I am diligent, acrylic and modeling paste on canvas, 2002.

The bell rings, and the girls push their desks to the middle of the room. This is the year I've stopped talking to people. The girls tell me to lie down. They brush the flame of my hair so straight and it is the closest thing to tenderness I have ever felt from another person. One of them lifts a blue anemone in a spoon and water drips down onto my cheek, trickling into my ear. The anemone is pruned. I want to tell her to put it back in the aquarium. Bubble-tips are poisonous. Without water, it will die. The girls say, "Fold your hands on your stomach. Close your eyes, no peeking. Head back. Say ahh. Say it longer."


Untitled drawing, pencil and acrylic on paper, 2010.

A moray eel feeds like this: they hide and wait. Out of the coral reefs, they lunge. If their catch struggles, they spin their tails in knots and push their heads through, twisting hard enough to rip their prey open. A second jaw slides out from behind the skull. It is a razored sling of bone.

When I was twenty, I was afraid living in Japan would reveal a part of myself I did not know. Someone else who was not me, submerged in this body. How else to explain the feeling of being gnawed at when alone. I didn't want to be touched. Only held. Like that would coax the thing in me back into hiding.


Elevator Hall, acrylic and shell powder on canvas, 2007.

These days I don't sleep. I feel safest in love hotels where there is no front desk. No doorman. Just a series of touchscreens and buttons. In the room I choose, a black light setting turns the world into a bioluminescent wave and it makes me feel so small.

On TV, oarfish wash up dead on beaches in the Pacific, and the camera pans over their red dorsal fins, their skin, bright as foil in the sun. Their eyes are dry and crinkled.

My mother once said that was how you knew an earthquake was coming, deep-sea monsters drifting toward us like that. Days later, I was on the bus home and saw dust rise in red clouds. When it cleared, the streets were broken and people outside were shouting and my tights were wet with blood. 

During the speechless months, I willed myself to communicate with my mind, concentrating very hard to tell people what I wanted.

I begin: I want to know a world without violence. I want to set my heart right. I want a love that dampens my head with a washcloth, a love to blow-dry my hair when I am sick, when I disappear too far into my thoughts and forget how to do it myself. I want to reach through the screen and pluck those fins, pin them into my hair, because maybe that will be enough to heal me. 


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Jessica Cavero has work in or coming from SmokeLong Quarterly, Gone Lawn, Jellyfish Review and others. Her story "Toguro" won the 2017 Katherine Anne Porter Prize from Nimrod International Journal.

Read JC's postcard.

Detail on main page from "Herald," by Fuco Ueda (acrylic on canvas).





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