Remembering an Event
I remember that Winter when everything was dark, and the lights in the darkness were tainted. Inside, the warm glow of our kitchen lamp belied the shadowed snow.
I pulled the tinfoil off the great picture-window above the spiral staircase and let the morning sunlight in, but nights, oh nights. I filled the window with delicate rose-patterned showflakes cut from tissue paper. We hung lights and sprayed snow. Deep into the evenings, lonely and helpless I began a 2000-piece puzzle of a famous painting, but there too I could only see darkness. The table was a glinting onyx color, and the puzzle pieces hid their gold paintbrush strokes under blacks and browns. The sky and the forest. I worked night after night. I asked for help, but that winter they were pairing off. Gina and her boy cuddled in the love-sac and distracted for a moment, I came to converse. New Years Eve, and they were headed to a party around the corner. They spoke flippantly of the future and I mentioned that I can read palms. I can read anything, but only with an imposed, external meaning. Like the bark on trees, palms and hands simply reflect environment and genetics. To say that by the depth of this crease I know someone has greater passion, or that by that cross I can see an important decision is only to make the cracks in a sidewalk mean the life of my mother or the health of her spine.
I read his hand - his right hand, the dominant one. It was different than other hands I had looked at. There was a horizontal crease where should have been one vertically. I said something. I looked pale, and drastic.
They set off fireworks that woke me early in the morning.
When I awoke later the house was empty, and suddenly very light.
Kelly told me later, and I did not believe. Gina's boy had blown his hand off with fireworks he brought back from Mexico. She used words like "limp," "bloody," and "splattered." They talked about hospitals, amputations, and pieces of flesh caught on the stucco wall. The police acted responsibly, and without malice.
I had lain in the darkness while the light had bitten off a piece of his life, this boy whose name I can't remember.
But in a silent, snow-dampened night I had walked alone. The wonder of it filled my chest and lifted my chin. Images of purple knitting needles and white yarn stuffed into my coat pocket flicker through, and bending down to pass a low-hanging branch. The orange streetlights - always orange streetlights in every night image that isn't our Milky Way - they faded into the darkness of the vast, virgin snow.
I pulled the tinfoil off the great picture-window above the spiral staircase and let the morning sunlight in, but nights, oh nights. I filled the window with delicate rose-patterned showflakes cut from tissue paper. We hung lights and sprayed snow. Deep into the evenings, lonely and helpless I began a 2000-piece puzzle of a famous painting, but there too I could only see darkness. The table was a glinting onyx color, and the puzzle pieces hid their gold paintbrush strokes under blacks and browns. The sky and the forest. I worked night after night. I asked for help, but that winter they were pairing off. Gina and her boy cuddled in the love-sac and distracted for a moment, I came to converse. New Years Eve, and they were headed to a party around the corner. They spoke flippantly of the future and I mentioned that I can read palms. I can read anything, but only with an imposed, external meaning. Like the bark on trees, palms and hands simply reflect environment and genetics. To say that by the depth of this crease I know someone has greater passion, or that by that cross I can see an important decision is only to make the cracks in a sidewalk mean the life of my mother or the health of her spine.
I read his hand - his right hand, the dominant one. It was different than other hands I had looked at. There was a horizontal crease where should have been one vertically. I said something. I looked pale, and drastic.
They set off fireworks that woke me early in the morning.
When I awoke later the house was empty, and suddenly very light.
Kelly told me later, and I did not believe. Gina's boy had blown his hand off with fireworks he brought back from Mexico. She used words like "limp," "bloody," and "splattered." They talked about hospitals, amputations, and pieces of flesh caught on the stucco wall. The police acted responsibly, and without malice.
I had lain in the darkness while the light had bitten off a piece of his life, this boy whose name I can't remember.
But in a silent, snow-dampened night I had walked alone. The wonder of it filled my chest and lifted my chin. Images of purple knitting needles and white yarn stuffed into my coat pocket flicker through, and bending down to pass a low-hanging branch. The orange streetlights - always orange streetlights in every night image that isn't our Milky Way - they faded into the darkness of the vast, virgin snow.
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