Creature by Amina Cain Page B

Dubai?”
    “I want what everyone wants.”
    I looked at him and saw that he had a scratch on his face. “Which is what?” I asked.
    He never answered.
    When I left the museum it was starting to rain, and a guy called me over to his tent. It was a simple triangle, like the one my parents and I had taken camping when I was young.
    “What?” I asked him.
    He shrugged. “I’d like to invite you in.”
    “Why?”
    “You seem like a nice woman.”
    “I am.”
    “Your arm bends in a weird way,” he said.
    I held my arms up in the rain. “I know, it always has. Both of them.”
    “Are you going to come in?”
    “No.”
    “Your loss.” He unzipped the tent door and bent down to crawl inside. I could see part of a blue sleeping bag and a few magazines stacked on top of it. A lantern hung from the middle of the ceiling and the guy turned it on. “Have a good night,” he said.
    “You too.”
    Back at the loft I stood looking out of the window, at the school, its long shape extending into the darkness, at my arms, my shoulders in my dress. I made it look like my arm was as long as the school.
    Later, when I had lived here for a while, my second friend and I visited an orchid estate. It was finally cold outside, but the greenhouse was warm. Water droplets collected on the plastic covering and window panes. I walked around looking at the orchids, at their ways of being in air. Some of them seemed like they were holding it, like they were spoons or bowls; some faced the air, slender prongs pointing up, slender fangs pointing down; some pushed through or away, small, strong flaps with light yellow ridges or dark red spots. I looked at the plants for a long time. Then I sat down in a chair and wrote in my notebook. I noticed it become evening. When I finally saw my friend again, he was carrying two orchids.
    In the car, we situated the plants in the back seat so they wouldn’t fall over, and rolled the windows down so they would get some circulation.
    “Can we drive by the university?” I asked. “I’d like to see what the campus looks like.”
    “Sure.”
    We drove through the campus where the lights from the buildings shone out onto the grass. The buildings were new with hardly anything to distinguish them from each other, except that some of them had more floors than the others, and in front of the library was a sculpture that looked like a coat hanger. A few students were sitting on it. I tried to imagine myself teaching there.
    “That’s enough,” I said. “I just wanted to have an idea so I could picture it in my head.”
    It felt like something weird was going to happen, but nothing happened. I turned around and looked into the backseat. The orchids were upright; everything was the same. I thought back to the period of time when it had taken me half an hour to eat a piece of toast.
    Back then it had seemed as if I was living a life after it had already ended. Now I could hardly take in enough.

ATTACHED TO A SELF

Sometimes there is a great emptiness, like shaking a box nothing is inside of; sometimes the box becomes warm. It was like that when I arrived here. It was four in the morning and before coming I had been reading a book about being an adult. I had also been trying to read The Flower Ornament Scripture.
    I can’t picture you doing that.
    It’s not weird, is it?
    I guess not.
    I don’t know yet what I’m walking around in. I feel lost. I like that. A sentence in the introduction to The Flower Ornament Scripture reads, “It could variously be said with a measure of truth in each case that these teachings are set forth in a system, in a plurality of systems, and without a system.” So there is a web, but that web doesn’t actually exist, and sometimes it is multiple.
    Do you think you are walking around in a web?
    On the way here, the person I was driving with asked me lots of questions about my life. I asked her lots of questions too, and though I thought I could go on for a long time in that