This Year, Todd’s Spoons are slender as women conjured by Modigliani: Clarice has been to the beach. She shakes out her shoes, removes thick woolen socks and pins them on the clothesline to drain out their sand. Alda has been brushing the ghosts of Edward Gorey’s cats, a demanding chore she busies herself with four times a week. On Fridays she sets out black bowls of raw cream. Skinny Mickey has spent all afternoon drifting back and forth thinking she might dust the front room windowsills. She loves vernal pools and frog songs, but the season is long past and the music she thought stored tightly in her mind is fading. That distresses her; she’s the saddest of the three Spoon sisters but she never speaks of it. We’re lost, she thinks, why dust at all. Why sweep up the sand sliding from my sister’s skirts; why wash and dry the ghost bowls, or tidy the invisible litter boxes. Justice is a feather caught in the tide, affection a plastic Christmas tree torn up at the curb; singing starts with pride and a wide heart but daily sours in the mouth.... Still, it matters to make the evening soup, buy bread, chocolate, paper and pens. Clarice, Alda, and Skinny Mickey gather for their meal: curtains drawn, joy and discouragement are both set aside in a velvet-lined drawer. The sisters rest like any family at their small kitchen table with its yellow oilcloth. Just a few cobwebs in the corner above the closed and bolted cellar door. Page 20 - Nine Mile Magazine
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