Rotator Cuff Vortex

Abstract

top photo : dan zelazo author photo : james rudy 40 worldliteraturetoday.org for Tim Kelly When the TV played above the bar, I faked my interest in the game – it was the bodies I wanted to tell the stories. Like the story Tim told of Darryl Stingley: there was a photo of him playing in his obituary, leaping for the football in a perfect arabesque (this before the hit that cut his spinal cord). On Friday nights, Tim and his friends throw The Vortex Ball in the bookstore parking lot, although Tim threw his shoulder out, and now the game is on hold until the surgeon finds the time to cut Tim’s rotator cuff and reattach the fittings. The body tells a story mostly about loss (all, in Stingley’s case). And still the ball exerts a pull: the men strain toward it when the TV’s playing, transfixing the dog as well, who goes crazy playing fetch, and will retrieve as long as anyone can be coerced to throw, a drive inbred and neural, although the ball is, in the dog’s case, a stand-in for some specimen of game – by what gene does the compulsion travel? In the epic story of the Mayans, the heroes get their necks cut by the wings of bats down in the underworld, so that their cut heads can bounce off the hips of the death-lords playing a game simply called “the ball game” – naturally, the story ends with the heroes resurrected, then thrown into the sky to become the moon and sun. Scholars call the game a way of ritualizing war, blood not entirely averted by the ball since the losers were beheaded, skulls racked like bowling balls in the upperworld arena. I have seen depictions of this cut into the stones of Chichén Itzá, where you can hear the game still roaring from the dusty court, although the playing died five hundred years ago. Also carved there is the throne, or chac-mool, and the king lounging on it, though this story is debated: could be any doofus spectating. And what’s the story behind his enthrallment with the ball – do all round things have gravity, no matter if they’re thrown by men or spin of their own accord in space, orbs cut from bigger orbs in a motion picture that’s been playing ever since The Bang? And we take our miniscule positions in the game. Forever after, Stingley sat in the throne of his chair, uncomplaining, probably dumbstruck: when your old life cuts out and a story takes over that’s all a game played by the ball on your neck. Lucia Perillo’s sixth book of poems, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (2012), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her previous book, Inseminating the Elephant, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. In 2012 she also published a book of short stories, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain, shortlisted for the 2013 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Rotator Cuff Vortex Lucia Perillo special section ...