The Hands That Hold the Wire

The Hands That Hold the Wire

The duende is not in the throat. It rises from the soles of the feet - from the floor, from the ground the copper runs through.

I have been looking for the dark sound in the wrong end of the body. The throat only shapes what the feet have already sounded.

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The woman in the print has her back to us. We see her shoulders, the sinewy arms raised, the hands clenched not in fury but in holding - the way you hold what you cannot put down.

The mothers form a wall. Not one mother. All mothers. The mass is the shelter. The grief is structural.

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He came out of the bushes soaking wet and stuttering and that was the first line of the love song.

The character would have said it like that. Not prettier. Not more musical. The ugly exact word that is the only word.

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The crucial detail is the one not given. Two girls in Room 406. One mother danced all night. One mother was sick. Which is which?

The reader fills in the code. The reader is the subject. The story watches the reader try to categorise what refuses to be categorised.

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The copper knows it is copper before the artist admits it. The wire knows it is wire. The hands know they are hands.

The quiet is the position - not silence, not absence, but the presence that doesn't need to prove it's there.

The duende rises from the feet. The hands hold what they hold. The character says the ugly word. The withheld code is the truest code.

And the wire bird sits on the sill in the quiet before the dark sound, feet on the floor, not singing yet, not singing yet.