The State We're In

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The summer school assignment, the fucking fucking summer school third paper of ten, and if you didn’t get at least a C on the first nine, you had to write eleven papers, the fucking teacher wadding up her big fat lips so they looked like a carnation, her lips that she’d use to pout at your inadequacy… this paper, to hold their interest, was supposed to be about Magical Realism, and although you didn’t have to read all of the Márquez book the teacher sooooooo loved, she had distributed several paragraphs from the book in which weird things happened, and your paper was supposed to go on forever, like the writer, then have the clouds howl, or something. “Not a metaphor! Or, not merely to be thought of metaphorically!” she’d exclaimed. “The psychological state has to matter. You have to embody emotion in the stretch you make.” She gestured with her gangly arms. The woman was at least six feet tall, every bit as tall as Jocelyn’s uncle. Writing essays was retarded. It completely was. Summer with her aunt and uncle was torture, from start to the yet-to-come finish, which would end when the days were no longer long and when the flowers began to droop and the water was totally too cold to swim in at the York Harbor beach, where summer brides who were way too old to get married came out onto the lawn and stuff blew all around them, their veils, their hair, their bouquets, everything airborne. One bride sprained her ankle running after her stupid pink lilies and baby’s breath — she went down like Humpty Dumpty and a seagull swooped up the bouquet and dropped it, but too far out over the rocks for anybody to retrieve it, although the best man tried. But that — real life — you couldn’t write.

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