She said that wanting to be liked was a weakness of character.
She must have been annoyed that it no longer worked. One morning he looked down and it was gone. I expect she’d pointed at it when he was asleep. She was keeping it in a cedar box with some other penises she’d stolen; she was feeding them on grains of wheat. That’s the usual method of tending penises.
We begin to climb and my husband catches up with me again, making one of the brief appearances, framed memories he specializes in: crystal-clear image enclosed by a blank wall.
It’s an old word, fading now. Dearly did I wish. Dearly did I long for. I loved him dearly.
The collective memory is notoriously faulty, and much of the past sinks into the ocean of time to be drowned forever; but once in a while the waters part, allowing us to glimpse a flash of hidden treasure, if only for a moment.
She’s afraid of men and it’s simple, it’s rational, she’s afraid of men because men are frightening.
And did you feel protected?
She had caught herself lately watching herself with an abstracted curiosity, to see what she would do.
And when I go that way, grow fur, start howling, scratch at your airwaves: no matter who I claim I am or how I love you, turn the key. Bar the window.
I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they’re my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I’ll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone.
No. It’s the newly conscious young I mean, the ones with ambition and fresh diffidence, those who’ve learned the hard way that reach exceeds grasp nine times out of ten. How disappointed they are! And if and when they succeed for the first time, how anxious it makes them! They develop insomnia, or claustrophobia, or bulimia, or fear of heights. Now they will have to live up to themselves. Bummer.
My mother had a thing for blue in tableware; she said it warded off any evil eyes intent on ruining the food.
Girls of that age can be quite sadistic.
Why do men feel threatened by women?” I asked a male friend of mine. – – “They are afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their world view.” Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, “Why do women feel threatened by men?” “They’re afraid of being killed,” they said.
Don’t look behind, they say; you’ll turn to salt. Why not, though? Why not look? Isn’t it glittery? Isn’t it pretty, back there?
As the twig is bent, so will the tree grow.
The aliens arrive. We like the part where we get saved. We like the part where we get destroyed. Why do those feel so similar? Either way, it’s an end.
A wolf in pain admits nothing. His dinner bit him. It was a miscalculation, and now it will be a disaster. You can’t go far with a ripped foot; among wolves, no doctors.
Now she wants these voices back; even the squabbling, even the rage. She wants to dance with flowers on her head, she wants to be endorsed, sanctified, she doesn’t care who by. She wants a mother’s blessing. Though she can’t imagine her own mother doing such a thing. This is the problem. She knows by now that people do not behave the way she wishes them to. So what should she do, change wishes?
I didn’t want any phase of my life to be gone forever, to be over and done with. I preferred beginnings to endings in books, as well – it was exciting not to know what was lying in store for me on the unread pages – but, perversely, I couldn’t resist sneaking a look at the final chapter of any book I was reading.