Emergency Contact

“Gold Splatter” by Marleah Singleton

For (720)***-***4

1.
At the bird sanctuary, my emergency contact and I watched the dog rip into the shining body of an unsuspecting mallard, blood in Lake Michigan’s tide pools, in the dog’s curled black fur.

My emergency contact called animal rescue while I walked along the shore, following the duck as he swam with one leg down the shallows to rejoin the others, blood trailing behind him.

He leaned towards uninjury and kept paddling. One yellow webbed foot hauling the body, panting in distress.

I was surprised that, in the dog’s mouth, the duck did not make a sound or put up a fight.

A few weeks before, I had told my emergency contact, on the train to Indiana, how I used to hike in mountain lion country alone, without any precautions. I used to think if the smell of me was the smell of a meal, then I was a meal.

I’d like to think I would not fight or make a sound, if nature were to reclaim me. In the past, I have not flapped or made much sound in the jaws of the mountain lions that have not fully finished their dinner.

He said he didn’t like that, and that he’ll bring bear spray when we go camping.

***

2.
For the first time in my life, my emergency contact is not my mother. My emergency contact has a tactical flashlight in his backpack and mud under his nails. He has a sense of invincibility that gets us in the middle of illegal street races at night. My emergency contact piles CRT TVs on top of each other “for art” and sketches out how he plans to put an organ at the end of his bed in his sad, windowless bedroom.

I’ve never trusted someone more.

A month into knowing him, I got into a car with him for thirty hours to drive through Colorado, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois— nowhere to run land. He pointed out birds, rocks, and cars and I studied the midwest through the passenger’s side window.

I am also his emergency contact. We are both people for whom this is not merely a formality.

Someday, perhaps soon, these roles will be invoked. A bell, rung, the sword kissing our shoulders in ceremony in the hospital waiting room, police station, or park ranger’s office.

Someday he is going to see a bald eagle’s nest on top of an electrical tower behind three layers of barbed wire fences on a long concrete pier covered in sheets of ice jutting out into the lake and he’s going to think I need to get in there.

I’ll get a call later that day from the park ranger, to come get him, they’ll say “Hello, you’re going to need to come down here, your emergency contact tried to climb an electrical tower in a restricted zone and is being detained and fined for trespassing.

And I’ll say, “Well, how many bald eagles were involved?”

***

3.
Someday, my emergency contact will be called by a hospital or by our university to let him know that maybe I had seized twice in a row or hit my head or followed through with that stroke.

My emergency contact has seen me have three full seizures. This is more than any other person in my life.

He is the first person who’s never balked. Even I balked.

The bird sanctuary has signs upon entry not to bring dogs, not to smoke, not to litter. It is land especially set aside to protect native Illinois birds, a few species of which are endangered.

It is the birds’ sanctuary, so maybe the duck did not know to fight, he was not expecting to have to. This is the one strip of land where nothing is supposed to touch him, and for so long, for so many generations, nothing has.

I am a different kind of duck.

Always in the anti-sanctuary, always expecting jaws and a piercing all the way through, body always tensed for its end.

In the anti-sanctuary, the police lights flash and my professor forgets about the ADA. In the anti-sanctuary, I cannot hold the fork to feed myself; I drink electrolytes through a straw; on the plane to a marathon week of medical imaging appointments, I rehearse ways to tell my friends bad news in a funny way, just in case.

In the anti-sanctuary, what is the punch line of my early death?

In the anti-sanctuary, I’m called a spaz when I tic at the dinner party, my hand stuck like a Lego person, wondering if I’ll ever be the object of anyone’s desire.

I told my emergency contact about a relationship where, when I knew I was going to have a seizure, I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower and put a towel under my head so that they didn’t have to see it. I didn’t know if they could handle it.

My emergency contact builds little sanctuaries where I need them. In the hallways, in the trains, in the grocery store. The back of my head does not hit the tile floor. I do not fall.

I am told I can cry, I told that it must’ve hurt and that I can cry.

***

4.
Last week, my emergency contact was in the ER. I was with him. I’m good at hospitals, I know their rules. The waiting.

The way the waiting must split you and your will before anything can happen, only once your humility is shed will you miraculously be seen. I know that game.

We spent around eight hours in the hospital, purple and red tubes sticking in his arms like cables, hunger and an inability to swallow battling each other. I told him to not look down or think too much about what procedures might have to happen after the doctors saw him. He said he wished he had a GoPro to film it.

If you are looking for an emergency contact, I recommend finding one who believes horrors and misfortunes of the body are fodder for comedy.

Someone who wants to use a GoPro to livestream the draining of his neck cyst, perhaps. Someone who categorizes their friend’s seizures into categories like “paralysis seizure,” “vomit seizure” and “vacuum seizure.”

It would be unbearable in live in the anti-sanctuary if it wasn’t so funny over here, my fish of a body trying to remember its fingers back into use, my emergency contact and his lungs full of silica and silt, the cause of illness for this particular hospitalization being simply “ceramics.”

In the anti-sanctuary, it’s all fodder in the end.

***

5.

In June, my father came to visit me. He had never seen me have a seizure. It was an idea in the back of his mind, his for-years-faraway child maybe writhing on the floor of a pine forest, of a concrete studio, maybe in pain, maybe tired, maybe avoiding strobe lights.

While my mother, hand over my knee cap through MRIs and EEGs, used red pen to chart my seizures in her day-planners for years, across the country, called neurologists, and researched medications on my behalf, I think, to my father, the idea of my even being disabled seemed like the low blue flame of a gas stove in someone else’s house.

My father took me and my emergency contact out for dinner on a Saturday night. He joked about how my apartment was unairconditioned and unvacuumed, hot air and cat hair like proof of my art student scrimping.

He joked about how sure he was that I wouldn’t be able to learn how to use a knife sharpener or a drill.

I could feel my face slackening, static blood in my cheeks and finger tips, my vision barreling down into a tunnel with no end. My eyes fluttered, a halo of static around the nonexistent muscles of my brain, like a thin ring of self-made lightening cracked knuckles in preparation for the storm. I looked at my emergency contact, who I think knows by now the way the avalanche falls.

***

6.
I could be broken one way and another; leg twisted, neck snapped, head cracked, puffed feathers spewing around the pulverized leftovers.

There are many hungry dogs here, in the anti-sanctuary.

But the weight of me is shifted onto someone else, my head is held, my neck is braced, from one cliff of awake to the other, unwilling to accept any sort of carnage between those ledges.

I don’t know when my father found us, how long he watched. When it subsided, he was there, sitting on an ottoman across from us, eyes building ponds within themselves. Outside, he smoked a cigarette for the first time during the trip and the next morning bought me a two hundred dollar vacuum cleaner.

Through the ponds he built, I imagine how my father saw it; he remembered I am his child, his child dizzily falling into the eye of a storm no one else can see. His child who couldn’t possibly handle the blade of a knife against the flat rectangle of a sharpener, turned to their emergency contact, and this is who they give the moment to, this is the current when your child becomes a mallard snapping in two.

This is true and this is because in the morning, I will see my emergency contact and he will see me and neither of us will see bleeding ducks.

About the Author

Bela Koschalk is a writer based in Chicago, Illinois. They have been awarded the Poetry Society of America's Student Poetry Award. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Denver Quarterly, CutBank, and elsewhere.

About the Artist

Thirty-four year old poet, painter and activist, Marleah Singleton, is a Bay Area native currently living in Miami. She combines her passion for art and belief in the power of people to use as a catalyst for collective action and encourages us all to advocate for change and create a better world. Her work has been displayed at Art Basel exhibitions since 2020, an international art fair featuring over 4,000 artists from five continents. Marleah has also had her poetry and artwork published in online and print magazines and journals. She is self taught and has plans to travel the world with her bunny as she experiments with different art mediums and discovers inspiration.