Fiction

Who can fault them, outwitting their great heft? And I am the size of Grammy’s voice at the burnt crack beneath her knife. Her grandmother, mème, would eat two toasts per day, no grease, between her prayers alone. Face against the floor. Grammy takes hers with coffee and a camel. An earlier version of this piece contained incriminating information on           but I got rid of her. An earlier draft of this piece contained incriminating information on           

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Grammy once described clothing as forgiving and I imagined a wardrobe built only by resentment. She spoke between smokes of her deathdream: a forest, a fuck, a rainstorm, alone. I can’t breathe around you, granddaughter tells her fore. Now you are a featherbed. Now I am a rib. Who can fault me for outwitting my body. 

^{____________________________________________________1} having gone the distance as it were from the scene

² of which dried up carbon, or perhaps the sound of scraping

³ hitherto unknown but as measure of license

⁴ and perhaps local to the knife or even the greed

***

The spaghetti went cold in my mother’s mouth. You stood there with your hand raised and ready to fire, like a petty tower. 

I promise I will not be reasonable about this. 

Your place has no toys. Four items under the television: a holey tennis ball, an old book, a pen, a key. The children’s place, you called it. You speak to my mother with your oblivious. Goodness is a series of good acts / I stab the ball with the nub of your pen. 

Your fat old cat is afraid. My father tempts her with soft wet tuna. He wears gloves in the basement with you. With her. It is difficult to know who is when, this memory. You, aching and raging from the bed. Afraid is a dangerous animal. 

She is upstairs these days, a dark trace at my mother’s feet. Frightful bastard. You are.

***

If I were the person I thought I once was this spring evening I’d walk miles in my mother’s old sweatshirt not out of hatred for my body but out of sheer sick cold. I would smell manure familiar to me and invented by the dairy midway between my home and the school where I learned I was fat. In that story, I become thin the way others grow up: gradually, adding with patience restraints, compunctions, ligatures, weights; steel where once was air. In my hometown is a correctional facility, another word for prison. When inmates escaped we kids hid in a dark corner of the classroom as in active shooter drills. Afterward we ate lunch. Today is any other March Wednesday. My arms with bumps or perhaps goosegrief                         I am feeling perhaps even grief for the girl whose few words concerned the grief I mean the geese of her sister: good geese, kind. At the correctional facility she wound mandalas into ink at her bed while I, adjoining, jogged in place. You see there is a point that you get to when you forget to be hungry and begin to run into traffic. Sometimes I grieve that feeling the way my mother has tacit-promised to grieve me, if                      At present the sun is melting and I am about to bike from this place to the the apartment in which I keep my sad food and sometimes food for strangers. When I reach the traffic light I will consider my bicycle, legs, white shirt, bare arms now thick with ink. Being disordered is a manner of being out of order, that is, insequential, that is, inconsequential. I think of my mother. I love you. Your sweatshirt is in my closet.