FICTION - ISSUE FIVE
Fall in love with me, Hannah Silverman
ROBYN O'NEIL
* * *
nd 100 years later, I fell. Finally. This damp and weary body crashed into the Earth’s clay, and I crawled home. Home, which wasn’t a home anymore at all. Just grass surrounded by more grass. I saw nothing but an endless field of green.
My face down, the lush strands teasing my lips, I whispered through my war my woe; I muttered something about wanting to take you by the hand. Yes, you were my first thought. Not my mom, not my dad. You. I wanted to put your hand here on this soft green grass, place it next to mine and together we’d avoid the bowels of this bitter world. We. We’d be bound together on this base beneath the firmament I formerly called home. Me, now being wet, jobless, mythic and virgin.
You always wanted some sort of release. But even here, where I brought you long ago, where you thought you might be free, the buried tangles and tangles and tangles of our hidden home stole your hand from mine and away you went, you, the hand that never knew how to stop a fall.
Thinking of you and of this and still lying on my belly, I put my right hand through the grass, finger tips first. I wriggled them as far into the dirt as possible. Mainly I just felt soil, but after a bit, my pinky made contact with something that felt warmer than rock and dryer than a bug. I picked at the dirt around it until it was released to me. Out it came. A small yellow-brown bone.
Almost generic in its boneness. Either animal or human. As if there were some other option. I put it in between my thumb and pointer finger, rolled it back and forth for a while. It was about the size of my pinky, and delicate. Dead. I decided then and there, it was your middle finger. You greeted me after my 100-year sabbatical from Arbor Bridge Court, Houston, Texas, USA, Planet Earth with the bone of your middle finger? Really? You know what? I’ll take it. Thank you, my dear, sweet, pretty, silent, strong, and middle-fingerless Hannah Silverman. Thank you.
Robyn O’Neil is an artist and writer living on a balcony in Los Angeles, California.
