Hope Tied With Spiderwebs by Emily J. Lawrence
After the flood, the door opens to their last supper washed on the walls. Meatloaf shelved with books, bread caked to the T.V… A comb of yellow cake makes a hotel for the ants. The boy picks corn from the blinds while his mother walks to her bedroom and closes the door behind her.
She peels off her clothes and wrecks herself on the floor with the trees and telephone lines. She becomes dozens of bodies licking sand, pushed ashore by the pulse of the waters. Their burial service lies in the oil-black tape of a newsreel.
The boy kneels in soggy toilet paper in the bathroom. He drops a large ant into the toilet. Sprawling in the water, its legs row without form.
His mother’s limbs make sopping noises in the carpet. Hope is tied to her with spider webs. She sees it as a shattered light bulb by her head. She sees it as shards lying like ripped butterfly wings. She sees it as a dead fairy among the glass. Hope, a broken idea she knows she only half-believes. Yet, she sees it. Her arm beneath her, she rolls to her side; two maple leaves hold her naked backside with a drowning grip.
Meanwhile, the ant her son dropped in the toilet swims with God’s eye on it.
***
About the Author
Emily J. Lawrence
Born: Hale Center, Texas
Now Resides: Anderson, Indiana
Online: www.emilyjessannlawrence.blogspot.com
Bio: I’m a moleperson, digging inside myself for something worth preserving on the page. I want to write so that if the reader broke open the words, her hands would get sticky with the truth – and if she is willing to drink deeply, there’d be enough truth that she’d know something she hadn’t before. About me, and about herself. I endeavor to create sentences nobody has ever heard, metaphors never thought of, and characters who take over. My work is forthcoming in Relief: A Journal of Christian Expression and Luna Station Quarterly. I’m also the Assistant Editor for Prose Fiction at Literary Laundry.
***
image by Iamo.
-
burntfilament liked this
-
glossolaliaflash posted this
