bio

Rachelle Cornell Nashner lives in New York City and bows to no earthly authority save the second law of thermodynamics. She's made of water and carbon, mostly, with a smattering of as-yet-unanswered prayers, nostalgia, and apocalyptic visions thrown in. Unsatisfied with all other symbolic systems, she's currently fashioning a new maximum-yield alphabet out of macaroni, barbwire, and insect husks.

Islands

She steps back. She steps back from the wave. An island off. An island. Doesn't want to get her feet wet. She kicks at the hot dumb sand. Her name. It means: 1. to cherish a desire with anticipation. Alike, but not the same. She is motionless now while around her a raft of gulls wheel. As if on. An island. Or pickets. Born from a gaze, she is transfigured. At counterrhythm to the sea. She returns the look. Of her father. Of what remains. After. He is watching from the boardwalk. She runs perpendicular to him. Out of phase with the music from the calliope and the traffic on Surf Avenue. Scattering birds on her Z-axis.

Zed. Omega. Her dress. No particular color. And her hair. Cut so short now. It betrays her. There is something unpoetic in her features, which read like a new menu. She is saying something you can't hear. Born there at the island on the edge of the sea. Frozen, somehow. Not from a shell but from a gaze. A look. Something long lost and held back, now moving like a glacier of blood on the creep. The ocean is a pulse seeking neither systole nor diastole, pulled instead by stronger magnets. This one. Stops moving. Is arrested. Her name. It means: 2. (archaic) trust, reliance. The sand is combed down at low tide, a canvas for cigarette butts. Detritus. Paper hot-dog wrappers catch the wind. Her father watches while fingering a dozen postcards from his late wife in the pocket of his greatcoat.

Her sister, Jeanie Jeanie, is playing with marbles. Straight down the line. The shooter hops between new and old wood where the boardwalk is seamed. They'd spent ages in front of the aquarium. He promised both his daughters. To take them there. But instead he takes them back by way of Prospect Park. Hoping they will forget. Peregrine names perdure: Clarkson. Lennox.

"Daddy, you promised."



At the home, he holds. One daughter's hand in each of his. Two of something. The same but not. No man an island. A nurse comes out from a room farther down the hallway. With red hair and a crucifix on a silver chain. Into the adjacent room. The corridor belongs to their footfalls. Each in her mind the precursor to something. Arrival. Their steps elastic like the release of a javelin.

"My grandmother," the father says to the girls. To himself. To no one. To one not there. Jeanie Jeanie pressed to his leg and behind. The other. Her name. It means: 3. to desire with expectation of obtainment. Is sitting on a chair. Watches television. "Your great-grandmother."

White hair comes to a point in front and sticks out in back. Like two waves converging over an island. No sound from the television proffered from an arm on the ceiling. "Grandma Upstairs's...," Jeanie Jeanie says. "Grandma Upstairs's Mommy?"

Through the window, brown buildings in the shape of plus signs. A shopping cart wasted on bread-love. It was her great-grandmother's way of breaking out, she figured. The eclipsed top of the Ferris wheel. The long gray worm of a wave across the gray water that would never break.

Where they lived, you couldn't jump. You couldn't jump onto the manhole cover from the last step. Grandma Upstairs had vinyl chairs. Red-backed like in a Chinese restaurant. Carpet with blue fuzz as long as your finger. A black-and-white television that played Tarzan. No stairs in that house in Indiana. Here, small walls and you can see into the day room from the bedroom. Someone out there behind the couch pretends to be a tiger. Jeanie Jeanie leaps up with tears. Kicks over a bowl of candy shaped like a piano. Candies skitter across the linoleum. A million baby teeth.

The father moves parallel to the bed. The skin on his grandmother's arm is like a week-old helium balloon. Purple and brown smirches where her robe is open. She can see green veins on her cauliflower belly. "I can't see the television," she says.

Father leans back. Head in the light, purposefully obstructing. "Now. You remember the girls, Nanna." He points to his daughters in turn. "She is nine. Jeanie is six. You haven't seen her since she was a baby."

"It's awful."

"What's awful?"

"Those people on the television. Flapping their arms like birds. They keep showing it. It was weeks ago."

Even still it had taken a long time to get through at LaGuardia with the extra security. Jeanie had asked about why all the big guns and mustaches.

"...," he had said.

"You're all blocking the television. Sometimes I think I'd rather be dead."

"Don't talk like that, Nanna."

Before. Before all this happened, Grandma Upstairs back home bought me a kite, she recalls. Her name. It means: 4. See DREAM. She envisions Jeanie Jeanie being taken by the wind. Arms aflutter. Over the island. Still half behind her father...

"You have a pretty face. Pretty smile," says the old woman, interrupting her reverie. "And your name, it's the same as--"

"I lost two teeth," Jeanie Jeanie volunteers.

Her name. It means: 5. to expect with confidence. In response to Jeanie Jeanie's announcement she tongues two imaginary holes. Adjacent. Alike, but not. The same. They were there with all the others. Now gone. Just holes. Waiting for something to push through. "Not so much. It just seems like a lot to you now."



"I'm tired," says the old woman.

"Okay. We'll see you tomorrow, Nanna."

"Tell the nurse."

"I will."

"Not the fat black one. She doesn't even speak English. I went to the toilet all over myself. She just laughed. The fat bitch."

"Daddy, what's a..."

"Not so much. It just seems like a lot to you now."



Taxi ride. Still something strange. Unsafe. With no seat belts.

"I want to go on the subway again," says Jeanie Jeanie.

"We'll go tomorrow."

"I want to go to the aquarium. Daddy, you promised."

"Maybe tomorrow."

The elevated tracks. And everything else moves past with the faltering pulse of late afternoon traffic into the city.

"I miss Mommy. Mommy would have taken us."

"Not so much. It just seems like a lot to you now."



Jeanie Jeanie's big masher sends her sister's cat's-eye flying. Rolls to the curb. Her name. It means: 6. belief in fulfillment.

"When I was your age," her father says, "maybe just a bit older, we used to put baseball cards in the spokes of our bikes and ride up and down the street making a hell of a racket."

"This street?"

"This very same street. Those cards would be worth a lot of money now."

"But you have lots of money."

"Not so much. It just seems like a lot to you now."



Two months in New York after the funeral. Ten dollars less in Christmas money that year. Birthdays, too. Jeanie Jeanie's teeth never grew in. But this year she is old enough to change her name.