No Two Persons

by Erica Bauermeister

“The trick for a writer,” the professor continued, “is to take those eternal questions, those known bits and pieces, and put them together in a way that helps us see our world in a different light. That’s where you come in.”

But hell, you could be hit by a golf ball, just strolling around a course. Get knocked flat, crossing a street. You might as well do what you want, right? What calls to you. What you couldn’t not do anyway.

Nola had read that when a female bat gives birth, she does it hanging upside down, catching the baby in her wings as it falls. Reality has plenty of miracles.

Customers loved that special touch—the author meeting up with the finished product, writing on its title page, sending the book off into the world for a second time. This was mine; now it’s yours. A kind of literary communion.

marveled at how two people who could be so different, could be so fundamentally the same.

Two lives folding into one another,

Still, wasn’t that what relationships were? Knowing someone well enough to smooth out the edges, hers or yours?

Wondered if she could hear this as well, the sound of everything breaking.

“Historians say a war started on such and such a day, but that war really started years before—when a man got on the wrong train and met a stranger, or a boy wasn’t loved by his mother, or a girl said no. And that war didn’t stop on its end date, either. Its effects kept going, down through the children and grandchildren, but they didn’t understand where it all was coming from because historians care more about the rocks than the river.”

which made sense because both of them were broken, their edges not the smooth arcs or straight lines of others, which fit easily into so many situations. No, there was only one place each of them belonged, and that was with the other. It sounded dramatic, but wasn’t.

Here were two people who’d had to learn to read between the lines of those around them—and for the first time in their lives, they were with someone who saw them with the same perceptivity they saw others.

A death sentence. Or worse—a dangling participle of an existence.