Following the Brush, with One Name I Don’t Say
origin unknown Following the Brush, with One Name I Don’t Say The last two chairs at the table face each other like rival hypotheses. We sit in neither. Dust conducts the meeting with admirable neutrality. My sibling prefers the physics of denial: a closed system where no energy is lost because nothing is admitted. I bring conservation laws to dinner; he brings a lid. Fact: memory is reconstructive. Each recall edits the file. We have become unreliable narrators of the same afternoon, co-authors who refuse to share a bibliography. I inventory the dead—mother, father, elder brother, the cousins who used to laugh like loose change. Absence scales poorly; it makes our disagreement look large enough to live in. He says, It didn’t happen like that. I say, It happened enough. Between those two measurements sits a gulf with excellent acoustics. Life always allows digression: the hinge on the old door still squeals. I oil i...
