Fringe
>All that I cannot understand
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| Adele Holmes @ F-Stop Magazine/ |
Gary Presley considers the symbols and mysteries of nature @ Fringe.
I live in a place where the wind blows, not constantly but nearly so. Only on the hottest, most oppressively humid days does it stall. Only on a hard winter morning, all things ice solid beneath the weight of a sagging Arctic high-pressure system do I see branches hold still. In the summer, the wind is from the south and in the winter from the northwest. In the summer, it generally is pleasant enough, sometimes cooling, sometimes like the hot breath of a hair dryer; in the winter, it always hurts.
I have only lived in this particular house for a year. I never thought much about the wind in the other places I have lived. The constant wind here reminds me of my grandmother, a woman who liked the wind, perhaps not liked so much as she felt the wind cradled her in a familiarity. I know she seemed to like nothing very much. My grandmother was a native of the Appalachian foothills of east Tennessee, but she lived seventy years or more on the prairie. When I was a boy we lived in the deep hill country. When she would visit, I would listen to her complain of not being able to see the horizon, of being closed in by the hills pressing against Spring Creek valley, a place all the more isolated by its thirty mile distance from the Mother Road, Route 66.
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The wind in this place is still new to me, even after a year, a thing both understood and surprising. I first began to notice it because the room in which I write looks to the east, and there is a point in that direction where the land slopes downward in a dramatic fashion. The marrying of terrain and prevailing winds means a consistent updraft works its invisible magic outside my window nearly every day, a magic lifting and cradling of two birds common in this part of the world, red-tail hawks and vultures. Each day there is a festival of birds riding the wind, sometimes at eye level with my window, lingering, always lingering a hundred feet or more above the ground as they ride the updrafts.
>Between the self and the environment
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| Flora Maia @ Posi+Tive Magazine/ |
Nick and I leave at night, in the cold, with a thermos of over-steeped tea dripping onto the porch. We leave in our woolen hats, me in my mittens and downy winter coat, he in his flannel shirt and the tattered blue jeans that fall just a bit too short, ankles exposed. He calls his flannel a jacket because he grew up in Maine where blood runs thick, and sweat is saltier and does not freeze. We walk cautiously and hold hands, feeling in the dark for cracks in the wooden porch and the heavy, cumbrous ice slicks that settle over the steps. We are leaving like thieves in the night, vulpine and furtive, through a cloud of hot breath and steamy chamomile. We just had sex on the living room floor, and for once I didn’t cry as I came, didn’t glimpse that small death just over the precipice.
I am going away, again, I am excited, and he is going back, but we are going, and this is what matters. I like going, leaving, moving. Only yesterday, I returned from abroad, returned to the empty apartment and abandoned college town. The roommates were still at parents’ places, in slippers, feasting on holiday leftovers, on fatty ham sandwiches and twice-baked potatoes. Nick picked me up at the airport in Manchester, and we drove the two hours back to Durham in near silence. We were groggy and disoriented from the sudden evaporation of distance, of the two months spent apart, unlearning the body. But it was not an uncomfortable silence, and I watched cows mill around the mud-slicked barns outside the window and he occasionally played with my hair. I stuck my finger in his ear and twice shoved a hand down his pants.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )At the bottom of the steps, I hear the shuffling of the caged raccoon. He is tucked beneath the porch and looks out at us with raging yellow eyes, neon blinkers from deep in a black hole. His warm body heaves steadily inside the metal cage. A shackled creature, those terrible eyes like portals to some ghostly landscape where we might all quietly go mad, where I could placidly shed my clothes and roll in shit and chew on the cheeks of rodents.
>The truth can be a burden too
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| Michael Wolf @ The Morning News |
Kelly Sundberg on secrets and lies @ Fringe.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Because this is a story I don’t often tell, it sticks to me like mud. I was nearly abducted when I was sixteen. The details to this near-abduction are long, and the end is unsatisfying with no resolution. I haven’t told this story many times. There’s an air of untruth to it, a sense of hyperbole, and I wonder if people will doubt its authenticity.
It’s lodged somewhere in what I call the well of untold stories. The well is full of stories that are either too far-fetched or too shameful to repeat. The problem with these stories is that they’re the stories I want to tell the most. But I don’t want to be doubted, and I don’t want to be judged. I’m both a doubter and a judger, myself, so I don’t always trust people and their intentions. My well of untold stories is a burden; I feel this compulsion to tell everyone everything. It’s a nasty little compulsion. No one likes the person who tells all, and I do want to be liked. I have to work at curbing my tongue, at reining in my stories. I’ve developed an awareness of the eyes; eyes say everything. Someone can be nodding and smiling, but if their eyes are cold, it’s time to change the subject.
Now, I only tell true stories, but I used to tell untrue stories. I used to be a liar.
>Self-Portrait in Apologies
>Sarah Einstein constructs a personal essay through a series of apologies @ Fringe.
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| Helen Aylon |
Apology to an Ethically-Inconsistent Friend
I’m sorry for picking the chicken out of the soup and telling you it was vegetarian. I was broke and there wasn’t anything else in the house to offer you. Besides, the last time I saw you, you were eating a cheeseburger and smoking a Marlboro.
Apology to Three Lovers from My Youth
I’m sorry for telling you I was a virgin that night in the back of your car. In your parents’ basement. In my dorm room. As you may have guessed years ago, I wasn’t.
Apology to the Boy Who Wasn’t Quite Right
Even in the comparatively egalitarian world of first grade, it was social suicide to be seen with you on the playground. Until third grade, you were The Boy Our Parents Made Us Be Nice To, the one who was invited to birthday parties and sat in a corner, alone except when our mothers dragged you out of your chair to play some game they rigged so you could win.
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