Saturday, April 29, 2023

the last book I ever read (Bliss Montage: Stories by Ling Ma, excerpt four)

from Bliss Montage: Stories by Ling Ma:

We looked down at the blood on my fingertips. I was sweating. This was because his pheromones has begun to secrete—just a bit, he couldn’t help it—and I was beginning to feel their effects. Cars honked outside. Women sat at sidewalk cafes with their financier boyfriends, eating late-night Nicoise salad. Only their hands looked old. The lake kept rolling. Weatherman Tom Skilling said it was going to storm that night. I wondered if I had closed the windows in my apartment. “I never gave you my heart,” you told me, two days before you got into that bike accident, breaking three ribs and your ancient, Germanic clavicles. If your body had been broken beyond repair, I would have paid them to pluck out those bones for me—me before all other: friends, family. It had been raining that day too. Whatever I felt, whatever this feeling was inside of me, there is no place for it. There is no place for it to go, and I would have to carry it around inside of me for a long time, so long that it would fossilize and become a part of me.



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