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I’ve lost my bearings. Fourteen years old, and I can’t find my bearings, nor do I know what bearings are exactly
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Set the forks, Lou.”
My mother opens the drawer on her way to the oven, pulls it hard enough for the cutlery to clatter loudly. Ma loves emphasis.
“Right,” I mumble in response. The word comes out corroded, as if I’ve just woken up.
Hannah comes into the kitchen, wrinkles her nose at the sight of the mashed potato-meatloaf amalgamation cooling on the counter. “Where’ve you been?” she asks me.
I shrug, nod toward the open drawer. “Set the forks.”
As I head into the dining room I hear her mutter, “Just forks.”
Something close to laughter wells up inside of me and I spin around, searching her face to see if I’d heard correctly. That’s the thing with hermit life; there’s a lot of doubt, on account of the whispers trickling down the walls, murmuring from the furniture, whole conversations from the trees outside my window. These days I can’t trust myself to differentiate between wishful thinking and actual sound. I’ve lost my bearings. Fourteen years old, and I can’t find my bearings, nor do I know what bearings are exactly, but my grandfather used to say that before his brain melted into mush, and I think that’s about where I am right now. Bearing-less. Pre-mush brain. (Excerpted from Calligraphy, Issue 728)
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