Читать книгу Feebleminded - Ariana Harwicz - Страница 5

I come from nowhere. The world is a cave, a stone heart

crushing you, a horizontal vertigo. The world is a moon slashed by black whips, by arrows and gunfire. How far must I dig before striking disdain, before my days burn. I could have been born with white eyes like this forest of stark pines, and yet I’m woken by volcanic ash on the garden clover. And yet my mother’s pulling out clumps of hair and throwing them on the fire. The day begins, I’m a baby and my mother’s in her armchair with her back to me, crying. I wake up as a girl. Outside, the lavender; inside, mother, her black hair in the embers. Cuttings of cloud everywhere, low and pasty, high and fleeting, dark and nondescript. Sitting on my clit I invent a life for myself in the clouds. I quiver, I shake, my fingers are my morphine and for that brief moment everything’s fine. My hand inside is a thousand times his face inside me. How hard can you possess a face, how hard can you shove a face into your sex. For that moment, the grass is grass and I can run through the meadows. Of all the ways of being, I ended up with this one. I recognise nobody, and when I’m really desperate I live anywhere. My mother’s stopped crying. I can already walk on my own, I can already speak, we already share clothes. I want him to come back against all odds, against all grief. I want his eyes to unearth me until I see the treetops. My head takes a turn. My head is in freefall, entrenched. Suddenly I have the voice of a dead woman. My face swollen like an addict in the bath, the epic body of a woman about to leap into the void. Suddenly I realise it’s midday. The blue eyes of the hares shine cold and I go outside to eat, but it’s already over. I begin to pray, or is it that I’m in love. I ask him to spit on me, to crush my face with a slap. I stare at him. I’m not crazy, just possessed, the answer’s always the same. Mum, I’m bored. My brain is moths in a jar, hanging themselves.