The day after we moved into our house, I waited for my husband to leave for work so I could lie down on our bed, close my eyes, and disappear. I drew the covers over my legs to keep my feet warm; they are always cold, regardless of the temperature.
Sometimes, as a tease, my husband says: “It is as if you are dead.”
“I am,” I say. He cocks his head and squints at me like an investigator…
Read more… https://www.guernicamag.com/the-vase/
Here, where I live, there are roads where the asphalt has broken up. There are street-side shops which windows have been shattered. I like to watch the wind blow through the openings and bat around the abandoned interiors. Sometimes, I find old shards of glass scattered over puke-green carpet, the edges of the glass dulled from the passage of time. This is a dark place, a cold land. I don’t know how I came to live here. I could say I’m a drifter. I could say I let life tug me this way and that—this time to the corn fields, to the cow pastures, to the post-industrial wreckage, to the malls where I can buy baby clothes for my expecting friends, chilled wine to sip in the evenings with my husband, paint to give my interiors new life. I am chameleon-like. Over time I have understood that this means I have a tendency to mirror the landscapes I inhabit. I change myself in order to blend in. I employ camouflage to survive the drifting, the nomadic impulse I am convinced is there to harm me, causing me to disrupt my life as soon as the trees I have planted bear fruit, so to speak, as soon as the garden of my life blossoms. Here, in the heartland, my language has flattened to emulate the leveled landscape; it has become wounded, because when I look away from the fields, from the horizon of corn, I see the architectural wreckage, which suggests to me that those who lived within the ruins must have suffered an equally negative fate. They could have been buried alive, or fled the impending collapse in a mass exodus no one will acknowledge…
Read more… https://as.vanderbilt.edu/nashvillereview/archives/12074
The war is ongoing. It is unclear what set if off. Very few people want to admit this. They talk as if they know. At dinner I suggest to them, to my people, the people I love and know, that certain things, especially those that are hugely consequential, cannot be grasped in the present; any attempt to do so, I say, will inevitably result in reductive justifications, linear arguments of the cause-and-effect kind. Illuminate us, my friends say. They ask: what do you know that we don’t?
I am building a house around my thoughts. Each time I feel I am misunderstood, I add a new brick to the structure. So far, I have accumulated enough bricks for a wall…
When I bent down to stack the papers, I thought the sensation I had had in my brain earlier was the same sensation I had once felt when I shook a pomegranate near my ear. Or, not exactly a sensation, but a sound. That when I shook the pomegranate it had made the same sound as the sound my blood made when it swiveled in my brain, and that both sounds led to the same sensation: of something having dissolved where it shouldn’t have. I went over the memory, from when I picked up the pomegranate to when I shook it near my ear: I had squeezed the pomegranate by rolling it, had pressed into it with my thumbs, juiced it without cracking it open, because it’s the only way to juice a pomegranate without any special machines. All the juice was swiveling about inside the shell of the pomegranate, channeling its way around the seeds the way river water channels around driftwood. When I put the pomegranate down I could still hear the juice working its way around the seeds that were dead without their pulp. I had squeezed the pomegranate till the pulp was dead. I could invent a machine to juice pomegranates, I thought, and not just pomegranates but persimmons too, some very basic, cheap tool people could use in their homes, and then I imagined a thousand people, all wearing their house slippers, juicing their pomegranates and persimmons for breakfast, and I thought, never mind, no doubt someone has already invented it….
The day after the gallery visit, I awoke with a lingering headache, alarmed by the sound of the phone. At first I confused the sound of the phone with the sound of swallows. Those birds are capable of making a terrible noise when they get together. In the summertime they glide through the narrow Florentine alleys in communal roosts, and burst into the air space above the city piazzas, evicting the elderly, terrorizing them with their macabre noise, and causing the poor old souls to break their habit of sitting on the benches to stare ahead blankly for the remainder of the evening, as if into a void. I imagined the elderly leaving the piazzas in pairs; in the transitory space between sleep and wakefulness, I saw them throwing the weight of their weaker halves into their canes, filing out into the distance two by two. When I finally emerged from the slumber of sleep, the sharp stabbing headache drawing me out into the light of day, I identified the sound: it was the phone ringing, sending its dreadful vibrations through the wall…
Read more… https://bombmagazine.org/articles/zero-an-excerpt/