The Mythmakers by Keziah Weir

Author:Keziah Weir
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

I ORDERED A cheap flip phone, the kind I’d had in high school. Without a tiny entertainment center in my pocket, I started carrying books everywhere I went, reading them at the Beanery and on park picnic benches and in the bathroom while I peed. During my sparse work shifts, Sawyer taught me to angle the stainless-steel pitcher so that the steamer on the espresso machine churned the milk into luxurious foam, and the nails of my pointer fingers darkened from scooping out grounds caught in the portafilters. (“This smell,” they said, banging the filter’s handle on the trash can to clear it, “will never not remind me of my mother’s breath, singing on Sunday mornings.”) After a visit to Randy’s to check on the state of the news—an industry, to hear him tell it, that he was single-handedly upholding—I started writing for him, short pieces about a town hall meeting for a proposed affordable housing complex near the playground and one on a little girl in 4-H whose pig, not yet full-grown, weighed 850 pounds. I’d missed having assignments, I realized, and the feeling of working and reworking sentences until they said what I meant them to. “I can’t pay you,” Randy told me when he first asked whether I was interested, “but can you even begin to fathom the exposure?”

When two weeks went by, and with them three visits canceled by Moira, I left a message on her machine saying I’d meet her at the farmers’ market, her weekly Saturday ritual. I biked there and sat down under a tree to read: Nicholson Baker’s ode to Updike, U and I, which Randy had recommended earlier in the week. I was wondering whether Updike could actually have described a vagina as being like a ballet slipper, when I glanced up and saw Moira hovering over the edible flower stall. “Chamomile is a sleep aid,” the teenage seller was telling her, though surely she knew already. Her rigid multicolored basket bulged with red-leaf lettuce and stone fruits. Blue sat beside her, dejected, her short back legs splayed to the side. I wished, not for the first time, that Moira and I had met under different circumstances, that I wanted nothing from her but her friendship. “You can make chamomile tea,” the kid continued, “but they’re also pretty on cakes. You can infuse it in honey, or—”

Moira noticed me as I approached. “You weren’t joking, then.” She pulled a few dollars from her wallet and exchanged them for a berry box of flower heads like tiny fried eggs.

“Did I do something wrong?” I followed her to a stall of breads and canned goods: mason jars filled with buttery lemon curd, raspberry jam, ginger marmalade, apple chutney. They glittered like gems in the sun. “Are you avoiding me?”

“Sal,” she said, perplexed. “I’ve told you that I’m preparing for the conference. I’m busy. You caught me in a lull earlier this summer. I don’t usually have time to sit around yakking about days gone by—it’s why the house is in the state that it’s in.

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