She was led outside into the sun. The courtyard was a negative, sliding, and the sky was white or silver—tinny when tapped. Dark silhouettes surrounded her body, and when one spoke, it moved to its haunches; she had become a small dot. The base of the lamppost was cold through her pants. She tried to be courteous by listening and, around her eyes, forming shades like finger goggles—a darkroom to develop the face of the one looking in. The rest of them were just shoes encircling her—pairs of shadows.
“We can’t let her go by herself,” she heard, but barely. They were trying to persuade her to let one of them drive her car home. She would rather have died there on the concrete under the dangling impatiens than allow her colleagues to witness the trash-strewn, coffee-cupped, dog-haired interior of the car. For a moment, she was shaken to clarity for the sake of image but could only struggle weakly.
The squatting one squinted into the goggle holes, striking cymbals: “You must drink fluids.” The biggest voice, coming from the longest shoes was saying, “I grew up with my grandmother who had no feeling in her left side, and I was always taught to let her take my arm, not to give it to her.” Smaller pointed shoes clanged, “Two years ago, I took my daughter to the emergency ward where they flushed her kidneys. You should go to emergency.”
Then a black bird swung low in the backdrop. A crow, maybe? She found herself awkwardly mounting its back while a feathered ruff fluttered in her face. Cherry season. They soared into a windy orchard near Woodburn and forcefully dived through the holes in the bird-proof netting—scavenging, stealing. The trees were stencils and the crow clipped and tore around the edges where fruit glared metallic. It was time to take all they could. She clung to a few of the stiff flight feathers by stretching her arms down the insides of the wings (“So, whose car?”) while being shot through cold: now a cinema. She ducked as, with beak, her crow split the screen, and this or that actor, gesture, word, for a moment, was impaled. Now black, now white. Black white black white black white. The screen flapped. Faces undulated.
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2 comments:
Lisa, I love this! The writing is totally beautiful. It's one of those pieces that makes me think, "How was it even possible for the writer to come up with this?" The images are so original and well crafted and the black bird references seem perfectly fever appropriate. The tightness of your writing is remarkable. I'm going to remember this piece.
Lisa,
Everything about the writing here--language, syntax, imagery--is fresh and unusual, and there's a real sense of altered perception. I particularly like the oddness of that final image, the world becoming "cinema" and the narrator splitting the screen open so that it "flapped" and the "faces undulated." Very arresting. Occasionally the imagery lost me, I think because it veers into abstraction…
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