The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers

Author:Nona Caspers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781946448187
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2018-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

A PAIR OF SUNFISH

There were days in my new apartment, during the first months after my lover Michelle died, when time was elastic. I would wake up in the middle of the night and think it was morning, or I would wake up in the morning and the room would be dark.

Once, I woke at midnight and what appeared to be the afternoon sun already lay across the room. The building and streets and alley were quiet. I got out of bed and walked across the bedroom into the living room. The light was a swath of yellow fabric unfurled across the writing table, gray carpet, and small sofa. I walked in and out of the warmth, the heat rolling over me. My hand in the light glowed and reminded me of a sunfish. I stood there swimming my hand through the light, then both hands, a pair of sunfish in the sun lake.

There was a line in my palm I had never noticed before. A deep wrinkle that started at my wrist and went straight up to the padding at the bottom of my middle finger; it cut through the life line and the heart line. I looked at the other palm: the line was there, but instead of going straight up to the middle finger, the new line on this palm curved toward my pinky. I sat on the floor, my upper body and head in the light and my legs outside the light, and contemplated this arrival. Was I dreaming? I didn’t know.

I went about my night as if it were afternoon. I sat at my writing table and wrote on my thesis, describing how the use of place in x differed from the use of place in y. I talked about how place and time could not be split one from the other, time being an inextricable element of place and place of time. For humans, I concluded in an overly long sentence, time was the lung or skin of place. Though as soon as I wrote that down I thought, no, time was more like oxygen and place breathes it. I was beginning to get lost in my own ideas, which kept shifting as I looked back on them or forward into the blank space on the page at the tip of my pen. Did time precede place or did time need a place to spread into before it could exist?

When I was finished writing about place, I got up and went into the kitchen, and even though the kitchen clock told me it was three o’clock in the morning, the light in the room said early evening. I began making supper. I opened a bag of split peas and added water to a pot. I washed and cut a zucchini, a red onion, a carrot, and a potato. The apartment building was quiet, and I could feel the other inhabitants sleeping; I could feel the sleepiness of the building and the sleepiness of the streets and the City, though I was wide awake and ready to eat supper.

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