Page 64 - WTP VOl. VIII #6
P. 64

 ranDi TrianT
Two In the Morning
At two in the morning I find my mother in the living room, sitting in the dark on her sand-colored sectional. She’s clicking her way through a carousel of slides. I’ve come downstairs for a drink of water. My mother doesn’t look up. Photographs of my older brother, Schuyler, from a college trip to Paris, shift across a blank wall where she has removed one of her watercolors—a still life of lively limes and lemons in a golden bowl. Schuyler was shot a week ago in a hunting accident in upstate New York. He was walking to a picnic
on the other side of a grove of birch trees. The slides flash by in an unfocused blur as if our mother can’t take the time to adjust the lens. Schuyler draped over a gargoyle in Norte Dame. Hugging a nude sculpture in a rose garden. At a café table with several very drunk people. Montparnasse. Jim Morrison’s grave.
“There’s a watercolor by Rodin that he loved,” she says, preoccupied. “It’s in here somewhere.” When I urge her to go to bed, she waves me off. “Why that one?” she murmurs. “If I could just see it again...” Eventually, I head back upstairs, leaving my mother alone, searching for her son in twenty-year-old images that stop time and then jud- der, slide, judder, slide, onward.
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Triant is the author of the novel, The Treehouse (Sapphire Books, 2018). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary journals and magazines. “The Pecking Order” was selected for an anthology of the best writing about HIV/AIDS, Art & Understanding: Lit- erature from the First Twenty Years of A & U (Black Lawrence Press) and “The Memorial” was included in the anthology Fingernails Across the Blackboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora (Third World Press). She has taught creative writing at Emerson College.




























































































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