by Sara Veglahn
The weak morning sun brought no warmth. I felt a headache coming on. I was so tired. It was difficult to walk when I was so tired. I kept my steps and my breath even. I counted one, two, one, two. The wind whipped my hair around my face. I was blinded by hair.
My ladies watched me leave. They stood at the window in their nightclothes, each of them holding a hand to their mouths, holding a hand to their breasts. They seemed not to know if I would come back. I did not know.
Many were taken out. The bodies. Violent shaking. The effort of water to extinguish. The bodies must be cleansed and described. Take them to the nearest house, clean their mouths and noses of mucus and froth with a feather dipped in oil. The whole is procured, is stiff and cold and moved along. Pit of pulsations, pit of agitations. Breathe into these mouths, be very patient. It is necessary to be restored. Air into lungs. A cup of hot brandy. Common salt. A robust remedy is to introduce water back into the lungs of a living person. A drowned person may be a person with the cold of living. Sudden operations and speedy shocks, gently cover with nettles, cover with warm grains. Press down on the chest. Remove what is lodged there.
In the dream I grow smaller and flame-like. Smoke glistens as I walk and decide whether to move through another tunnel. The balustrades where my ladies stand are held up by heavy metal spikes. We are so isolated. No one can remember arriving but we all continue to wait, our arms crossed over our chests, and everything we need is here.
Walk into a photograph. Enter into a real that is no longer. A time of other time. The effort to place yourself there. This is different than the real world.
Someone hands her the glove she’s dropped. A flock of geese honk overhead. The traffic light switches green. Things are going forward, every car, every bird, every person, every dog, every gust of wind, every headache, heartache, sadness, every leaf, flower and insect, everything goes forward.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors who first published excerpts of this novel (sometimes in very different versions) in 1913: A Journal of Forms, Bombay Gin, Octopus, Sleeping Fish, Tarpaulin Sky, Thuggery & Grace, Trickhouse, and Web Conjunctions.
Enormous gratitude and special thanks to Laura Davenport, Laird Hunt, Bin Ramke, Selah Saterstrom, and Lesley Yalen for their invaluable suggestions and insights as this book went through its many drafts, and for their continued guidance, support, and friendship.
About the Author
Sara Veglahn is the author of three chapbooks, from The Ladies (a novel excerpt) (New Herring Press), Closed Histories (Noemi Press), and Another Random Heart (Letter Machine Editions). She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a PhD from the University of Denver. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014, text by Sara Veglahn.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5847-9
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the MCACA.
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