(Parentheses) Review

In the block next door to me lives a man with scars running up from either side of his mouth, a violently extended smile. His top-floor flat was once home to a pack of black and white cats he got as kittens, or perhaps bred, but once the cats became old or bold enough, they escaped from their balcony, down to freedom in the concrete streets of East London below. 

When I was 12, or 13 or 14 I had a Joan Baez record. I had about 20-30 records then in my collection. Some were given to me, from my grandfather, and maybe my cousin, who I considered an expert of music at that time (she was a Beatles fan), and some I bought with my own  money, earned from dog sitting, baby sitting and handing out flyers for a nearby second hand store, that paid me too little to stand for hours in the street …

Shortly after Hurricane Melissa, my aunt calls to tell me everyone’s roof caved in. The magnitude of this causes me to elide grammar in my retelling: surely I should write everyone’s roof has caved in, roof should likely be in its plural ‘roofs’, the tense of the sentence is both present and past. And of course it wasn’t necessarily ‘everyone’; she was referring to her own home …

I’ve been accused of being insincere. In March, I had a Paris love affair. The shooting of Braquâge (une évasion) caused Jacques Rivette to have a nervous breakdown. Shot in June 1975, but only released in 1978, the film, a western set in Paris about a jewel thief and her sales girl accomplice whose title combines the words braquage (robbery) and âge (age), was intended to be the third filmed and fifth released in a quintology of films Rivette called Scènes de la Vie Parallèle …

Votives, archives, storehouses, bric-a-brac shelves, the magnetic side of my boiler, mantlepieces, picture galleries, display cases, messy drawers, white IKEA Kallaxs and shelving units from Habitat, pinboards, Pinterest, the area of skin that starts under my right arm and goes down to my knees, Encyclopedia Madonnica, hard-drives with the orange rubber lifejackets, a jeweller’s well-worn fingers

Taking on a lecture titled ‘Why I Write’, Lydia Davis struggles with the why and decides instead to focus on the how. Into the Weeds, a book edited from this lecture, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, started by Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell and administered by Yale University, opens with the initial invitation.

I know people know what death looks like and I knew what it looked like before I saw how my mother wore it but there was no way for me to know what she would look like dead until she had died which feels unfair.

The winter wind hitting your exposed skin feels sore; the two collide to create a fissure on the plain of your neck like brittle land. Your hands are red and swollen, ankles charred from the chill.