The Left Parenthesis by Muriel Villanueva

Author:Muriel Villanueva [Villanueva, Muriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Letter

It happened when we walked outside the church. It all started with, People are such pigs. On the sidewalk out front was your typical dumpster overflowing with dusty old furniture. We’d always complain when we’d see a dumpster but then we’d always run right up to it because we knew that, cast about among all the crap, we’d find strange yet conceivable pasts, and our own possible futures. We’d end up leaving everything there, of course, but the fiction of it all drew us in so deeply that we couldn’t help it. Inventing separate lives was one of the few delicious bugs we’d caught in the spider web between us, the only tooth in the cog—no, one of the two, the other was sex—that didn’t need to be polished, smashed, shaped, or unchained.

And there it was. A simple, wooden chest of drawers, old and dusty, tall and narrow, veneered and varnished, inlaid with marquetry. You asked, Have the termites gotten to it? And I made sure they hadn’t. I pulled on the top handle, the highest up of its eight or nine golden knobs, which gave it a rococo air. It looked like the first drawer was dragging the second one open with it, but what was really happening was that the two were actually connected, and they moved as one piece. They advanced like that, a united front budging toward me, and then I managed to separate the magnets holding them together with a shove, until the top lay flat, like a table, like a vanity. Inside—in a seven-by-four grid—twenty-eight compartments awaited me, all with corresponding golden handles, all empty. I want it, I thought.

Do you want it?, you asked, in blinding white. We’ll take it with us, you said. I looked at you like you were crazy, but you insisted. Seriously, I’ll grab it and drag it to the train, okay? It must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds or something like that. I thought it was a dumb idea. Now I wish I had a keepsake of that stupid thing you’d done, done for me. To stash my words away there.

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