Tell her you’ll do anything to keep her.
The red dress twisted under her is the last of
her mother’s history. You want to keep her
always. Every noon you carry her from the house
to the field, her one perfect foot dwarfed by the
other. On the northern slopes townspeople are
grazing. Their bitter grass is that taste filming
the lines of your rooms, the floor swept with a
bundle of straw. Weeks ago the rumpled sheep
were eaten. Girls walked off to other towns
where their clothes bloom in the rain. The
blind beggar’s eyes are vesseled white, and
haywagons groaning over stone smell of swallows.
The girl pulls an oatcake from her boot. Let
us eat, she says. And sleep before the owls come.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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