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Closest Without Going Over by Annie DeWitt
Fandoms: Original Work
This work isn't hosted on the Archive so this blurb might not be complete or accurate.
02 Sep 2024
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"That summer I’d begun to have the feeling I was disappearing. I’d had this feeling once when I was in college. A professor had asked me to start off a workshop with comments on a young woman’s story about Florida. The story ended with the woman’s dog drowning. Her retriever descended paw-over-paw to the bottom of her in-ground pool. The dog’s body was discovered by her husband the next morning. The story was always punctuated by lines like: “Summer scratched her head and the ships went out to bay.” I had had enough stories about women named Summer in Florida and their dogs. I’d gone to school with them."
"(...) What mattered to me was the private space between people, the length of bedsheet between you and the person with whom you shared your luck at the end of the day. That, I thought, was where you could measure how chosen you’d been by love or lust or something that lifted you up outside of yourself and made you forget life as others lived it."
"I look over at Rocket now in the tub across from me. He looks like someone I know from the television, a glowing hologram radiating his own distinct light. “Come on down,” the Barker calls out. I watch from my seat as Rocket bounds through the aisle toward the stage.
On stage, there is a woman displaying a showcase. “Life,” it says. The showcase looks like nothing I’d imagined. What I see is threads of longing. A little girl planting some beans. A man holding his own head. David Bowie is playing in the background: No one ever saw you. Moving through the dark. Leaving slips of paper somewhere in the park. Hidden from your friends. Stealing all they knew. Lovers thrown in airless rooms then vile rewards for you.
As Rocket disappears into the showcase, I feel my voice rising. This is the sound I was waiting to make. "