Sublime

his expressionless face and cropped head were between her legs and a last fruit fell with a thud—the dropped dot of an inverted exclamation point.

Over the years, Da’s anger became Mary’s own. She locked her memories of her mother deep inside her heart. It was easier, she learned, to be angry than to be sad.

Let her, if she will, forgive him her own suffering, her own extreme anguish as a mother, but she has no right to forgive the suffering of her mutilated child; even if the child himself forgives, she has no right! And if that is so, if the right to forgive does not exist, then where is harmony?

benevolence.

Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark.

tryst.

antediluvian

She does not take her mother’s hand. Instead she finds herself repeating a line she read once, in a poem, in a book on a shelf in a house where she spent no more than a few illicit hours. Everything tends towards iron.