Fruiting Bodies by Fruiting Bodies (retail) (epub)

Author:Fruiting Bodies (retail) (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Is This You?

You know it’s going to be a bad day when you get up and find yourself already in the kitchen, seated at the table and eating Cheerios. The you at the kitchen table is thirteen, and she’s eating the Cheerios straight out of the box by the fistful. Try to call her Maura. You are also Maura. Two people can have the same name, but two people cannot be the same person. A few Cheerios fall from Maura’s hand and roll pinwheels across the tile. You tap your foot.

Maura doesn’t look up, hiding behind the grease slick of her hair. Your hygiene at thirteen was awful—how often did you shower? Once a week? “Are you going to clean up after yourself?”

She rolls her eyes, slides off her chair, and swipes the mess up with a napkin. “Good morning.”

If Maura is here it means your mother has published an essay. You ask Maura where it is this time, but she ignores you, licks her fingers, and then reaches back into the cereal box. The teenage iterations of you are the worst, though thirteen is not as bad as the years that followed it; angst-ridden, messy, uncooperative. There’s a minor foam of acne bubbling on Maura’s left cheek.

You turn to the counter to make your coffee. Looking at her is like looking at a photograph of yourself taken too long ago to remember the circumstances of it, recognizing yourself there, but being unable to recall ever inhabiting that moment. That’s more words than you ever put to a photograph of yourself, but of course it’s different when the uncanny feeling is made flesh, taking up room and air. Picking at her cuticles like you still pick at your cuticles, though you have the self-control now to stop before they bleed. She, tugging a pale strip of skin between her front teeth, autocannibalistic, does not. It’s a kind of emotional headache, a knot of buzzing tightness forming at the base of your throat where your collarbones notch. You put your eyes back on the coffee grounds.

“I don’t have time for this today,” you tell her. “You’re going to have to take the train to Mom’s.”

“I hate the train.”

“I know.” You put your coffee down, and go and get a banana. There’s nothing else breakfasty around, you’ve been putting off shopping. The Cheerios aren’t looking appealing.

“What do you have to do anyway?”

“Work. It’s Thursday.” That might be a real headache building in addition to the existential one; stress. It’s only seven-fifteen. You’re not late yet, though you are starting to fall behind, standing in the doorway half-dressed and without your hair brushed.

Maura raises a two-finger gun to her forehead, mimes pulling the trigger. “That’s not funny,” you reprimand her. It just sort of feels like you should.

* * *

It took you until Maura’s third reprise in your life to realize that she came from your mother and not from some glitch in your own connection with reality. Your mother was publishing infrequently back then; you’ve heard it takes a while to get a leg up in publishing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.