Parakeet: A Novel by Marie-Helene Bertino

Author:Marie-Helene Bertino [Marie-Helene Bertino]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374229450
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2020-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

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I craft emoji-rich responses to brunch invitations, remember paper towels, who likes artichokes, then remember deeper: I deliver hellos, concoct opportunities for his intelligence to shine. I am a Post-it. If you do these things while pocketing a part of yourself, if you complete the correct actions with the mental equivalent of a caveat, who is the person engaging in the action, and who is left behind? Fiancée, a location between two states of being. I am no longer what I was. Yet I am not quite. This is a hyphen of time, an antechamber.

The groom does not deserve to have a wife with a retreating soul. I do not deserve to be gripped in place each time I want to leap. I will go through with the wedding, our life. He will come home from school, I will come home from interviewing clients. We will watch television and grill slabs of chicken. It is not the chicken’s fault, or society’s, or the meticulous florist’s, or the groom’s, that I’ve led us all onto Long Island to witness the beginning of what everyone hopes will be a happy marriage. On what everyone hopes will be a clear day. Everyone has prayed to their ancestors for good weather. If there’s sun, the dead will be praised and, on the occasion of rain, blamed.

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