Stories from the Flannery O'Connor Award by Nancy Zafris

Author:Nancy Zafris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8203-4535-2
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2013-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Emily

Recites the same history to each new therapist, a narrative that has been reduced over time to formula, an incantation of sorts whose individual words mean nothing. “I was eleven or twelve,” she begins, “walking with a group of girls across an asphalt parking lot where I found the first one, a bright piece of broken glass, yellow and curved like a scythe, that a magpie might pick up, or a child. And that is the one that I used to draw the first red scream across my wrist. So they told their mothers that I had tried to commit suicide, as if anyone who wanted to kill herself would do that and laugh, though of course the cure was the same.

“And this is what I said to Michael the summer after he graduated from medical school. ‘What if you had bees inside of you? What if you had swallowed them somehow and they were carpenter bees working away inside the wooden you? What if you had soaked up poison like a sponge, so that it went flowing not through your veins but through the crooks and cavities of your flesh, all through your secret self? Would you try to get it out?’

“Because it’s not a matter of pain. There isn’t any. It is a relief. I can’t explain more than that. See? A crisscross of white lines. I can read them like a map.”

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