Sam Collier – Guernica

Gravity

Bite a poisoned handkerchief, and shut your eyes. A girlhood dream is unprofitable. Still, she would sell a castle for the price of oats, if she could buy a certain story for the papers; three times the smoky war has kissed her hand and galloped off with somebody she loved. She thirsts for news. But she has no castle, and the newsmongers keep peddling reports of rising columns, percentages, and lavish speech. Nightly, when the television flares with the skeletons of men and animals, she finds herself wanting to tear meat with her fingers, to pinch and vex the muscles of an unfamiliar body, to crunch a wishbone in her jaw. Sometimes in the hallway of the house she’ll glimpse a shadow of the cat who died years ago. He seems fatter, like a star that bloats in death, before collapsing on itself. The heft of distant suns cannot be measured, there being no scale large enough. But children know. They do. And they feel, peering up on windy nights, not a weight but a pull, a different kind of gravity, an ache. Listen: Your browser does not support the audio element.Click here for the mp3. Feature Photo by Eddie Welker.