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The lights blink out and I can't see her. When they flicker on again I am extinguished. The sun rises into nothingness. I step out my door and stamp my feet. Tomorrow it will snow. One flake will catch the wind and cross the world to melt in Maiduguri. Unremarkable Light That is: after it has fallen through the black tupelos and possumhaw, after it has been steeped in the pickerelweed 
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and bladderwort, after it sinks into our cypress swamp then drowns. Like what Miss Margaret once said about her Deaf Boys. Or the low croak of the Great Egret in the evening, which equates, in one sense, to dimming shadows moving at a sluggish pace beneath the water's surface. Which is why Miss Margaret imagines each mangled voice as unremarkable. We are the broken vessels. We are the cottonmouth asleep beside the epidendrum. "They are mercy's parasites," she said once as we stood beneath the Spanish moss.  |
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