Description
The world is overwhelming enough – the world, and everything happening in it. Maybe that’s why a few members of Palm-Sized Press’ community wrote about water, exploring the strength of its push and pull: like Eleanor Scorah’s playful sea that, when you cannot go to it, comes to you and taps at the window – an invitation – but then carries you out to a numbing, empty blue. It’s the freezing darkness Jordana Belaiche’s protagonist lowers herself into, desperate to please, not knowing that already she is a swan. It’s home to Rose Segal’s “otters, slippery-bellied,” a place to feel lighter and remember, but also a seductive call, a lure to “quick, hidden sinkings in dark places.”
Ethel Maqeda’s Nomadlozi cannot “duck her head and cross the threshold” to tell Gogo she is leaving. While for Rose and Ethel’s protagonists love and sorrow linger together, Michael Gigandet’s protagonist ponders how innocence and cruelty can exist side by side, unable to claim the red carnations – fascination and love – he has sent in secret. And Bessie Flores Zaldívar’s characters lay in bed, “as far away from each other’s borders as possible,” unable or unwilling to speak of the sickening horror they’ve witnessed on late-night TV – their initial excitement, a glimmer of representation, seeing “a familiar face on TV, even if we had never seen the man before, only in the mirror” – sinking into cold, grotesque recognition: “This is just a bed, and we are just limbs. And to someone, just fertilizer.”
When we went inside, we longed like E A Fowler’s protagonist “For the world that was taken from us” – for “the richness of the earth, sunlight filtering through the undergrowth.” We remember going out, living normal days in the world with our friends and family. We feel it still like we know the touch of flowers, “the visceral familiarity of the damp stems” in our hands.
But now the world is not what it once was. As much as we’d like to go back to some kind of “normal,” we know that much of that “normal” means silence; it means death. We know the unspoken things. We have always known them. They sing like a finger on a wine glass rim, a song we could never ignore. We have sown the wood with memory; some trees grow crooked, some straight; the saplings rise, their “leaves like moth wings.” Christopher Baker’s narrator tells us, “the worst thing you can do to a memory is try to remember it. If it wants to be known, you’ll hear it.”
Featuring an interview with The Writing Cooperative and art by Naomi Pacifique.
