They had hoped to find the equilibrium between white hot and frigid, silent and noisy, clasped and turned away.
They knew how to live in yesterday, and they knew tomorrow. It was navigating today that left them unbalanced, teetering on the brink of something unusually steep and dark.
They backed away from the edge and from each other. Some days, it’s simply easier to admit defeat.
“How do you feel about slavery?” the defendant asked the potential juror.
The potential juror clutched her purse tighter. “Historically?” she asked. “Or modern?”
“It’s a broad question,” responded the defendant, who was representing himself. “However you want to respond.”
“Historically, it’s wrong,” the potential juror said, her eyes darting to the courtroom door. “Today, it’s wrong.”
It always took her bruises days to surface, sometimes so long that she thought she’d imagined the sore places under her fingers. They arose like leaves emerging from a river, blurry around the edges, dark at the centers. A new one arrived on her forearm four days after she’d last seen him, and she touched it with her tongue, tasting the unexpected salt of desire.
*Thanks to Evan Karp and Rajshree Chuahan for hosting the first night of the Quiet Lightning reading series, and for including me in the party.
He worried, each time, about the curvature of the spine. He explained how one wrong move could unite flexion and disaster. Contraction could become more than a way to bring words closer together.
He hobbled the situation with all that caring. She watched him retreat, back bent by the weight of the worry.
This was, at it turned out, ordinary time. She had forgotten that children get taller with the weeks, nights end at dawn, and fireworks explode in the air, not in her hands.
For a moment, she thought she’d gone soft, that she’d lost the edge by which she knew herself.
“Did I hear you correctly?” she asked, and it turned out she did not.
She never let on what she thought for that split second, never told him how she really thought he felt.
100 Proof 