Like Lightning

Jenny, with her wasp waist and breath like stinging lemons. Jenny’s husband is very ill. Full, alienated clauses of time are being pulled through IVs, sucked into his life-thirsty body. Jenny thinks, “Maybe my mid-gut will quit before his,” and quickly stops her thoughts.

Six children bang the ground around her. Six children who have emerged from her thorax: newfangled, right-handed. Six glorious exits that became entrances.

The swinging fraudulence of “forever” brushes the side of her face again and again and again, rubbing it raw. She is surrounded, albeit alone, with six beehive minds, quick to omit the worst facts.

Friends travel into his room to make blank truces, lastditch efforts to make indelible marks on him.

Jenny’s eyes, full of so many angles, sense the world framing these instants for her memory. She is compelled to doubt almost everything. She often misses the point. Some foreign filmmaker’s mind is converting everything to images.

Summer is spent in a carefully air-conditioned laboratory of a room.

Time quickens. The silt of everyday encounters adds up to more. Six weeks drop away, leave Jenny so tired she doesn’t have the energy or space to flap her wings into flight. Her balance is off. She is heavy with the loneliness that awaits.

Then, one day, an anonymous deliveryman arrives with cases of an expected yet unknown substance. As her husband turns back to make sure she follows him, his breath halts. Simple marching songs play in the air. She doesn’t care to concern herself with the truth. Not even a single question presents itself. This moment has been living within her for months.

This darkness cradles the room until the light of six unborn stars bursts in to shine full sentences of future upon her.