The Story by Kim Addonizio The woman came home to find her husband and children sitting around the table as theyd done so many nights, the lamp on the sideboard casting its usual glow over the rough wood, some flowers the children had picked in a blue vase, the youngest daughters drawing of a horse tacked beside the window with its burlap drape. They sat around the table with their severed heads set before them on the woven placemats, and each ones arms had been lifted so the hands rested on top of the hair, thick hair of her husband shed wrapped around her fingers, fine hair of her two daughters, and the babys soft, barely visible wisps over the small skull the babys hands were tiny, theyd had to nail them in place, and this is where I begin to hate the man who told the story, who made me see not just their deaths but the soldiers standing around afterwards, the arc of the hammer as it comes down and drives in what I now cant forget; the best I can do is to think of Christ, so I can somehow bear the nails, so I can carry them to you, and maybe Im no better than the soldiers to do that. Im asking you to walk into your own house, to see a childs head bent over her homework as she scissors pictures from a magazine, the bright or dark hair she brushes impatiently out of her eyes. I dont know why I need to say this, or what good or evil it does. I want the old, acceptable story of suffering, the cross become icon, holy blood in the chalice. I want not to know what I know as I turn back to my life, my friends who love me, as I set the table with candles and glasses for wine and later put my hands in my lovers hair; he enters me, we fall together onto the bed, he bites my nipples as hard as I can stand it and then harder, and still its pleasure I feel, we are given this, too; I tell it to myself over and over as we make love like animals deep in the forest, far from any village, caring nothing for the world, ravenous for each other, crying out while workmen slowly hack a road toward us, while the machines come on.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 02:09:03 +0000
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