John Biscello

It was a time in her life when she was not there, not inside herself or her life. And she was pregnant. Pregnant by the wrong man, so many wrong turns and wrong men, and this one, a mislaid night gathering force and momentum in the base of her spine, her small history measled with shivers and white spiders. Placing her hands in the soil and planting things helped, because then the earth became her body, the earth which never suffered an identity crisis. Hands moving through soil was balm and shelter. Another was reading. Entering the lives of others was like playing safely in the country of shadows. The novel she had read, written by a South Korean woman, mirrored her psychic landscape to a tee. In the novel, a woman was breaking apart. Quietly, quietly. No one heard a sound. Until the woman began demonstrating unusual and erratic behavior, a deviation from the norm, and then the woman, as an aberration, was somewhat heard and somewhat noticed. The woman’s ghost took center stage in her life, and she, practicing séance and exorcism all at once, became the body and template to a chronic haunting. A haunting whose night spilled forth into broad daylight. It was, according to many, disturbingly unnatural to see night insinuate itself into day. The woman’s husband was revolted by this grotesquerie. And, by proxy, revolted  by his wife, who had become the insistent bringer of night. The author lights the novel dimly, a muted sepia with hints of ash, and perfumes its air with dying roses. It is a novel that is both quiet and quietly devastating, a cortege of soft footfalls echoing in a long hallway. It was as if the woman in the novel was continually awakening from a dream, and with each inebriated awakening, with each round of stupor and revelation, a new fold emerged, a new edge spanning chrysalis. The novel broke off where the woman was beginning and ending.

By reading this novel, three times, the woman outside the novel took a census on melancholy and came up empty. Yet she kept on reaching, beyond herself. Where was I became where am I, which eventually morphed into I must return … and everything was set in motion. She would give birth to a daughter who would be raised fatherless (which wasn’t novel, many were raised fatherless, whether a father was in the picture or not), she would move back into herself, bloodying her hands along the way in smashing mirrors (but how beautiful the pools of blood darkening the slick lunar glaze)—she had been reflected back to herself as a woman trapped in a novel that no one was reading, and no one had written, but she was not that woman, that woman was trapped in a changeless fate, crystallized in fable and dirge … she was not that woman, she was herself outside a novel, herself inside life building itself to house her name, her slow and holy name committing ceremony to mother-tongues.