Status Updates From Swimming with Jonah

In her head she heard not a single name for this anatomy, not one word of vocabulary. Not for this body. There existed only the feel of...what remained of him...trying so hard to learn the real anatomy of death, a single death...trying to memorize the knees [&c.] of it...

Her map of her body had changed over semester like maps of So. America over the last 100 years. 1st a wide-open continent drawn only as an outline, hesitant towns speckled along the edge, hazy path of rivers wandering off into the unknown, an understandable belief in inexhaustible resources. Gradually changed to things charted/known, exact edges of rivers, fault lines, height/metallurgic composition of interior mnts.

Since her fall into Jonah's pool, colors seemed much more vivid, so saturated, especially yellow. Any yellow seemed to vibrate in her eyes; even the smallest patch almost made a noise, a high hum in her ears...A half-hidden flower, a pale band of yellow in the sunset, her highlighter. She came to a slow stop in front of each, mouth open. She wanted to be able to swallow the color, keep it in her lungs.

This was dancing where the dance alone had to fill her, where the movements had to be just right, where she could hear the sand shuffle beneath her feet and clearly see each awkward movement of her arms...it was only after a while, Jane began to really dance. Or it might be more accurate to say her body began to really dance, her new body, the thin one. Her exhaustion began to dance, her fear of exams.

And maybe it was the very silence in that room, the drip of the faucet, the muffled creeping movement, the rhythmic rasp of Trent's blade against the bone of the knee, maybe it was all this that made Jane uncertain about when she should move, at what point she should join the line.

The students considered it almost patriotic to drink more; with each drink you were affirming your lack of belief in the teachers, your contempt for the school. . . She knew what she was risking. She leaned toward it, half-hypnotized.

[The fire] devoured the whole night, burned its way into the eyes. . .it seemed more powerful than anything she'd ever really examined. Looking at it, into its think center of fury, hearing the breath of its destruction, she wondered what it would be like to be the fire, to be this brilliantly hypnotizing creature.

His anger wasn't like the other teachers' here, not calculated and timed. It was real . . . Still, she admired him, for loving the material, for caring about learning on its own, for assuming each of them would try as hard as they could simply because they should. She admired him for being contuslly surprised at their lack of knowledge and effort. She thought she and he were a lot alike.

In that two-hundred-foot-long walk to the nearest house, following the dark-face stranger, Jane learned about the extremes of her Mother's silence, all of its strength. The machinelike click click of her Mother's heels was stronger than Jane would ever be; that sound alone could crush her under its weight.

~In a way, she'd begun to realize that rather than being the broken point, the weak link, her dead ankle was the strongest point, the one aspect that could not change, not even if she wanted it to, the one point that would not stretch to accommodate...A hidden secret, an iatrogenic writing on her body, trying to communicate.~

A limp that put her stride off-balance, canted forward, as though she was just about to break into an eager trot toward you. It gave many people the feeling she liked them more than she did, that she liked life more than she did...She hid behind [her long, down the middle of her back, uncontestedly beautiful hair], washing it daily, hoping people would think of clean blond tresses and not of her.

He looks at his buddy & sees nothing there he recognizes, not the grasping hands, not the distorted face, certainly not the way the base of the chest caves in toward an unnatural diet. He is filled w/a fear that this surprising thing twisting in front of him might reach out to touch him, might call out his name...He understood for the first time how the world worked. It felt like someone passing a hand over his face.