The Physics of Imaginary Objects (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize) Read Online Free
Author: Tina May Hall
dried by her own breath.
We will gestate plump happy babies in the bone cages of our pelvises.
When we lift our arms to the moon, there is a sound like branches scraping.
Lizzie stops a car with her bare hand, standing in the middle of the road over the body of the dead fox. The car just kisses the skin of her palm as it drifts to rest, like a boat easing into dock. Beneath the wishbone of her legs, the fox shudders. The moon falls right out of the sky. Fur springs up to cover wounds, its tail traces an “S” on the asphalt.
We chant Plath at school assemblies. “One year in every ten, peel off the napkin, I eat men, I eat men,” as we shake our pom poms and swivel our hips, left, right, all around, a racetrack, a snake eating its tail, the eternal omphalos. Our classmates love it, throw carnations at us, send us candy-grams and risqué text messages, dream of us all weekend long.
We will donate cells drawn from the doorknobs of our spines, the needle a key turning us.
At eight, Francie is the youngest of us. We feed her the choicest bits, the organ meats and the toenails, the nose cartilage. She is pretty as a stream, kind as a blizzard, graceful as a schooner a thousand feet underwater. She plays goalie on the hockey team and roars like a lion when she has a bad dream. She will not sleep alone; her fears are our fears. Her knuckles dig into our necks at night; her mouth touches ours when we least expect it. Little ghost, how often we have closed the door on you, how often you have tunneled through.
We will not stick our heads in ovens. We will not throw ourselves from bridges, nor weight our pockets, nor disturb our veins.
Nessa is the mean one, the one who deals with telemarketers and credit card bills. She never holds the door for anyone, puts the empty milk carton back in the fridge, tells people their pets are ugly and ill-behaved. In her spare time, she climbs, her feet wedged into the too-small shoes, her fingers caked with chalk. Once, she fell sixty feet and dangled there, hanging from the rope and a leaf-bladed piton, the last of three, the only one to hold. She broke all of her fingers that time, trying to find a way up or down. In the end, she swears she used her teeth to unclip the carabiners and release herself from the granite face into the air, where she floated, hollow as a feather, lightning cracking around her, knowing what was coming, the morphine and its weird itch, the feeling of her tibia stitching itself back together, the forever lumpiness of her ribs, the first drops of rain, heavy as lead on her skin.
We will grow up to be doctors and stockbrokers and video store clerks. We will wear our hair like crowns and snort through flared nostrils.
Martine is 115 years old and still flat-chested. In her cold, blue heart, three little men live. By night, they write love poems and keep her awake with their sighing. By day, they smoke cigarettes and discuss Nietzsche. Finally, they lick clean the last can of duck fat, cough up their black lungs, and wither into tiny skeletons, whose splintery outlines Martine can feel if she presses hard enough.
We pass each other notes in the hollows of our collarbones.
In the snow, Audrey is invisible. Her pink cheeks drain to white, her eyes pale, her skin turns waxy. She is the corpse-bride running after the soccer ball. She is the one who chirps, “We're late again,” hands around lunches in paper bags, and builds scale replicas of Chartres out of the ice she scrapes from the windshield. Inside, Audrey is always the first to be seen. She is all roses and oranges and zebra stripes. She jingles when she walks—it is her molars rattling.
There is no noose that can hold us.
Fiona writes romance novels on her cell phone during lunch hour. All of her heroines are named Fiona, and her heroes are prone to swooning. Her publisher pays her in pounds and thinks she is a little old grandmother in County Cork.
We will gestate plump happy babies in the bone cages of our pelvises.
When we lift our arms to the moon, there is a sound like branches scraping.
Lizzie stops a car with her bare hand, standing in the middle of the road over the body of the dead fox. The car just kisses the skin of her palm as it drifts to rest, like a boat easing into dock. Beneath the wishbone of her legs, the fox shudders. The moon falls right out of the sky. Fur springs up to cover wounds, its tail traces an “S” on the asphalt.
We chant Plath at school assemblies. “One year in every ten, peel off the napkin, I eat men, I eat men,” as we shake our pom poms and swivel our hips, left, right, all around, a racetrack, a snake eating its tail, the eternal omphalos. Our classmates love it, throw carnations at us, send us candy-grams and risqué text messages, dream of us all weekend long.
We will donate cells drawn from the doorknobs of our spines, the needle a key turning us.
At eight, Francie is the youngest of us. We feed her the choicest bits, the organ meats and the toenails, the nose cartilage. She is pretty as a stream, kind as a blizzard, graceful as a schooner a thousand feet underwater. She plays goalie on the hockey team and roars like a lion when she has a bad dream. She will not sleep alone; her fears are our fears. Her knuckles dig into our necks at night; her mouth touches ours when we least expect it. Little ghost, how often we have closed the door on you, how often you have tunneled through.
We will not stick our heads in ovens. We will not throw ourselves from bridges, nor weight our pockets, nor disturb our veins.
Nessa is the mean one, the one who deals with telemarketers and credit card bills. She never holds the door for anyone, puts the empty milk carton back in the fridge, tells people their pets are ugly and ill-behaved. In her spare time, she climbs, her feet wedged into the too-small shoes, her fingers caked with chalk. Once, she fell sixty feet and dangled there, hanging from the rope and a leaf-bladed piton, the last of three, the only one to hold. She broke all of her fingers that time, trying to find a way up or down. In the end, she swears she used her teeth to unclip the carabiners and release herself from the granite face into the air, where she floated, hollow as a feather, lightning cracking around her, knowing what was coming, the morphine and its weird itch, the feeling of her tibia stitching itself back together, the forever lumpiness of her ribs, the first drops of rain, heavy as lead on her skin.
We will grow up to be doctors and stockbrokers and video store clerks. We will wear our hair like crowns and snort through flared nostrils.
Martine is 115 years old and still flat-chested. In her cold, blue heart, three little men live. By night, they write love poems and keep her awake with their sighing. By day, they smoke cigarettes and discuss Nietzsche. Finally, they lick clean the last can of duck fat, cough up their black lungs, and wither into tiny skeletons, whose splintery outlines Martine can feel if she presses hard enough.
We pass each other notes in the hollows of our collarbones.
In the snow, Audrey is invisible. Her pink cheeks drain to white, her eyes pale, her skin turns waxy. She is the corpse-bride running after the soccer ball. She is the one who chirps, “We're late again,” hands around lunches in paper bags, and builds scale replicas of Chartres out of the ice she scrapes from the windshield. Inside, Audrey is always the first to be seen. She is all roses and oranges and zebra stripes. She jingles when she walks—it is her molars rattling.
There is no noose that can hold us.
Fiona writes romance novels on her cell phone during lunch hour. All of her heroines are named Fiona, and her heroes are prone to swooning. Her publisher pays her in pounds and thinks she is a little old grandmother in County Cork.
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