I’m thinking I like Elora’s idea of posting from her work in process. It’s fun and it will keep me sharp. I do so love my friends at CCC, and you might try your hand, too. This was yesterday’s submission.
Esme doesn’t know. She doesn’t know from whence she came. And I can’t tell her. Not now. Not just because I don’t want to, but because she can’t hear me. She doesn’t know. The vast mount of knowledge she does not have staggers me.
Once, many years ago, as she lurked on the ledge of true adulthood, when she had begun to pack away the childishness of adolescence, I thought she could see me. I thought, at the joint of college graduation and first job, there was a crack, through which I could have poked a glimmer, a seed. I thought, even, that I might have had the ability to utter the words: “You were conceived in rage.”
To utter the words, to pester the remnants, to chip at what I remember and to dismantle the plaster of years, heavy and thick like the seal at a crypt, to remember the night, the horror, my pain, his violence, my shame. I could not do it.
Instead I spin here, listless and unaware. As unaware as I want to be. They make their fuss, they straighten the dead sheets, they prick at the edges of my worthless hospital pillow, crinkly and flat and they think I don’t lie here raging to burst with the secrets I never had the courage to tell. The most dearly kept story, the one I held closest to me like the skin of my palm, is the truth. No matter from whence she came, she is my daughter, this wild, bony, scattered child woman, and I love her.
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Margi
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pastordt
