Mother pushes us out the door and across the porch, yelling for us to hurry up, like it’s a race to see who gets there first. The sound of her keys jingling around worries me, making me wonder what would happen if she dropped them down between the slats of wood beneath our feet. My sister freezes in place, tears in her eyes even as she tries to hold them back – and I realize she’s holding us back. Her feet are bare like mine, but I’ve already made it to the car while hers are stuck in place; our black cat walks over and rubs up against her leg, unaware that this is an emergency.
“Come on,” my mother says, reaching
her arm out, urging my sister to get in the car. …
A
fledgling fell from the steep
elm branches last night, never learning
to fly. We crept over dew, thinking it asleep,
and learned the truth.
Hallmark strangeness of childhood, finding things can die. Like learning our parents had names, it tumbled us out of ourselves into an expanding world where the metallic twist of pennies on tongues echoed in blood.
Life released slowly to us, unfolding its creases—a map of courtesies letting us stay small and close. But it rushed when we lifted feathers limp and cold, light, and folded death in a box atop a broken nest.
If life came all at once, we could never learn to breathe, to speak. Never learn bird and flight and tree, fall or death or broken, never blink or become ourselves.…
Ari Rosenschein is a Seattle-based writer whose essays and fiction appear in Entropy, Noisey, Drunk Monkeys, P.S. I Love You, Observer, The Big Takeover, PopMatters, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch Los Angeles. A lifelong musician, Ari currently records and performs with his bands, The Royal Oui and STAHV. He lives with his wife and dog and enjoys the woods, the rain, and the coffee of his chosen region. Coasting is his first book.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Rosenschein about the creation and reception of Coasting, as well as his experiences as a musician and music journalist.
You are four years
old. Your father hands you a brick. He says, “This is lighter
than it feels.”
You are in a garage. The walls are cluttered with newspaper – photos of aftermaths. Rusted tools hang from the ceiling. The
concrete floor is splattered with grease. Your father grunts against a band
saw. Sawdust floats into your breath.
You drop the brick while you are testing its lightness. You stare
at the blood. You stare at your separation. Your toenail ripped off. The flesh
underneath is hot pink. You can’t remember if you cried.
