CURIE POINT
JORDAN HARPER
I saw it in a video; the scientist wanted to know if molten iron would be pulled towards his 800 lb magnet, which confused me at first—I didn’t know anything about force, or newtons, and that magnet fit in his palm like an egg. I asked my father, doesn’t that magnet look kind of small? For 800 lbs? And he told me he didn’t know, didn’t know anything about density. He was watching a show about how deadly dog saliva was, because those were things he did know—why our dachshund shouldn’t be licking our faces, why scientists were shooting pigs in the head to examine blood spatter patterns and not human cadavers, why my skin is brown but peels off white. And me? I was learning why the metal slid off that magnet like a sea from shore, and the scientist experimenting explained, every metal has a Curie point where the metal loses its attraction to other metals; the iron hadn’t cooled to align in any magnetic field yet; there was a picture of parallel arrows and arrows scattered in heat. Reaction was impossible.
When the iron cooled into a lump on the ground, the lava-like substance finally taking shape form spilling, it pinched the man’s hand between him and his magnet so heavily, all 800lbs, his finger bled; at last, his love had arrived.
When the iron cooled into a lump on the ground, the lava-like substance finally taking shape form spilling, it pinched the man’s hand between him and his magnet so heavily, all 800lbs, his finger bled; at last, his love had arrived.
ABOUT SNAILS
JORDAN HARPER
It is October, vegetation stunted, yet there they are—thousands of snails littered across my yard, like the crows most people expected around this time of year. They are everywhere: in the drainpipe, on the walls, in the windows, on the curb, in the mailbox, on the yarrow plants me and my husband Kyle bought last spring that we were supposed to alternate deadheading to encourage more blooms, each now in some state of dying. That’s just our thing, waiting for the other to act. It’s something we were learned on reliance and are still kinking out but it’s a complex race; on the other’s mark, get set, then? I am coming back from the therapist while Kyle is still at work, something he’s chosen over the home now shrink-wrapped in mollusks. I start pulling into the driveway but their cracking is too painful—hundreds of little bodies breaking, too many lives on my conscience. When I shift backward, more crackling, like salt in a fire, salt that would have melted icy pavement in winter, would’ve melted the snails now. And when I step out of the car, their ooze pools from under the tires like actual blood on my hands. I shudder and jail myself back inside.
I call my husband. “Kyle, you won’t believe this, but there are a million snails all over the house. I can’t even get into the driveway.”
Kyle laughs. “Are you kidding? What, you didn’t try salting them? Like ice?”
“That’s what I was thinking!” We are always finding little unisons in our thinking patterns of idea, which is why I think we fit so well together; and I know he thinks the same. “But I literally can’t move right now. I hate hearing them pop. Can you get here? I don’t know if they’re ever gonna leave.” The snails are torturously slow; the suction-like grip of their slime does little to reduce friction, and carrying their homes on their backs can’t be doing any favors. I am watching teeth grow.
At that moment, Kyle’s daughter calls. “They’re everywhere!” Panicked breaths slam through the receiver while my son cries in the background. To say the least, Lauren is inconsolable. Still practically a stranger to me, her face is young, thirteen and stress-pocked, but she is cheaper than a babysitter. And I have to have faith in her because I too cannot cope in these situations. It is how I dealt with being away from my son—if I have to trust myself with a baby, I can trust a young girl who is considerably more stable.
“I know, I see them, I’m right in the driveway. Can you come outside? Bring the baby.”
Lauren says she can’t even open the door—seconds later I see the front door pulse but not budge. Then a second time, the snails and their goo stretching as a screen as Lauren struggles against them. Shockingly, it snaps back into place.
My mind is bright with question marks. I try to step out the car again but I hadn’t even seen the snails’ slow encroach upon me, the door glued with Fibonacci creatures. It too only gives a little, the thin space filled with shells and blocking me from the outside. I reached out, a weak attempt to interrupt the membrane, only for them to enclose my hand like a bubble wrap glove. They are impenetrable. Door sabotaged, I slam the it shut, their wicked crunch alive in my ears.
I ask Lauren if she tried 911 and she says I was the only live number. Any other contact hadn’t even rung. I take her word for it—everything is so bizarre. “Stay near the phone Lauren. And stay calm.” I want to sound sure but the word calm cracks in half against my teeth. I went back to Kyle’s line but saw he’d hung up. I called back. “Lauren and I are trapped. She can’t leave the house and my door won’t open. You’ve got to come now.”
“Sorry babe, but I’m really swamped right now. I swear I’ll be off at five.”
“These things are faster than five.” Therein lay one of our problems; we put everything off. Our hot chocolate always gets cold, even when it burns us at first, because we are afraid it will keep burning us. The fridge is never stocked, not by lack of resources, but lack of initiative (we’ve at least become great salvagers). After proposing, it took Kyle three years to marry me. If we had the money then we didn’t have the time and if we had the time we didn’t have the confidence in our relationship and if we had the confidence I would tell my increasingly concerned friends, “Don’t worry! It’s coming together!” Issue swipes through us like a bored cat’s claw. Another saltine cracker dinner, another cold sludge thickened with sugar, another goddamn day—we move through life like it never ends.
“They’re snails, babe. I’m sure you can take it.” He hangs up without a goodbye, like he can’t waste the breath. The snails swim on, inch over their bodies pooled beneath them like melted butter. Desperate, alone, I set out my options:
1. I can wait. Kyle will come home and the bugs will disappear and we’ll laugh at this whole kooky thing later.
2. I can take matters into my own hands. I will do whatever it takes to get in that house, get my baby, and rescue that frightened teenage girl.
3. I will remain here. And if it comes to such a point, someday, somehow, I might die in this driveway. Kyle will mourn me briefly but soon move on, find a new girlfriend, get to tell that crazy story about how he became a widower at parties abounding. For as long as her gait was more toddle than walk, I worked for Lauren’s then-living mother as a babysitter. After she tripped the wrong way onto the corner of a picnic table (“The dumbest thing,” Kyle wept at our first dinner. He was wanted tips for taking care of his toddler. He was busy even then.) I became familiar with how the man moves on. How easy it’ll be; even with his doomed scalp, that bitten fingernail bed of a mane; even with his hard-to- read face, solid as a continent; passionless; unmoved. Even though you could never be certain if, after he slammed the door so hard you felt it behind your eyes, his next car trip to “clear his thoughts” would be his last, or at least in our lifetime together. It had to be easy. It had to be.
I am not a fan of option three. And Kyle is too preoccupied to make the first option a likelihood. So I decide to battery my way inside; strapped in my seatbelt, I grope for the gear shift with my dry hand, the one abstained from snail glue, and go back into drive. I don’t want to think about it, don’t even want to waste time with deep breaths or vehement screams to give me an empty sense of triumph. Without preamble, I slam on the gas, speeding over the gravel of shells. It is a bee-line towards the garage door, a determination to knock it down, a quick brace for impact and then—I look up. One moment I am moving and the next I am still as skin. A film of dead gastropods separates me from the door, their remains like shattered eggs, but the sacrifices are quickly replaced. Snails cover the hood again. I hadn’t even felt the collision. No damage. Nothing.
Lauren calls again. The baby is still wailing. I felt my heart beat in a bloodless face as fate nestles deep inside me. She tells me they are all over the windows and she can’t break them; it looks like midnight and the lights won’t turn on. She says something about antennae poking out an outlet and begins to heave dryly.
Don’t leave the baby, I try to whisper, but my lips cannot shape the air around the words, as though they have no weight. The coat of snails is getting thicker around my own prison. When I call my husband again it does not go through. Nor the call after that and again after that. Balling up in my seat, I wait. That is another problem with Kyle and me—we give up on things very quickly. We’d no luck with a baby after two years and never tried again. This was enough to make me hopeless and not for the first time in time—bouts of depression were nothing foreign, so when it came back for me, most at night sitting in the corner of the room, like an abductor, I didn’t tell anyone about it. “This is just something to deal with,” I’d tell myself, as though it could be treated like a chronic itch on my back or an old mole. Whose business was it but mine? Who’d really care if I was a little sad? And what would they do about it anyway?
I did used to think if we broke up and he moved on, maybe it’d be better if I were dead first. There was his hate, naked and burning. When our frustrations boiled communication down to white noise yelling in our marriage, he grabbed his daughter and they just ran. I wasn’t going to stop them—I thought I would like the silence. But instead, gloom echoed in the empty house, its reverberations coming back at me in great, unyielding tides. While cleaning out the bathroom, I realized half the medicine cabinet had expired and decided to swallow it all because I too often wasted things. The world slowed shapeless—I thought I’d try cleaning out the bathtub next. Impossibly, Kyle returned that same afternoon, found me twisted in the tub like I’d had a wild party without him, our guests gone back to their husbands and children, adjusting their hair and dresses, restoring the façade of stability when they were on their own. Look at me, I must have said, look at these mountains I’ve crossed without you. After long hospital stays and counseling, couples and my own, I became pregnant and what I wanted to tell him, to tell myself, was we’d finally resolved everything.
Which brings us to today.
I ask Lauren what is happening inside—she tells everything is starting to feel damp, even my voice; that the air clicks and she can’t stay still. They’re in here, her whimpers confirm and tell me without saying, I’m so, so scared.
The snails make a fist around my car, their grip so tight, so wrathful, our connection begins to break. Though I can already hear his own quickly dissipating whines in the background, I ask Lauren to put my son on the phone. I think maybe his mother’s voice will soothe him or I can hold the phone to my chest like it is really his ear and he’ll know I am alive and there because he’ll hear the blood swarming in and out of my heart. But before she can answer, a black screen of silence falls between us. I comb through the lost signal for anything. A scream, a cry, or relieved laughter that will tell me my home is still whole. Nothing. I press the phone to my cheek anyway, can’t tell if what burns down my face is tears or the snails themselves; either way, I do not resist them.
Air rattles inside my throat like something I swallowed dry. The engine sighs and stills without me touching the key. A phrase of my husband passes through me. Oh, Kyle. I think of our little son inside crying. Oh, Kyle. I think of the weight of snails, our house folding in on itself. Oh, Kyle, Oh Kyle. I think of poor, innocent Lauren’s final words to me. I’m so scared. “Oh, Kyle,” I cried back. “I am, too.”
I call my husband. “Kyle, you won’t believe this, but there are a million snails all over the house. I can’t even get into the driveway.”
Kyle laughs. “Are you kidding? What, you didn’t try salting them? Like ice?”
“That’s what I was thinking!” We are always finding little unisons in our thinking patterns of idea, which is why I think we fit so well together; and I know he thinks the same. “But I literally can’t move right now. I hate hearing them pop. Can you get here? I don’t know if they’re ever gonna leave.” The snails are torturously slow; the suction-like grip of their slime does little to reduce friction, and carrying their homes on their backs can’t be doing any favors. I am watching teeth grow.
At that moment, Kyle’s daughter calls. “They’re everywhere!” Panicked breaths slam through the receiver while my son cries in the background. To say the least, Lauren is inconsolable. Still practically a stranger to me, her face is young, thirteen and stress-pocked, but she is cheaper than a babysitter. And I have to have faith in her because I too cannot cope in these situations. It is how I dealt with being away from my son—if I have to trust myself with a baby, I can trust a young girl who is considerably more stable.
“I know, I see them, I’m right in the driveway. Can you come outside? Bring the baby.”
Lauren says she can’t even open the door—seconds later I see the front door pulse but not budge. Then a second time, the snails and their goo stretching as a screen as Lauren struggles against them. Shockingly, it snaps back into place.
My mind is bright with question marks. I try to step out the car again but I hadn’t even seen the snails’ slow encroach upon me, the door glued with Fibonacci creatures. It too only gives a little, the thin space filled with shells and blocking me from the outside. I reached out, a weak attempt to interrupt the membrane, only for them to enclose my hand like a bubble wrap glove. They are impenetrable. Door sabotaged, I slam the it shut, their wicked crunch alive in my ears.
I ask Lauren if she tried 911 and she says I was the only live number. Any other contact hadn’t even rung. I take her word for it—everything is so bizarre. “Stay near the phone Lauren. And stay calm.” I want to sound sure but the word calm cracks in half against my teeth. I went back to Kyle’s line but saw he’d hung up. I called back. “Lauren and I are trapped. She can’t leave the house and my door won’t open. You’ve got to come now.”
“Sorry babe, but I’m really swamped right now. I swear I’ll be off at five.”
“These things are faster than five.” Therein lay one of our problems; we put everything off. Our hot chocolate always gets cold, even when it burns us at first, because we are afraid it will keep burning us. The fridge is never stocked, not by lack of resources, but lack of initiative (we’ve at least become great salvagers). After proposing, it took Kyle three years to marry me. If we had the money then we didn’t have the time and if we had the time we didn’t have the confidence in our relationship and if we had the confidence I would tell my increasingly concerned friends, “Don’t worry! It’s coming together!” Issue swipes through us like a bored cat’s claw. Another saltine cracker dinner, another cold sludge thickened with sugar, another goddamn day—we move through life like it never ends.
“They’re snails, babe. I’m sure you can take it.” He hangs up without a goodbye, like he can’t waste the breath. The snails swim on, inch over their bodies pooled beneath them like melted butter. Desperate, alone, I set out my options:
1. I can wait. Kyle will come home and the bugs will disappear and we’ll laugh at this whole kooky thing later.
2. I can take matters into my own hands. I will do whatever it takes to get in that house, get my baby, and rescue that frightened teenage girl.
3. I will remain here. And if it comes to such a point, someday, somehow, I might die in this driveway. Kyle will mourn me briefly but soon move on, find a new girlfriend, get to tell that crazy story about how he became a widower at parties abounding. For as long as her gait was more toddle than walk, I worked for Lauren’s then-living mother as a babysitter. After she tripped the wrong way onto the corner of a picnic table (“The dumbest thing,” Kyle wept at our first dinner. He was wanted tips for taking care of his toddler. He was busy even then.) I became familiar with how the man moves on. How easy it’ll be; even with his doomed scalp, that bitten fingernail bed of a mane; even with his hard-to- read face, solid as a continent; passionless; unmoved. Even though you could never be certain if, after he slammed the door so hard you felt it behind your eyes, his next car trip to “clear his thoughts” would be his last, or at least in our lifetime together. It had to be easy. It had to be.
I am not a fan of option three. And Kyle is too preoccupied to make the first option a likelihood. So I decide to battery my way inside; strapped in my seatbelt, I grope for the gear shift with my dry hand, the one abstained from snail glue, and go back into drive. I don’t want to think about it, don’t even want to waste time with deep breaths or vehement screams to give me an empty sense of triumph. Without preamble, I slam on the gas, speeding over the gravel of shells. It is a bee-line towards the garage door, a determination to knock it down, a quick brace for impact and then—I look up. One moment I am moving and the next I am still as skin. A film of dead gastropods separates me from the door, their remains like shattered eggs, but the sacrifices are quickly replaced. Snails cover the hood again. I hadn’t even felt the collision. No damage. Nothing.
Lauren calls again. The baby is still wailing. I felt my heart beat in a bloodless face as fate nestles deep inside me. She tells me they are all over the windows and she can’t break them; it looks like midnight and the lights won’t turn on. She says something about antennae poking out an outlet and begins to heave dryly.
Don’t leave the baby, I try to whisper, but my lips cannot shape the air around the words, as though they have no weight. The coat of snails is getting thicker around my own prison. When I call my husband again it does not go through. Nor the call after that and again after that. Balling up in my seat, I wait. That is another problem with Kyle and me—we give up on things very quickly. We’d no luck with a baby after two years and never tried again. This was enough to make me hopeless and not for the first time in time—bouts of depression were nothing foreign, so when it came back for me, most at night sitting in the corner of the room, like an abductor, I didn’t tell anyone about it. “This is just something to deal with,” I’d tell myself, as though it could be treated like a chronic itch on my back or an old mole. Whose business was it but mine? Who’d really care if I was a little sad? And what would they do about it anyway?
I did used to think if we broke up and he moved on, maybe it’d be better if I were dead first. There was his hate, naked and burning. When our frustrations boiled communication down to white noise yelling in our marriage, he grabbed his daughter and they just ran. I wasn’t going to stop them—I thought I would like the silence. But instead, gloom echoed in the empty house, its reverberations coming back at me in great, unyielding tides. While cleaning out the bathroom, I realized half the medicine cabinet had expired and decided to swallow it all because I too often wasted things. The world slowed shapeless—I thought I’d try cleaning out the bathtub next. Impossibly, Kyle returned that same afternoon, found me twisted in the tub like I’d had a wild party without him, our guests gone back to their husbands and children, adjusting their hair and dresses, restoring the façade of stability when they were on their own. Look at me, I must have said, look at these mountains I’ve crossed without you. After long hospital stays and counseling, couples and my own, I became pregnant and what I wanted to tell him, to tell myself, was we’d finally resolved everything.
Which brings us to today.
I ask Lauren what is happening inside—she tells everything is starting to feel damp, even my voice; that the air clicks and she can’t stay still. They’re in here, her whimpers confirm and tell me without saying, I’m so, so scared.
The snails make a fist around my car, their grip so tight, so wrathful, our connection begins to break. Though I can already hear his own quickly dissipating whines in the background, I ask Lauren to put my son on the phone. I think maybe his mother’s voice will soothe him or I can hold the phone to my chest like it is really his ear and he’ll know I am alive and there because he’ll hear the blood swarming in and out of my heart. But before she can answer, a black screen of silence falls between us. I comb through the lost signal for anything. A scream, a cry, or relieved laughter that will tell me my home is still whole. Nothing. I press the phone to my cheek anyway, can’t tell if what burns down my face is tears or the snails themselves; either way, I do not resist them.
Air rattles inside my throat like something I swallowed dry. The engine sighs and stills without me touching the key. A phrase of my husband passes through me. Oh, Kyle. I think of our little son inside crying. Oh, Kyle. I think of the weight of snails, our house folding in on itself. Oh, Kyle, Oh Kyle. I think of poor, innocent Lauren’s final words to me. I’m so scared. “Oh, Kyle,” I cried back. “I am, too.”
JORDAN HARPER is a senior at the Alabama School of Fine Arts as well as an alum of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and Interlochen Arts Camp, where he received a Fine Arts Award. His poetry and prose has been recognized by the Alabama Writers’ Forum and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. His work can be found in Best Teen Writing of 2015.
