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"Reading Material"
In the heat of the lightening belt, enamored of humidity--the wet ruin it makes of everything-- my sister reads to the head-injured who can only blink or nod. Her goal is consistent response. When I ask what she reads, she will not tell. My sister, being my sister, just laughs. Laughs until I laugh too. In the early days, daily laughter a memory I did not remember, the familiar form of recipes calmed my breathing. Bee balm salad. What to do with wild plums in season. News was then and remains a risk. Even when old: The November 1964 Farmington Valley Herald weekly my mother sends because it contains notice my sister's second grade class is going on a field trip. (My mother knows I will save anything anybody else has saved that many years.) But buried in the police report. Buried after the reports of drivers failing to maintain resonable distance apart, buried after the reports of drivers operating with mudflaps, I find a young girl kept in a tobacco shed the six days she was missing from her home. Turning from the page, I can not turn from her, from the light streaking in between those dark weathered boards, fracturing, splintering upon reaching the dried blood, earth marking the slender golden length of her. I find in her eyes what I found in the eyes of my own mirror. Until I just plain stopped looking. I could not stand what was there, not there. What I still have no language to describe. Reaching for contemporary distraction, I read in Texas of interest in investing in functional clay. I don't know what functional clay means, but love the sound of it in my mouth. But above the fold on Page 1, begins a story we know: Men with eyes of sharks, wiped fingerprints, slipped away, the Associated Press reports, leaving hostages to stumble away newly blind, emerging trembling into desert morning darkness from a prison of fear they will carry now with them. I remember this. This forgetting of ways to move. What was left of that night, I could only crawl. We could talk here of loss. We might incorporate a discussion of deconstructivist architecture. The irreconcilable. The deranged. The deformed. The tilted. The warped. The unsettling. Sabotaged notions of stability. Consorted interiors reflecting the disquiet of our world. Designed to cause pain. Keeping me pinned to my own floor required somehow only three limbs. One hand was free for what he wanted. Please, I said. Please. I could not say that word again for a long time without immediate need of those good pills. But I can say that word now and still get some sleep the same night. Some small things are returned to us given enough time and careful care. For example, when Barbara Louise gave me camomile soap, I remained longer then under water. But, 1,572 days later, when a man with truly wonderful hair who reads about parrots in the wild and other interesting things says--and from an appropriate distance--could I have a birthday hug. I say, No. Move sideways. Away. Barbara also gave me clear pink rose-perfumed soap. The rose you know is in the peach family. I have a wonderful recipe for peach ice cream.
~Frances Driscoll
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