a little night music by Maggie McCUTCHEON on March 10th, 2010
I wrote something and I want to share it. Even though I don’t ever really let people read my stuff.
It’s a working title. An annotation is available should anyone want it.
Borges was the main inspiration for the work; he disliked fathers and mirrors for they created imperfect duplications.
That which contained Nothingness in its essence
Her father was a glasscutter. Her mother had been dishonoured. The girl in question, who was but an infant at that time, was born in 1396 in Crna Gora¹, nearly one century after its first recorded mention by a king in some personal papers.
She had been offered a privileged life before she was old enough to refuse. She liked to smoke tobacco in the bath, and to ponder cross sections of the earth. She liked to think of the core as a cauldron of boiling liquid, swaying with the planet’s pull. She liked to think clouds were painted on the sky.
Her father cut glass. Her mother complained of imaginary maladies. She played in a walled garden for most of her childhood, though she dreamed of imaginary worlds.
Today, she was lying in the sun and her skin grew paler. She had been by the garden’s pond for the morning amid the constant arrivals and departures of an avian genealogy²; the sun was just overhead. Standing up, she became faint. Her head felt empty, hollow.
Her father read a book. Her mother slept. She would peer through the door, but could read only the title.
The sun hit the road, and you could see it sweat in the distance. The earth seemed alive. The earth seemed an athlete, billions of years old, in constant rotation like a discus thrower. The pathway twisted down the hill as she staggered toward her home. Blinded by the humidity and hazy sun, her focus faded in and out.
Her father sold his glass to mirror merchants. Her mother went for ‘treatments.’ She, too, read The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia but found it dull.
One by one, the fingers of her left hand slowly went cold, then lost feeling. Freezing in the high heat, they turned white before crumbling. Her right hand soon followed. She left a trail of small, white, round balls behind her as she staggered along.
N 31. I 27. B 5. N 37. G 57. I 28. O 72⁴…
She willed herself to disappear.
She vanished. Her mother ceased complaining of imaginary maladies. Her father ceased cutting glass.
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¹ Crna Gora is the native name of Montenegro, meaning ‘Black Mountain.’ The name changed numerous times but stabilized centuries after this story took place.
² Decadence as a substitute for amusement.
³ “…the encyclopedia is misleadingly titled The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917), and is a literal (though also laggardly) reprint of the 1902 Encyclopædia Britannica.”
⁴ Although earlier forms of the game can be traced back to the 16th century, Bingo was not introduced into North American culture until 1929 under the name “Beano.” It took up popularity among gamblers, and later purple haired old ladies wearing visors and orthopedic shoes.
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doesn’t that feel better?
Posted by Aaron Kopff on on March 11, 2010
maybe the next time will feel even better.
Posted by Maggie McCUTCHEON on on March 11, 2010