By Kelly Krumrie.
A Parametric Study of Sound Mirrors
The sidewalk is underwater. We did this. I hear it.
The next day it dries up easy. I walk and listen. I know my love is insensitive, distant.
Along the sidewalk, I’m walking, I hear no more water—it’s dry here and will get drier, each day, I’m out, leaves browning.
The old brick houses are brightly painted. I come across a set of concrete barriers. A hole in the road, equipment, but no one’s around but me.
This mess is meant to facilitate resurfacing.
The barriers are triangular when I look at their ends. They slope to the asphalt and are crooked in their row blocking the road. I approach like they’re deer.
1. Making the Mirror
I decide to move them. I’m an operator, an agent for my own sentences. There are six. So. The arrangement is this: one in the center, two flared out on either side, then the other three on top, one on another. I’m strong enough to move them, which seems impossible, but I do it, I move them, with my arms, and I press my hip against the edge of one, bending low and pushing from there, the strongest part of me. It slides like it’s on jelly.
The apparatus (image one) consists of me shouting, Listen! I’m just trying to get this right!
When drunk I’m handsy. If unconstrained I radiate sound waves in a coherent beam.
2. Siren
My eyes are two equally spaced concentric holes.
The vertical reveal at the base of the barrier is intended to provide a neat line. I line the barriers up in an arc and shout into it: echo. I mentally cut a curved reveal in the concrete surface and shout into it.
The sound out? This person I manifest for myself—ah!
Barrier slope banks the vehicle which may yaw, pitch, or roll over, a motorist’s head could go through a side window and make contact.
Not with this kind of warning—the sound I’m holding.
A verb which takes no complement (such as rain) has zero valence.
*
Reason
I’m afraid of drowning, which is reasonable, though I don’t live near water. But an aquifer could be beneath me at any moment. I spend the morning looking up aquifers but facts won’t penetrate images of myself trapped inside one. For example, there are layers of rock and clay I could never fit between. I find a multi-colored illustration of a cross section of an aquifer with arrows connecting parts to their names and further differentiation of rocks and depths made by stipples and crosshatch. At the top of the illustration there’s a green lawn, a red barn, a blue sky, and a yellow sun. This is in a geology textbook I have. On this page there are sidebars with descriptive text, bolded words, footnotes and capped headers, suggestions to learn more on other pages or online.
When I drive I visualize the immense puddle my car could sink into, and I wonder if we’d bob or plummet. But quickly, when I’m picturing it, I’m out of the car—it’s just me closed up in water like black glass.
I’ve swum in oceans, lakes, rivers, and pools. I’ve boated and surfed, cliff jumped (though not bravely). I’ve waded unsteadily over mossy stones. I’ve tumbled so long in a wave I was sure I’d never come out, clawing at bubbles and sand, brain long off.
I close the textbook.
There’s debris on the street from part of my neighbor’s car being sawed off and stolen. A bit of plastic, metal shavings. A little dog shit at the edge of the sidewalk.
My ability to approximate feeling is diminishing. I think to myself that I’m fine with getting old though frown at the backs of my hands. I manage sadness well. It would be impossible for me to identify the rocks that line the garden in front of my house so I don’t even try. For a brief moment on the sidewalk I feel the uneven junction of two pads of concrete and the warmth of the sun and the coolness of a shadow as I move my arm through it, and I’m so overcome with desire I can hardly breathe.
Inside a timer’s going off so I walk through a series of doors and push a button, turn the knob for the burner around until it clicks.
The fact that I spend most days waiting fills me with an embarrassment I suppress by running from my house to the park and back. I time myself, track my pace, and log each run in a notebook. I’m getting faster. Still, sometimes when I run, though not often, I’m suddenly certain I’ll cry, a cry coming out of me terrible and unwanted, like a flood of moths, and my face will take on an expression I hope no one ever sees. I haven’t yet let this feeling overtake me. This is a kind of drowning maybe. That the waiting’s a suspension in dark water and I need to get it over with and swallow the waves and die already.
Where am I? I’m sifting sediment out of homemade elderberry syrup. I put the syrup in jars and carefully wipe drips from the rims. On small squares of drawing paper I’ve cut out I clearly print the ingredients, and I tape these to the lids. Later I’ll draw something, I decide, as I cap the pen, jars lined up and ready.
But my car won’t start. From inside the warm car, sun beating down on its shiny hood, I compose an email on my phone telling my friends that I can’t deliver their syrup because my car won’t start. I write a sentence I think is funny about how I’ve drunk all the syrup by myself in the car, I rhyme “antioxidant” with “accident,” and then I delete the sentence. I only want to help them. I draft another email. I make a few jokes, then I delete them, then I delete the whole draft. I carry the box of jars back inside and they clink together.
It’s like the geology textbook is looking at me. What does it mean?! I’m tired of learning. That will never be true. I keep a record of books too. I’m inside for the day, cloud cover’s come in, so I switch on the lights and refresh my email. I draft an email where I list several facts about aquifers and how the Ogallala Aquifer is at risk for over-extraction due to agricultural irrigation, specifically from center-pivot sprinklers, which are what make the circles you see from planes. My finger hovers over the icon to send.
Should I think through what it is I’m waiting for? When I came out of the wave my surfing instructor scolded me for fighting it instead of allowing my body to rise limply to the surface.
I hate being wrong.
It dawns on me that the illustration in the geology textbook depicts a farm that’s probably irrigated by the aquifer beneath it. I know this is a simplified image. When / if my friends read my emails will they picture me labeled? See text tethered to my body and brain by dotted lines?
What happens?
I research something you’d never guess, day becomes night, no one writes me back, I take a big, painful drink of water because it’s information I can’t handle.
*
By x, y, z
By x
I tie a net up. I knot it and loop some ends together but not all of them.
I let it take the weight of a potted plant then set them both down on the counter.
The net falls open and its spaces’ shapes are irregular and wandering as the rope shifts itself into settling.
This leaves me—something.
I hold the net up to the skylight. I wouldn’t try to save time by cutting it? Even these holes aren’t nothing.
Fine. I travel to another city. It’s easy.
Motorbikes—
I go to cross the street and a stranger grabs my arm to stop me.
I cast myself to the other side now he’s with me. We walk around the trees in the sidewalk.
Let him kiss me in an alley where there’re iridescent puddles, sunlight off an aluminum awning sharp in my open eyes as he jabs his tongue in. I wait for it.
Knots on the trip home make me smaller than I am in the seat.
Diesel on my fingertips? Just a sheen from the small, greasy crackers.
Out the window it’s night, in here any time. By here I don’t mean the plane.
By y
The infrastructure’ll change how I project a diagram of the city’s gas line which had to be flared at the end of my street, loud and hot.
Under me is the line, I mean, the pipe.
By project a diagram I mean I’m trying to map my surroundings and lately the city’s been digging up sidewalks I’m on so I cross and then cross back.
By project I mean picturing an elongated body (mine) as if I’m outside it, to observe my own discipline, how I’m all angles and aggregate not yet dug up.
By z
I say, look here. There are as many sounds of transport on this block as there are ghosts.
Though the sky’s crisp and blue and I’ve got bright winter air in my lungs, I’m blanketed in beeping, an idling bus, those scooters. This is stupid?
I’m gonna slingshot myself somewhere else.
Or: Pick me up in your electric car.
I mean, listen, I’m brave enough to get in.
Anything’s outside.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kelly Krumrie is the author of Math Class (Calamari Archive, 2022). Other creative and critical writing appears in journals such as Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, Annulet, DIAGRAM, La Vague, and Black Warrior Review. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver.
