Issue Thirteen
A man and a woman stand on the stairs and he becomes angry. The bricking of the walls is suffocating in the day but always looks black in the night, someone has left their gloves in the apartment entrance. There is a new god on the throne today. There is, up the stairs, a child listening to the sound of a street musician playing a requiem on violin that the child only recognizes as a lullaby. Then it is a lullaby. Voices are raised, and it is a lullaby of boots on skin, a solar catastrophe on a throne, as there is today, the child hears her mother come back home. Someone is choking on old water, someone is taking off their coat. Mama? She, the woman from the stair, knows that a hero is simply a glorified existence and an existence is alone. A dress is pulled up above her engorged stomach, next to the child’s bed, to show the deep blue shadows of where fists go on dead skin. The woman leaves, feeling blood between her legs, feeling a presence in her bed. The child decides to kill her father, but it is cholera, and it is the way that lovers move in twos, that takes him before she has the chance.
“The Fugue of la Voisin” up in Issue Thirteen of Shirley Magazine today
