Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Author:Melissa Pritchard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8203-4193-4
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2011-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Shed of Grace

Graceless things, I told myself, are never loved.

A household fly lands upon threadlike legs which end in splayed, cabriole feet. No head to speak of, its oxblood eyes split by a puny spray of antennae. Even in patterns of flight, the fly remains graceless, a creature of annoyance.

I take sharp pleasure in slamming him into the desk top, in sweeping the dead pulp onto an envelope and removing it to the garbage. I should remember to ask Penelope’s husband, when he returns here, if he finds any charm in burying the dead, in tamping down their final bit of property with one of his several shovels.

My impulsive sister Penelope has witlessly married a gravedigger and moved to this frayed town near a man-made lake, a lake encircled by deteriorating summer resorts and dispirited families. Penelope used to work as a model for photographed greeting cards. Whenever I visited the gift shop near my apartment, I would search among the rows of cards. I might find Penelope in a rowboat, holding a lace parasol over her egg-shaped blonde head, moving across a misted lake. She might be sitting on the pier, her slender legs like softening stems in a vase of clouded water. I sometimes discovered her running down steep grassy slopes, holding out a fistful of wildflowers, her hair in a thick, sun-riddled braid. An office acquaintance of mine bought one of these cards, the rowboat one I believe, and I commented on what a maudlin card it was. Offended, he claimed it was for his grandfather who was in a nursing home and was cheered by pretty things.

Pretty things. On the second day of my visit Penelope stood in the creek, cold water shackled to her calves, her hair a brilliant hinge between her shoulders. Unselfconsciously she waded, even with her puffed-out belly, so much like a bloated fish, purple stretch marks climbing up from her pubic area like winter vines. I watched as one watches any perfect creature, with furtive absorption, which bore on its underside murmurs of self-reproach.

From the moment I arrived I was asked to run errands and to perform favors. Only three days after I arrived I was asked to carry a black lunch pail to the cemetery. I chose to walk the mile and a quarter distance as it was not much more than I was accustomed to. I remember turning back the screen door as if it were a worn, oversoft book page and going down the grassy path of the sidewalk, the lunch pail a black speck in the corner of my eye, a black weight, anvil-like, in my hand.

These earliest days of October have sapped the foliage, leaving it brittle, yet along the road in front of Penelope’s house stood several clumps of mauve-blooming phlox, ashen fungus furring the leaves, still pillaged by heavy-bodied insects. I passed beyond the shallow town, the single street with its church-owned thrift shop, boating shop, small grocery and drugstore; I passed the gas station and the bar, finally climbed the graveled incline.

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