Shirley

by Susan Scarf Merrell

the smile of the mother-to-be who had never been mothered, the smile of the brilliant person in a woman’s body, the beautiful woman in an ugly shell.

that was Jackson’s gift, to understand the absurd unloveliness of love.

we would sit and talk in morning murmurs, as if the baby inside me were asleep and not to be awakened.

I suppose that women who are often called beautiful have no idea what the rest of us feel like when we hear it, but there are no other syllables so charged. Beautiful. That word easily makes a woman so.

how the night smelled, the odor of cold that one smells only in New England—apples and oak leaves and freezing water, and the day’s sun caught in the grass, a blanket of fog around my shoes.

In the absence of the extraordinary, we become excessively concerned with the mundane.

It was the moment just before, that most delicious cresting that jolts one aloft, time paused, time delicious—if the heart could salivate, it would.

one of the dark hooded trash bins that sat like chess pieces taken prisoner along the edges of the Mall.