Muttering

She watched soap operas compulsively, writing lists unintelligible; we never bothered to know. I reprise her, spinning notes to nowhere--writing them out and throwing them out over and over, just as she did.

On commercial breaks she would rise, sometimes quickly, and walk out of the room to mutter about the drama just suspended. I do something like that, wandering from room to room, occasionally muttering. After our mother died I heard her mention "mom" in such an occasion. She was born mildly retarded.

When she was very little a gust of wind lifted her off the ground, she was that slight, with her dress like a sail; the memory was a source of delight, retold with the same innocent enthusiasm with which she regarded a cat or a baby, the sort of enthusiasm of which only a child in her innocence is capable. Similarly deprived of guile, she retains that same childish enthusiasm, expressed just as it was when she too was a child.

She wasn't goofy; the impression I've had, biased but based, is that she was highly intelligent, but for the deprivation of oxygen in the womb or, we children did debate, a violent blow in a domestic row. She's still there in those small rooms, in the crater left by the blast, from which the rest of us scattered or succumbed.

Lifted her off the ground that gust of wind did.

The Picture of Alice

The porch was a concrete block with steps formed into it and a visible tilt, or so I thought, like some chunk of brutalist architecture that had fallen out of the sky. It was about five by five feet. Young people were crowding there to smoke, despite the rain having lapsed into the faintest trace, with individual drops coming like random stragglers.

She stood on the corner of this grotesque pedestal facing me on the lawn below. She was a standing shadow shrouded in the halo from the bare porch light behind, a white trash Birth of Venus, and, I knew, no less beautiful behind the dark there, mercifully hidden from my searching eyes.

The outline of her hair was the only discernible, familiar thing about her--otherwise it could have been anyone there--but it was undeniably her. This minimalist sketch evoked the full light of memory, the memory of her still compiling that final version to take her place when she's gone, the dead thing to replace the living, the trace of her arc across my life, documented and filed away on paper already yellowing.

That was Alice up there on the porch, looking down on me with--what? I couldn't see. Was she talking? I couldn't tell. Was she talking to me? Was she smiling at me? Did she see me, finally? See my desire?

That was Alice, midway through her ruin, long after mine.

March or April 2017