Kai (excerpt)
Kai,
Oh the mathematics of solitude. I wish your father there. I read your wanting subtracted between the lines. He is almost gone. Hallucinates, not awake even though eyes are open. Yesterday he saw the baby brother you never met. I light four ultramarine candles—for your brother, your father, for you, for me.Mother
Kai,
I tell him you are destined for something big. Remember this. The unbelieving professor said I could not break the riddle of the egg. But I knew the answer was hard boiled and cracked it on the desk, experimenting and making it stand. I knit the cerulean yarn now. Count the stitches. Knowing when we let him go, he'll leave a multiplying path of blue.
Mother
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Author's Note
This appeared in Sidebrow in January, 2010.
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"I knit the cerulean yarn now. Count the stitches. Knowing when we let him go, he'll leave a multiplying path of blue."
I nominate this for Best American Sentence in a novel excerpt, Epistolary category.
Star!
More!
James,
Thank you very much. You made my day.
Best wishes (star),
Deborah
I second the nomination, that and the rest of it striking and beautiful
Really nice, poetically soft and singing. Is this from a novel?
Thank you Morgan.
Susan, yes, it is from one of two hybrid projects. However, the second of those, provisionally entitled Helene, has been taking most of my attention in terms of the two.
I write fiction and poetry, so there are a couple of other projects that I am also working on, one of which is a more traditional short fiction collection called Event Landmarks.
Thank you all again for the kind words. As a poet coming to fiction (a work in progress for the last several years), it is nice to hear.
Oh yes, I third that nomination.
You know those mornings where you wake up and are still walking inside a dream, stuck in it almost as if you were in a placenta, and you don't what time or day it is or who you are?
That's how this piece makes me feel. It's so...soft, and translucent and wonderfully dreamlike. I love your use of egg imagery. And cerulean, that's such a beautiful color.
There's so much to interpret in these two paragraphs. As I re-read this, I wonder: what is this? Death? Birth? Love? Hatred? Interesting how the same words inspire contradictory emotions. I can tell you're a poet. This is absolutely filled with poetry.
Lovely work here. I very much enjoyed.