A Lite Too Bright by Samuel Miller

Author:Samuel Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2018-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

6.

WHEN I RETURNED my eyes to Mara’s, there were tears beneath hers. “Shut up,” she said, wiping them. “It was really nice, okay? I’m allowed to be a little emotional.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Did you not like it?” Her voice still watery from the drops under her eyes.

“No, it’s, it’s really nice, but I . . . I don’t, I just don’t really notice anything right away, as far as, like, a clue is concerned—”

“Oh, shut up about that for a second!” She smacked me in the arm. “Just enjoy the poem! I mean, can you even imagine? Someone writing about you like that? That kind of love? Your grandmother was a lucky woman.”

I felt a lump in my throat. “Yeah, maybe.”

“‘Yeah, maybe’?”

“It’s just that he says, ‘I was eighteen and you a year older.’”

“So?”

“So he didn’t meet my grandmother until he was twenty-five.”

“Oh.”

“So this means there was another woman. That he was writing to.”

We sat in silence, the alarm clock ticking to let us know that it was now 4:00 a.m. Mara sat up and spoke properly.

“‘The best way to know God is to love many things.’”

“Oscar Wilde?”

“Close. Vincent van Gogh.”

“He cut off his own ear.”

“Okay, but—”

“For love—”

“Yes, but—”

“—of many things.”

Mara’s face was close to my own. Six inches of air separated us, both our cheeks against the shared pillow. The dim overhead light was painting the room yellow and her skin a soft gold. I’d never looked so closely into her face, but I realized now that it was all perfectly placed: her small eyebrows and small ears and small lips. Her eyes glowed green in their frame and flashed around the room. Down the bed, up to the ceiling, out the window, and finally resting on me, reaching directly into mine.

“Okay.” She leaned her face toward mine and kissed me, softly, quickly, before I could react. “Read it again.”

And so I read.

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