My son today is anarcho-Marxist and looks towards a world of fractured power. On the way to school he laughed at the rationale behind a thin blue line; a line he’s certain will and should self-implode. I feel like there’s an even thinner line between how people see me and what’s happening inside; maybe it’s the color of a two-way mirror. On one side there used to be a bougie white woman with bohemian tendencies, a well-read Northeastern WASP, and on the other was sharp teeth, madness, the unpredictable danger of an inappropriate turn of phrase; blood-crusted fingernails; cake for breakfast. Then someone flipped a switch, maybe me, and the line separated instead an inner composed sophisticate and an exterior mess, a person who has lost track of how to wear her face. Strange fluids burbling out of unnatural orifices, oops! Yet when I turn to plug one, chunks of flesh fall away, revealing open tombs of dead promises and unfinished thoughts. But that’s just right now; in a few hours the key will be properly in the ignition, engine on, and I’ll pick up my kid; he’ll complain about plutocracy and play me bad punk from his phone, gleeful, knowing or not knowing that his driver is an unreliable narrator of the short ride home.
by Abigail King
Abigail King lives, writes, and eats radicchio in Austin, Texas.
