Today I was handed the obituaries in class. I took this as a bad sign.
We
were using the newspaper for a linguistics exercise, and I got death.
The girl next to me had a headline about incest. I was surrounded by
death and Deliverance*. I took this as an intensely bad sign.
Bad signs are everywhere. People tell me it's just because I look for them, but I don't, they're there. Take, for example, the fact that every day, no matter where I go, I have to drive straight through a graveyard. Every day. A graveyard.
I
started sweating in my linguistics class. The girl with the incest
headline seemed to suspect I have a phobia of mono-morphemic words.
Then
a coldness came over me as I had a particularly horrific thought:
what if I recognise a name?
I
scanned, feverishly, simultaneously compiling a mental list of the
most likely acquaintances to have died in the last week. I work with
elderly people.
But
no one had died. I only felt a weak connection to one of the names, a
Myrtle something or
other. I never knew Myrtle, but I felt that I could visualise her.
She was a lot like my grandma, she had the same transvestite-type
glasses.
I superimposed her onto old memories: there she was making me
“soggy toast” (butter soaked toast, little slices of
cholesterol), her poky unit brimming with papers and jewellery, the
radio sounding like someone walking on bubble-wrap. I was the saddest
I had ever been in a linguistics class.
So
I've decided to reincarnate her, or at least my
Myrtle, in my future
international best seller. And when I do so, the dedication will
read: In fond and fictitious memory of Myrtle.
*
see: Deliverance,
1972; starring: token inbred
banjo boy.
related posts.
the boab tree by charlotte guest
ripe for the picking by colleen yo
