Indiana in 1986. Having lived throughout the Midwest and Southern United States, the variety of landscapes in which they have lived informs a wealth of variety and interest in plants and animals in imagery as well as material choice. After graduating Herron School of Art and Design with degrees in Painting, Sculpture, and Art History in 2009 the longing for a sense of place and being conscious of the fragile nature of mortality has been a current within the works. Currently based in Zion National Park, their works maintain an environmentally conscious and sustainable working practice.