RICH MUSICAL HONKING: an essay by Darina Sikmashvili

Afternoon

I want to talk about the Hudson River today. 

It’s sunny outside. This is the walk I take whether it is sunny or not and whether I want to or not. Going outside once a day is Essential. The phone will ring: Have you been going outside? Yes, I will say and honestly, too.

The water today is foamy and green. Another time I would have looked and said, dirty. I am last to notice nature. Now I am searching for signs of Earth's thriving even at our expense. Far into the horizon looking south I can see the gemmy water. I share with the crows and jellyfish this: I like a glistening thing. Maybe sirens are just that: water shimmering.

Out in the shimmer it is blue but close to me it is an alluring kind of murky green like a toad or like seaweed. Deep and dark and not at all the kiddish bright shade of a patch of grass.

To fight time I have been reading only what pertains to nature. I quarantine my thinking and the world is contained to what would have been here anyway. What pushes through and blooms and stinks despite.

Am I enjoying this walk? I bloodied a butcher's apron. All I can think about in this big stupid orange sweater in this screaming sun is whether They have restocked bleach. Whether I can feel better soon and focus only on my fortune. Like the fortune of being outside, of seeing water shimmer.

Nonessential and so I am spared hauling bags of people into temporary morgues. I have the task of walking, the task of agonizing.

Afternoon

My roommate's girlfriend sobs and screams on Zoom. She's not left her Boston apartment in weeks and all his coaxing and speaking softly and speaking firmly does nothing.

Days ago she stuck her hands out of the kitchen window. And yesterday, trembling, her head. I'll task myself with sitting with him. He will talk thinly. Not one to pry, but then my world has been shrinking and everything inside of it ballooning to catastrophe.

Their fight is a placeholder: when I hear her voice from his room it is like a cornered animal choking fear with rage.

Early Evening

And just like that, clouds part in my tiny patch of sky: one two three four five geese in the grass; a sixth on a rock, a seventh in the water.

Today at the beginning of my walk, near the awful metal sculpture of what I cannot possibly tell you—a shape eating a shape, there—today I see one goose settle gently onto the grass, her body wide and beautiful like a speckled glistening bowl. What I want to do is lift her and place her on my lap. The way she curves her jet black neck to dip her face back into her feathers. They, all of them, are perpetually cleaning themselves.

People stop to stare. It's April, someone notes. They're visiting.

Look at one peck at a rock. I don’t understand that desire at all. What could that satisfy? But there, look: that's how long you didn't think about disinfectant? That's how long you didn't sit inside of your head muddy with sadness?

Morning

Windy. So windy that to write this, I stand behind a tree. Another obligation I ornate myself with: I go running now.

I'll go anywhere do anything so I could just for a little bit stop feeling like I am losing my fucking mind seven seven hours of reading the news yesterday my cuticles bloody ribbons in my teeth a friend joked, so did you find a cure, then? I grinned my grin and bit an ice cube and thought, dick.

Six geese at the start of my run. Close to the dock, amid people, spread out like a rowdy family at a picnic. A little ways in, further along the running route, I find the two I photograph. I suppose it’s because there are two, a neat pair, that I am drawn more to them.

I and the cherry blossom. Branches bow to shade the couple. Flower petals gather.

One stands close to the rocks, pecking and pecking at grass. The other sits wide and quiet, watching. Again I get the urge to disturb.

Is it the water? This reminds me of a wonderful sight I often see on the beach: a mother in a swimsuit, propped up on her elbows on a towel, hawk eyes on her child splashing near the shore. I was a bad swimmer but in denial. I am.

One's incessant activity imbues the other with divine calm.

Evening

I am foolishly thinking perhaps if I keep returning they will recognize me and see me as a friend. In Audubon's guide I find them, and with my mouth I try to shape their sound. Rich musical honking.

Today in twos in the water. Two by the water plant. Two just minutes into The Cherry Walk, chipping around rock algae. Bobbing in the water they look perfect and solid and complete. Like little buoys.

But I know below there, below the water, are feet paddling. I know there is effort there, that there is navigation.

Morning

Everywhere are people. Far apart from one another and unable to resist the sun, the warmth. I am outside too, on my health-advised walk but also I am yearning for movement that is not my own, for faces. From a distance, fine, but faces. For others.

I find and follow a loner goose. Ungainly when I watch him walk across the grass. A man walks past and smiles at us, I can feel, though I cannot see his mouth.

Morning

I watch a funeral taking place in Lubny, Ukraine, on my mother's cellphone, on WhatsApp, in her kitchen, in Brooklyn, at 4:30 in the morning.

I have to find something to focus on, what do I do? I make Turkish coffee in a tiny copper pot. Once and then again. It is the kind of coffee you labor for and you have to concentrate since it'll bubble up quick the grinds thick will leap right over the copper lip and your mother will turn around and ask, how many more times. A decade you've been making this coffee and still you let it spill.

The woman who guides our view of the funeral with her phone walks it close to my grandmother’s face (closer than I would have approached were I there and not in Brooklyn, in my mother’s kitchen), tells us to say goodbye and my mother reaches for the screen and I say to myself and have since said again: I am at a virtual funeral.

This is my first one. We are told closure is coming like a faraway rider. A man I lean on has lost many people. He notes the misfortune of this: a funeral ties the knot. A funeral confirms. Hired holy men remove a bed of Blue French Lilac, (President Gravy Lilac, Blue Skies Lilac, Common Lilac, we had to ship it from Poland) off my grandmother's body and lock the casket. Where's she going? What are we keeping from coming in?  

Reception cuts out and out and out. Freeze frames on a corpse that swaddled me. That taught me to read.

Old women in masks shovel dirt, that's what we're shown. My mother in a bathrobe in her kitchen, shocked into sobbing. My mother says only: tвое лицо. Your face, your face. My mother says only: моя мама. My mother, my mother.

Then daylight hours—hours and hours—she spends waiting to sleep. The candles burning in the morning. 

Morning

THE GEESE HAD BABIES THEY HAD BABIES TINY GRAY AND YELLOW BABIES. Puffy with dark gray and mustard yellow like ruddy dandelions. The mom and dad walk slow and the little ones follow behind. They can't keep up, they fall asleep, they bake in the sun. I get too close and one hisses. Got it.

Everything is blooming like a slap across the face.

Darina Sikmashvili was born in Lubny, Ukraine and raised in Brooklyn, New York. As of fall 2020, Darina is pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. She’s at work on a novella about insomnia. Contact her at darina@sikmashvili.com. Find her on Instagram @dvs_primary.