Remaking
When recycling paper, I tear up junk mail, notes, and bills and blend them with water. The slurry sometimes has a few random letters, and when the paper dries, the letters remain.
***
I first made paper in fifth grade. Mr. Bruce gave us mimeographed instructions, and we mixed together shredded newspapers, water, and coffee grounds. We didn’t understand about screens and deckles, though, and the paper turned into a gray, globby mess. We threw it away a few days later.
***
I started making paper a few years after my father shot himself. I like making something new out of what I once would have discarded.
***
In Alaska, I fished once for sockeye salmon on the Kenai River. The guide showed me how to clean the fish, how to slice through the skin, how to cut along the backbone, how not to waste any meat, and finally how to throw the remaining carcass into the river, which swiftly takes it downstream. “For the bears and eagles,” he said, smiling.
***
My dad didn’t like to waste any meat. In Hungary, during the Holocaust, he’d savored rancid horse meat and rotten potatoes. When I was growing up, I’d watch, disgusted, while he ate the cheapest cuts of meat, kosher or not. He loved jellied pigs’ feet. He’d take them apart, sucking out all he could and leaving a little pile of bones on his plate.
***
I learned crafts from my mom, who crocheted every night, her needle clicking, the thread spooling. She taught me to sew, to cook, to draw, to write, to make what I need.
***
My first deckle kit included plastic bags of things to mix in with the slurry: silver glitter, lavender buds, colorful fibers, shredded money. Soon I headed out into my own yard to gather handfuls of grass, clover leaves, flower petals.
***
S U I C I D E
D C E
S I
I
***
I don’t like killing fish. I don’t like the soft feel of the hook setting into mouth. I don’t like reeling it in, struggling with its strength as it pushes, pushes, pushes up the river. I don’t like the knife, cold and sharp. I don’t like throwing the soft guts into the cold, quick water.
***
I have a pile of flyers from furniture stores, car ads, and credit card offers forming in my kitchen. The pile keeps growing. I need to do something with it.
***
I’d always wondered about the paper-making in Mr. Bruce’s class. What did we do wrong? How could we have done it better? Is there still time to try again?
***
After I finish a batch of paper, I iron it, trim it up. Some of it I stitch into journals. Some I fold into note cards. Some I just stack into piles of pages, blank except for those few random letters, scattered, trying to say something new.
Vivian Wagner is an associate professor of English at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio. Her work has appeared in The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Creative Nonfiction, and other publications. She’s also the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music.
