“What’s the phrasing, again? Round the mulberry, slip the mangrove, bunny ears?”

            “You don’t need to memorize the words, dear. Just… watch… and then repeat the action, exactly. Ok?”

            Tyla’s mother bids the young girl to observe with a short, nonchalant turn of her wrist. Tyla leans in, her nose twitching in anticipation. 

            Tyla watches as her mother slips two foot-long laces between the thumb and pointer fingers of each hand, pinching the plastic nub-looking-things at the ends of the lace whereto the thread has been fed. Then, with a grace seen only in repetitive motion, her mother twirls one lace around the other. For her next trick she manufactures, almost magically, a cotton-based loop. Tyla’s eyes burn hot with inquisition. Suddenly, a second loop appears beside the first. How? This loop her mother wraps around its sister before piercing it, sort of like the way a spear is run through the guts of an animal. Her mother wrenches the killer strand of lace away from the bundle resting on the ledge of her locked thumb. 

            Mother and daughter lock eyes. Mother smiles at daughter.

            Lightly grimacing, mother completes the mission: she dips her hands, each clasping lace, to the ground, straining to remain simultaneously delicate and precise. There is a tightening. New veins form along the backs of her hands. She reels her elbows in, empty-handed, open-palmed. Where two balled fists had been hovering in the air, quivering, trembling, now sit two perfect bunny ears atop one perfectly tied shoe.  

           “Now you try.”

 

           It is many years later. Tyla stands barefoot before a grave, crying silently. She is weeping tears, hydrating the snapdragons leaning against her mother’s tombstone. Tyla is thinking about how her mother taught her everything she knows. About how to use a grill. About what to say during awkward silences at high-born functions. About where to shop for cheap produce.

          Tyla, rankled by the inertia of bittersweet memories, phantom sensations, and adages and lessons bygone, the things that go hurtling through the anxious person’s mind like gravity-defying comets, is holding a pair of velcro shoes in her hands. Stupid girl, she thinks to herself. Stupid little half-hearing unminding unlearnable girl. She places her velcro shoes atop the fresh-plowed earth, that grassless plot, and crosses her heart. 

          Tyla knows it isn’t her mother’s fault she had never learned how to tie her own shoelaces. Tyla was always, and still is, a stubborn gal. But however, in that moment, that obsequious moment in which Tyla contemplates life and death and generational gratitude, and weighs the tumult of child-rearing against the impossible prospect of eventually having to let go, Tyla makes a vow: she will never wear velcro shoes again. No. She will wear shoes that have laces, even if she cannot tie them. Even if it kills her.

 

          Tyla is a grown woman who countenances with something like pleasant ambition. Around her mouth are arrayed constellations of contradictory wrinkles. Above her top lip there are shallow, vertical gores which bear an air of severity. The product of a stern expression, reflexively bred about by pursed lips. At the corners of her mouth, on the other hand, lie a pair of smile-spawned dimples. What Tyla’s friends call her “happiness dents”. 

          Tyla is downsizing on the career front. She used to be a high-powered attorney. And for two decades, she onlywore heels. But after the death of her mother, Tyla has been forced to reconcile the rote inadequacies she had priorly been compensating, illy, for. For far too long Tyla ignored the damage wrought of faults mental and spiritual, instead adopting a framework that co-opted the reaching of more, more, more rather than live, laugh, love. Invariably, when a man or woman confronts his or herself, truly, and seeks to absolve his or herself of the guilt and shame and nastiness that comes with neglect… no amount of unseeking can undo the experiment.            Tyla does not know this.

         Tyla lands a job at a slaughterhouse. It is a low-paying job, and it is labor that she is unaccustomed to.                          However, it does succeed in satisfying her self-prescribed terms of future employment, which are simple: she must work a job that requires her to be on her feet, in the literal sense. The first day of work arrives and Tyla shows up at the stockyard in a pair of wranglers, a sweater dappled with grease stains, and tan work boots, untied and unshiny. The foreman makes it a point to ask Tyla about her shoelaces, but Tyla dismisses the man quickly, noting that it’s part of her religion. What she doesn’t say is the truth, and the truth is that her shoes are untied as a tribute to her dead mother. 

         “It’s a liability.” Says the foreman. “But I’ll mark it down on my sheet and if anything happens to you on the job, say, you get injured or something, it’s on you.”

         “Sure.”

         Tyla is shown to the end of the line, where shanks of meat are packaged. A woman named Rosetta is hunched over brown parchment paper, folded at the corners, tying string. Tyla freezes. The foreman notices the sudden shift in temperament and asks Tyla if everything is alright. Tyla asks if there are any openings in the freezer, claiming she prefers knife work to string work. The foreman shrugs, thinking to himself how odd her request is, since men are usually tasked with the heavier, bloodier, less desirable labor. But, knowing the times, he bites his lip, foregoing the entrenched politics of gender in the workplace, and escorts Tyla towards the front of the line. 

 

         Time passes as time tends to: sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, sometimes as a blur, sometimes with definition. Tyla is four months a veteran at the slaughterhouse. The executive suite and dissection line alike know Tyla by name since she is considered a rare bird inside that hellish conservatory: a well-educated, middle-aged female who has broken spines, carnal as well as leather-bound, in the corporate sector.

         She also has a nickname: Tylass. As in, “Tie lass”. As in, “tie-less”. Indeed, she still walks around with her shoelaces unknotted, having never learned to tie them. It remains a symbolic gesture in honor of her mother.

One October afternoon, just as the bite of first frost appears on the grass outside the stables, Tyla takes a tight turn round the northerly bend of the corridor that runs adjacent to the cafeteria. She is thinking about mice and whether mice hold any preferences about cheese varietals. Tyla silently has determined that American must be the most sought after. Medium-stink. Medium-texture. Easy to put down. That’s her mouse brain, talking.

While lost in thought, however, a most terrible and unfortunate sequence of events unravels. Following the incident, one employee goes on record saying it is “the longest fall he has ever seen”. Another, meanwhile, sums it otherwise, saying “she lost her balance, and never regained it as long as she lived.”

          What happens is that the sole of one of Tyla’s shoes catches one of the loose shoelaces of the other. She steps on it and trips. Instead of flace-planting on the ground howeer, like a locomotive she lunges forward. Tyla rams against the wall, face-first. An “uff” squeezes out of her chest, uncontrollable and almost inhuman. The impact buckles her knees and sends her running, awkwardly, haggardly, sideways–resembling the fresh victim of a dizzy bat beer game. Down the corridor she tears. Tyla bursts out into the open, where the marbled torsos of de-limbed cattle hang by chains from motorized tracts affixed to the rafters. She bashes into one, steps on the loose lace again, smacks the back of her head into another, then shoulders the next torso–and again, the next. She is screaming hog-wild at this point, but her peers are too stunned to act with any sort of conditional volition. All the apes gape.

           Tyla flails forward, lurching ahead in spite of herself. She encounters a stairwell–down she cartwheels. Down she goes. Yes, the woman is out-of-control. She reaches the bottom and somersaults forward. Attempts to stand. Steps, again, on a shoelace, and doubles over at the waist. She tries to catch herself with her feet but cannot, instead, generating more and more momentum. Nose to ground, arms waving wackily behind her, she picks up speed, faster and faster, until, at last, a wretched end is met: she sprints full throttle into the meat grinder and comes out the other end in a perfect brown parcel… just waiting to be tied.