Posts tagged prose
the neighborhood.
You used to be friends with these people, I want to say. You drove Mrs. Epperson to the hospital when she was giving birth to Sally. Mr. Epperson was out of town on a business trip and it was pouring rain but you did it. You played cards with the Montgomery’s every Monday night, you came home drunk and singing and laughing and happy, holding my mother’s hand and spinning her, equally drunk, around the kitchen table. You helped Mr. Parks fix his car, you shoveled Mrs. Allen’s driveway for her after her husband died. Every single time it snowed. Without being asked and without being prompted or reminded.
This was your neighborhood. This was your town. And you left. You got out.
These small towns are toxic, you said. They’re suffocating. They get under your skin and they imprint themselves on you and they never let you get away from them. And the only way to break free is to break free completely, and that’s why you did it. That’s why you left. You can never come back because it will never be the same. The people here, they attach onto you like a parasite, like an outsider; they suck away everything positive. They feed on possibility - what you could have done with yourself, what you could have made of yourself. Places you could have gone, people you would have met.
That’s what you said but I don’t think you meant any of it. I think it came from a place of anger, from a place of sadness, from a place of being cast out and stripped of all title and banned from ever returning. It wasn’t your choice to leave. And I think that’s why you had to hate it. You had to hate it to save yourself from the pain of losing it.
the infinite summer.
That summer lasted forever, stretched on forever, curled outwards to the very edges of the universe. It hooked itself around the folds in my skin and it pressed itself against my lungs and the heat was the kind of solid, unforgiving heat that chokes all the breath out of your chest and makes you weak under its weight.
I kept my sister’s secrets for her even though I didn’t know what they meant and I didn’t know what it meant to keep them. But I wrapped Twiggy up somewhere safe and I put her into a box under my bed and I let myself drown in that summer. That summer like a wave, that summer like an ocean. That summer like a hot, stagnant, lake. Like a dozen arms pulling me underwater, filling my lungs, seeping in through the cracks in my skin and filling me up with scum and mold and sand.
Did I think I would ever see her again?
I don’t know.
But every night I stood in the middle of her room and every night I felt the air charged with the energy of her, an energy that was quickly slipping away, receding, falling backwards and falling away from me.
I used to think: the air in this room is air expelled from my sister’s lungs. The dust in this room is Twiggy’s skin, the errant hairs in this room are hairs lost from the top of Twiggy’s head.
The air conditioners whined and buzzed and groaned with electricity but the house was hotter than ever. The hair and the skin cells were vacuumed up. And I’m sure if you could measure it, the air was wiped clean of her. Every breath I took in, I breathed her up and she caught on the inside of my lungs, melting into my body.
I used to think: now we are the same. Now we are the middle ground my mother so often wished aloud for.
Now the space my sister left behind has been filled with my own shallow breaths.
an excerpt from a longer piece
by Katrina.
the ocean of the dead.
When my mother is dead and when my father is dead and when half of the world is dead, when we run out of room to bury them all and when we burn all the bodies into ash, when the ocean turns grey with the dust of the dead, that is when I get into my car and I drive the many hours to the shore so I can see it. I bring Tomak and my son, who is three and who is quiet like me when I was a child. I call him Peter. He is named after his great uncle. He does not have a great uncle. If my father had not been an only child, if he had had a brother named Peter, that is who my son would have been named after. When I get older, if he asks me, I will tell him something different. I will tell him I named him for the boy who flew and who never grew up. He will like that, I think. We never really outgrow fairy tales. We have to just pretend they are silly and for children.
I am twenty-three when I have Peter, twenty-six when I bring him to the beach, when I point out over the water and when I tell him that somewhere in the mess of gray waves there are pieces of his grandmother and grandfather. He doesn’t understand me, of course. He is only a baby and Tomak lifts him onto his shoulders and he laughs and laughs and laughs and I stand at the very edge of the water and I pretend I can still feel them. My parents. But they are dead, and we cannot feel the dead. They pass out of this world and into some other place. Into darkness or into light. I don’t know which.
Tomak and Peter fall asleep on a beach blanket. The sun sinks lower in the sky and people come to the water to pay their respects and then they leave again but we stay. We stay as the day passes into evening and they wake up and Peter plays in the sand but I will not let him swim. He will not swim in the water of the dead. I had a dream he would drown if he went into the water and I can’t lose him. I need to die before him. I can’t lose anyone else.
Tomak takes my hand and he asks me if I am tired. If I am ready to go home now. I say almost, Tomak. Only let’s stay a little longer here. Let’s get a room, let’s wake up by the ocean tomorrow. He says we can. He lets me have whatever I like because I let him have Peter. I never wanted children and when I got pregnant I wanted to let the air in. And that’s what I said to him, exactly like that, and because he reads Hemingway I knew he’d understand me. But he wanted the baby and I thought I could grow to want the baby too and so I kept it. And now I love him. Of course I love him. He’s my son. But if I never had him, I wouldn’t miss him. I wouldn’t have known the difference.
It’s like this. I see everything. The past and the present and all the paths of every decision I have ever made. I saw Tomak before I met him, Peter before I had him. I saw my mother die a thousand times and I cried for my father five years before he left me. I saw this day on the beach and I see my own death, years away, but it is faded now. The medicine helps. The medicine dulls the edges of my memory and it helps me stay in the present. Some things are surprises now. Small things, I never would have guessed.
I’ve seen this day and I’ve seen the ring and I say yes before he asks me. I never wanted to get married but it is what Tomak wants and I’ll let him have whatever he wants now because he’s all I have left. They’re all I have left. He proposes to me on the threshold of the ocean of the dead and I pretend like my parents can see us. But I know they can’t see us. I know they can’t see anything.
from a longer piece by Katrina, in the hall of one thousand mirrors
