The Ascension of Teresa

“It”, that magnanimous little nominative pronoun, is something Teresa lost. She lost the feeling of its forgiving embrace, its comfortable ambiguity. She was catapulted, quite suddenly into a new, autocratic world.

As a child she had played games, dancing and hopping gingerly between various forms of furniture to avoid the imaginary lava that clawed its way across the floor. Now it was buildings instead and the game never stopped. The unknowable loomed, simple and static, from beneath. Nameless Daemon, conducted past their dark prisons at the center of the earth, bloomed like rare orchids from exposed veins of copper to stalk the lesser altitudes. The dark children of Kennecot.

She, then, was a penitent exoskeleton, her soul buried just as deep as she could dig and her body clamoring unto heaven.

Look! She can be seen even now, vaulting the gaps that separate all her intimate Babels. See her olive drab coat shimmering with that fibrous luster of polyester, startled pigeons fanning out behind her in tidal formations, caught quite by accident in this mythology; they flutter, indistinct as reason, as memory; trapped by worldly distraction but straining nobly at the bridle. One sneakered foot finds purchase on this rough rooftop and the body follows. Distant lightning flashes uselessly somewhere and, having sighted prey, she knocks an arrow.