Read More: A brief Q&A with Indrani Sengupta
the Narrative soliloquizes
forgive me. I variegated the tulips. I sliced the wedding train and swans commenced out from the eider. they ate some children and not others, and no one could tell why. forgive me I could not tell why. where there was bread, I did not allot butter. where there was land I planted great big men. in the likeness of you. they made forests and I wandered. forgive me. I wandered into forests without a fur to my name but so so many names upon my fur. I wandered calling where are my sacrificial boars but I have never once held a sacrificial boar. not lovingly. forgive me, I have sent you hawks and all three were spies. and oh have I have self-sampled. I held the egg in my mouth and didn’t bite down, not for you or anyone. forgive me. I have hated the woman whilst being the woman. each day I put on a new one of her and it is all the wrong size. forgive me. I have lost all your sacrificial boars. I have obversed your deadheading. now your garden is askew. I have riddled your cosmogony with oaths, boats, boars, dime-sized boreholes to fit my fingers through. now Time is no more than a shoe I wear or do not wear. forgive me. it was me. I took your wife. I led your daughters to the river.
the Narrative soliloquizes (2)
the women cannot meet, cannot constellate in hallways between the first act and the third, cannot follow each other into their private grotesques to loosen a pin, fit a tampon up the other’s nose. here there is no handkerchief. and beauty cannot know what thumbelina knows. what it means to hold the key and what it means to turn it. what it means to stay home. loneliness is part of it, the musculature of this world. you need to want to talk to animals. to be unmoored by fruit. to appear together in wolfbelly, one a goose and one a girl, past seems or the width of semaphore. you need to walk the same slipshod architecture of the road that is every road and be made blusteringly new. this is the theatre and you are the box, the symphony, the stage. but it is all for you. when I send you linens, chickens, a scalp of flaxen hair. the forepaws of a rabbit you know by name. this is the only fable and you the only girl it reels for.