Creature Read Free Page B

wearing headphones.
    I will force this into a story. I got cold when I thought this. I started shivering. I was in a place where I couldn’t control the temperature, which upset me. I wanted to be comfortable so I could focus.
    I moved into a sunnier part of the library and continued reading. Right away I was able to see the specter of the story. Now I am moving through literature, I thought. I would like to move through something abject. Like when you touch something warm and you get warmer. But, I am abject myself. I don’t need to touch another to feel this way. I possess it inside, like a little clamshell.
    I was tempted to move in a way that would make the others in the library think of me strangely, the way I had moved when I was in the gallery.
    I looked at my hand. How can I re-imagine you?
    This can not be a portrait. The page is the size of a mirror, but that doesn’t mean anything. Once I looked at my arm and wanted to write about that. Write about the arm when the whole body is being abused.
    Tonight, the night I am writing this, I am sick and tender. My body is warm and it hurts my throat to swallow.
    Not knowing what is good for anyone, I start writing.
    I want to make another costume for myself. I want to perform another thing on a wall, like truth, but I don’t know what truth looks like—I haven’t experienced it yet.
    I remember a moment in winter when snow was stuck to the grass, intimately. One light thing moved through something that was solid, darker. In that moment, someone had asked me to help host a festival of literature.
    “Yes,” I had said.
    “It will be about memory.”
    I was admiring what was underfoot.

THE BEAK OF A BIRD

Sometimes I forget the names of books, the ones I like the most. My memory is bad, and I’m also ashamed of what I think about literature—I can only open up to a few people in this way. I work in a bookstore, so this isn’t a good quality.
    After work, I walk home in the dark. Sometimes on the way I stop at a gourmet food shop, knowing I don’t belong there, and yet feeling that I do. I buy a small jar of something, like pumpkin butter, and I have a friend, a cousin, who likes to come over after she’s finished working at the hotel. She’s young and so working at the hotel doesn’t bother her. I am already too old to be able to work at a hotel, though I did work at one once, and I am only a few years older than her. We come from a long line of women who have worked in hotels.
    I clean my apartment until it’s immaculate so that it feels like a good place to be, a kind of nest for when my cousin comes to visit. A place safe from this rich city, though we play at a certain kind of richness. Once I slapped my cousin so hard she fell down. It was because of something that had happened in our family, and I know now I was wrong. She forgave me. In our family we are good at that.
    When I was a child I thought no one had experienced the world like I had. I would sit next to the ocean and think, no one knows the ocean like I do. No one has ever been this close to it. I didn’t actually say these things in my mind, I just knew them to be true. My connection to the ocean; my walk through the tropical night. If I walked long enough I came to farmland.
    One night when I was working in the bookstore my cousin called to tell me she had hurt herself at the hotel.
    “What happened?” I asked.
    “I cut myself with a pair of scissors. One of the customers left them under a towel on the bathroom floor. I didn’t know the scissors were there. Now my hand won’t stop bleeding.”
    “Clarice, tell your manager. Don’t just let your hand bleed.”
    “Okay, I’ll tell him.”
    “There must be a first aid kit at the hotel.”
    “There is. I’ve seen it. Once I had to get a band aid for someone.”
    “How bad is your hand?”
    “Not that bad. It just startled me. I didn’t know I was going to get cut when I picked up the towel.”
    “Should I come get you?”
    “When