PAPER CATHEDRALS — CHARLOTTE HUGHES
/After “Anamnesis” by Ravi Mangla
The quiet came after I almost drowned at the Jersey shore, the salt water rushing down my pink throat to fill my belly; after a boy drove my powder-pink Chevrolet ninety down my front driveway and then rear-ended into an oak tree, either for revenge or to impress me—I don’t remember which; after I went to basement parties and never the library and left college with a bright ring instead of a piece of paper; and after I decided girls like me became secretaries, so I gilded my eyelids with gold glitter for company events on the weekends, and on the weekdays, memorized the coffee order of my boss, the president of the largest insurance company in the world; after I always rode the subway way past my stop to explore, and picked up dimes and lost earrings and tortoiseshell buttons from in between the seats; after I lit prayer candles wrapped in thin red paper in Saint Patrick’s with my husband, and while he was turned away, blew them out to hear my breath echoing across the marble and colored glass; after we watched sitcoms at night filled with housewives that were perfect, groomed, stiff like paper dolls; after my husband said, drunk, Why can’t you be more like that?; after I maxed out the library card with self-help books and wrote out checklists for my self-improvement and started reciting New York is no place to raise a child after anything bad happened; soft gum, lost ticket, cold front. The quiet came after I gave up on the big city, after I filled the paper walls of a red-brick house in the Carolina pine forest with cross-stitches of lambs and doves and babies and my husband always came in late, filling the entire house with the rumbling of the car engine; after I decided it was easier just to stay home and manage the bills, receipts, papers; after my children grew feet and after they left and after I tried to fill the quietness in my house with more—handbags that smelled like skin, spice sets, made-for-TV product subscriptions; after I started going out for breakfasts of biscuits and gravy with my husband and called it eatin out as my mouth started to lilt and drawl and lose its last letters; after my husband’s body ate him from the inside out. The quiet came after, when I hired a girl down the road to help me sort out all my papers—those checklists and certificates and insurance receipts, all the pieces of a life. I sat in the living room watching a Christmas movie marathon when the girl walked out, drowning in a stack up to her forehead, and as she tripped on a loose floorboard and all my paper cathedrals fell down, a brief thought fluttered past my mind—perhaps embarrassment for at some point having built my life around a box of papers—before falling to the floor, too.
Charlotte Hughes is from Columbia, South Carolina. Her writing can be found or forthcoming in CutBank, Meridian, Waxwing, PANK, and Monkeybicycle, and her poetry has been honored by The Kenyon Review, Third Coast, Princeton University, and The UK Poetry Society, among others.
