The Awakening, or Keira and Jon, a Short-Story About Growing Up
Acknowledgments: for Lexie Williams and the night we ran away from all our friends who made fun of us just to be alone and sit in silence together too shy to talk when I suppose I should have just started kissing you when we were around eleven; and for your mom for being funny and for your sister for being as cute as you are, but not for your little brother—I never liked him very much; and for the inevitable girls in my childhood at events and parties who teased and mocked me and embarrassed me relentlessly; for my shyness moodiness and embarrassment that makes me as alluring as intimidating and most of all impenetrable, unreachable unapproachable irreproachable and inaccessible; for Will Woods for inspiring the Randy character here; for Liz Cronin whom I can never mention enough who told me she wrote in a creative writing class in college a story about a female prison guard who contrives to keep a prisoner on bad behavior she’s in love with so he can’t be reunited with his girlfriend or ever get out of prison, Liz who’s constantly telling me she’s not a genius—like if that is not the most Sadean ingenious thing a girl ever wrote who’s never even heard of De Sade, Liz if you don’t unblock my number I’m going to take all your ideas that I don’t even know yet—I’ll take your ideas before they even fly into your pretty head; and for whatever guy Liz is most assuredly with right now because she can’t go a minute without someone for whatever reason, you’re going to have to get used to me
“I put my hand on a stove to see if I still bleed—” Kanye West, “Ghosttown” his last good album before he became unlistenable
“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket—” Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar
“She would have been a good woman if you had someone to shoot her every minute of her life—”Flannery O’Conner, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
“They sat together in the park
As the evening sky grew dark
She looked at him and he felt a spark
Tingle to his bones
T’was then he felt alone
And wished that he’d gone straight and watched out for a simple twist of fate—” Bob Dylan, “Simple Twist of Fate”
“The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink
at my water trough
And depart peaceful, pacified and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?”—DH Lawrence, “Snake”
“If you’re a good lookin’ man you got trouble. If you’re a good lookin’ woman, you got trouble”— Howlin’ Wolf, live at a concert in Chicago
Author’s Note: I think this is maybe my best work so far. This is very personal, and it was not easy to write, but I am very proud of it; I think this is very very beautiful, so I hope you enjoy.
“The Lady with the Umbrella,” by John Singer Sargent
The Awakening, or Keira and Jon, a Short-Story
by Jay Burkett
Keira
The girl they called Keira was the most popular girl in camp if she was the most feared not just among the girls especially the ugly and awkward diffident and shy ones; but the boys too but especially the pretty ones, a pretty boy who was shy and diffident and reticent and unable because he was unwilling he was too shy too self-conscious too embarrassed and fearful of opinion to speak his mind, which was the only thing she respected.
Only ugly boys didn’t fear a pretty girl. They didn’t have to.
Keira was as pretty as she was bossy (she was blonde with long messy frustrated hair that she stuck a bow in, she had large seeing blue eyes, white skin that burned in the summer but tanned too, an ovular face, and a perpetually sassy expression on it and great legs for a little girl); and if the other girls in camp had to fear her picking on them for being themselves and not being able or willing to be better, superior, then there was one boy who had to fear her meddling in his solitude. His sanctuary. This was the boy they called Jon.
Jon wasn’t like the other boys. He was not into or interested in sports, and he wasn’t talented in any particular way. He was not exceptional. He wasn’t even very smart. But he dressed with uncommon distinction, and she knew it wasn’t his parents who made him wear a Ralph Lauren button down shirt to go canoeing at sleep away camp. No one hesitated to submit Jon was handsome even beautiful and mysterious and admit whether they liked him, but he wasn’t as big or athletic, and he wasn’t as popular as the other boys. He had no “rep.” To Keira though with whom all the very popular and conventionally generically good looking boys were obsessed and infatuated or in love, it was Jon’s lack of popularity that was so striking to her, and how he lacked even the aspiration to be popular; either he was a genius or he was an idiot, or he was a psycho or something. He didn’t like sports, he wasn’t funny, he didn’t talk and it wasn’t that he didn’t have friends but he didn’t appear to need any.
Who didn’t want friends?
Well Keira might not have needed them either. Keira used her friends. She didn’t need them. She wasn’t close with any of them. They were a springboard a wellspring a backboard a base a wall against which she defined herself and flexed. Keira was no normal no average child; her parents were divorced, and her mom was maybe crazy in an inexplicable way; her older sister had sex with her boyfriend all night long right next to her, shaking the walls; her other sister Alexa had killed herself in college for no apparent reason. Keira was the unsolicited nude of a byproduct of her mother’s second or third marriage. And she took all this all out on other girls with happier more comfortable boujee’er loser upbringings.
What drew her to that boy they called Jon was a sense that in some vague voguish roguish elusive way he was just like her. Jon had long dark hair that was secretly blonde, smooth good French skin that got awfully tan in summer; he stood by himself apart from everybody steadfast, and he looked nice like a nice boy she knew he was—he was no psycho—but he never smiled. Never.
She wouldn’t be the first girl in his life to do this but her first instinct was to embarrass him. He was very shy and egregiously handsome, and she would tease him by flattering him that he was very handsome, so handsome and violently embarrass him. She could tell that here was an interesting boy who hated his own gifts who hated his own blessings, and she was to be his angel redeemer or else make him suffer for his pitiful abysmal lack of confidence and punish him for the joy of what he was missing out on and denying her and everyone else. Keira was bored. He stood out. He didn’t chase her like all those stupid popular athletic big boys, and she shot a famous desirous coy coquettish smirking look downhill at him.
Jon
Whenever the boy they called Jon glanced up it was that girl again Keira staring down at him, a playful smile became her, and he knew exactly what she was up to, because even at ten years old he had gotten this before; the you’re so handsome treatment that he was never ready less in the mood for ever, making him hate himself more and wish he were obese. Girls no matter how pretty—actually the prettier they were the worse it made him feel sick to his stomach at his consciousness of his own desire for them, like they ruled him and controlled him and were making fun of him or whatever that phenomenon was where he peed from that hardened him when he saw or he encountered pretty girls—as pretty as Keira no less the girls all the other confident unquestioning unskeptical uncritical boys so sure of themselves who didn’t think or wonder or stress obsessed over—they embarrassed Jon and made him uncomfortable when he just wanted to be left alone, but the girl got his attention.
She would stare with approval and pleasure and delight and excitement and joy and enthusiasm and exuberance, consort with her friends while snatching looks at him, them too—they all laughing for no reason. Then she would do something like put on a life preserver or shower the sand off her feet at the beach eat lunch and then she would catch Jon looking at her, at her legs and she would laugh at him, and embarrass him again.
“What’s the matter with you?”
She found him standing in a foot or a lot more of seawater up past his knees and got wet, standing next to him gazing out to sea.
“Jon, don’t you think I’m pretty?”
Jon didn’t say anything.
“Why don’t you say anything? You’re always so quiet.”
“I have nothing to say.”
“Why don’t you like me?”
“I like you.”
“I mean why don’t you like yourself or like that you like me?”
“I do like you. And I do like myself.”
“No if you liked yourself then you wouldn’t be so afraid to like me.”
“I’m not afraid of anything.”
“Yes you are.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are. Do you want me to tell you what you’re afraid of?”
“What?”
“Girls. You’re a boy who wouldn’t flinch if an attack dog were charging him but would run like the wind from a pretty girl.”
“Why would I be afraid of girls?”
“You’re afraid of how they make you feel. All those gooey messy uncontrollable evil emotions.”
“They're always teasing me.”
“But that’s because we like you.”
“It’s a heck of a way to show it by making me hate you.”
“Say hell, not heck. It’s just because we’re girls. We make you boys scared. But you just make us feel silly.”
“I don’t know why it matters.”
“What?”
“Any of it.”
Keira smirked. “Isn’t it exciting when camp and school is so boring?”
He said nothing.
“Isn’t love exciting?”
Jon blushed and let slip a smile.
“There’s that smile. You have such a handsome smile Jon.”
“I’m tired of people calling me handsome.” He said it like handsome was a bad word. Well it was. It may as well have been. It was a curse on his existence and he would have to bear it like a cross a target on his back his whole life. It made him feel vulnerable and feminine and girly and he didn’t goddamn like it.
He wrung his legs like hands whooshing the seawater troubledly.
“It’s because you’re a boy. Because you’re a manly little boy. Men aren’t supposed to be pretty and nowhere near as pretty as you. So you feel like a girl when people call you handsome and maybe this is part of the reason you hate girls.”
“I don't hate girls.”
They make you uncomfortable with yourself.
“You make me feel weak.”
“But you want to be strong.”
“I am strong.”
“It doesn’t make you weak if girls make you feel so sometimes. It takes a strong girl to make a strong boy feel weak.”
“Are you trying to say I have an excuse to feel weak if you make me feel weak?”
“Do I?”
He said nothing.
“I make you feel weak but did you know you make me feel strong? Girls make boys weak, but boys make girls strong.”
“How?”
Keira thought for a second. “Something about you brings out the woman in me.”
Eli
When a camp counselor Eli was aroused from his pot-exacerbated drowsiness approaching summer afternoon sunny light summery birds were singing chirping calling chatting for mates.
Sometimes you had to wonder whether animals didn’t even eat; they cared more about sex than people, given how much people ate especially Americans and how little comparatively they fucked. These were some of Eli’s actual thoughts when he had arisen and come to his foggy senses, and snuck a puff of his vape pen, holding it long in his lungs before exhaling then wheezing weirdly and coughing dryly like a regular smoker of something, and he thought of Abby another camp counselor and he strode by himself through the beach trees in the speckled dark of dense beach trees speckling scattered the spotty sporty intense sunshine through a canopy of darkness.
This was where he overheard before he even saw the little girl whose name was Keira and the little quiet boy named Jon; when Eli still had his hand down his shorts with thoughts of Abby tormenting him Abby, who would never even think about Eli not in the way he did about her; she didn’t desire him— in the water up to their little knees; light waves still whisking methodically and meticulously the monotonous still solid shore, stroking it like a painter’s brush: the girl said alarmingly on a gentle undulating breeze skipping the water and caressing their young faces, “what's your favorite animal? Mine is a snake.”
“Why a snake? Snakes are dangerous.”
“Well,” she said embarrassed of herself, “because of how sensual they are. And like on the Mexican flag, they’re worthy for eagles to tussle with. And you know there’s that flag dating back to the Revolution where the thirteen colonies are all pieces of a big snake, and there’s the motto Don’t Tread On Me? Snakes are very American. All red-blooded real dyed-in-the-wool American patriots are snakes.”
“What does that word mean sensual?”
“It’s hard to describe,” she lied. Her older sister used the word once to describe her boyfriend she was constantly having perpetual sex with in her house. This is where all Keira’s crazy ideas came from and vocabulary. She went on, enlarging, eyes wide with the fury of delight, the fever of passion, “I like how private how solitary and independent a snake is and how much it needs the heat and the sun for its cold blood. And how snakes are not dangerous not unless you provoke one. Then they coil up or they uncoil— I like that how they lash out and bite without hesitation instinctively intuitively. They’re deliberate almost like they had a brain like us when they hunt, but then they’re animals beasts when provoked and cornered. I like their pretty colors. I like that they like to be alone. They’re dominant predators, but they don’t need to prove it. What’s your favorite animal?”
“A fish I guess,” Jon said as the minnows nearly neatly kissed and tickled his legs, swimming like they never knew ever what direction they meant to swim in like the CGI props of a video game not real authentic aspects of the real world.
“Why a fish?”
“Because they’re a challenge to catch, and no one can get you underwater.”
“That’s ridiculous. Anyone can get you anywhere. There are even deadly underwater snakes.”
“Is that true?”
“Yup.”
Was Eli a pervert or was this snippet of dialogue between the two children really inappropriate, and it was the girl—before even the boy’s balls dropped she was trying to capture him not as a romantic pursuit but a lover, a victim.
For a free everlasting moment Eli was inexplicably terrified of nothing.
Lindsey
The girls were all in secret not the little ones but teenage camp counselors like Lindsey and Eva and Abby passing around a new book called Untrue, Why Everything We Believe About Women Lust and Infidelity is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free, and Lindsey was just reading the results of a promising new study on page eighty-five,
“Historically female macaques were often kept in cages with the males, who seemed to initiate all the sex by unceremoniously mounting them, which the females seemed to endure indifferently. This informed not just the primate literature on macaques; it served as more proof from the animal world that female sexuality is essentially passive and ‘less than’ male sexuality. Didn’t it? Wallen wasn’t buying it. He wondered, What if the animals spent more time outside of their cages? Would that change the choreography of rhesus macaque sex and, with it, some of our convictions about female sexuality? What happened next was a stunning performance of female macaque sexuality. In larger enclosures, females did not simply endure sex; they initiated it. Assertively and insistently. They followed the males with stalkerish intent, and smacked the ground in a kind of Morse code that meant ‘Serve Me Sexually right now!’ They also got bored and listless after a few years of having sex with all the available males. Wallen wondered what if we introduced new males? Sure enough, with fresh guys on offer, the females were again suddenly bananas for sex. Out of the cage they were utterly different than they were within it.”
This was a galvanizing motivating impetus crossing seductively with artistic inspiration suddenly slowly and progressively to fill her head with fancies such that she almost had like a right to cheat on her long distance boyfriend, because life was not long enough not even these days to miss any more opportunities. She fancied Eli in particular, but he was enamored with Abby and Abby was just unavailable for romance and didn’t even fancy Eli. Abby was too pretty right now for commitment. Why did men want you to commit so much and own and possess you; why couldn’t we all sleep around and go crazy? Why did our erotic desire for more even compromise our romantic affection for one? It was all so stupid! What would the Greeks and Romans and Egyptians think of us today? Aren’t they laughing at us and spinning in their graves? You could thank the author, Wednesday Martin for revealing this to her. What a funny name, Wednesday. Women were loose as hell and men weren’t loose enough naturally fundamentally unoriginally; if a woman wanted more she should have it; she deserved it! Why not take it! Take everybody! To hell with commitment and the drudgery of faithfulness! What was the point? Fertility rates were declining in this country along with marriage rates because of how our base intolerance for betrayal and our condemnation of lust and eros, erotic desire America’s puritanical settlers enforcing the hatred of it and institutionalizing it, hatred of female desire. So much for the land of the free. Why couldn’t we be like the fake marriages of the “Mad Men” era when America was strong in its celebration of unchecked unleashed desire rampant, men women both all over each other.
Lecherous male bosses promiscuous powerful frisky horny secretaries and receptionists and day drinking. It was so annoying how rigid and moralistic America had become over the years. They say that the libertines and hedonists of the post-war period “all died.” But we’re all dead too in our determination to hold everything together and live forever were any of us really living? Anyway living forever was a sin. God didn’t want us counting calories and worshiping technology. AI was Frankenstein’s monster. It was Huxley’s Soma. There was a special place in hell just for Silicon Valley. But people are not property! My lust is mine! My lust is my own! It is not for a man to say I am a slut, not if I want dick, and to be dicked down like a girl’s never been manhandled before by multiple partners at once. Lindsey’s burgeoning contempt for the abstemious, and self-denying, self-abnegating, self-loathing, self-conscious too self-aware was infinite. Men are not real men who don’t crave us, chase us and let us chase them. And faithful people who commit and honor commitments compulsively were all cowards!
Randy
Little Randy was the most popular most athletic talkative and flirtatious naughty boy in camp who couldn’t stay out of any kind of trouble manifestly who was constantly breaking into the girls’ tents at night, who all were obsessed with him well except for Keira, whom he affected to disdain because Keira was the hottest but Keira couldn’t be less interested in him. And now he was about to have his revenge by spreading rumors about her.
“I saw Jon and Keira kissing.”
“You did?” one of his friends and sycophants asked.
“Yeah down at the beach.”
“Really?”
Keira
“If I asked you to kiss me, would you?”
Silence.
“Jon why must you be like this? Don’t you want it? You will be the object of ridicule and envy and even hatred whether you kiss me or kiss anyone for that matter or you don’t. You need to be a man and not run away like a fish when a man envies you or a pretty girl wants you. You can’t just sit sulk and brood languish and fester in yourself by yourself. You need to break out of your morose shell and dare to be happy. Dare to be happy with me.”
Jon
When the little boy they called Jon and the girl they called Keira wandered back to camp, Keira was proud as much as Jon was ashamed when all the little girls and boys chorused, “Keira and Jon sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”
Jon was on the brink of tears of embarrassment when Keira smiled ebulliently and threw her arms hurtling plummeting around him squeezing him with astonishing strength and kissed him on the cheek, Jon feigning to hate her and wriggle out of her tight high grasp.
“Don’t act like you don’t like it. Don’t make us all hate you,” she said in his ear.
“Be yourself,” she said.
“We’re Married!” she announced joyfully.
Keira’s Father
Keira’s mother over the phone,
“You should be ashamed of yourself you hussy. You embarrass me. Jon’s parents said you made him feel very uncomfortable and he came home crying. Why do you have to do this and be like this? Why?”
Keira was in tears when her father came to get her from camp because it was the last day of camp, and school was on the horizon a melancholy ship a silhouette in the late overhanging afternoon of August and dawn of the school year.
“Don’t listen to her,” he said when they put all Keira’s clothes in the trunk of the BMW they couldn’t even shut, and they had to ride home with the trunk tied shut with a stretchy elastic cord. Keira loved clothes. The only friends she could rely on. Her favorite color was white. Like her black heart. Its purity cloaked her demonic character. “I’ve never loved you more than I do now, baby.”
In her tears she lurched across and warmly hugged her dad who let her ride in the passenger seat though her mom would have thought her too young for it like she might die from the airbag.
He was smoking a cigar as he drove the sole reason her crazy judgmental mom divorced him. She hated how old-fashioned and old-school and “behind the times” he was. Her dad had a gravelly man’s voice, and he dressed impeccably and worked in finance where he had cheated on Keira’s mom in New York City a million times night and day. Like there was never a tomorrow. Why the hell shouldn’t he?
“Your mother’s a prude, baby.”
He was confident. He was in his late forties and he was vital very handsome and roguish. And Irish American and tough. Really conservative but also careless and hapless. He was wearing a suit with suspenders and a bow tie. He wore round tortoiseshell eye glasses and flirted with any woman that walked and would flirt even if they didn’t walk and didn’t even have legs. It appalled her sisters but amused Keira. His reckless self-indulgent misbehavior. Maybe she just needed to grow up to understand, but she didn’t want to grow up and he didn’t want her to either of course.
If he had no legs too.
He was the most hated man on Wall Street and loved to rub his reputation in everyone’s face.
“You are fulfilling my highest wish that any father could and should have for his prettiest daughter. That you Break Every Boy’s Heart. Be proud. I’m proud.”
Keara
In embracing her father tightly in contempt of her mother who really was a scornful scolding prude, Keara recovered her natural God-given self-possession and smiled at how truly authentically pleased she was with herself.
“I love you daddy.”
“I love you too so much sweetheart.”
Jon
When he came home he was in tears; he wouldn’t have told his mother if she didn’t torture him with menacing questions.
“Why are you crying? What’s wrong?”
“It’s not her mom! It’s me!” he protested in the girl they called Keira’s defense when his mother called Keira’s outraged mom and told her how obnoxious and needless and heedless her daughter was.