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i was in mary’s house, my mother’s friend she calls her angel. she was having some kind of gathering and there were people scattered amongst the rooms. i don’t know what i was looking for as i moved through the walled spaces, the palisaded people. mary had chosen to make a bedroom of the living room, and guests stood around the centered bed with its lavender sheets as if it were a normal piece of furniture. the house was small, with a solitary bedroom, and i wondered then if she created this arrangement for one of her adult sons. now, i see it as a split in my house of “marry,” of mornings with contracting back muscles after sleeping on the sofa, of a gulf widening. there were dogs moving through the legs of guests, in search of fallen morsels of finger foods. i found a silent backroom, an addition that seemed bigger than the framing of the original house, where a woman i didn’t recognize was seated alone on a plaid couch, breastfeeding. at one point, my girlfriend renee was swiping through photos on her phone as she stood by my side, showing off evidence of a huge brick-lined tunnel she found beneath her house. i was shocked that such perfect architecture could exist from the hands of masons a century later. i thought about the underground life i pray for daily; i wished to descend into what had been excavated, to see where it would lead. later, i went out the front door of mary’s, and her stoop became a series of platforms and trellises. there were vines everywhere; the parched and twisted ropes awaiting leaves—a lot of brush and bramble on the verge of verdancy. and a beautiful bird was there, a plumed partridge that was unafraid of my advancing, unflustered by the longing in my gaze.
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