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bending_sickleSinopsis and reviews.
“Hockey, like stamp collecting, it seemed, was a world apart, immune to the regular prejudices of race, province, and country – although she did sometimes berate my father for siding with a Yankee team.”
“For years after this I would think of myself as lucky at cars. In certain difficult situations which showed a disturbing tendency to repeat themselves, I would often be reminded of Rita’s teasing warning: ‘Lucky at cards, unlucky at love.’”
“ ‘And we’ve been friends ever since,’ my mother said in a pleased and final-sounding voice, the way you might say, And they all lived happily ever after.”
“I went back to school that afternoon with a picture of my mother as another person altogether, someone I had never met and never would now. This woman, mysterious, incomplete and broken-hearted, pestered me all day long.”
“She spoke calmly, looking down at her lap, not moving, and a sense of young tragic death wound around her like scented bandages, permanent and disfiguring, the way Japanese women used to bind their feet to keep them dainty. She was damned somehow, I could see that now, even though I’d never noticed before.
‘You have to be strong, we all have to be strong,’ my mother said without looking at me. ‘We’re the women, we have to be stronger than they think we are.’”
“You, who have lived your life believing
if you made enough plans
you wouldn’t need to be afraid...
- Bronwen Wallace, ‘Into the Midst of It’, in Common Magic
“fear is the general term for the anxiety and agitation felt at the presence of danger; dread refers to the fear or depression felt in anticipating something dangerous or disagreeable [...]; fright applies to a sudden, shocking, usually momentary fear [...]; alarm implies the fright felt at the sudden realization of danger [...]; terror applies to an overwhelming, often paralyzing fear [...]; panic refers to a frantic, unreasoning fear, often one that spreads quickly and leads to irrational, aimless action [...].
- Webster’s New World Dictionary
“If a story is not to be about love, then I think it must be about fear.”
“We were going through a phase together: that was how I thought of it then. We were in disguise, playing at self-destruction. Or we had a new hobby. Or we had spring fever.”
“We sat around The Belvedere night after night, drinks and cigarettes in hand, talking about the time to come when we wouldn’t be doing this anymore. [...] we could talk glibly about the future because the end of the pointless present was always firmly in sight. We were just waiting to get tired of it. We were going through our mid-life crises early or our adolescent rebellions late.
We were never in real danger, or so we thought. There was always a part of us that didn’t enter into it, that didn’t get drunk. Much as I liked to drink, I always assumed that I would be sober when the time came: sober when my real life began. And now here we are.”
“I am no longer the woman who does these things. Perhaps I am no longer the woman who did them.”
“This is from the hard-drinking days when new friendships were frequent, instant, emotional, and brief. I have no idea what became of those people who seemed so important, so bright, or so clever at the time [...]”
“I think of them as witnesses, waiting and watching a woman who used to be me.”
“I knew better than to mention the other residue, the disquieting dread which clung to me all the next day [...]. The anxiety hummed through me all day, striking a honed high note upon hearing, for instance, the news that a small plane had crashed into a bookstore in Atlanta, Georgia [...]”
“I was certain then, in my spike-edged angst, that I too was bound to suffer heartbreak, loneliness, and terror forever, bound to be the victim of a random, ridiculous death, someday, somehow, soon.”
“...it appeared that another day might actually be passed without panic or punishment. I was once again cushioned by that false sense of security, that expansive illusion of well-being you get on your third drink and then you have ten more trying to recapture the feeling and end up wondering why you’re crying in your beer at three a.m.”
“That was a long time ago and now I understand about the comfort to be found in fear, also the power. Sometimes now I think it is the fear that keeps me safe; sometimes now I think the fear is all that keeps me safe. When I am scared of everything, the fear becomes a gauze bandage around me and I am convinced that if I stop being afraid, if I let my guard down for just one minute, all hell will break loose and fly apart in my face like a shattered windshield.”
“...they have no responsibility and so no power”
“The power of fear lies in its conceit or the conceit of fear lies in its presumption of power.”
“Even as a child, I never thought that terrible tragedies could only happen to other people. I never acquired or accomplished this particular form of delusory armor with which most people gird themselves. I was a nervous child. I was quite confident that disasters could only happen naturally enough, to me. Maybe it was selfish to be so afraid, but at a very young age I had stopped believing in protection, no longer expected to become safe, grown-up, or immortal. There were too many things to worry about: car accidents, plane crashes, kidnapping, fire, explosions, cancer, burglars, guns, knives, the bomb.”
“My flagrant fear, I figured, must single me out as the conspicuous choice for a catastrophe.”
I did not tell this to anyone, knowing instinctively that fear was something to be ashamed of.”
“I was not afraid of monsters or magic: it was, I had decided early on, only people and thunderstorms that were seriously dangerous.”
“I sat at the kitchen table with my eyes closed for an hour, praying.
When my parents came home and found the dishes not done, my mother slapped me across the face because I was too big to spank. The humiliation of fear was inexcusable.”
“It is only necessary to know that I am more afraid of pain than of death and sometimes this seems sensible.”
“In the bathroom, putting on my makeup and trying to tame my hair which has gone completely out of control in this humidity, I see by my face there is no way of knowing. The black eye is long gone and the broken finger on my left hand, the one that had to be mended with a metal pin, only hurts now when I knit or the weather in winter turns damp. There is no way of knowing that, in what I think of as my former life, I was once thrown to the floor by a man I loved, and while he kicked me in the head, I made a sound like a small animal with soft brown fur and beady eyes.”
“His damp eyelashes on my naked neck flutter like butterfly wings or a baby bird scooped off the sidewalk, fallen out of its nest, and you hold it in your palms like a heart and you know it will die no matter what you do.
I want him so much that I weep.”
“I imagine Melody and Ted living out their lives in that apartment, cooking meals, reading magazines, listening to music, making love, taking a bath, and they would never notice how even the fresh-cut flowers smell sinister sometimes.”
“Is this how it is done then – sorting through the past to find premonitions, portents, and signs, until you have convinced yourself that you knew what was going to happen all along, until you can say, I knew it, I just knew it. But then of course you didn’t really know it, couldn’t, were too far away, too busy, too tired, asleep.
I feel the fear come winding around me again. Maybe there were signs, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention at the time, maybe there were signs all along and I missed them.”
“I am feeling jumpy, but try to match my mood to hers.”
“But it does not seem possible that she ever did those things. She is attended now by a blissful aura of amnesia which renders the past innocuous and the future bright.”
“Melody says, ‘Don’t think about it. You just can’t think about things like that.’
I want to say, How can you not, how can I stop?”
“There is no way of knowing if she will live long enough to deliver, but, to look at her, there is no way of knowing that she is dying either. She does not cry but sometimes, as she’s leaving the office after her weekly examination, she grins and shakes her fist at the sky.”
“I imagine that he too likes to have something to look forward to.”
“...and pray that Andrew will never be hurt or unhappy. There is no way of knowing, there is nothing I can do. For the first time I fully understand that having given birth to him guarantees nothing, gives me no power, no shelter, no peace save that to be found in the sound of birds.”
“If a story is not to be about love or fear, then I think it must be about anger.”
“You tell me to close my mouth when we kiss. Think ‘man’ in English, you say. In your language, it starts with the lips together and opens slowly the way love should begin.”
- Linda Rogers, “Devouring”
“She is young and strong, intelligent and honest, but she has never been very attractive to men. She has puzzled over this repeatedly. [...] Either way, she is still a virgin. She suspects that’s what the other Naomis call her behind her back, some saying it with pride, others with pity: ‘Here she comes, Naomi the Virgin!’ Privately, she thinks of herself as Naomi the Anachronism.”
“...she is wondering why nobody ever falls madly in love with her.”
“(When thinking along these lines, Naomi often mixes up the words consummated and conjugated, and then she discovers that they really do amount to essentially the same thing.)”
“And what attracted Billy to Naomi in the first place [...] was exactly what he tried to knock out of her in the end.”
“Modern men, Naomi decided then and there, were a bunch of malcontents. They wanted too much or too little, or they wanted somebody else altogether. They thought women were like empty rooms, waiting to be redecorated. The wonderful women were they had in their heads had little or nothing to do with the ones they took to their beds. It was hardly her fault that all she wanted, all she really wanted, was to be adored, to be swept away by a man who thought she was perfect. She decided she was tired of being disappointed. She would rather be a cynic. She would rather give up on men than give in. And they would all be sorry in the end.”
“Naomi likes to think of these islands as uncharted and unnamed, although she knows this is no longer possible in our shrinking world. But still, she finds comfort in putting herself in a place where no one would ever think to look for her, where no one will ever find her.”
“But the truth is that he calls himself by different names on different days, depending on the weather, a whim, or a voice in a dream.”
“...converting Celsius to Fahrenheit by doubling and adding thirty-two.”
“Much to her own surprise, she realized that she wanted nothing more or less than to lie him down and fuck his brains out for a whole week straight.”
“He lives in a world of such perpetual wonderment that nothing surprises him. He never had got a grip on words like incredible, incongruous, or imagine.”
“‘I can hear what you’re saying,’ Naomi says, ‘but I don’t know what you mean.’ She is not exactly complaining.”
“‘You must listen,’ Iquito says in his elegant English, ‘to the water instead of the words.
Naomi still doesn’t know what he means, but she’s wiling to give it a try.”
“She has suspected all along that there is a trick to words that she hasn’t figured out yet: if you can just find the right ones and then string hem together in the right order, it will all make sense. But there are so many of them, arbitrary and constantly shifting like sand beneath her feet. Sometimes she is overwhelmed by the sheer number of words in the world, by the sheer number of people flinging them around so freely, so certain that their words can mean something, do something, change something: so that silence is no longer significant or socially acceptable.”
“If Iquito drowns now, Naomi thinks, she will be a widow in her widow’s weeds. She is not exactly sure what this phrase is supposed to mean but she imagines herself on this beach with green-black strings of seaweed draped over her face and bare shoulders like a veil, while the water-logged body of her new husband is plucked by the fishermen out of the sea.”
“If the Eskimos have twenty different words for snow (and everybody says they do, although nobody seems to know what they are), the islanders have at least that many for water. So that a glass of water, a body of water, and water under the bridge have virtually nothing to do with each other. There is even a different word for water when you are in it as opposed to water when you are only looking at it, thinking about it, or wishing for it. Naomi is coming to understand that this dislocation makes more sense than a lot of other things. Iquito has never had any reason to think otherwise.”
“...it was already dark and the houses of her friends up and down the street were already receding into the night which was pressing down on her face like a pillow.”
“He has also heard about snow but has never been able to get it clear in his mind. He would like more information.
‘What does it taste like? He asks Naomi.
‘Water,’ she says, which is not quite true.
‘What does it smell like?’ he asks.
‘Nothing,’ she says, which is not true either. Snow smells like snow. There is no way around it.
They jump out of their angels and walk slowly on.
Iquito is no angel. He is an innocent, Naomi thinks, a reckless and remorseless innocent, who has no sense of sin and so no sense of the guilt which animates the remains of the real world.”
“(Stomping away in bare feet, Naomi notes, is much less effective than stomping away in stiletto high heels or hiking boots.)”
“She has never seen him angry about anything else and doesn’t know what to think.”
“But even in the utopian ocean the fish must eat each other to survive.”
“Time passes. All time passes in its own good time.”
“Naomi would rather have a nice simple number to go by but Iquito cannot figure out how or when the number six might mean supper and what difference does it make if the sun comes up at seven, eight, or nine: it comes up anyway.”
“No matter how you figure it, time is always passing and proving that everything changes, everything must move forward and forward and on. It is only when you think of it that time stands still.”
“Their laughter is delicious, like that of mischievous children stuffed to bursting with secrets and plans.”
“The sound of the surf seems to come not from the sea but from the stars speckled above them.”
“The little green island feels like a boat, sealed up and salty, on the verge of becoming gladly and forever lost at sea. There is no telling what has become of the rest of the world.”
“And the rain still falls silently into the sea.”
Because there is nothing to be said, there is nothing to be remembered or regretted.
In the dream there is no word for love.”
But there is always the rest of the world out there, waiting to be acknowledged and appeased.
1. Oh
Oh never mind that.
O to lie in your arms and laugh.”
“What it all comes down to is that we are the sum of our efforts to change who we are. Identity is no museum piece sitting stock-still in a display case but rather the endlessly astonishing synthesis of the contradictions of everyday life.”
- Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces
“Ranged around me, cross-legged and humble on the cold stone floor, were all the people (including Laurie) who had ever hurt, insulted, ignored, demeaned, dismissed, degraded, or laughed at me in my entire life. While they bowed their heads before my consummate beauty and wept at their hitherto wicked ways, words of wisdom were plopping out of my mouth and rolling around their dirty suppliant feet like pearls. When I arose and waved a limp royal hand over their heads, they fell to their knees, scrabbling like seagulls for the shimmering pulsating pearls, scooping them up with heir long pink tongues and swallowing them whole. I levitated briefly and then dissolved right before their adoring apologetic beady little eyes.
The dream was in the nature of an epiphany and I woke from it saying, ‘Of course, yes, of course, now I see, yes.’”
“Brenda doesn’t know whether she wants to marry Bruce or not. They do love each other but whenever they spend more than two days together, they end up arguing about absolutely everything. Then they break up and Brenda is sure that she wouldn’t marry Bruce if he were the last available man on earth. But after a week or two Brenda gets lonely: it begins to look more like Bruce is the last available man on earth. So then they get back together and Brenda thinks she might as well marry him after all.”
“I could hardly blame her: who could resist a man who loves the hairy mole in the middle of your back, not to mention your stretch marks?”
“I was at the tail end (or so I hoped) of a long series of misguided, unpleasant, and ultimately unsuccessful romances. There was a time in my life when I had actually found myself in danger of being happy but that was a long time ago, I was much younger then, and perhaps my ideas of happiness were rather stunted. It was, to coin a phrase, a humbling experience.”
“Brenda and I knew we liked each other a lot but we had to admit that we didn’t much like ourselves. This, according to all the pop-psychology books I’ve been reading, is the root of all evil. I have studied these best-selling books in some detail. I have done all the quizzes to determine exactly how low my self-esteem really is:
A. I feel that I am not as happy/smart/attractive/funny/successful/good as other people.
1. rarely
2. sometimes
3. often
4. always
B. I feel hopeless, helpless, and out of control of my own life.
1. sometimes
2. often
3. always
C. I feel defeated and pessimistic about the future.
1. often
2. always
D. I feel disgusted, depressed and dissatisfied.
1. always
I have tried the exercises guaranteed to improve my wilted self-esteem once and for all. I have tried, for instance, to generate feelings of control and accomplishment by:
1. planting a garden (but I hate gardening and do not see the point of all that dirty work when you can buy perfectly god vegetables downtown at the market three days a week, cheap)
2. organizing my photo album (which I hadn’t touched in years because it always makes me depressed to see how much my life has or hasn’t changed since 1973)
3. alphabetizing my spices (this proved more difficult than you might imagine: does Sweet Basil, for instance, belong under S for Sweet or B for Basil?)
I have tried replacing my negative thoughts about myself with positive ones so that I was walking around all day chanting silently: I am good. I am beautiful. I am kind. I am strong. I am damn near perfect. I am a bloody miracle. I was not convinced.
In the end, these books just made me feel like I was a lost cause and the only thing I could do now was kill myself or turn into somebody else altogether.”
“I went through my photo album and ripped out the pictures of all my old lovers. I rewrote my entire romantic history, renounced all former folly, and became a virgin again.”
“That night I soaked for an hour in a hot baking soda bath, dreaming up my future and sponging off my past. This took longer that I’d bargained on so there was little time left for my painting.”
“We remained (or should I say, we became) friends, suggesting that maybe someday, maybe ten years from now, who knows, maybe then we would get back together again and get it right.”
“Eventually, as so often happens, over distance and the passage of time, our sporadic attempts at maintaining communication petered out and we lost track of each other’s lives. I can’t remember now the last time I heard from Jonathan. I also can’t remember the last time Jonathan and I made love. I can remember the first time very clearly but not the last because, as so often happens, I didn’t know it was to be the last time at the time and so I was not paying as much poignant attention as I might have been.”
“Madeline was calling Sunday morning to tell me that Jonathan was dead. She said she thought I would want to know. She said she thought I would want to know the truth. But as it turned out, she knew nothing, nothing but facts.”
“...arguing amiably about the proper way to put on the tinsel: the one-strand-at-a-time advocates versus the heave-a-whole-handful-with-your-eyes-closed contingent.”
“After the party, he came home with me. After we got undressed and climbed into my bed, I said, ‘I just want to sleep with you, I don’t want to make love,’ and he said, ‘That’s okay, I just want to be close to you tonight.’
In the morning we made love for a long time. In fact, we stayed in bed all day which was something I had never done before.
Jonathan Wright and I loved each other suddenly and, in reality, we were very happy for a while.”
“In fiction, we are accustomed to encountering people driven to extremes, people brought to their proverbial knees by love and loss and other such earth-shaking heart-stopping soul-shifting events, people who are thrashing around inside their lives instead of just living them. In reality, these extremes are merely the end points of the continuum. In reality, it is all the points in between, cumulative and connected, if not downright boring, which are the important part. In real life, it is all the points in between which comprise the real life we are really living. In real life, people driven repeatedly to the limit are very had to take. The friends of such people (if they have any friends left) suspect they are crazy, emotionally disturbed, mentally unbalanced, manic-depressive, but mostly just plain foolish. In reality, people who go from one extreme to the other (and back again) on a regular basis are more fun to read about than to know.”
I never expected to se you again / but I never expected you to die either. / I hadn’t seen you in so many years: / it was as if you were already dead / or / it was as if you would never die / would just go on living somewhere else / two thousand miles away / while I was still here / going on about my business / never giving you a second thought. / Unless a stranger in the street happened to have / a jacket, a walk, a smile, / or a receding hairline just like yours. / Unless I happened to be cooking your favorite meal / for another lover (pork chops, green beans, mashed / you called them ‘smashed’ / potatoes) and it turned out he didn’t like pork. / Unless I surprised myself / looking through the old photo album / and weeping. / If this were a poem / I would have had a premonition / a cold-sweat shiver down my spine / at the very moment you died. / If this were a poem / I would still be able to see your face / your real face / not your other face, shot to pieces / exploding all over the wall / like the time we were splitting up / I was crying / you were drunk and raging / threw a whole plate of spaghetti across the room / and nobody cleaned it up for a week. / If this were a poem / I would be able to remember everything / including the weight of your body on mine / and how it felt to love you. / If this were a poem / the truth would be known.
But the truth of the matter is: this is fiction.
Pure fiction.
Pure: mere, simple, sheer, not corrupt, morally undefiled, guiltless, sincere, chaste.
Fiction: feigning, invention, conventionally accepted falsehood.
Pure fiction: a convenient literary device which allows me to say that I never knew a man named Jonathan Wright, there was no Christmas party at Madeline Kane’s house ten years ago, no Scotch pine, no tinsel, no Kenny Rogers song, no dreamers falling fast in love, and no bad jokes. Which allows me to say that I never cried into your angry arms, there was no spaghetti splattered on the wall, and I never ever missed you.
If the truth were known, this is fiction, a valuable revisionist device which allows me to say there was no man at the door with a gun.”
“It is the question the writer asks when writing a book: Shall I fill in all the details? Or shall I let the reader imagine them all? ... What if I gave you dots and numbers and you draw in the lines?”
- Kristjana Gunnars, The Substance of Forgetting
“1. On the dining room table in my parent’s house, there is a shallow crystal bowl filled with 10 ceramic balls. They are like billiard balls without the weight, Christmas baubles without the hooks. They are perfect and useless, bright globes of pure colour. I am forbidden to touch them and, being a good girl, I don’t. Only my mother handles them. I suppose my father could too if he wanted but he doesn’t. Once a week my mother removes the balls one by one from the bowl and polishes them with a soft rag, a piece of my old nightie with ducks and bunnies on it. She lines the polished balls up like beads at the edge of the table against the wall. They make my heart ache.
Occasionally she lets me hold one: the red one, the green one, just for a minute now, the blue one is my favorite, be careful. That is how I know the balls are nearly weightless. Occasionally I imagine smashing them one by one against the wall. More often I imagine juggling them in slow motion, a luminous halo of colour suspended over head.”
“Mostly though I write about the future. I describe in detail the man I will marry. I choose names for our 3 perfect children and our dog. Sometimes I draw pictures of the house we will live in, the car we will drive, the dress I will wear on our wedding day. If the present is frequently confusing, at least the future and the exquisite weight of its abundant possibilities are always clear. Even from this distance, I can see the colour of his eyes, the smile on my lips, the never-ending song in my heart.
The largest mirage ever recorded was sighted in the Arctic at 83°N 103°W by Donald B. Macmillian in 1913. It included hills, valleys, and snow-capped peaks extending through at least 120° of the horizon. It was the type if mirage known as the ‘Fata Morgana,’ so called because such visions were formerly believed to be the nasty work of Morgana le Fay, King Arthur’s evil fairy half-sister. The technique used to measure and record a mirage is not described.
I have all the confidence in the world. I wear the key to my diary on a chain around my neck like a locket. Being a good girl, I naturally assume that I will eventually be the recipient of an appropriate measure of eternal happiness. The future will be my just reward.
4. I fall in love every time I turn around. I am supposed to be studying Philosophy and the great works of Literature but I am drinking coffee in the university cafeteria and falling in love instead. Even Plato had a theory of desire. I am always ready to be swept off my feet, even when I’m sitting down. I fall in love with a wrist on a table, a thigh in blue denim, a lock of black hair, the tickle of a moustache, the tender angle of a manly neck bent toward me. I pick up the electricity in the air, the force fields of handsome men who mill around me, until my stomach feels charred and my hands are shaking. This could be from all that caffeine but I take it to be another symptom of love.”
“My best friend tells me I’m addicted to love. I say, At least it’s more harmless than heroin. She says, Are you sure?
5. The men I love don’t love me back. I sleep with them anyway. The men I don’t love call me in the middle of the night, crying or cursing because I won’t sleep with them. I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall, one of those stucco walls with bits of coloured ground glass embedded in it.
The beak of the red-headed woodpecker, Melanerpes erythrocephalus, hits the bark of a tree with an impact velocity of 13 mph. This means that when the head snaps back, the brain is subject to a deceleration of approximately 10 g. The type of tree is not noted, nor the possible long-term effects of this activity.
I decide I will marry the next man who asks me. In the meantime, I try on the notion of celibacy the way other women try on a new coat. It doesn’t fit. I try learning to live without desire but I can’t get the hang of it. Years pass.”
“Sometimes I think that the couch with the weight of him and his depression on it will eventually crash through the floor and plummet directly to the centre of the earth.”
“7. We talk and we talk and we talk. We cry. He makes up his mind and then changes it back again. Finally he goes out, ostensibly to buy a bag of chips. He returns an hour later with a 3-piece set of matching luggage, soft-sided in royal blue with locks and tiny keys like the one I had for my diary in Grade 8. He fills the biggest suitcase with books. It is so heavy he cannot lift it. He rearranges the contents of the suitcase to achieve a more even distribution of weight. He sets them on the back porch and calls a taxi. He kisses me goodbye. We do not discuss where he is going. We are all talked out.”
“We speculate as to the exact nature of the male ego, this allegedly natural phenomenon which gets so much attention. Where is it located? In the head, the heart, the penis? What colour is it? Blood red, royal blue, deep purple, black? How big is it really, this marvellous chimera which we have spent so much of our lives tending to, massaging, tippy-toeing around?”
“On the advice of the parenting books, I get down on my hands and knees and crawl along beside my daughter to see the world from her angle, to scout out dangerous objects within her reach. She laughs at me and claps her hands. She thinks I’m playing. Little does she know. I am doing my best to protect her. It will be years before she falls in love and flies away.”
“I imagine I am the woman in Vermeer’s painting, the woman weighing pearls on a balance. She stands before a wooden table in the corner of a room. The light comes through the window and illuminates her right hand, the balance, the pearls, and the white fur on her blue morning jacket. Intent upon her task and the attainment of equilibrium, the woman’s eyes are downcast and her forehead is smooth. She looks to be several months pregnant. On the wall behind her is a large painting of The Last Judgement. To weigh is to judge. Recent microscopic examination has revealed that the pans of the balance contain neither pearls nor gold but are empty. The woman nevertheless is suffused with serenity.”
“Apparently the contents of a soul does not alter its weight. Good or evil, souls are all the same. It is only the weight of the world upon each soul that varies, not to mention the miracles or atrocities which issue from it.”
“Someone at work says 21 grams is too light. Someone else says it’s too heavy. But to me, the weight of these paper clips as I pass them from hand to hand by the window in the moonlight feels exactly right. As I contemplate them, I imagine my face is expectant but serene. My forehead is smooth.
Year pass. The future becomes the present which then becomes the past. This transformation is inevitable. All events must first occur in the present tense. Before the fact, they are mirages; after the fact, memories. Through it all, the weight of my soul remains unchanged. A stable still point of reference, it continues, constant, motionless, and invisible. The exact number of its contents has yet to be revealed.”
* The Antonyms of Fiction, Diane Schoemperlen
