Two Stories
Michael Trocchia

Animals We Wear
 
“Animals first entered the imagination
as messengers and promises.”
-John Berger
 
 
He had something he wanted to tell her. But this something belonged to another language, another land altogether, and that land could be reached only by boat. So one afternoon, with the sun at its highest, he led her down to the docks. She was wearing that shirt with the sapphire elephant on it, its white tusks pushing right out of the thin fabric almost. He rowed her out as far as he could, just half way, the weight of the elephant a challenge he could not foresee. He asked her to remove her shirt please, to toss it over the side into the sea. Could she trust him? She knew he feared her more than she him, and so she slipped it off without a sound. He watched her as she watched the shirt disappear into the deep waters, sinking down to the seafloor, where all things are safely remembered. When they reached the shore, he anchored the boat and then hesitated, each step sucked into the wet sands. He pulled out his map from his shirt pocket. Despite appearances, he had never been to this land before while to her everything suddenly looked all so familiar—a pair of dogs running up to her, the sun hitting their tongues and tails at once; and atop the high cliffs in the distance, the gaze of a young ram fixed solely on her pale body; and the tall trees too, like creatures with open arms; an old mule emerging under their limbs, bearing a sack of clean linen and wool, soft bedding fit for her sleep under the stars. She walked just ahead of him now and heard faintly the tiny birds printed on his shirt following behind and singing a song she once knew, a song flying out of her childhood. But when she turned back to him, his eyes had fallen silent, his throat swollen with the blood of a fawn—everything he had to tell her torn apart by the animal in his heart.
 
 
 
 
  
The Muraled City
 
There were murals painted on every one of the city’s buildings, depicting in exacting manner the forestlands and mountain towns of faraway places. Young, mustached fathers of the city came to think that, if approached at the right speed and angle on foot, one could pass directly through its murals and into the bucolic scenes they displayed.
 
And so, not long after some questionable training in both geometry and the gym, such men, in their slim shorts, laid dead on the pavement before these murals. Some of the families of these men believed they had indeed passed into the pastoral life of the mural, leaving behind their bodies at the wall as one leaves this life for another. These families set down letters and lilies at the murals, not out of mourning, but merely to communicate with their fathers and in case flowers were hard to come by on the other side of all that cinder and stone. Some even left cooked roots so to nourish the young men’s memories of their families while living on the other side.
 
Yet many fatherless families wished to destroy the murals of the muraled city altogether, to wipe the buildings entirely clean of them. But year after year their votes came up short, and so another plan had to be worked out.
 
Having heard of a certain young visitor’s talents in illustration, they approached this visitor to draw a series of works from photographs that would depict the buildings of the city before it had even its first mural, to render the sides of its buildings in full as they had been decades ago, when buildings were merely buildings, windows windows. Her work, they plotted, would be projected onto the buildings, and the finest muralists from far and wide would come color in her illustrations at large throughout the city.
 
In this manner the very mural character of the city, and the reputation it enjoyed, would persist. And the families, if they wished, could themselves run at the new murals, passing through them to reunite with their fathers in a time before the muraled city had come to be thought of as such.
 
The young visitor agreed and when her work was done, she handed it over to the committee that commissioned her.
 
Nothing more, however, came of the plan, as the members of the committee, one by one, disappeared in the following days, along with the drawings she made for them. The young visitor left the muraled city herself not long after, sooner than she intended, on the advice that it would be for the better.
 
To this day, despite some cracking and fading here and there, the murals of forestlands and mountain towns remain. Every so often, a child walking in the street hears a window open through the trees or a door unlock in a mountain.
 
 
 
 
 

 
 









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About the Author: 
Michael Trocchia’s Mortals in the Making will appear in early 2019 from Finishing Line Press.  He is author of The Fatherlands (MPP 2014) and Unfounded (FutureCycle Press 2015). He lives in the Shenandoah Valley. 
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