Spilling the Inkpot
Short Fiction by Jeff Rehnlund
A friend taught me a memory exercise she called The Inventory. It’s a kind of abstract diary.
You number a page and write down images or thoughts or sensations from the day before. The
practice forces you to relive yesterday in order to retrieve the image. It transforms daily life into a
kind of zoetrope or cinema as you’re always experiencing the world with an eye to write it down
tomorrow.
​
1. woman in the cover of darkness leaves her apartment and says to herself, "I didn't break any
rules." She sits in a parked car in front of her place for two minutes and reenters the apartment.
2. a potato chip on a expanse of bermuda grass
3. Fernando rubbing olive oil into the hinges of a door
​
I would put this image in my diary: the blue figure of Saki rubbing my shoulder smoothly until I
woke. The window behind her was black. She had wanted to get to the market before dawn. I
was still in my clothes. I stood up. Saki handed me my coat and we left without words. God,
there really is no part of life more lucid than the morning. Five wine bottles queued up at the
door -- how many on the roof? The air felt thin and limpid outside. No morning without birds. I
figured I’d feel woozy from the night before, but in fact I felt fantastic.
There was no direct way to the sea. Valparaiso was founded at the docks -- quickly and
inevitably cobbled alleys and sidewinder streets climbed hills as necessity demanded more
residences, more storage, more restaurants, more cemeteries -- there was no plan, the city
grew from the sea, creeping through the undulating topography. Six times the seven hills of
Rome. They had to add funiculars.The streets of Valparaiso, like plants or language, are
heliotropic. They reach toward what they desire. I mentioned that to Saki -- though I think it’s
from Thomas Merton. The way we descended by foot looked like we were reluctant to gravity.
The ocean unfolded glittering, lifelike. There was a ship on the beryl glass horizon. We
talked about living by the sea, which only Saki had done. Are the pulsations of the sea the
heartbeat of a living earth? And the tides? Are they a sensation of the cosmos? We decided that
salt is the soul of seawater but the opposite of water. We also decided that the ocean is the
unconscious, the shores are gnosis, the shells are language, and the pearls are experience. A
man pushing a stroller carrying his toddler on his shoulder, dressed in rainbows, did not make
eye contact with us. Saki said she had a plane ticket to Vancouver the next evening where she
was going to get a job as a waitress at a Chinese restaurant. No matter that she’s Japanese,
Saki said she can get a job at any Chinese restaurant in the world -- they don’t care, she says.
It’s easy work, if long hours. The money is liveable. I remembered a pro-tip, a secret of Chinese
restaurants while traveling through the USA: they don't mind if you take naps in them. Order hot
miso and sip it slowly, lay back in the booth, let the aquarium bubbles and soft murmurs shut
your eyes. No one bothers you for hours. More or less, perhaps that’s why Saki was going to
Canada -- she didn’t say more than that she hadn’t seen her family for a long time and she
didn’t like living in Japan.
Last night, we’d all been at Mark’s drinking wine. I encountered something awful on the
way there. I took one of Valapariso’s serpentine curves and walked onto four men thrashing one
guy. A couple of times they threw him into the metal shutters of a closed shop -- every so often
he'd scramble away and run for a second, tripping and dodging among parked cars and
motorbikes, calling out "amigo, amigo" between exasperated pants. Again and again they'd
catch up with him and bash him a little more -- every time he ran, he was getting a little closer to
me, so I had to turn around which forced me to endure the sounds now blindly -- fists on flesh,
thud, slug, swat, a body rolling. Other passersby looked surprised but didn't move toward them
either. Debe ser un ladrón, one of them said. I turned the corner with a quick heart. The shape
of a man separated himself from the shadows -- instantly a crest on his left chest glinted in the
moonlight or streetlamp, like a police badge or the symbol of an authority, and I thought the poor
guy on the other street might get saved, but when the shadow stepped into a beam of light, the
crest or badge turned out to be a sports emblem and he was just a dude in a soccer jersey. I
figured I’d better eat before I reached Mark’s and got a bowl of ravioli and some wine.
​
4. a green bra splayed in the leaves in the street
5. a fat ill-looking molting pigeon on the sill shitting
6. like a cabinet of wonders, there's the sunrise over there -- cerulean, magenta, mustard
7. a long table of beer drinkers yelling at a kissing couple through the window
​
The sun crowned the hills by the time we reached the sea. There was a strand of beach
where eight fat black seals were attempting to feed off a pile of bones and trawl scraps but a
swift pack of street dogs didn't approve -- though they couldn't quite get to the pile themselves
without being spooked by the massive and alien seals. The dogs and seals barked at each
other and the seals looked bored. When the strays snarled, they looked away and squinted at
the sun. Then a fisherman walked out onto the pier and dumped a bucket of shrimp parts into
the limbo between the land and water. Immediately, the animals frenzied and forgot about the
war with each other -- everything was bloodthirsty and free for a moment, then they resumed
their standoff.
​
Inside the market, small silver tuner radios combined and distorted all the hits of Valparaiso.
The disparate fish stenches evaporated any somnolence left in the morning. Saki went into
two-three fish stalls and bought me an orange ceviche from a thin man drinking red wine with
lemon and cinnamon sticks. She stopped a young man carrying a bucket of yellowfin straight
from the catch and purchased one from him. The fish looked like it was gasping. We found a
bench outside. Saki took a knife and sliced behind the gill down to the spine -- did the knife
come from her shoe? -- then she cut the underbelly of the fish from tail to mouth and separated
the meat from the ribs. She flipped the fish open and stuck her fingers into the white inside with
savage energy. Parts of the tuna were still alive, perhaps blood was running through it. The
instantaneous and expert dismantling and devouring of fish flesh happened without any words.
Saki placed a bite in my hand and my palm nearly digested it. When I tasted it, there was no
flavor -- just ambiguous, evaporating texture. Saki chewed with her mouth open. For a long
time, we just ate. I remember her tongue and disorganized teeth, soft white bits of fish
vanishing, visions of Saki in an apron with menus approaching tables in Canada, waking me up
again.
​
8. bent man in the alley, face hidden, filling a pail at the spigot: water under control -- blocks
away, the ocean is the image of primordial formlessness
9. the scum of memory is tenacious, holding onto every last hook of experience
10. two children run into the coffee shop. They've eaten sour candy and are waving their hands
in front of their tongues -- "Can we get some water for free?" They don't wait for an answer and
run over to the jug. The woman next to me folds her work into her bag. It appears she's been
drawing a garden. She notices me looking at her and smiles -- I give a half smile back because,
I think, I'm afraid to bare everything to her.
11. A man in a leather jacket, sweating in the face, getting thrashed between two dark vehicles
​
I didn’t mention the mugging when I sat down at Mark’s place. The table was a black
door set upon two sawhorses with a circular hole where the knob would be. There was a
half-fridge and a faucet, the walls were hidden behind patterned textiles, the room was a mess
-- all sorts of dishes, utensils, books, pencils, tobacco, glasses, scraps of paper, rubberbands,
bottle caps, bottles strewn all over -- and the trash can looked full. Just fragments of things
everywhere. We were discussing earthquakes. The house was considerably high up one of
Valparaiso’s forty-two disheveled hills near the Cementerio de Disidentes and belonged more
specifically to Mark’s boyfriend Eduardo. Mark picked grapes for pennies but he had a hustle:
throwing semi-weekly “wine tastings” for a small fee with bottles pilfered from the vineyard.
Sometimes they’d draw a small crowd and to be honest, I was happy to be with company.
Mark poured carmenere from a green bottle with no label. Saki was there, of course and also
Maria Paz, a reader and poet. I knew Maria a bit because she ran a motel and I’d stayed there.
Later tall Vero from Buenos Aires walked in. Her cheeks bulged, in an attractive way, because
her mouth was too crowded with teeth. She had gaunt, penetrative eyes with Caligula’s
hyperthyroid stare. She moved fluidly but her long green dress did not -- just sort of hung in the
air -- it was positively vampiric. Her skin had undertones of blue and a vein cropped her mouth
and ran straight down her chin like a doll's jaw. When she sat, from my perspective, there was a
flake of the moon looming in the window behind her. Later, it would set into her hair. Never
before had I wanted so much to be an oil painter. Mark explained the carmenere really did come
from the ancient world. It was Nero’s favorite red, he said, and Pliny the Elder’s too. The grape
was once considered lost to history, wiped into extinction by the plague phylloxera. Secretly the
rootstock made its way to the New World. For four hundred years, Chileans produced some kind
of faux merlot until someone figured out it was the venerable Roman grape escaped -- though
Mark didn’t explain how they figured it out. We drank it from jars, all different sizes. Vero broke
hers almost immediately. Red fluid on her fingers.
Saki didn’t keep her hair. That’s the first thing you notice and remember about her. It was
like some kind of unwashed spectral nest, something you could lose your hand in -- stuck to
itself, dense, thick, and lavishly coarse. She had a small voice and we all got quiet when she
spoke. Mark uncorked two bottles of Syrah. He constantly looked wounded -- wore a meek
smile behind his orange-blonde hair. It was difficult to catch a glimpse of his eyes. I liked his
smile though, surrounded by a thin, careless looking beard the color of roses. “A carafe of the
water of life!” Maria Paz broad, bold, loud, said the cheers for the carmenere and we all clicked
jars. She had one of those large-haired Amazonian frames where you can’t tell if she’s the most
beautiful woman you’ve ever seen or a drag queen. Sometimes I asked myself if I loved her. We
all agreed that 2015 was the worst year on record and we clicked jars again to wish for a good
2016 if it ever comes.
​
12. Half her body was visible -- her head and torso levitating above the sand, her legs lost in the
heat mirage between her waist and the sand
13. Wine is a device
14. A boy finds his father chatting with friends in the plaza. He jumps up when he sees the boy,
“Who’s watching the store?” The boy smiles free and easy: “God hopefully!”
15. Memory stalks the present, inhabiting it like a piece of furniture
​
“Argentina has earthquakes, but they never happen in Buenos Aires," Vero told us, "But I
was in Valparaiso for the earthquake this year and I also caught the one in Ecuador. In Valpo, I
was in a coffee shop with all these large windows -- and then everything started shaking. The
coffees were sliding across the tables. It was hilarious. Everyone was kind of quiet and we
watched out the windows. The buildings looked like dancing snakes.”
"They engineer buildings to survive earthquakes here,” said Maria Paz, “otherwise nothing
would be left of Chile.”
“Yes, Nothing fell out of the sky. The coffees didn't even fall off the table. It lasted 40
seconds or so -- we all watched the nodding buildings, pedestrians doing a surfing dance in the
street. Then when it ended everyone started laughing. It was ecstatic. Way different than
Ecuador. In Ecuador, I was taking a shower in a windowless bathroom. I didn't even know there
was an earthquake. One second, I was soaping.. the next I was on the floor of the shower -- I
thought I'd slipped. It didn't hurt a bit. So I got up, rinsed, and dried off. It always takes me a little
while to do my hair and I clipped my nails. So it wasn't until twenty minutes later when I left the
bathroom that I saw one of the walls in the house was gone. My phone rang. I was staying with
a friend, but he was in Quito. This was him calling me. He told me I had to get the hell out of
Ecuador. He said there'll be aftershocks. In Ecuador, they just build houses, buildings, with
almost no money and no forethought concerning earthquakes. I peered out the part of the
house without a wall and there were all these half-collapsed houses and silence. It wasn't funny
at all."
Everyone or perhaps me waited for Saki to mention an earthquake from Japan, but she
didn't. Someone came to the door looking for Eduardo. It was a middle-aged man with gleaming
teeth, long peroxide hair, and a clean face -- Michael invited him in, but he said he’d come back.
We rose to the roof for cigarettes -- the crisp flux of night air made me wonder why we were
ever inside. Valparaiso laid like several anthills alit with puny windows holding lights and little
lives. The hills also resembled bunches of grapes. Maria Paz pointed toward Neruda’s house,
high and dark, resembling a ship. The sea was black and invisible to us, but the salt
interpenetrated the air. Soft balmy winds crashed onto us like waves and seemed to spread out
and spill off the roof near our feet. Light glinted green from beneath the necks of naked bottles.
Mark carried three at a time -- what a thief, but these wine tastings were really worth the money.
I watched the jar slip from Saki's fingers only to recover it immediately -- her fingernails looked
ravaged and jagged. They looked like a child's hands. I realized there was one small braid in her
nest of hair. Maria Paz went on about Nicanor Parra -- “and he’s still alive! 103 years old and all
he does is make fun of God!” Her laugh is effusive, contagious. She looks like a deity herself --
everlasting, omnipotent. I glimpsed her chest move. Vero inquires about the immortals of
Okinawa, but Saki has never been. Anyway, her own grandparents lived to 108 and 109. Time
slows for everyone late in life. A year becomes an inch, said Vero, face green in the night.
Unexpectedly, the tang of copihue -- and another smell -- Mark and Maria Paz call it ”herb of the
worm.” Jars refilled as if from cracked amphorae. We slid into the horizontal mix of wine and
blood feeling bright, clear, and alive like embers in the tendrils of vines. I told the story of what
happened earlier -- the crime on the way to the wine (a crime which I witnessed and did nothing
about) -- and when I say “fists on flesh” everyone cringes and laughs, surprising me as if the
sequence of Fs and Ss are sorcery. Words are magic, I told Maria Paz. Her head moved slowly
like an enchanted lion. No, she said, words were invented to record debt, then bastardized by
every idiot poet with an inkpot. Everyone laughed at the word inkpot. Laughter polishes the
surfaces of conversation. Vero told a story about UFOs. I looked back toward Maria Paz. A
dense network of silence unfurled between our mouths. There was some kind of harmony to it. I
watched Maria Paz watch me in the silent baths of the moon. Moon the color of bone. She
moved her lips into a flat smile and her eyes into circles. We looked at each other until Mark
jumped up to tear at the tree branches above him. Even though it felt sudden and semiviolent,
we sat there while all sorts of leaves and seeds rained on the roof. He couldn't separate the
branches from the tree so he broke off some sticks. He sat down and held them in front of us so
we could see the little malformed nuts hanging. Something to chew on, he said -- his smile is
fleeting but there it is. Nuts are the embryo of wood. He cracked them with the wine jar. Saki's
teeth in the nuts look even more jagged than her fingernails -- but also childlike, naive and
virtuous. Her nose and eyes were hidden in a graph of shadows. She said she wanted to go to
the predawn fish market and I agreed to go with her. Wine -- even today -- continues to mystify
us and so without prompt, Vero began to cry. She was rather loud about it. She appeared to
grip her wine jar for balance. Her lips filled with blood but her skin kept its blue nether glow. She
didn’t say anything for a long time, then, “I don’t wear necklaces because I’m afraid they’ll be my
murder weapon.” Syrah atomized between Mark’s teeth and flew off the roof. He began cackling
wildly like he was having a seizure or hallucinating from the nuts. His mossy red hair veiled his
eyes or his eyes are buried and lost in his hair. I love his sea-bitten beard, I'm attracted to it
even. Lying on his back, he said Chile is a country of love. I disagreed and said Peru is love.
Peru is love, Chile is art. Paz laughed like a mirror cracked in the wind, she thought that was so
stupid. Mark was dreaming or crying or said something beautiful. Everything around me was an
action -- just fragments of things everywhere. A red abyss opened wide beneath us. Violets,
plums, and amethysts. All you have to do is LOOK..
​
16. The lucent trail of a firecracker coal producing clumsy, child-made figure eights
17. Rain clotted in sand
18. Fish in a pail of seawater, now glistening rather than hidden
19. Effusive moss drooling indelibly over stone