Spill Simmer Falter Wither

by Sara Baume

There’s something sad about the jumble shop, but I like it. I like how it’s a tiny refuge of imperfection.

See the picture frame. These smiling strangers inside, I don’t know who they are. I just buy the frames and accept whoever comes inside them.

I scoop up my money. I thank him. And the bell on the door chimes again, as though it doesn’t understand that I am leaving.

You tilt your head to the left. I know now this is the thing you do when you’re trying to understand, as if the world somehow makes more sense at an angle, with your sighted side slightly higher than the side the badger blinded.

I wish I’d been born with your capacity for wonder. I wouldn’t mind living a shorter life if my short life could be as vivid as yours.

I find it hard to picture a time when we were simultaneously alive, yet separate. Now you are like a bonus limb. Now you are my third leg, an unlimping leg, and I am the eye you lost.

See the green sprouts in the gutters? I love the way the grass grows like that, high up on buildings, as though it’s lost.

Sometimes I see the sadness in you, the same sadness that’s in me. It’s in the way you sigh and stare and hang your head. It’s in the way you never wholly let your guard down and take the world I’ve given you for granted. My sadness isn’t a way I feel but a thing trapped inside the walls of my flesh, like a smog. It takes the sheen off everything. It rolls the world in soot. It saps the power from my limbs and presses my back into a stoop.

I haven’t lived like the characters on television. I haven’t fought in any wars or fallen in love. I’ve never even punched a man or held a woman’s hand. I haven’t lived high or full, still I want to believe I’ve lived intensely, that I’ve questioned and contemplated my squat, vacant life, and sometimes even understood.

They all have the same shiftless way of holding themselves, as though their limbs are hinged into their torsos by a network of sagged bungee clips.

I’m afraid the boys will look up and see me sitting pathetically in front of the television with my pathetic dinner on a plate on a cushion nestled between my pathetic knees.

I longed to be left to my books instead, to be far away inside their worlds and protected from my own.

but better to be content with ignorance, I’ve always thought, than haunted by the truth.

Caring for you is like keeping a nettle in a pretty porcelain flowerpot, watering its roots and pruning its vicious needles no matter how cruelly it stings my skin, until I’m pink and puffy all over yet still worrying the old welts back to life.

And now I think of how I was my father’s nettle. His big lump of an embarrassing son. A son with no life of his own, no apparent trace of intelligence, of personality. A son fit only to be kept indoors, away from people and from light. Where there’s nothing to sting but himself.

I used to tell my father things like this, later when he chose to remain mute and it was left to me to chip away at the surface of our shared silences.