Spring Summer 2022 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

After the party when you’ve collapsed on the couch, leaving the mess for the morning and he gets up as if it were the most natural thing and fills one sink with soapy water and starts moving the sponge along each plate and cup until the dishwasher is full, nothing sexier than his hands dripping soap suds, his love handles peeping out from his shirt as he moves his fingers up and down, around and over, nudging the crud from the tines of the forks, emptying the sink, nothing hotter than the tendons of his arms as he swabs the counter and when he’s done your fatigue has disappeared and you can’t get to him fast enough and even the longest schlong in Cincinnati can’t compete with that.

I have, may it please the court, a few words to say.

In the first place
I deny everything
but water
have all along
I quilted my designs
on a map, all stars
freed slaves
we upended
serpentry. Oh!

to have made
such lean patties
of fat masters
they froze last winter
we shook them down
with the trappings
of a jinn

Boats to either side
MOVE
slow
defend—we said No!
too rough
this country

Hands? Left them in Canada
Eyes? Divined to do the same

They never didn’t
intend murder
art
treason
order
corruption of progeny
or to excite
or incite
the enslaved to rebellion

We freed a mother tongue
abject in their ice and
it is unjust that ICE should sulfur
our ancestral dreams

Had I so interred fear in the path of the rich
the powerful
the intelligent
the so-called “patriot”
on behalf of any of their friends—
father, mother, sister, wife, children, or any of that class—
and suffered
and sacrificed what I have
for this interred fear
it would have been
purest flight

End every man in this court
either hand
punish
vent

rat rabbit
mary martha
bathed in honeyed
milk sick
silk grenadine
cherry syrup
angel face
Nardostachys grandiflora
stored in alabaster
boxes marian
memorabilia
halo of aluminum
foil stars
fortune smiles
upon our bed when you
take me home on
saint valentine’s day
canopy beaming
christ’s radiant light
virgin wife
feet and hair and
love and service
have your cake and
eat it, too
candy hearts
prayer and worship
blessed is she,
amongst all the women
i was always giving myself
laundry to do

They hold chalices above their mouths
and the eggnog
never tickles their lips. It’s

stuck at the pommel.
The false-teeth manufacturer millionaire
nods. Aren’t those transitions between our

two coasts strange? One’s
bailiwick in this

case, is the dank snow falling
at the philtrum. Backward in a lovely
smoky hovel.

The girl smeared chocolate mesquite
at piano. And we all poured ourselves
into bed.

Of this I can be certain: Liam’s head is swiveled east, away from the remains of the sunset, where what was April 15th, 2012 is saying adios and leaving a wide loud wipe of pinkish residue in its wake. The building that Liam is looking at is tall, rectangular, shore-colored; squares pop on yellow-white as the day recedes. Liam counts five windows illuminated. Six. The aluminum report of contact: Liam whips to watch the ball slice past the third baseman – bounce, catch, runner rounds to second, left fielder throws to second baseman to cut him off, runner’s back at first. Liam’s in right field. Come back, he is saying to himself: what if the batter hadn’t pulled it? He does the mental equivalent of slapping himself in the face to wake up. Say that guy had swung later: the ball would bounce past first, trace its erratic path back to the fence, and the hard cork on chain-link would articulate in a clink – that sound that only he can hear while all of his teammates, his mother, everyone else in the stands watch what is basically a silent-movie comedy reel, where he’s running back and trying to grab the ball while it bounces and rolls all over the place. And Shit, shit, shit, he’d be saying to himself, hearing the cardial fury of his just-awakened heart, the hush of the ball rolling away from him on stiff St. Augustine grass.

From where she sits on the veranda overlooking the narrow shoreline she can see a whole group of them, their stomachs stretched and shiny in the sun, waddling over deflated-looking dunes towards the water. She counts three, maybe four (with the fourth she can’t be certain). One of them looks as if she is about to burst. How can she be allowed out like that?

Shaking, Trembling, Quaking, Rending

Shaking, Trembling, Quaking, Rending was selected by Ottessa Moshfegh as the winner of the 2022 Louis Begley Fiction Prize.

Ottessa Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Her debut novel Eileen won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her subsequent novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation was a New York Times bestseller, and will be adapted for film by director Yorgos Lanthimos.

A panicked wail comes across the water, shaking the seafloor. A young sperm whale, caught in the North Pacific Gyre, is separated from her pod. The speed of the current carries her cries far away from their source. The calf’s father chases a trail of barnacles that had been ripped off of the child’s underside by the current. It isn’t long before the father is lost. An infernal din coming from far above the water grows louder and louder.