Rot and Gloriana
By Laurel Miram
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This revelation was born at the intersection of two grocery aisles, though it might have dawned anywhere and everything would have followed on in the same way.
I am typically cautious with shopping carts at aisle turns, but like all creatures I harden under sedimentary pressures on occasion, in the depths of which self-preservation proves antonymic, and at such times veering toward a crossroads— any crossroads—is worth the hazard for the chance at air it brings.
So it was (and thus was I) on the verge of her emergence. Rattled and preoccupied, yearning for home and an hour’s ease, I hurtled toward the end of the aisle, the end of the list, the end of pleading ends. Recklessness plays at freedom and so did I. But nature abhors a forged abandon, and my affected rush fell desolate, impotent.[1] An imminence mounted between my end and me. It halted my propulsion, tried to prepare me. It would have been reprehensible to launch into the space she was about to inhabit. I heeded a foreign instinct to wait upon the unknown.
Life is a series of forgettable encounters. Remembrance is a pledge, a contract of the mind. Signatures are required to bring memory to the table and make it commit. It craves impasto and gestalt. Slant. Flourish.
I reared as she ushered herself into view.[2] Here was a walking life frame. A grave, stolid skeleton who shifted past before me, eclipsing my presence, enlisting my future.
But slowly, so slowly, each step a conservation. I cannot say she shuffled; that would be unjust. She deliberated with her paces, as one who has had to learn how. She picked them up and carried them in arms cinched taut about her body, two ends of the same twine, holding the whole back from collapse like ribbon coiled around gift wrap when the tape’s run out.
And that was her regalia. There was no hint of the sufferer about her, no cry of sickly or aged indignation, no breath of loss. It might have been acceptance, or perhaps its mortal enemy, or some odd commingling even she did not understand, but somehow this woman, this fastidiously kempt tower of jarring angularity beneath barely worn, perfectly pressed blue and white, minced footfalls as if they were of no consequence and all consequence, as if they were the proper rate of change, as if none more able than she could be found in the entirety of the building.[3]
There’s nothing left of her, I thought without thinking, for I had not her wisdom. Is it cancer? Old age? Something broken, or incurable? What toll, what cost to make her way around, to take this walk about the store?
Her rebuke was unspoken. Certainly unaware. Equally as convicting as her arrival.
I know how I appear, she said. I scale toil and cost and I daily count currency. I keep my accounts as I do my hair, my clothes. Beyond interest in what I have left, or what is owing, or what has been denied, I am here, I am walking. I will still be walking when you remember me in the evening, swallowing footprints, afraid to meet my slightest stride. I will walk out of this skin in glory. What will you?
And so she walks, wending through my shame like a time snake—the kind that wraps you up when escape’s run out—slowly, so slowly, balancing, reckoning, weighing the cost of air against columns I’ve left to rot, waiting for Gloriana.
[1] That is the way of things with human creatures; we are alone amongst the living in this respect. The petal, the seed, the bested lion and postpartum octopus, the queen’s indeterminate mate: do they not give themselves to dissolution without regard? Who among us is so blind with knowing, so dangerously capable of release?
[2] My shopping cart might have indulged me and lifted its front wheels to oblige my metaphor. It did not, but now I have insinuated the image anyway, so for the purposes of this reading, it did.
[3] I suspect she holds this truth self-evident, wherever she goes.
I am typically cautious with shopping carts at aisle turns, but like all creatures I harden under sedimentary pressures on occasion, in the depths of which self-preservation proves antonymic, and at such times veering toward a crossroads— any crossroads—is worth the hazard for the chance at air it brings.
So it was (and thus was I) on the verge of her emergence. Rattled and preoccupied, yearning for home and an hour’s ease, I hurtled toward the end of the aisle, the end of the list, the end of pleading ends. Recklessness plays at freedom and so did I. But nature abhors a forged abandon, and my affected rush fell desolate, impotent.[1] An imminence mounted between my end and me. It halted my propulsion, tried to prepare me. It would have been reprehensible to launch into the space she was about to inhabit. I heeded a foreign instinct to wait upon the unknown.
Life is a series of forgettable encounters. Remembrance is a pledge, a contract of the mind. Signatures are required to bring memory to the table and make it commit. It craves impasto and gestalt. Slant. Flourish.
I reared as she ushered herself into view.[2] Here was a walking life frame. A grave, stolid skeleton who shifted past before me, eclipsing my presence, enlisting my future.
But slowly, so slowly, each step a conservation. I cannot say she shuffled; that would be unjust. She deliberated with her paces, as one who has had to learn how. She picked them up and carried them in arms cinched taut about her body, two ends of the same twine, holding the whole back from collapse like ribbon coiled around gift wrap when the tape’s run out.
And that was her regalia. There was no hint of the sufferer about her, no cry of sickly or aged indignation, no breath of loss. It might have been acceptance, or perhaps its mortal enemy, or some odd commingling even she did not understand, but somehow this woman, this fastidiously kempt tower of jarring angularity beneath barely worn, perfectly pressed blue and white, minced footfalls as if they were of no consequence and all consequence, as if they were the proper rate of change, as if none more able than she could be found in the entirety of the building.[3]
There’s nothing left of her, I thought without thinking, for I had not her wisdom. Is it cancer? Old age? Something broken, or incurable? What toll, what cost to make her way around, to take this walk about the store?
Her rebuke was unspoken. Certainly unaware. Equally as convicting as her arrival.
I know how I appear, she said. I scale toil and cost and I daily count currency. I keep my accounts as I do my hair, my clothes. Beyond interest in what I have left, or what is owing, or what has been denied, I am here, I am walking. I will still be walking when you remember me in the evening, swallowing footprints, afraid to meet my slightest stride. I will walk out of this skin in glory. What will you?
And so she walks, wending through my shame like a time snake—the kind that wraps you up when escape’s run out—slowly, so slowly, balancing, reckoning, weighing the cost of air against columns I’ve left to rot, waiting for Gloriana.
[1] That is the way of things with human creatures; we are alone amongst the living in this respect. The petal, the seed, the bested lion and postpartum octopus, the queen’s indeterminate mate: do they not give themselves to dissolution without regard? Who among us is so blind with knowing, so dangerously capable of release?
[2] My shopping cart might have indulged me and lifted its front wheels to oblige my metaphor. It did not, but now I have insinuated the image anyway, so for the purposes of this reading, it did.
[3] I suspect she holds this truth self-evident, wherever she goes.
Laurel Miram is a Midwestern writer. Her work appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, Eastern Iowa Review, OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays nominee. Connect with her on Twitter @laurel_miram.