Daniel Barban Levin
ONE YEAR IN NEW HAMPSHIRE
Through my bathroom window, a snow-capped mountain. Like granite chipped off a lake bed and dropped on the horizon. I go to therapy for the second time and my therapist tells me her marriage isn’t working. My ceilings lower. In the back of my bedroom there is a buzzing that turns up in volume until my neighbors scream at someone through a car window and the car peels off. Red blinking on my wall. A horse trailer emblazoned for Trump is parked outside my house. The river is wide and cold and drowned a horse once. It broke its leg and fell so its nostrils faced upstream. This is a town in the north which draws tourists for winter. It is not winter now, but it is always cold enough to snow without notice. Raspberry soft serve. Tiger lilies and lupines. A bear that lopes across the dirt road I think at first is just another lost dog. I watch a man sitting outside holding a hand mirror in one hand and trimming his beard with a pair of tiny scissors in the other. I realize for the first time that the people who want to seduce me are the ones who warn me about other people wanting to seduce me. A man invites me to dinner at his farmhouse, and in his car I stab the side of his throat with my mother’s fabric scissors. These are not my fingernails. My boss comes over and traces the shape of my car on a piece of wood. She gives me an ottoman I don’t want with a secret compartment inside, then invites me to her house and makes me watch a show called Naked and Afraid. She has rigged a tinfoil satellite on her roof, which she points towards the coordinates of any major television studio. My girlfriend visits; she is entering a period of not sleeping with me, which begins now and ends when I move away to California, where everything is yellow instead of blue. I go on a hike for hours and when I reach the waterfall, it is frozen. I stand on the rocks at the river’s choked-up throat and take a short video. The day I move away, my boss’s dog dies, and when I go outside, my car is encased in a pine tree. I have lived next to the only graveyard in town this whole time, which explains why my breath catches as I drive away. I always held it without knowing why, as if I were underwater. My therapist says she hopes we can still be friends as she begins to pull her skirt up. When I shut my eyes and she puts her tongue on my tongue, I am inside the mountain, trying to stare out through miles of nothing. The rocks here are so dark they look wet. Put them in your mouth and they change color, revealing a picture that wasn’t there before. I woke up one morning years after having left and found two of those stones drying on my doorstep.
DANIEL BARBAN LEVIN received his MFA in writing from the University of California, Irvine, and his bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He is writing a memoir for Tim Duggan Books.
