Essays          

Short Prose

“Do you not know how the buds beneath are folded?
Waiting in gloom protected by frost.” *

When snow falls so lightly you can barely see it, I point it out to you. Do you see it, I ask. I smell it, you say. Let’s catch it in a jar for a snow broth, I decide. The more it snows, the more clearly I see you. When you start shoveling before even an inch has accumulated, I see the Protestant work ethic. When you don’t wear mittens, I see your chapped, confused hands turn whiter and whiter. When you give up on building a snowperson mid-torso, I see how painful it is to have never been loved. What is love if not a snowstorm? Has someone asked this already, I ask. You’ll have to ask someone else, you say. As you turn to walk back inside, I point to how bright the sky seems. That’s what the movies want you to think, you say, that a snowfall signals peace. No, I say. Snow falls this way so that we can rehearse all our senses. We will need to perform these senses on another day, when you will point a loaded gun at my neck. My neck may snap like a thin branch. Everything must die, you will assure me. I don’t want to lose my senses, I will beg. But I am no match for a loaded gun pressed against my neck. The gun turns as soft as a neck growing hard, and the memory of snow melts. –S.R.

* Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass

“You and I we head back East to find a town where we can live even in the half light.” *

Someone once lived the world through a camera lens. He would stoop on the city sidewalk, balance his apparatus on the head of a hydrant, point, and shoot. The people who passed him would either smile or step out of the way, abscond the frame, polite self-negation, a hand over a face, a not wanting to be remembered, a wanting not to be remembered. Impatient, I would stand behind the someone, looking instead at the real, as though this too were not a frame. The someone turned to ask me, Why do you always get annoyed when I stop to take photos? I told the someone, I prefer to stand on a floor and not just a tile. He told me taking photos is like sculpting a scene, flecking out the extra marble. Other people will tell you photography is writing with the light. I like both of these ideas. I closed my eyes and wrote a photo: my mother on the left, my father on the right, I am one year old in the middle of the boat – a small slit in the Dal Lake. Because my eyes are wide and my mouth pursed, I assume I had made my peace with the boat. Because we are in black and white, I assume I will want to have this photo on the day I die. My mother’s face is twenty-seven years old, a face I reworded. My father looks prescient because he knows the boat will take him to another country where other lakes will wear different kinds of boats with very different people on them.  In the photo, we are all younger than we are now, but also older because of the black and white and splotches of yellow. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Unfortunately, the photo is currently in a flimsy beige envelope in a pile of flimsy beige envelopes filled with steadily yellowing photos locked up in a bureau in a white two-story house protected by a network of black metal gates in a city much closer to the Dal Lake than where I am now. I will just have to remember it, I decide, and open my eyes. –S.R.

* Arcade Fire “Half Light II (No Celebration)”

“The sort of desperate calmness with which this was said, lasted no longer than while she spoke, and was immediately followed by a return of the same excessive affliction.” *

Someone once lived the world through a camera lens. He would stoop on the city sidewalk, balance his apparatus on the head of a hydrant, point, and shoot. The people who passed him would either smile or step out of the way, abscond the frame, polite self-negation, a hand over a face, a not wanting to be remembered, a wanting not to be remembered. Impatient, I would stand behind the someone, looking instead at the real, as though this too were not a frame. The someone turned to ask me, Why do you always get annoyed when I stop to take photos? I told the someone, I prefer to stand on a floor and not just a tile. He told me taking photos is like sculpting a scene, flecking out the extra marble. Other people will tell you photography is writing with the light. I like both of these ideas. I closed my eyes and wrote a photo: my mother on the left, my father on the right, I am one year old in the middle of the boat – a small slit in the Dal Lake. Because my eyes are wide and my mouth pursed, I assume I had made my peace with the boat. Because we are in black and white, I assume I will want to have this photo on the day I die. My mother’s face is twenty-seven years old, a face I reworded. My father looks prescient because he knows the boat will take him to another country where other lakes will wear different kinds of boats with very different people on them.  In the photo, we are all younger than we are now, but also older because of the black and white and splotches of yellow. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Unfortunately, the photo is currently in a flimsy beige envelope in a pile of flimsy beige envelopes filled with steadily yellowing photos locked up in a bureau in a white two-story house protected by a network of black metal gates in a city much closer to the Dal Lake than where I am now. I will just have to remember it, I decide, and open my eyes. –S.R.

* Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility

“but we have seen the moon in lonely alleys make a grail of laughter of an empty ash can,” *

The mountains, now swollen with color, cannot be redacted. If you want to forget them, all I can suggest is to think of a hanging cello note, or a string of Christmas lights. A spool of film. A spell of disease. Fathers who love their daughters. Do you find it as difficult as I do to sing the alphabet backwards? We settle nothing with wordplay. Kindly remove. When I saw the person, he was business casual, on University Place, same glasses, same ruffled hair, same uncoordinated gait. He had pulled me out of anonymity, since that is what l*** does.  When something tragic happens, and you’re old, and your parents are gone, what then? What is a then? I’ve decided I’ll be ready to live once I let a death happen. I pull the earth out of orbit, I stroll to the silo, I scour the fallow fields. I take the whorled leaves from the backyard and make a tree. We walked around the city, sometimes hand in hand, in a casual manner. We still found skin a great surprise. Then we were on a ferry and spread out on the seats, giddy with boat-feelings, carried out and married out where the peaches grow, and a life. Cause of you, it’s cause of you, I chant to myself in the shower, looking to the mirror – that is, that I can’t throw anything away. Not even peach pits. Not even corpses. The ferry feeling felt like a sprout, a telephone ringing on a Saturday evening. -S.R.

* Hart Crane “Chaplinesque”

“I turned to look but it was gone, I cannot put my finger on it now.” *

The beginning of Fall holds the same promises – a blush here and there, a reverberating tease. A strap falling off a shoulder. Even if I know and deeply desire what’s to come, I hope it won’t. I hope it will stay this way for just a little longer. But these are the ways we see things coming. We aren’t granted grand visions on mountaintops. No oceans part – only lips, to tell us things that will foretell other things. A secret body hurtling through space is the crumb I flung at your cheek with my projectile plastic spoon. I flung it like a body jumps to the end of a photo. A crumb seems so big compared to the distance between you and me. It sticks to your bottom lip like Velcro. Every day with you is a photo album. Every month with you, another continent. But there are only six continents, seven if you count the seventh. If we tried to go to all the continents in one life, we’d run out of places to go. This is why I won’t go to the last with you. -S.R.

* Pink Floyd Comfortably Numb