Of light leaking in through cracks in the floor, I have prepared a sentiment that father asks I refract through the lens of fact. I can say it makes me feel blurry to be a darker shadow in the dark shadows about me but that being only in small ways illuminated by the light makes me want to glow vastly but not to illuminate. I have chewed too long on the teat of wordplay. Please let me move on.
Loving comes easy in a breeze of salted rocks and pulverized glass. I ask Brian to hold out his hands as if to receive an escapable liquid and he obliges. In this way, we sift through glass houses to find no bones and only footprints. The data eludes us and becomes the lines in our hands as we share knowing such very little about anything that was here before us. I could ask him to return to my attic, but that would be unfair to do to a dearest friend. It is far better to hate someone in your mind than to bring them where they could confuse themselves for your heart. For so would you be in their minds, if they held you there.
So I spun on a loom of fancy- the braided rope that lowers the heavy lamp I light with a match. Throwing shadows up like tarp from the stacks of chopped wood that will warm me in winter and I must replace come the fall. I brought in mighty steeds and named these after pocket monsters so we could go forth and slay demons and dragons! Such laughter as only the newly born make, as it only ever fades away. Out into the universe, where maybe the vibration may sway something yet unmade into unbecoming the monster it might have been were it not for our mirth.
My father wants objective truth. I did not break his portrait cabinet. That was the rush of wind from the window opening in another room. A door had been closed, I explained. Science does not mean understanding, I should say, but finding out.
He and me and mother walk through market on square day, picking out shapes of nutrition to come. The pasta wheel could be toys because why else would they grow them that way? When I go forward, the shopping cart that has no other name and how boring rattles and even though it’s in the back of my head I know I’m reaching the dairy aisle: I love the look of all that cheese.
Mother tricks me into helping by doing my homework at the kitchen counter. That’s actually nice, but I can’t say that. Good is habit-forming, and I’m much too young to allow myself to be so impressionable. I would be the hands not the knife because then I could smell the onions, the garlic, the breading and the oils. Watch the flash of the gas-lit burner that science proves my father is wrong for wanting after. It is nice, though. It is odorless and I could play with the knobs for the click and the fwoom! all afternoon.
The attic loosens in my mind, as though on legs that strut after they detach from my one story hovel in the dirt. Why don’t we have a house like all the others in our extended family? Are we poor? Yes, I can say I have been told. But they didn’t say that. We just don’t have the money that grows on trees. How wonderful it must be to have a plant that could give you exactly what you need. The old Greek woman next door has a pear tree and a fig tree and two cats to prove it.
My sisters go up with the attic and come back down elsewhere, on a boulevard where I imagine all my friends line up to take the bus route of my mind back to me. I will play with them all later.
The bathroom is for embarrassment, for shame, for no desires. I will not speak of that here.
“What are some things you are grateful for? You must consider them.” an instructor tells my classmates, but she never looks at me. No adult ever wants to look at me! What is wrong with me?
I do my assignment and go home. It wasn’t good enough. Some other little girl that isn’t the little girl that I am did something nicer. And besides that I can’t be a little girl, and so then of course I don’t consider if I want to be. I’m just happy to not be like the other little boys. Maybe I am a bigger boy. A growth spurt would tell.
The nakedness of dressing once in the room away from the shower likes to spill sunlight on my weird knees and when wasn’t there hair on my calves?
The attic remains undisturbed. Thankfully, my sisters climbed down and started going to schools of their own. They are doing better and not better than me. It is a competition because they tell us it has to be.
They must be the searching light from beneath the floor of the attic. They couldn’t be anything otherwise.
But I might.
Marketday, on any watchful early morning as the sun picks at its nostrils and yawns in its dirty hair over the cobbles of Union Square, smells like basil and wet leaves. Please turn me down, I want to shout. But playfully. Say something extravagant and lovely. Sounds that would fill the place with people with a desire to dance and leap and shout as well as only I may! But I do not. We get tomatoes, a bag of stale pretzels we are told is fresh, and a hungry clutch of wildflower and we walk away from little me towards First Avenue and… mother clutches my wrist so I will move to her. I do not know what she has come for but we are going now.
That next week, the chill snaps and I am glad for a large sweater. My mother tells her mother into the phone that is the long couch in the living room that I have agreed that it is cozy. But I am itchy. And I do not know what happened to the days before this one. The attic is missing and I could not even tell you that I’ve thunk to find it. I concentrate, instead, on everything wool tells me it is.
The fact is wool does not tell me anything.
quick tongue, & done... 