K.A.Thomas

Fall River, August 4th 1892 "And when she saw what she had done she gave her father forty-one." It must have been the August heat, its steaming iron sky pressing you for months that year. Calculations later concur: it is the year of the dragon — inspiring every searing breath. Heat coils & howls, singes your lungs, & dense air perspires, expands, like serge suits bloated by scalding water, & monthly flood of blood cramps your frame, groans hormonal, inflammatory elegies to your body burning infertile eggs & the sidewalk’s infernal, hot enough to poach soles right through the shoe. And you cannot breathe. You are suffocating in yards of over-starched cotton drawn over long drawers & woolen stockings, a silk chemise & whalebone corset —  your carcass trussed & dressed made ready for the oven of your father’s baking house —  snapped under the thumb & nail of the coffin king, Procrustean in his attempts to fit them in their last narrow bed —  one size fits all — rumors of limbs lopped or bent to accommodate. You are the good girl, still daddy’s spinster princess. It is 1892 & you are thirty-two & just back from Italy where girls must be at least twelve to marry legally. And you just spent this trying morning trying not to inhale fatal phosphorus from newly booked safety matches. And it is not safe. It is 11:15 am on August the 4th, 1892; there is a Depression going on. Your family lies dormant, glutted on mutton. You are dreaming over a scorching hearthstone sweating over freshly split logs & a demon-lover; the grave & cryptic man invented: whose hands ignite your flesh each night whose heels strike sparks in humid darkness, inciting ruts in asphalt roadbeds. Cleaving to this image, you go upstairs to wake your parents.

Copyright © 2000 K.A.Thomas All Rights Reserved