If I had to (today) pick an item to take to a desert island, it would be a coffee table book of art history (painting, sculpture, architecture) showing works (great and obscure) from all eras, which would be a catalog of beauty (for my eyes), but would also describe the succession of styles from what came before to where they did lead, because that might explain how my mind, which for a year was a torpid watercolor (bleeding formless across a fiber card that was illness) has leaped into the urgent, saturated squares and black borders of a comic book.
Category: 100 Words
Day 4: About Face
At fifty
I dreamed this mirror was a portal
To the all-girls dormitory bathroom on the second floor.
I could see the before-me,
Watch her with her shower slippers and plastic toiletry basket,
A portable drugstore shelf of cheap lotions
That smelled like mint or apple.
Mirror to trace, mirror to face.
Before-me would step out onto a square of rules
And rationales, and absolving religion.
She could not see fifty-me,
Could not conceive of living through the scheme.
Mirror to allow, mirror to choose.
Reflect the shine of your gloss, the fur of a false eyelash.
Mirror to promise.
Day 3: Tractor Girl
Jody’s friends feel sorry for her. (They never say so, but she knows.)
Sure, plowing’s hard work; it’s loud and cold, and she can’t feel her feet. But the twenty dollars per job will pay off her truck insurance, easy. She might even have enough extra by spring to afford the new lens for her telescope. (And —bonus— sometimes the old ladies give her cookies or candy with her pay).
This house, last on her list, is new. The girl in the window is no old lady. Delicate and curious, like a bird with glasses.
A smile. And a wave.
Day 2: Snow Day
The light in Cori’s bedroom is snow-day light, clean-yellow and buoyant, the kind of light that matches exactly with the taste of chicken noodle soup and the rumble of a plow.
It’s a girl, driving the tractor with the blade. Actually it’s the girl, the broad-shouldered stunner Cori’s only seen at assemblies, since they occupy opposite wings at school (Sam in Arts, Tractor Girl in STEM/Ag). Wool hat, red curls, soft brown leather gloves, breath puffing into clouds that rise and disappear.
Cori leaves the window to reach for her sketchbook, the one her art teacher will never see.
Day 1: Reacquainted
My first task is to find out what one hundred words looks like. My fingers are awkward on the keys. I’m backspacing, misspelling, because the home row is not my home anymore.
That’s a nice start. About three sentences for the first paragraph makes thirty-two words. That means three paragraphs of about that size would make one hundred words. A beginning, a middle, and an end.
I’ve just figured out what this project is about. It’s about getting reacquainted. Familiar with my computer and its sounds, it’s texture, its temperature, its weight on my lap. And also, reacquainted with me.
Cynthia Hamill 