#katiebellamymitchell

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The Note That Was Left on the Subaru (Allie Villarreal)

Remix  of  "Letter from the Inside of the Subaru"  by  Katie Bellamy Mitchell

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I was in love with Judith. No thinking. It just was. Ever since she leaned over and bit at the corner of my shirt I knew I loved her. After that first bite it wasn’t much longer before I was consumed. She marked the start of an endless summer on that never-ending trip.  Traveling together in that Subaru was a small world within a world as we drove mile upon mile across the country. But summers end. Trips end. Everything ends in the wake of the death of a star. Our world ended when Judith died. We didn't make it to that ranch house that existed mostly in our minds and that stranger called our father was never visited. The quiet driving turned to silence with the sound of bullet to brain. Who could have known those accidental vulnerabilities were only cracks of an infinite sadness. She was always so much for saying so little, but we heard it through her body and the rustling of her dress. She hated photographs and she hated her life so I think it’s only appropriate to write this note on the back of the only picture of her I was able to sneak: Frankie fucking guitar as it moaned its personal ecstasies while you and Judith, played the voyeurs; with Judith’s mouth open just enough for the sounds to escape as she sang her sad songs. We all sighed along as each note passed from throat, to tongue, to those teeth that held my world together. I can’t stay, Isaac. In this little car was the life I could only have dreamt of living; the life that I lived with Judith. So it goes and so I go. I got myself a Styrofoam cup of coffee and am waiting at a rest stop somewhere far from you and Frankie because I have nothing better to do. So I’ll move around this country trying to sing quieter, warblier, and I’ll lean over and bite at the corner of someone’s shirt in the hopes that one day a world will be hinging on these teeth.

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Courtesy of Flickr: 

Sydney Harbour Bridge - Safety Mechanism for Creeper Cranes by State Records NSW

View of a Building: Silver Glen Springsby Florida Memory (State Library and Archives of Florida)

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Kilter (Katie Bellamy Mitchell)

“He will be remembered for his monochromatic color scheme and obsessive labeling.” Sophia drifted over closer to the chatty couple in the kitchen, who were turning over bundles of cutlery tied off with price tags. It was true; the estate sale was unlike any that she had ever seen, but she felt a little defensive of whomever who had owned the house before these two had walked in. The couple matched in a way that would have been sickening if it hadn’t been unintentional and probably a daily occurrence: skinny faded blue jeans, patterned dove-grey button downs, skinny vintage-looking brown leather shoes and horn-rimmed glasses. The man laughed and held the woman’s ass as they kept speculating about the eccentric and lonely man who had died, tragically and dramatically, by throwing himself off of a building after someone had upset a glass of red wine all over the tablecloth. Sophia blushed angrily and walked out of the kitchen, embarrassed by how loud they were being and how tasteless. They moved through the house, she decided, in a way that was too obviously acquisitive, anyways, as if they had already bought it and were planning on starting a family in there. Or just fucking on the marble countertop, from the look of her hand drifting towards his crotch.

Sophia sighed and stopped in front of yet another wall with neatly framed abstract wooden block-prints. She was doing the same thing that they were, being just as speculative. But it was rather presumptuous to think that he had died, anyways, sometimes people just wanted to start over and get rid of everything by selling it off. Or, she reminded herself, that it was a he that had done anything at all. She pictured a woman wrapped up in a huge gauzy scarf – despite the summer heat – drinking her morning tea at the long, silvery wooden counter overlooking the garden. The home was obviously valuable, but the aura of extreme wealth was not due to the normal profusion of expensive lamps and plates and unopened books, but the militant lack of anything particularly distinguishing, an Spartan and pervasive whiteness. Whoever had owned the place must have been extraordinarily lonely, or perhaps they had been fabulously popular, throwing quirkily blanched dinner parties while they hid, Gatsby-style, in the hallways crowded with stilettos and important people. 

Normally houses were chaotic, and older. Her entry always felt in medias res despite the fact that the appraiser who handed her a neat little price list had obviously gone through and parceled everything into sellable quantities: clothing sometimes still in the closet, feather boas tucked in the backs of closets, amateurly taxidermied animals, framed birth announcements on the wall, a few cracked cereal bowls, a box of mostly left-handed driving gloves from when the owner would pull off her right-handed glove to scribble something down, or to shake someone’s hand. It was a museum to someone’s life. Or, the material that they choose to tell their lives with. What about someone whose objects are utterly simple? No images of a family, no images of a life? She shook her head. No one lives like that. We all accumulate things, even if you live in a magazine. People are always throwing parties, dropping objects, breaking objects, leaving things behind.

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Letter from the Inside of the Subaru (Katie Bellamy Mitchell)

I think I’m in love with Judith. We picked her up somewhere west of the Appalachians, at a rest stop with a Styrofoam cup of coffee and an easy grin. She wears thin summer dresses like crumpled sheets of tissue paper that get all twisted up into straps and stick to her shoulders like embroidery, without purpose and direction in the backseat of the car.  She is all thigh and sprawl and big and sometimes we see her nipples spill out, none of us want to say anything and she always shifts back anyways right before, and it feels like some part of her personality is small and brown and only ever accidentally visible, accidentally vulnerable. I didn’t even know you could pick up hitchhikers now. I didn’t know anyone still moved around the country with nothing better to do. It felt like transit beforehand, Just Isaac and Frankie and I swaying in a train-compartment of a car moving from one side of the continent to another. Suddenly it was a trip. Suddenly I wasn’t sure that there was really an end to the trip, if we were really going to visit our estranged father, if that ranch house from the Facebook photos really existed.

You know every time you tag yourself in a photo, you’re just making the government’s facial recognition system more powerful?” She hates photographs, and complains loudly whenever Isaac pulls out his phone to take a panorama of some soybean field at sunset. Other than that she doesn’t really talk much. She’ll sing along with me whenever Frankie plays the guitar though. We’d have a proper band or something if it didn’t sound so intimate. Frank starts playing something fast and light, and Judith and I start out high over Isaac’s low humming, she a little quieter and warblier than me, but the guitar is too alive sounding. The whole car just echoes with the movement of his fingers and the squeak of metal, like we’re in the texture of his fingerprints. And he plays for her voice, not mine. I guess we’re all a bit in love with her.  

It’s as if she’s been in the car with us the whole time. From the moment she draped herself over the backseat next to Frankie she was hot and silent, breathing with the same listless energy we all had. Frankie shifted slightly and made sure her dramatically flung orange backpack didn’t interfere with his guitar playing and nodded. I wasn’t sure that I was in love with her until she leaned over and bit at the corner of my shirt. It was a small thing, just the thin ridge of her white teeth tugging on the loose cotton on my shoulder. I was playing Townes Van Zandt and she sat up a little bit, humming along to “Pancho & Lefty” and just grabbed at me and it felt like the realest sort of communication, you know? Like a paperclip or something pinning all the parts of that car together: white sun on the beige plastic dashboard, the persistent hum of the ac, some cowboy crooning about the federales, Frankie snoring and Isaac with his head out the window all hinging on those teeth.

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Courtesy of Flickr:

Classic Look by John Lloyd, used under CC BY / blur effect + black and white

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The Birth of Futurism (Katie Bellamy Mitchell)

Every time his fingers twitch he is thinking about folding a butterfly wing in half, and in half again into a small rectangle of creases and then dropping it into his pocket. He will convince you that it was your idea. You keep your hands closed. He keeps his eyes closed, cataracts, like opals, that everyone strains to see when his lids flutter. He keeps them closed. He runs a small museum, Maritime History, where he stores torpedoes, sliced open and wired tightly with coils of red and blue, like capillaries. There is one room full of seashells, just seashells. All of them delicate and white and lit by electricity and a sense of what feels like vertigo, but is really just the potential of so many brittle bodies with rooms like cupboards inside of them. The fact that you could shatter them all. You touch his face, and then hold your hand a moment apart, hovering between sliding down to his neck to rest your palm around the nape like he is some handful of animal about to buck, or pull away. His breathing is too loud for this room and your body is too large, the broad metal chests of his machines hum behind the glass like the souls of the creatures that lived in the seashells, like invitations to violence.