Petra by Shaena Lambert

Author:Shaena Lambert [Lambert, Shaena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

I didn’t want to unthaw at first. Bringing you back does hurt. It hurts the way my fingers once hurt after skiing, driving home in the back seat of our family car. How cold my hands were. Chilblains, my mother called them: “He has chilblains, Konrad.”

“And what am I to do with that?” was my father’s reply. “He ought to have kept his mittens from getting wet.” And my mother was silenced, and my fingers hurt so much I thought they would crack as the warmth came back into them.

Yet here I am, the morning after my pilgrimage to your flower-covered grave in Würzburg, hovering over my desk at home, about to try to bring you to life. I perch my coffee cup on the windowsill, where it won’t leave a ring, then I pause for a long time, staring at the wood grain of the desk surface.

I’m not going to let you be the corpse at the top of the stairs. This is what I say to myself, with some awareness that I’m being both grandiose and earnest. But still. There it is. You’ve been the corpse for too long. I’ve let your final identity define you, your murder turn you into a murder victim, as though that’s who you were, your meaning, your self. As a feminist, how you would have hated that! All your complexity, your laughter, your fears, reduced to a dead body in a bed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.