HOW TO WRITE
by Mary Kelly
Chain the dog to the table. A bichon frise. Watch the teeth of the circular saw blur, readying themselves for shearing. You need only the upper
jaw. Scrape away the remains of the flesh with the tapered edge of a flat,
egg-shaped stone dipped in almond oil. It is true that the mechanics of
chisels and drills are crude--all tools by our nature are rudimentary, but
the delicacy and precision of their yield always assert primacy.
Discard the nose.
Fashion the mandible into the size and shape of a human knuckle with spindle-sharp protrusions on either end, like a planet impaled by a new and
inappropriately elongated axis; like the core of a searching eye skewered by
a needle.
Shards will give way to flecks and flecks will give way to a fine mist of mineral, of calcium and phosphate with the mottled, opaline luster of the
moon, of a lime-like powder fully possessed of its property of infusing
itself with something stolen.
Mindfully attend the porousness of your work as you stain it deep mahogany and lacquer it repeatedly to embalm the marrow, to keep it in
memory, to preserve from oblivion the vascular nourishment of its heart,
until it gleams with a terrible luminescence.
MARY KELLY's fiction
has appeared
in Linnaean Street, Pidjin, and Painted Moon
Review. Her
first published
short story, "Housewife," received Linnaean
Street's Award for Excellence
and Clarity in Writing, and she recently had the honor of
publishing three
short pieces as the August Mid-month Surprise in the web-to-print
anthology Literary Potpourri. She lives in Rhode Island with
her three young,
overly sheltered children and one old, overly sheltered
cat. The cat,
however, will probably not need therapy.
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