Daughter in Retrograde by Courtney Kersten

Author:Courtney Kersten
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780299317089
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

Fish

Your Reading For: February 14, 2013

It’s on the end cap. It’s always been there. Write down what you need—do not be so arrogant, little Ram, as to assume that you will always remember.

A dozen red roses stand lovely and oblivious on the dining room table before my mother and Bruce. She slumps against the chair, her hair greasy and matted, lipstick misplaced on her mouth. A plate of steak and baby red potatoes remain untouched and growing cold as she limply unwraps a heart-shaped chocolate praline in her lap.

Bruce sets a cellophane-wrapped box tied with a red ribbon before her.

Happy Valentine’s Day, baby.

Hands trembling, she reaches for the gift. She unties the ribbon and watches the cellophane unfold.

It’s a box.

A pink, metallic box.

She stares at Bruce.

He grabs the box, rips the top off, and turns it upside down. A perfume bottle shimmies out. He sets the bottle on the table as the overhead light illuminates the prismatic cap.

She stares at it.

The perfume seizes her.

This is not a test-tube sized bottle or something meant to last for six months of squirts or even made to last a year. This bottle is a joke, an impossible delusion, a gift in ignorance of the truth. And she knows it.

Bruce hands her a card and kisses her lips. As she turns away to shove her thumb under the envelope’s seal, her eyes transfix on that bottle with enough fragrance to last if she made it to sixty.

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