Seat company limpingHe was donning those large white plastic headphones everyone our age seemed to be wearing in transit, and I had to reach out and touch him on the shoulder to get his attention. When he slid the headphones down around his neck, I said,“I’m Daley Kushner, the guy who’s writing about you.” So you were raised at sea. Don’t make me laugh. People need change, Harpa, a little fluctuation. Life shouldn’t be so dull, so tightwaddish. People should be left alone to do what they want. The old man took the fossil and held it toward the moon.“My mother said such seed stones were proof that though time always takes life, the messages of life endure through time.” He bent to a squarish block of stone below the altar and slid back the top. The stone inside had been carved out to create a container. Inside was an object wrapped in whatlooked like eel skin. Jaho carefully unwrapped the flat rock it covered. “This too was always on our altar, from years long ago. My mother said it too was a kind of seed stone.” Half an hour after Lana had gone I went out to the driveway to ignite Theon’s bright yellow Hummer. It was the largest model ever made and even a tall person needed the extra step to climb up into the driver’s seat. “Because she’s mine. She’s come home from the horror. And he is one of ours too. Atticus. I told you about him. He was a freed slave but he went back down into slave country when he heard about the missing men. About the bravest thing I ever witnessed. Left ten days ago for Townsend’s Store.” He was a young man of about thirty with dark-blue eyes beneath brown eyebrows. As I drove away from the mutated trailer I told myself that the only reason I left Lester alive was so that he could suffer a little more, so that Mrs. May could keep him breathing while she collected his Social Security checks and boiled potatoes and guzzled beer until they both ran down the drain and into the sewer. I was determined to find a Wild Child, even if it meant searching for the entire day. As soon as I’d crossed the plank over the shallow ditch, I crawled on my hands and knees, head bent down, so the Wild Children wouldn’t notice me right away. They were, in fact, incredibly timid, which was one reason why so few had seen them. A big boy at Laugarnes School was supposed to have come across agirl and boy as they cuddled in a large cardboard box, dressed in skins like Stone Age people, with hay for a blanket and mattress. But the boy, who was called Fri?rik or possibly Ingvar, had quit school and moved, to Greniv?k or Grindav?k, and that’s why it was impossible to get hold of him and ask him more about it. With smiles for all in store ‘What new bank?’ seat company limping Isn’t it dreadfully polluted there? But that didn’t bother me. I was thinking about Marcia and the gray cop, my father’s gun and a new wardrobe for a new life. “Yes.” Within a day, all of the Emperor’s gentlemen have Shonagon’s response written on their fans. Shonagon becomes not only the confection of choice, but also a kind of legend at court. For her small witticism, her tiny act. But it’s along a web of such small elegances that Shonagon survives, since she is not beautiful, and not noble, and soon enough not young either. Every week she is more at risk of being sent away, and even her own intelligence, which is what saves her, also makes her vulnerable. She can’t stand the sight of her reflection, or the sight of other women in decline, and that revulsion also fuels her work. “I cannot stand a woman who wears sleeves of unequal width,” she says. And “When I make myself imagine what it is like to be one of those women who live at home… I am filled with scorn.” As a samurai’s judgment of a ronin makes psychological sense as someone catching sight of themselves in a lower state, Shonagon is never more rough than on figures who resemble her. In her list of “unsuitable things” she notes: “A woman who is well past her youth is pregnant and walks along panting.” Another passage describes a visit from a beggar nun who is asking for offerings from the altar — asking, basically, for food. Shonagon and the other court women are amused by the beggar nun, who dances and sings, but they are also repelled by her clothing and manners, which are repeatedly described as disgusting. The ladies prepare a package of food for the beggar nun, and then complain that she keeps coming around; we hear that the beggar’s voice is curiously refined; the fate of the beggar nun could easily be that of the women then at court, though this is never said. Instead, the beggar nun passage switches abruptly into a lengthy anecdote about all sorts of hopes and bets among the court ladies as to which mound of snow made in the castle courtyard will last the longest; none of the court ladies wins; Shonagon prepares a poem about the last of the snow; the empress has the snow swept away, ruining the game; Shonagon is more devastated by this than seems to make sense; but the empress has treated her court ladies in the same indulgent then indifferent way that the court ladies treated the beggar nun; Shonagon juxtaposes the scenes so that we see each person, even the empress, slipping in power, clinging to the tiny entertainments they can offer, their only currency. Taste culture helplessly tells another story. Don’t you want boots and rain gear? she asks worriedly, as if I’m going to sea without oars. They hadn’t merged after all. “But it’s raining!” Haintl shouted.. |