Molly Fuller
1.
February
If I could use any words in my vocabulary, how would I describe sunlight on snow? The moon is friendly and we are able to avoid gravitational disasters—dislocated shoulders and cracked femurs as we slide, slide, slide on patches of oily ice.
***
My eyes hurt because I am away from the sun. My husband and I live kindly in this half-darkness.
I am struggling with all this diagonal thinking. I have too many thoughts.
***
I pad my hips with wool, breathing layered clouds in the air. I want to slip new skin over old bones, like mittens over chilled fingers. Sew up chapped edges of splits on a seam. The weight of the fat soles of my boots. The bleeding insides of my raw bitten cheeks. Everything tastes of salt.
***
Finally the ice is cracking. Against the white, my red hair is fire and my lungs burn. This pain reminds me that I will not be able to erase the days of damage. There is strength in this body beyond my understanding. Still, I participate in this testimony.
***
The air is painful. I am too far away from the sun. This month, we are in love with half of the cold. The light refracts and we turn around to look at the ice ribbons flying from gutters and windowsills, glittering. We can barely see the tracks we make with our sturdy boots. How do I describe solar radiation in a desert made from snow? My red hair is streaked with white and my fingertips are pins and needles. The clouds refuse to leave the earth. I turn my back on the wind from the river and laugh as I bend into the fog.
***
I want to apply new skin to old bones like skin grafts on burn wounds. View the diagonal slices of disease under a microscope. Forgotten bruises are suddenly troubling me. The confirmation of my own slipperiness brings my body back to the present. Everything goes flying. I am still here, I am still.
***
This shifting patchwork of human body has power beyond its own borders. I have many opinions. Heat, ice, cuts. The dangers of misunderstandings and fresh wounds are unavoidable. This is troubling: I will not be able to apologize for all past damages I have created in this one lonely day.
***
We watch changing light from the upstairs window, see a child’s lost glove, small as a matchbook down below. It is a gentle and protected inclination there for our nostalgic reminiscence. All of it. Everything. It is too much. Compression of cold air, stills of a memory, flashes, the way in which lovers hold hands together in rest. Sleep, sleep now, for there is tendency toward protection of the fragile.
***
I catch snowflakes on my gloved hands. I think I have never held anything so fleeting.
2.
March
My body is cold, hot, back to cold. I can’t stop my teeth from chattering, my hands flutter. A kind man takes my phone and inputs the calculations for me. I shake.
***
At the hospital, I hold my husband’s hand, answer the same six questions. I time it: a minute and twenty eight seconds of memory. He makes the same joke over and over. I try to laugh the ninth time. He asks me again and again, taking my hand and touching my cheek How are you? How are you, my love?
***
Amnesia. Transient. All signs are in French. I try to translate one word at time. I live one minute at a time. The doctors ask, pointing to me Do you know who this is? My husband answers My beautiful wife! Have you met my lovely wife? He tells them we got married last year. I shake my head. He tells them it is fall. That the ground is clear.
***
We have been married almost five years. Winter is blanketing the city, all is still and white.
***
I send a text to his children. I’m sorry this is a text. I write I can’t leave his side. I write I am afraid I will never find him again.
***
They take him for a test and I am allowed to go because he keeps asking Why am I here? The sign on the wall says TACO. I want to take a picture, but there is a time and place for everything. I tell him why we are here. They take him for the test. I try to eat a cookie. It tastes like dust.
***
I wake up and make sure he is breathing. Is he breathing? Am I breathing? The hours tick by and I listen to both of us breathe.
***
Three AM. I think I am dying. I want to wake up my friend and tell her I want to live. We joke about killing ourselves. Sometimes we are only kidding. I tell her later that something funny happened in the night but that I can’t remember. I tell her I am fine.
***
I don’t want to forget: You do not have the time that you think you do. I have written myself a note: I promise you, you do not have the time. I participate in this testimony: Compression of cold air, stills of memory.
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Molly Fuller is the author of the full-length collection For Girls Forged by Lightning: Prose & Other Poems (All Nations Press) and two chapbooks Tender the Body (Spare Change Press) and The Neighborhood Psycho Dreams of Love (Cutty Wren Press). Her work has appeared in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence, 100 Word Story, Blue Earth Review, Kestrel, Oklahoma Review, NANO Fiction and Pedestal Magazine. Fuller was a Finalist for the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently a doctoral candidate (ABD) in Literature at Kent State University.
