Ways to Disappear

by Idra Novey

Miles went on exploding in English

What a prefect way to describe the language and the way some American native speakers tend to speak it. Bombastic. Boisterous. Like a cacophony of jagged sounds.

From the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter he extracted some old lemons, clenched them, and shrugged. We’ll make do, he said, and began to prepare a trio of caipirinhas,

When life hands you lemons in the form of your mother's gambling addiction, you make caipirinhas

The test had to do with the density of the smoke once the steaks began to sizzle. With the works of fiction he selected for his press, he tested for density as well, for something tender in the middle yet still heavy enough to blacken the air.

By noon, Beatriz had written in her first novel, the heat in Brazil was an animal’s mouth. It would swallow anything to feed itself.

When she told Miles that she’d agreed to the project, he’d pursed his lips as if he’d just noticed the green crusted residue of a pea soup in the corners of her mouth. For months after, at the thought of that moment, she experienced what García Márquez described as poisonous lilies taking root in her entrails.

Colloquially known as The Ick

Matter: From the Latin word for the woody part of a tree, derivative of mater, mother.

She’d had too many reservations about giving herself over that way, risking that some book might obliterate her carefully constructed sense of who she was.

To have stayed awake for two nights watching your grown child sleep, a child who you’d forced too early to be an adult and who’d grown thick from it the way a vine will.