our life a time-shaped miracle —Brenda Hillman
I should have paid attention in geometry instead of staring at the yellow patch in Mrs. Reid’s snowy hair, wondering if a rodent had peed on her while she was sleeping.
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I barely know what a parabola is, but I want to climb inside the word, slide down its sloped walls, skateboarder in a drainpipe of echoes. Parabolic, so close to parable, a lesson to be learned or ignored.
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At nineteen I stayed on the eighth floor of the San Francisco YMCA, still a stranger in my own body, still trying to squeeze my curves into the square jeans I’d seen in glossy magazines. One morning in the group shower, another naked woman looked me up and down and said Giiirl, you sure got a nice shape.
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My husband needs eye surgery to correct an earlier procedure. Capsular haze, they call the film that makes the world look like a fogged bathroom mirror. The doctor lasers a hexagon opening in the implanted lens. His brain interprets it as a circle.
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Once in the school library, I saw Mrs. Reid emerge from the ladies’ room, polyblend skirt smashed into the back of her pantyhose revealing a white rhombus of underwear. I did not warn her before she walked out into the gauntlet of students.
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When my father-in-law was nearing ninety, he sat with my toddler son sorting plastic blocks into holes—red triangle into triangle hole, blue oval into oval hole. They were the same age, the decades atrophied by dementia. Frustrated, he snatched the pieces from my son’s chubby hands and snarled, I was playing first! My husband said Dad, he’s just a baby.
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My friend whose son disappeared raises butterflies with stained glass wings. Her living room is full of tiny geodesic domes where just-hatched broods hunch like rain-soaked hitchhikers. Her favorite is Dolly, named for Dolly Parton. Born with a bent wing, she will never fly. My friend lets her roam the house, feeds her melons and honey water. Sometimes she swears she’s lost and will search and search until she finds her atop a lampshade or an open book.
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In my father-in-law’s last days, his son became his father. Papa, Papa he would cry, time compressed. He would stroke the arc of his forehead and say Don’t worry to calm him. Don’t worry. A palimpsest of years and pronouns: he and his and him. Their, their. There, there.
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Disappeared isn’t the right word. My friend’s son was kidnapped by her ex before he could say Mama, before faces on milk cartons, before genealogy kits and hi-tech tracking. He would be almost fifty now, twice the age she was when she last held him.
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Picture Dolly’s mouth when she sings I will always love you-ooooo, the notes from her lungs stretching like the bubble from a child’s wand as he runs barefoot in grass.
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Light-shaped. Fear-shaped. Loss-shaped. Vowel-shaped.
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When my son was born, I buried my face into the fleshy origami of his neck and inhaled and inhaled and for the first time did not think about what came before or next, only the yeasty smell of his skin, the warm, doughy folds.
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This-shaped. Now-shaped. The shape of what we carry, what we hold.
Erin Murphy’s work has appeared in The Best of Brevity, Waxwing, Guesthouse, North American Review, and elsewhere. Her books include Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers (SUNY Press), winner of the anthology Gold Medal Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award. She teaches at Penn State Altoona.
