zhang180

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She thinks I will have more paper, please
She thinks I am ELIZABETH
It must have been like being given back your
tongue after you thought it had been stilled
foreverIt was a gift of
herself, of ELIZABETHEven from those incredibly
brave first drawings, she must have understood
what was happeningThe best gifts – and the
worst – always are
4 – Friends with Benefits
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i
On New Year’s afternoon, I woke from a brief but
refreshing nap thinking of a certain kind of shell
- the orangey kind with white specklesI don’t
know if I dreamed about it or not, but I wanted
oneI was ready to start experimenting with
paints, and I thought one of those orange shells
would be just the thing to plop down in the middle
of a Gulf of Mexico sunset
I began prospecting southward along the beach,
accompanied only by my shadow and two or three
dozen of the tiny birds – Ilse called them peeps -
that prospect endlessly for food at the edge of
the waterFarther out, pelicans cruised, then
folded their wings and dropped like stonesI
wasn’t thinking of exercise that afternoon, I
wasn’t monitoring the pain in my hip, and I wasn’t
counting stepsI wasn’t thinking of anything,
really; my mind was gliding like the pelicans
before they spotted dinner in the caldo largo
below themConsequently, when I finally spotted
the kind of shell I wanted and looked back, I was
stunned at how small Big Pink had become
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I stood bouncing the orange shell up and down in
my hand, all at once feeling the broken-glass
throb in my hipIt started there and went pulsing
all the way down my legYet the tracks I saw
stretching back toward my house hardly dragged at
allIt occurred to me then that I’d been babying
myself – maybe a little, maybe quite a lotMe and
my stupid little Numbers GameToday I had
forgotten about giving myself an anxious miniphysical
every five minutes or soLike any normal personI could baby myself going back,
stopping every now and then to do one of Kathi
Green’s side-stretches, which hurt like hell and
didn’t seem to do much of anything else, or I
could just walkLike any normal unhurt person
I decided to go with thatBut before I started, I
glanced over my shoulder and saw a striped beach
chair a ways farther so