White Bird in a Blizzard

I remember reaching under him, between his legs, while we fucked, touching his balls. In my hands, they felt loose, and invertebrate, and at my mercy, and I’d thought of a marble Madonna I’d seen once at the Toledo Art Museum. She was holding the world in the palm of her hand, and seemed pleased. There was a thin, mysterious smile on her lips, as if she knew how much power she had.

I was wearing when I got in bed, I took it off and threw it on the floor. I liked the feeling of nothing but my skin between the sheets and me.

humid with booze, warm and debauched.

face pressed between my legs

The decorator here, my mother thought, seemed to be denying the very idea of decoration.

The decorator here, my mother realized, must be blind.

I was maybe seven years old, and in that mirror the whole future was waiting for me like a skyline of cut-glass perfume bottles, silver tubes of lipstick.

It’s impossible to imagine my mother like that. I cannot imagine her softened, thawed, decayed, becoming sweeter as she spoils. I imagine her trapped in a mirror instead. A permanent image of her locked into a rectangle of hard brightness, open-eyed.

I imagine her trapped in a mirror instead. A permanent image of her locked into a rectangle of hard brightness, open-eyed.

. I think of a pile of leaves my father left raked last fall in the backyard, but forgot to bag, to have hauled away—

Those leaves sank back into the earth after only a few months of rain and snow. They turned first into a layer of thatch, melting into each other, becoming one thing—a thin black mattress that seemed to exhale a cool but festering breath. Then, they started to shrink, curl up, absorbing light like skin, as if you could dig there and find night itself in the center. And then one day they were simply gone, merged with the earth, swallowed up, a damp shadow, something as thick as gravy spilled where they’d been.

Paper-skinned, exquisite,