FIRST DIBS/LAST WRIGHTS: Chapter Two*
DIBS'S GRANDMOTHER FACES THE PROSPECT OF RAISING ANOTHER TWO-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER ONCE DIB'S MOTHER AND FATHER DIE IN THEIR CAR CRASH. AND THEN: THAT KNOCK AT THE DOOR ...
(Above: “Cat Catching a Bird” by Pablo Picasso. 1939. Musée Picasso. Paris.)
[All subscribers - free and paid - can read CHAPTER ONE here. *Except for the introductory paragraphs, each subsequent chapter will be for paid subscribers.]
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Poem 1 of Lucille Clifton’s “brothers” which she parenthetically describes as “(being a conversation in eight poems between an aged Lucifer and God, though only Lucifer is heard. The time is long after.)”
1
invitation
come coil with me
here in creation’s bed
among the twigs and ribbons
of the past. i have grown old
remembering the garden,
the hum of the great cats
moving into language, the sweet
fume of the man’s rib
as it rose up and began to walk.
it was all glory then,
the winged creatures leaping
like angels, the oceans claiming
their own. let us rest here a time
like two old brothers
who watched it happen and wondered
what it meant.
CHAPTER TWO
Rosemary looked at the two-year-old child, or chose to look at her. For the last couple of weeks after the car accident that killed the child’s parents, Rosemary’s daughter and son-in-law, she hadn’t been able to look directly at the defiantly mute little girl who seemed to have lost all facility for the wonder that words were beginning to have for her. Even when sitting at the kitchen table alone with her trying to get her to eat, she only peripherally would notice if the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which were the only things Rosemary could make herself conjure for the child for days, were being eaten by the tiny creature attached to the grubby nasty little hands that were grabbing them to stuff them into her mouth since Rosemary also hadn’t been able to focus on keeping either of them, her or the child, clean enough. It was all she could do to wipe the batter of feces from the child’s bottom and put a new pair of pants on her when needed and it was that - this - the smell now of both of them combined, the too deeply human smell, that was rousing her from her stupor which had caused her to avert her gaze from everything but the grief that had grabbed her with its own grubby nasty hands to stuff her into its own craw when she had first heard the news of the crash which seemed to stab her with how stunned she was by it and, with that stab, embedded the stupor she just couldn’t shake.
Until, that is, this moment.
Enough, she thought, when she looked down at her filthy fingernails which she had always kept clean of dirt no matter how many hours she gardened or scavenged down on the muddy banks of the Hudson River for the talismans that others saw as debris. But this wasn’t only dirt, she realized, this was also the child’s shit caked beneath them, the proof that she had not died along with her parents, that continued need to defecate what finally, Rosemary realized, defines us as the denizens of the living. That’s it, she thought, that’s what the opposite of dying is: shitting. Just keep doing that one elemental thing - or surrendering to the need to clean it from a helpless child’s ass - and you dammit know you’re alive. “Deborah,” she whispered to the child, “we’re alive. I guess we are … alive …” Rosemary felt a smile fumbling finally to form on her face, even that simple affirmation redolent of the child’s reliance on her.
And then came the knock that changed both their lives.