KEEP PLANNING – Fran Kursztejn

The stone crumbles the basin. It is not stone but a bunch of smaller pebbles I have swallowed up into a burlap sack with an ordinary string. The stone goes down again. I fish it back up, the water cold and gently dirtied by whatever is on the stones, or whatever is on my hand, though probably the stones, because I wash my hands frequently and nobody knows where the stones have been. On the way down there is a kind of crash. The sound of guts moving. I lift the stone and underneath a flurry of white sharded enamel dissipates and infects the whole thing. The water clouds up, billion-ed by milky atoms and now it is almost milk, or pilk. I think of her blood on the bleached crosswalk and only so many months ago we called each other sisters and laughed at the impropriety of it, we wished for just about anyone to overhear and get some kind of idea and then half-die when our lips were coiled up like the underside of a starfish. The water is almost gleaming now, almost like sugarwax. I have done very good at not thinking about her up until this moment, which seems ridiculous. Out of all other moments, she has chosen this one to run back to me, to slither from whatever damp coils set her pistoning the various gallows’ fumes and split-hooved gloamers of hell, this one and not any others. And even then, earlier that evening, my father and I are watching TCM on the big bed that was once a couch but any evidence of it disappeared, then he asks me whatever happened to you. Let me be clear. He asked ‘that bitch with the purple hair. With the adequate ass. That could not stop saying I love you to even the most disgusting and baleful strangers, with the eyes like peaking blinds.’ And I told him I did not know who he was talking about, so he went on. ‘The bitch who could not walk without swaying up and down like a choking cat. She knew Spanish and Urdu, Russian and Kazakh. She had made those videos where one goes up to strangers in the middle of Berlin and bets them one hundred American dollars that she can speak their first language, and she always could, and their second, too, and even their third, as if everyone spoke the same series of bleats and whispers and only pretended the discrepancies, laced the sounds with gibberish before coming upon a beautiful woman fit for the derobing. And she was beautiful. How to describe a beauty like that? It was tainted by everything. The sky, the air; yes, her hair, her ears, the tube-metal shoved up her nose, her shaven brows, her unshaven legs, her shaven and unshaven head, even her being beautiful was in fierce adjustment against her beauty, like a heart beating in a corpse already all the way lowered into the ground. It hurt me to punish you, to throw you off of her, because even if you were a man and she a woman, or you a woman and she a man, or the two of you men, or lizards, or butterflies, or rats, no-one can fault you for having chased after her except in envy. But I had to, you know. Whatever happened to her?’ ‘Oh, her,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. We stopped talking.’ ‘Just like that?’ He said, his mustache perfectly fixated on his brick-like skull. ‘Just like that,’ I said. Even then I did not think of you. That is the honest truth. I thought of Victor Mature. Chief Crazy Horse was playing. He was in poor red-face that clung to his cheeks like powdered dirt. His bones were like fishes’: soft and mealy and drenched in hard, thirsty flesh supporting his massive square head. He had his foot on the skull of a buffalo, half-dazed and thwarted by a sugary and dead. He is the leader of the Sioux nation. His lips are pursed with a decidedly anal opening in the middle where wind or some consonant-less words could pass in and out. But there is no wind or words, only a mound of brown-pink flesh that shines like rare metals in a noon that isn’t there. The lips do not move. I set the stones out of the burlap sack. The burlap shrivels up to dry. I pass a stone between my fingers while I sit on the toilet. The wet smell of minerals has always, to me, meant shit to me, as I’ve never been to a sauna or a cave and I have not yet smelled anything where the water is not more or less an expulsion of heat and indefatigable light that makes the whole world sear intolerably its mad religious scribblings on the skin. You see, now I am thinking of you. ‘That girl who laughed whenever the juniper was bent by the wind? Who didn’t even think to shield herself when that same wind got so strong, so delirious first with crushed leaves and the ambergris from the shed, and then sticks, stones, chickenwire, and whole fleshes from the garden that I had not yet planted; she was not hurt and not so dirty as one would think, but what kind of woman, thing, would not put up its hands anyway? What beast is so confident in its strength that it may look into the eye of the mother of a storm and not even avert its own eyes? Though I suppose one can have confidence in other things than living.’ And I’m just trying to watch the film. Victor Mature is planting his lips on Kathleen Grant’s face. Or he almost does. At the last second, his cheeks swerve away, and their nose touch tips, and suddenly, as if buried there long ago, there is a smile on each of their faces. Yes the Sioux cannot kiss like Americans. And those hard lips. They must have heatseekers in them. Big red sensors that are made for collision. But no, all they can do is swerve away like two airplanes evading a mountain, and the noses touch, and they smile. ‘What ever happened to her?’ ‘To who?’ I said. ‘To the girl who seemed almost older than me. ‘Just in how she talked, of course, not looking any less like a country waif before the barn. But the way she talked you would think she owned the barn, she had that old Southern book of expressions memorized somewhere, kept it close to her breast. She said reckon, she said y’all. She called a little girl a foal once because she had the face of one. She even said ‘bone’ in that way only people that have seen one do. That have seen an unwhite kneecap, the socket after the eye. She said it only when necessary, when it was right in front of her, during the cookout where I had grilled my best ribs I have ever done, and saved the best chuck for her. I slapped it onto her plate while it still sizzled, the meat still browning and the heat full of tender smells like burning honeysuckles. She looked at me with those dolls’ eyes that could barely take in the whole plate, then at the plate, then me and the plate; “that is a real hunk of bone,” almost whispering, and then trailed off and did not take a bite.’ ‘Oh, that girl,’ I said, still not thinking of you, but of Victor Mature’s back eclipsing the blood of the white man. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What ever happened to her?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. Victor Mature looked hard at the shining, moonwhite body underneath him, almost spitting, and left. ‘I haven’t heard from her.’ ‘Since when?’ he said. He rested his hands on his strange, tubular stomach. Victor Mature is now on the warpath. He has taken the red falcon that is his birthright, the fulfilled prophecy. He paints his painted face another gleaming shade of red, like canyons out west. He is staunch and nimble. His legs bend tragically. After a while, my father forgets about everything and goes to sleep. I cannot stop thinking about you. The basin is empty now. Propping myself up by the lip, I follow that metallic burn in the water that follows to actual, real metal, the color of pavement. Water has been silently retreating down a crack in the filament itself. It has stained the tile now, or will. The stain has made the general impression of a fish, a fishy smell, or that of basalts gently coated in grease. Eventually, soon, I imagine, the old sack will be dry again. Right now it is not so different from the stones, hard and shrivelled and weightier than that of which it holds. I do not know if you would remember, but one time you gathered your own stones, but they were shells, the most unbroken ones you could find, on the beach, your footsteps so light and heel-driven they were like the shells themselves left and trailing out of your pouch; by the night, you have given me the bag. It is so heavy with water and salt and the shells. The moon was half-full and in a little spot where it spotlighted perfectly on the almost white sand I dropped it, sent it crashing breaking so it shall take another thousand years for the tide to glue them together again. And you, with your two longest fingers, picked up a blue shard and without saying anything sliced a piece of my cheek out and a little of my earlobe. You made an awful mess. My blood is so thin it gushes at the smallest bruise. We went back to that spot over and over where the sand was pink as dawn and easy to hold. ‘You’re not sorry are you,’ you said. ‘No, I’m not sorry,’ I said. ‘And what happened?’ My father said, Chief Crazy Horse who had never once blinked the whole movie now shut his eyes. The white man will take away his buffalo. ‘To who?’ ‘To the woman who went to every nun, every priest, every hindu, shaman, and quarter-eyed psychic in the Southern addresses, to even the templemen, the rabbis and their sons, to pallbearers and the survivors of the world’s most heinous crimes: those who have escaped burning houses, genocides, and festoons of cyclones that creep and plummet this earth beyond even Satan’s proudest bordellos where the minstrels dance on slippery needles that were once their mothers’ elbows, anyone she met she would ask the same question: do you think that I am damned? And every last one, myself included, after those eyes trembled as a foal’s when it is mounted for the first time and feels the digging of spurs into its haunches full-knowing that this is all there is, replies “no, you are not damned.” Knowing full well otherwise.’ ‘You lied, then.’ ‘Yes, but I was only repeating the lie. Every last one of them,” he said, doubled over in a shadowy encasement. 'Every last one of them lied straight to her face. And if given the opportunity, would say the same thing, over and over, or their whole body will be set to weeping,’ ‘Oh, her.’ I said. In a half hour Chief Crazy Horse dies at the hand of his own people, also crowded in dumb-soot meant to convey indigeneity to a land that is like the noon that isn’t there. His lips do not part even when there is a knife in his back and the blood trails out of him like so much mucus or puss for the ants to drown in. The white man lies beside him. He is like the moon listening for the falling sun. He listens to Mature’s heart, Mature’s lips, that are faintly beating though they could not be softer than his own bones. In a moment, he will be dead. Instead of watching for the end, I went out into the garden and collected bigger stones.

*** Fran Kursztejn is a writer and filmmaker currently based in Atlanta. Her work has previously featured in Promethean Magazine, Apocalypse Confidential, Expat Press, and others. Twitter: @fkursztejn 30 April 2026