MATTHEA HARVEY

MATTHEA HARVEY

YOU KNOW THIS TOO

The bird on the gate and the goat nosing the grass below make a funny little fraction, thinks the centaur. He wonders if this thought is more human than horse, more poetry than prose. Sometimes it's hard not to abandon the whole rigmarole of standing at the counter-using a knife and fork to politely eat his steak and peas-to go outside and put his head in the grass. But what his stomach wants, his tongue won't touch; what his mouth wants, his stomach recoils from. Through the restaurant window he sees flashes of silver and pink in the river. It's so clogged with mermaids and mermen, there's no room for fish. And under the bridge, a group of extremist griffins, intent on their graffiti-Long Live the Berlin. The spray paint runs out and while they're shaking the next can in their clenched claws, the centaur spells out Wall on his napkin, and sketches next to it a girl in sequins getting sawed in half.

STRAWBERRY ON THE DRAWBRIDGE

I tried eating one there on the bridge’s fault line, listening out for the dispatcher’s radio so that I’d know if a ship was coming and the road was about to split in two—I love when roads give up on going anywhere and point up towards the heavens. But standing on tiptoe on that crenellated bit of metal (tongue in groove, groove in tongue) didn’t give me the right feeling. Ships were few. And it made me imagine myself being split in two, like St. Simon, martyred length-wise down the middle, which was a feeling I already knew.

For my experiment, I needed an abandoned drawbridge. I found it in Delaware. It was no star, with its rusted rivets and peeling paint, but it was what I was looking for. I got out my orange cones and police tape and cordoned off the area. As a last touch, I put on a uniform I’d bought at the Salvation Army. Then I made a little mound of earth right in the center of the bridge and planted my strawberry plant. I put a bell jar over it and sat next to it, shifting every half hour so that my shadow wouldn’t block the sun. Sometimes, I sat in the control box and polished the controls. Finally, one day the plant sprouted a tiny green strawberry dead center and a week later it was good and red and round. On that long-anticipated day, I pressed play on the tape recorder: Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right—here I am, stuck in the middle with you. On the word “middle,” I lowered the lever and raised by my best binoculars to my eyes.

The bridge groaned and began to open. Some of the roots went to the left, some to the right. The bell jar wobbled, then toppled into the water with a celebratory splash. Soil sifted into the river. And the strawberry hung there, suspended between its two sets of roots and stems like an atom in a science experiment. First the skin, with its little grainy seeds strained, then split. Then as the fleshy part broke open, I could see the pale V of its interior and when that split too, the words finally separated into straw and berry and draw and bridge, and like recombinant DNA, formed new ones. Straw bridge. Draw berry. In the world they conjured the straw bridges were sharp and shiny, too delicate to cross, and there in the berry patches were the artists, islanded at their easels.