V Garmon Koski September 2024
It creeps up, trailing unseen, in the most mundane ways. The wind switches direction. I’ve begun to sense a change, a hard seed on the back of my tongue. A young basswood tree has grown tall enough to spill its round glossy leaves over my fence. Climbing hills burns richly, my legs only steady, fluid machinery beneath me. I fall asleep each night without medication, and I rise a few minutes earlier each day. The staccato tapping of a cane does not precede me from far down hallways. Music sounds full and deep, fills in the wound at the base of my spine, pulls me hard and secure down into teeming reality. I laugh, rough and braying, about lots of things that writhed uneasily inside me before. People have stopped twisting their faces downward into pity when I come around. I am not the gray, unremarkable wad of pain that rides on my back. I am a mammal, cunning and ruthless, driven only by the passive understanding that at all costs, I must survive. At a pizza place in East Cobb, my dad remarks that I don’t walk with a limp anymore. It’s the first time I’ve noticed it myself.
V Garmon Koski is an Atlanta-born housewife and writer, with a penchant for making and rating soups. She isn't really sure how she got here. Her work appears in Maudlin House, Roi Faineant, Rejection Letters, and others. You can find her on Twitter at @veanimator.
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