Our house, lakeside and lofty and a soft dove-grey; a prime nesting location for the area’s birds. My mother, who loved them, would never allow us to move a nest, not even that of the crow who flew in our window and began to nest on our kitchen table. The kitchen was unusable until the eggs hatched, so we ate every night in the dining room on an enormous mahogany table my mother had salvaged from a downsizing convent: deep dark lustrous wood that whispered hymns and incense....
Posted by
Amelie
Tuesday, April 3, 2012 at 10:21 AM
By noon, everyone knew we had less than ten hours to live. It was frightening. Not just because the world was ending, though that was enough. Our fear was compounded by the knowledge itself, which had seemed to arise out of nothing, untraceable. It had no origin, no solid foundation, and yet everyone knew; we saw confirmation wherever we looked. The sky seemed lit from beneath. The birds were silent. The air was full of strange silent energy, a subtle electric charge I’d never felt before. And on every corner one could see some number of people, couples...
Posted by
Amelie
Friday, March 30, 2012 at 11:45 AM
I. My fellow Americans: We are no strangers to war. Your patience grows thin. Drugs, Terror, Afghanistan. Progress seems impossible. What happened to wars we could win? I tell you, we do not know whom we fight. I tell you truly, we do not know our enemy. We do not see what stands before us, chopping away at our territories, taking the lives of our children. We do not see the force that has plotted against us from the beginning of time. I say to you, we are fighting the wrong war. II. I wish to propose, very simply, war against that which causes...
Posted by
Amelie
Saturday, March 24, 2012 at 2:06 PM
How you play is you can either choose a Russian official or a dead author. Everyone wants to be an official because it’s more exciting. Usually Ivan the Terrible gets picked first, and then Rasputin, then Lenin and Stalin and all the more recent ones, and if you go down the row and people start running out of Russian officials they know about, or if they named one that didn’t exist, they can be either a boyar or a bureaucrat and they have to stand on the other side of the room. The kids who have been playing for the longest usually aren’t boyars because...
Posted by
Amelie
at 1:44 PM
At this moment I prefer nothing to wrapping my arms about her in the dark while her nightlight shines shadows on the ceiling between the ghosts of stick-on stars. There is something delicious about a Beethoven piano sonata punctuated by slow, small, sleepy breaths....
Posted by
Amelie
Saturday, March 17, 2012 at 12:11 PM
She cries nebulas, every sob is something enormous and hazy and vaguely spherical, that’s how I know things aren’t going to be okay, and also she starts apologizing a lot, like “I’m sorry, I’m okay, really,” like it’s all absolute bullshit and we both know it but she feels the need to say it anyway, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and I’m like “No really it’s okay” and then “Why are you apologizing” and then “Damn it I don’t actually care that you’re crying, like do you think this is going to ruin my day because really it isn’t, I mean it’s actually kind...
Posted by
Amelie
Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 11:22 PM
One night, in this very house, a child was born dead. A man stared out of his window while his wife screamed. That was the first time snow fell on this town. A stillborn waterbaby lies between his mother’s legs; the midwife slices the umbilical cord with a washed knife. The mother screams. The bedsheets are red, but her blood can still be seen dark and glistening against saffron. The sheets are drenched. It was a bloody birth. The midwife hums a song from her childhood she remembers out of nowhere as she calmly rinses off the small corpse; the man stares...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
