I look at this imaginary painting on the wall –
A man is standing on an Irish cliff with the morning dew glistening
Upon the grass as green as green can be
And in his unruly beard that is sometimes more brown than red,
Other times more red than brown.
The sun is in his eyes and he’s squinting.
In the distance where he is looking
There is a roiling sea with a small ship rocking on it.
Two women are on that ship, on their way to stand also on the Irish cliff
Where the dew will cling to their bare feet and hang from the hems of their long flimsy skirts.
One woman is with the man of the unruly beard where the red and the brown do battle.…
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I’ll have to come back to this book later when I’ve lost someone.
The book in that sentence is Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. The I in that sentence preparing for unknown yet certain losses is, of course, me. I was just sixteen, reading and journaling on a beach towel in my backyard, laying belly down with my bikini top off, hoping the tanning oil was making me good and bronze. I was sixteen, tanning in the backyard, and simultaneously stocking my mental fallout shelter like a prepper might stock up on canned tomatoes.
There are plenty of essays in which young women rhapsodize Didion. I love to read This is not one of them. I am concerned not with Didion herself, but with something Didion-adjacent.…
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Mason Hamilton Williams was four and a half years old and it was a big long name and he could spell it all himself, Officer Jane Park had just learned.
“I kin even read. I told myself how to read when I was three and a half years old. Grownups didn’t tell me. I told myself. My teacher didn’t tell me. She told me the ABC’s but I already knewn that since I was two and a corter years old. The problem with grownups is. That they don’t listen. To the words.”
Officer Jane Park’s gaze drifted to the child’s light-up Paw Patrol sneakers thumping rhythmically against the metal legs of the chair. Under the bouncing feet a large coffee stain reposed on the dismal carpet.…
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Red is the glow of a bonfire burning low between stolen glances.
Red is a plastic cup filled with sour liquid that stings like a sunburn.
Red is the burn of cranberry vodka as it stains clean white porcelain.
Red is the hem of my sundress, pushed up around my waist.
“Red looks good on you,” he grunts into my hair, sticky with liquor and vomit. “Brunettes always look hot in red.”
Red is blood circling the drain, coiled like smoke from a fired gun.
I stare at the red nail polish still sitting on my bathroom counter. It’s the only red thing I own that I haven’t purged yet.
Red looks good on you.
“Your eyes look red,” my mother says over a plate of burned toast.…
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“Hurry up!” he called out to them as they filed through the narrow, shaded Arab quarter. For once he was leading the charge. Laura and their two boys sweltering in the heat, 40C even in the shade. Sweating profusely under their baseball caps, they must have thought him mad, marching them at full pace when everyone else was taking a siesta. He couldn’t help it. He was so excited.
Cordova. The name hung over him like rich, intoxicating Arab perfume. He had longed to visit her since a child. What would she be like? Were her gardens still abloom?
As he impatiently waited for his family to catch up, he played back the image of a small boy, his head resting against his father’s shoulder watching wonder-eyed at the spectacle of Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen in Africa.…
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I escaped through the basement door
at midnight, while up on the third floor
they were playing death games
on the flatscreen. I walked the dark streets
barefoot in cargo shorts.
Above me half a moon and half a sun
were stalking each other.
A line of handsome homes posed
at the edge of the bluff
as if thinking about jumping.
I only wanted to hide for a while
in their electric landscapes
to become a stone statue of no one
so they would touch my face
with their trembling fingers.…
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I was seated
in the death black limousine
at the back.
Thirteen, sobbing.
Bagpipes played
the bagpipe songs.
Timely snow
covered our coats.
Our grandmother
mother
wife
stranger
lowered
into the ground.…
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