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Dear Wigleaf,
Hope you and yours are well.
I write from New York where every angle has been cleared, plotted, and
placed by human hands. I think about how, even on gauzy nights walking to
Walgreens or to the local market that doesn't put price stickers on their
goods, I can't hear insects gossiping. I think of summers in Kansas in my
grandparents' grass, astonished by the evening around me filled with
lightning bugs pretending to be stars. I think about how I would catch one
and bring it in cupped hands to my father or mother or whoever would
participate in my wonder. I think about how sometimes I opened my hands to
find the liquid light smeared on my palm. I think about how the road along
my childhood house curved to meet railroad tracks and how those tracks had
fire ant hills boiling along them, how I gambled on the length of stick to
stir them up just because I was young and flirting with menace.
Sometimes I wonder, and almost fear, whether on the way to heaven we meet
all the things we have harmed — the bees bothered into stinging, the fire
ants pulled biting from my ankle like an electric staple, the lightning bugs
with broken bulbs, my own small, six-legged heart.
Forgive me, everything. For everything.
Very truly yours,
Roblin
- - -
Read RM's story.
W i g l e a f
10-02-23
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