COMING SOON from ol' Fisher!

Caity Fisher - Only The Wind


Art by Caity Fisher. OU0015

Caity made crop circles. At about two A.M. she would load up her minivan with her four friends and employees: Tom, the stoic artist, Tim, the music historian, Katherine, the shy photographer, and Graham, Tim's brother, a nature geek. The five of them towed the trailer out to the field. It was equipped with Caity's four ride on mowers that she used to run her landscaping company in the summer. She usually did two or three, maybe four crop circles each year. She would scope out a farm, work on a sketch, have a group meeting, figure out the 'drawing', pick a night, and hope it wouldn't rain. She had been doing these art projects for about four years now.
Tom had unfortunately mowed over Katherine on the last outing. He was convinced he didn't do it. It was dark. Caity was in prison. So were the rest of them. It had been two weeks.
Caity spent the majority of her time preparing her defense. Otherwise she would read the complete works of Jack Kerouac and stare at the night sky with the telescope they allowed her. She mulled over the event again and again, cataloguing all the infinitesimal details, meticulously crafting her words in such a way as to effectively disassociate herself.
The guard walked by heavily. Caity glared at her. She took the pencil out of her mouth and examined the teeth marks in the soft wood. She began again, "I told Katherine not to wear headphones when we were out there." Caity erased that. All the others know that Katherine wasn't wearing headphones. Katherine probably didn't even own anything she could listen to music on. She reflected for a moment. "Katherine had been suicidal," she scribbled. This much was bendable, Caity reflected. Katherine probably wasn't but to anyone who didn't know her well enough, this could be implied. She was always giving her things away and spending most of her free time alone. She began again -- "I think Tom meant to do it." She erased that as well.
It was only a week before the outing that Tom had admitted to Katherine, and everyone else, that he was head over heels for her. In fact, Katherine had at first turned him down but the evening before the outing she agreed to start seeing him, formally of course.
Katherine was a very shy girl, very churched and withheld. Caity paused to reflect. "And obnoxious." She heard herself say that part out loud and covered her mouth. "But she really was," Caity thought. Katherine refused to date a boy unless it was as official as possible. She had even made Tom get her Father's permission. He was probably glad to give it to him. To hold any sort of misgiving about the sweet, kindhearted Tom was nearly offensive to Caity. For all of these reasons Tom would mark the first boy Katherine had ever dated.
Caity made sure not to write any of this part down. Earlier drafts had included this kind of information but Caity was sly to omit such details now. Caity would have liked to write that Tom had meant to kill Katherine but she wasn't sure that would be plausible. She just wanted to distance herself somehow from all this horror. She would write down whatever she had to. But she had to be careful, she reminded herself. The last thing she wanted was to be caught in a lie. She had to get her story straight as an arrow. She could just imagine Graham and Tim and Tom at their men's prison, sitting together at lunch, talking and talking and talking, conspiring against her. And poor Caity was left to speak with herself; to process the trauma on her own.
She picked the pencil back up. "Tom was a clumsy person, and Katherine was an aloof one, always with her head in the clouds." She paused to think. This had to be short and sweet. "It was very dark that night. No moon, no stars. Katherine had already taken photographs of Tim and Graham in the two circles over, gracefully carving the extra terrestrial into the earth." She revised that to be less poetic and more operational. Occam's razor, she repeated to herself. "After she had photographed them," Caity wrote, "she came over to my circle, the next over, and photographed me. She actually photographed me for a very short time, shorter than the others." That wasn't true. "Then Katherine went through the long straight corridor to get to Tom's circle, the final one. Tom mowed her down in the corridor there." Of course the others hadn't seen any of this happen, they were far away, mowers roaring, and Tom himself denied all of it, wholeheartedly. "He must be just marinating in his guilt," Caity thought. "I think Tom may have been drunk that night." She began again, "He was in higher spirits than any of us had ever seen him." She needed more lines like this- lines that the other two wouldn't argue with. She just had to give them a certain lean, stigmatize the whole thing.
"Tom-" Caity's pencil broke. She hollered out for the guard to come. The guard sauntered over slowly, her boots booming through the hallway. Caity watched her approach. She detested uniforms. Anyone in uniform unsettled her. It was such a human and dehumanizing implement. The guard was a fair woman though. She already knew what Caity wanted. She handed Caity the pencil sharpener and replaced it in her pocket when Caity was finished. There was an impressive pile of shavings there by the door. The guard smiled evenly, not betraying any amount of sympathy, but not being stand-offish or unkind. "What are you writing anyhow?" she asked.
"A short story," Caity replied, and broke eye contact.
"Ah, yes. In the vein of Kerouac?" she offered.
Caity glanced over at the stack of novels she had taken out from the prison library. "More like Mishima."
"Not familiar," the guard replied.
Caity smiled curtly and went back to her table.
The guard stood waiting for an explanation of the author but Caity didn't respond. The guard went back to her post. Caity went back to work.
"Tom is a man who loves art. He isn't very concerned with aliens at all. What intrigues him about crop circles is the artistic anonymity." He was initially reeled in by the underground stigma of the whole thing. He had been into graffiti as a teen and that same penchant for furtive and ambiguous authorship carried over into crop circles. "For Katherine the crop circles were her innocent, albeit illegal, way of acting out, her only real outlet for her societal rebellion. And she hated commercial farming as well." That could possibly be true. It is not as if she often weighed in on those conversations they would have driving out there, but she didn't say anything otherwise. Caity wondered if she should be including this.
Katherine, in Caity's opinion, was a great photographer but she was an otherwise innocuous person. And that's why Caity kept her around. Caity had always had the impression that Katherine wasn't a very bright or interesting person so she didn't really feel too threatened. As far as the landscaping company was concerned, Katherine did some of the minor accounting and took the phone calls, booking quotes and scheduling the crew's jobs. Nothing too difficult. In reality, Caity didn't actually know why Katherine came along with them. Societal rebellion was just a safe guess for the sake of the statement. Perhaps she came along for the camaraderie or the photographic opportunity. Maybe she really did want a fool-proof chance for rebellion, that quiet little angel, but Caity wasn't sure. Whatever the reason, Katherine certainly didn't believe in aliens. "The thought of aliens would probably upset her whole world view," Caity thought, snidely.
World view was a huge part of Caity's studies. Caity was in the honors program, anthropology. All of her co-workers were in their fourth year at the University as well, in different capacities. Caity had bought the mowers and trailer with inheritance money and made a summer business out of them.
Her first employee was Tom of course. They were best friends through high school. Caity had always suspected that Tom was a homosexual. That is why the whole Katherine thing came as such a surprise. All through school Tom would never flirt with girls and he certainly didn't flirt with Caity either. He was very handsome, tall and thin. His hygiene was excellent. And he was sensitive too, though stoic. If you didn't know him you wouldn't think so but he was easily bothered by things. When Caity and Tom hung out after school he would open up and it was clear to see that he was highly affected by the actions of others, for good or for bad. And Tom was so kind. He never wanted to hurt any one's feelings. Caity wondered at times if Tom was in fact an alien. Caity often wondered the same thing about herself.
That was Caity's secret. Only Caity. In her free time, she studied Aliens endlessly. It frustrated her that they didn't carry anything about aliens in the prison library. She had a deep affection for the extra terrestrial which carried over to the alienated in society. That apocalyptic prospect for immediate change, societal restructuring, for better or for worse, warmed her heart. Caity knew that a change of that magnitude could only be possible in the hands of another more intelligent life form.
Caity's thoughts drifted away. She remembered when she would watch the Space Channel after school with her Grandpa Gary almost every day. Glory bound, almost every day: the infinity of stars, the retina of the eclipse, the shadows on the sun. She could still remember that first time she saw a crop circle. It was illuminating. It was as if the earth and the cosmos had joined hands. Caity had the exact impression of that first crop circle inscribed onto her very heart of hearts.
When Caity was a girl she would have dreams where she was floating through space forever and ever until she woke up in a flying saucer with friendly little people. She would look at herself and she would be a friendly little person too, with big black eyes and long fingers and a cranium like a hot air balloon. Her slow measured movements would elate her.
Creating these crop circles was more than art for Caity. It was a way of communicating. She copied other crop circles and put slight variations on them, in order to encourage those same UFOs to land again. Caity had never told anyone that. She always approached it as Art with her employees and the few people privy to their work. She would never tell anyone her true intentions. She could just imagine their reactions. Caity didn't want them to think she was a lunatic!
Caity sat at her desk and looked around at the painted bricks, the iron bars, the stiff mattress. Tom was probably doing the same thing at that very moment. She hoped he was thinking of her right now. She hoped he hated his confines as much as she did. It was so clean and uniform. In Grandpa's house, where Caity grew up, she was always wading through a deep musty mess of paper and ashes. The heat was turned up high and the blinds were shut tight. This prison cell felt like a doctor's office in comparison, cold and clinical.
Caity thought of her poor Grandpa Gary. He had become a recluse watching that channel, writing dissertations on graphing paper, trying to pay the bills by calculating probabilities of lottery numbers. Caity had to make sure he remembered to eat and bathe. He became so distraught, so consumed by the philosophical implications, the theological consequences, of other life forms co-existing that he neglected all else. Caity followed the debate on the Space Channel with her Grandpa. Experts were always discussing what humans ought to do and what the aliens wanted from us and how we should approach them. Should we blow them up? Trade technologies? Become their slaves? It was the question that most intrigued young Caity as well. And surely enough, she had her own theory. It was a theory she had maintained from day one. If the Aliens come, she reasoned, they are here to love us. And we as humans must embrace them passionately. Because If we don't love them back, they will kill us. All of us. They will make us like the crops they landed on. And there will be no second chances. And oh, how Caity did love the Aliens.
Caity snapped out of it. She stared at the paper, covered in scribbles. She crumpled it up and added it to the waste basket. The prison was so cold sometimes. She pulled out another piece of paper and started again. With a slow deliberate hand she wrote, "I saw Tom do it." She signed her name, got under her blankets, and went to sleep.




Caity Fisher's BANDCAMP MYSPACE