L Is for Lion by Lanzillotto Annie Rachele

Author:Lanzillotto, Annie Rachele. [Lanzillotto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438445274
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

Magnetic Lace

BROWN UNIVERSITY, PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

I propped my bicycle up against the base of the Marcus Aurelius statue in Lincoln Field, climbed up from the pedal to the crossbar to the pedestal, and grabbed the bronze horse's hind leg to pull myself up. The horse had big bronze balls. I sat there, underneath him, and watched the birds landing on the green, and the wind trembling the trees. I leaned back to watch the clouds overhead. I watched the sky until sunset. I knew death served at least one purpose: God needed painters to paint the sunset. I watched the sunset and guessed what colors my friends would paint with, bold orange and stripes of pink, or gentle pastels. I imagined the sunset I would paint when I died. Orange, definitely orange. Stabs of hot pink. One burning red sun. White stripes of clouds. A purple and blue afterglow. I will use a million colors crazily, colors you don't think you can see in a sky, colors you're used to seeing at your feet. I went through colors in my mind. Blue is everywhere. We are surrounded by blue. What a blessed color is blue: the sky, the oceans, my mother's eyes. I wanted to climb the bronze horse and see Marcus Aurelius eye to eye, but I couldn't get up that high. I hung by my fingertips off the pedestal, jumped down to the green, and rode down the hill to the bottom of Lincoln Field. There was Dr. James Head's office, a first-floor corner room with lots of windows. I walked behind the bushes to peer in the windows to see if Dr. Head was in. I knocked on the window. He looked up from his computer and smiled, “Lanz,” he said, and waved me in.

Dr. Head's office was filled with maps and globes of Venus, the moon, Mars, and hundreds of beer bottles from all over the world. Just sitting in his office was a learning experience. He told me his job as a professor was like this: “You students are all sharks, and my job is to bloody the waters.” He'd pull something off a shelf and hand it to me, like an iconic blue and white New York City coffee cup with the Greek key design, but this particular cup had been shrunken to an inch high. When I couldn't guess what happened to it, he told me with a sense of amazement, “Its state is due to the pressure at the bottom of the ocean, it was outside a submarine.” Dr. Head made grand gifts to me, like that cup, introduced me to astronauts, and visiting Russian scientists. I told him how my father drove me to the Armed Forces recruiter in Providence, and how convinced I was that the military was a place where I could reach my potential, you know “Be All You Can Be” and fly planes. I wanted to be in the sky. I pictured myself waking up and doing push-ups.

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