Tag: stephanie crawley

I stopped because the world kept happening around me. I dreamed of my sister on a far-off telephone, me trapped in a car that would move but not motor on. I dreamed of my mother clipped and distant and the texture of rain on a windshield and a message sent out of the wrong atmosphere.

I dreamed I could write a story that was all beginning, and the beginning was an emerging out of nothing, a gradual brightening, or darkening, space condensed into a point that opens.

In Chris’ dream I am his wife and he builds us a house with mud and he is dying but okay about it. In the terrible novel I realize a suicide is coming and want to stop reading but can’t. A woman is punished with violence and I want to scream.

Everyone loves stories where women are made to live their whole lives underground. Everyone loves stories where women get, in the end, what they deserve. It’s funny or it isn’t the obviousness of the train and its clockwork precision, as if what’s funny about women is the way they are always having to stop to cry and make themselves late.

Outside, the sound of a piston, air pressure, a large piece of machinery. A forklift drives down the street carrying what looks like a large window.— 

—Stephanie Cawley, from My Heart But Not My Heart