Origin Story
Shara Lessley & Danielle Cadena Deulen
Issue 16 ProForma Winner, judged by Julie Marie Wade
Judge’s note: “Origin Story” is a wonder of elegant juxtapositions: as compressed as it is capacious, as timeless as it is rich with zeitgeist markers, as pithy and witty as it is evocative of deeper meanings. Collaboratively written with a singular voice—this feat astonishes me most of all!—”Origin Story” is a hybrid tour de force, a lyric essay that fittingly ends with an em-dash and sends the reader careening, dizzy and inspired, over that wide canyon beyond the page.
“I appreciate that this is a joint, co-authored project.
I felt the authors’ statement and excerpt would have been strengthened
by an anchoring theme: How did the two of you meet?”
– [REDACTED] Foundation Juror
Mariah Carey to Andy Cohen on WWHL: “I don’t know her.”
Whether we shall turn out to be the hero of our own lives, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin our life with the beginning of our life, we record that we were born…1
In the waiting room at Dr. Kawby’s. We reached for the same issue of Time.
A continent emerged from the primeval ocean of darkness and I generated myself, which was also the sun. Lonely, I drew from my body the god of dryness and air, and his mate, goddess of humidity. Both were you. Everyone adored your twins, earth and sky, but they engendered the perfect being, Osiris, who was a little full of himself. Humans dropped from my tears.
Happy Hour: I was crying near the patio when Jack introduced us.
We met in the afterglow, afterlife, the exciting part that came after all the crap before…
No. It was middle school. I thought she was too skinny, hated her laugh, the fact that she called me “doorknob-mouth.” What the hell does that even mean?
Amity Island. That beach party where Chrissie Watkins went skinny dipping and the shark got her. We met there. You were wearing purple. I’m sure of it.2
It was fall. Approaching life’s end, we fluttered down the edge of a dried magnolia leaf on its spine. When our antennae met, we could sense the vibrations of our next life together.
You took my umbrella by mistake.
976-BABE3
We were dating the same woman—a painter (derivative of Kandinsky) with long red hair and a voice like the sea. When her show opened in SoMa, standing in front of a two-headed portrait we sighed the same sigh and found each other’s eyes.
“I saw / your hands on my lips like blind needles / blunted / from sewing up stone / and / where are you from / you said…”4
She sculpted me from clay.
We began as grains of dust, smaller than the width of a human hair, swirling in an elliptical disk of gas and ice in space. Gravity pulled us so gently together that we fused into pebbles, then rock. The planetesimals of us orbited our star for millennia, accumulating, in our wake only tracks of emptiness, clearing a path for our final form. After billions of years, we were a new world.
You saw Scott slap me behind the Science Library, called campus police.
What I knew first was simulacra: her author photo beside a poem online. My live eyes met her digital face. I was pretty sure she wasn’t gonna like me.
Conservation Corps: advanced chainsaw class to earn certification in tree felling.
She slid into my DMs.
I once was a proper hobbit. Not this cave-dweller. Not this Gollum on my lonely island. I don’t remember it, that me from before, all I know now is you. Precious in the pocket of that cursed Baggins. Misery! Misery without you!5
Though we’d been kissing friends since seventh grade and everybody knew it, my mother married her father—making us SISTERS!
That I saw, plainly in you, beautiful co-adaptations, as in the woodpecker and mistletoe…in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feather of a bird.6
You were raven-haired, full-bodied, carrying a pail of milk. I fell in love, but my family forbade our union. We eloped. Called to fight, I fled my first battle, rifles firing around me. I ran and ran—ashamed, could never run back to you.
“Are you crying?,” she stammered, “Are you crying?—There’s no crying…There’s no crying in baseball!!!”7
Her cousin sold me weed.
Summer after graduation, we worked at Sequoia Mall: Hot Dog on a Stick ($4.25 an hour).
As sorb-apples are halved to make preserves, eggs sliced in two with a hair, the god’s knife worked upon us: our faces turned about, skin pulled over our bellies; like drawstring purses, the little openings in our middles pulled into navels. Split, abolished, we walked upright; found each other millennia later.8
You rescued my body from the dissection room.
Nude models. NYU.
At the entrance to the Japanese Tea Garden, I asked her how to get to the Japanese Tea Garden.9
Kicked out of the Scientology Center for laughing, you trailed me through the parking garage talking shit.
75th Precinct lineup: we identified the same stalker.
Our husbands met in a Star Wars chat room two weeks before Comic-Con San Diego.
I am the rain that makes rancid your meat. Sudden appearance of a cancerous mole. Dead weight in your backstory. Nemesis / impetus. Prodigal sibling you define yourself against. What’s a hero without an antagonist? I am your gritty city. Shadow self. Radioactive spider scuttling your wrist.
I bought a chair off her from Craigslist.
We whalers joined the Pequod when it ported in Nantucket. Having been on land too long, we were glad of the send-off. How we snuffed that Tartar air!—how we spurned that turnpike earth!—and turned to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.”10
Post-diagnosis, I pictured my lung, translucent as a bat’s wing, bloodying her surgical gloves.
We plowed into each other in a parking lot—a slow, head-on collision—both very drunk. By the time the cops showed up, we were waltzing in the neon light of a Pet Smart.
At an embassy in an undisclosed location, we crashed a clearance-only seminar led by government officials, RE: remote neurological attacks on diplomats. You knew that I knew the risks we were taking…
Imagine! The only two candidates not wearing suits!
I liked how you danced with the hat rack at that wedding in Brooklyn. You’d come for the bride. I’d been invited by the groom. In shitty relationships, both of us sat out the bouquet toss. Our friends divorced three Christmases later; we lasted.
“To tell her own story, a writer must make herself a character. To tell another person’s story, a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her.”11
Siege of Orléans: 1428. Her face was shining, ecstatic—I followed her into battle.
“Anybody have an extra tampon?” I called from a stall at the Rose Bowl. Lilith Fair, 1998.
Against all odds, you offered to be my surrogate.
We were benevolent; our souls glowed with love and humanity: but were we not alone, miserably alone? Our creator abhorred us; what hope could we gather from our fellow-creatures, who owed us nothing? They spurn and hate us. The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are our refuge. We have wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which we do not fear, are a dwelling to us, and the only one which man does not grudge.
Lightning struck the barn; her family rushed to help. Soot in our hair. Though we’d known each other for years, I’d never really seen her.12
I am the tree that grew the fruit from which she plucked the seed that birthed the
seasons—
You were John Keats and I was Fanny Howe.
At a table overseas we sat, ordered a lemon-mint. You, pregnant, skin flush with expectancy. I was reading for my doctoral exams. The hills around us stacked with square houses the color of chalk. The sun was high. It had been so long, it seemed I was beginning to know you for the first time.
Separated at birth, we met at summer camp; spent weeks plotting how to reunite our long-divorced parents.13
During class, I couldn’t remember how to spell Georgia, started to cry, then cried harder because I was crying in front of the whole third grade. As I spiraled, flecks in the beige tile seemed to crawl. Neat rows of desks waved and blurred. At recess, you drew a rainbow over a happy narwhal, scribbled “Cute narwhal!!!” with arrows pointing to it that said “→→→You!!!”
Al-Anon Family Group: Wednesday, T.P. Presbyterian
Our sons play soccer together.
From behind a glass partition I told her I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.14
Our joint purpose here is to articulate and defend a particular role for ethico-political values in social epistemology research. We begin by describing a research programme in social epistemology, and go on to describe the important role of ethico-political values in knowledge communities. Although our essay expands its focus beyond traditional descriptions of “knowledge practices,” our project still relates to some of the core questions pursued by traditional epistemology.15
1983, casting call: “Cute Kids Needed for Annual Holiday Catalog”
She was my Bee Charmer, my feral girl, sweet tomboy. She was the one soul at Whistle Stop to whom I could write: “…whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” Dear Idgie!16
Her boyfriend cheated with my boyfriend.
Union of the sperm and ovum, followed by implantation of blastocyst into endometrium, followed by cell division. Yadda yadda yadda. Eventually, we had supper together at a taco joint.
Did I ever tell you? I used to listen to you play piano in the apartment beneath me. Through the floorboards, I mean. Is that creepy?
Some dude mixed ginger beer and rum—hailed us Dark ’n’ Stormy!
New Year’s Day: We met on the front porch. All around us, kudzu and mist. Things weren’t looking good.
On the gallows she whispered, “Did you do it?”
From my burrow in the branches, I watched as she carved her own face, staunching the bleeding with ashes, fashioning gods out of her entrails. Moth to fire, I went to her—planted my wings in her sleeve.17
People we love we meet a thousand times with our bodies, our intentions, our masked and unmasked thoughts. Via indecision and cancellation and miscommunication. We meet in confessions—sudden and sharp—over glasses of wine, late in a high-northern country where the sun never sets, our words opening new rooms in each other.
Background talent: blink-182, “First Date” (Official Video)
She was one of two people who showed up at my book launch.
Tigers prancing across a screen, bright topaz denizens of a world of green, we do not fear the men beneath the tree, but pace in sleek chivalric certainty.18
“Hey grrrrlll,” she growled, gripping her hardhat, “Whatcha got on under that skirt?”
“Tummy Time” at the Rec: Sam had a blow-out; I was out of wipes. Like a boss, she fished through her bag then tossed me a pack of Mama Bear Hypoallergenic—all while breastfeeding twins!
I am her great-great Aunt Hilda’s Pomeranian reincarnated.
We met in lab coats. On the sly, spliced surplus fragments otherwise fated for biohazard receptacles: cells scraped from discarded test tubes, animal feces, fungal material peeled from the bottom of old refrigerators. Scraps of DNA birthed our hybrid. We christened her “Prequel.”
Slurping wonton soup and digging each other’s cars out of snowdrifts, we survived a record winter at a Midwestern university.
We were sirens on the same rocky inlet. For centuries, we watched sailors swim toward us.
When we met? What does it matter? Now that, days on the run, we’re here in a cloud of dust at the edge of the canyon: helicopters hovering; cops in their Kevlar, guns drawn. Across the stick shift of a blue Thunderbird convertible, our eyes meet. We kiss. I hit the gas—19
- adapted from David Copperfield: Charles Dickens ↩︎
- Jaws (1975) ↩︎
- Pretty Woman (1990) ↩︎
- from “Pirouette”: Audre Lorde ↩︎
- adapted from The Hobbit: J.R.R. Tolkien ↩︎
- Origin of the Species: Charles Darwin ↩︎
- A League of Their Own (1992) ↩︎
- adapted from Symposium: Plato ↩︎
- adapted from a cognitive-behavioral therapy prompts, “14 Embarrassing Things to Do in Public to Help Overcome Social Anxiety”: Arlin Cuncic ↩︎
- adapted from Moby Dick: Herman Melville ↩︎
- My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: Jenn Shapland ↩︎
- adapted from Frankenstein: The 1818 Text: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley ↩︎
- The Parent Trap (1961) ↩︎
- The Silence of the Lambs (1991) ↩︎
- adapted from “What We Owe Each Other, Epistemologically Speaking: Ethico-political Values in Social Epistemology”: S.C. Goldberg ↩︎
- Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) ↩︎
- adapted from Borderlands/La Frontera: Gloria Anzalduá ↩︎
- adapted from “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”: Adirenne Rich ↩︎
- Thelma and Louise (1991) ↩︎
