Where I End

by Sophie White

They know that religion is a pathetic performance, a plea for clemency by lost people.

I resolved to try and empty my mind. I imagined cleaving my head open, hunching forward and tipping the whole awful soup out and into the street before he could reach in and feel blindly, combing out strings of grim things tangled in his fingers like viscera.

could sit on the bed’s edge but I don’t bother. Sitting would be loving and this is transactional—a chore.

When I sit in the bed-thing’s room, I sometimes imagine that the little girl is still here in the room with us, forever pressing her cheek to the bed-thing, curling against it, placing its hands on her face. And nothing.

She tells me that drawing and painting and stitching are just doing, that what makes something art is the intention behind it. If the intention is to communicate some intangible feeling or slippery truth that resists capture by words, then it is art.