Mirror Image Published

Jessie *

I'm excited because I just got a story published in Stone Canoe.  The story is 4 and a half pages long, and I have included the first page here, along with a link to the rest.

Mirror Image

We were all invisible then, each in a different way. If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have paid more attention. Or, perhaps,I’d have at least tried harder. I should have been better at it. I’d just read “Our Town” again, for my college lit class. I’d read it in highschool, too. I kept saying to Jesse and Jesse, “Look at me, Mother. Please, just look at me.” And they would look, glazed, and maybe giggling, or sober, or half-crocked, and then we would all laugh. Or be spooked. Or turn away, tired of the game. But I did not see. I was too burnt and too hidden inside myself, and it would get worse before it got better.

It wouldn’t get better for a long time. 

We lived in the stone house at the bottom of the park. When I think

of it now, it seems at is if opened into the park, bright and airy yet

somehow shadowed, but that’s a dream fragment from the mixed up

dreams I have about the place. In some of the dreams, it is me who

dies of AIDS and I see everything as if I were watching from above.

Or I am killing Jesse Peters, or maybe Jesse French. In the dream, I

pull the trigger.

The real apartment opened away from the park. We lived in the

basement. To get to the park, we walked up around the house and

through the wild locusts and the grove of tree-lilacs. Up and up and

up to the brick water tower at the top of the hill where the whole

city spread below. And in the winter, down the great hill on sleds at

breakneck speeds.

Because the house was built on a hill, the back of our stone-house

apartment was below ground, but the front, downhill corner was

above ground. It faced south and had large leaded glass windows in

the front that filled the basement living room with sparkly light and

rainbows.

We three Jesses looked almost as if we were siblings. We each

had shoulder length wavy auburn hair, with varying degrees of red,

and freckles. Jesse Peters was tall, lean, loose limbed and always

looked a little out of focus, at least in my memory. He was highly

freckled, fuzzy and slightly unkempt. Jesse French was the best looking. He was more compact, more handsome. Shorter. More coiffed.  His face looked almost like a movie star’s, except for the long waving auburn hair. He had the fewest freckles. And then there was me . . .   to continue reading, click here

© 2013 Stone Canoe Journal - http://www.stonecanoejournal.org

*Image of Jessie adapted from Ami with Crow, a gouache painting by me.

This story is fiction but based in part on real events.  I have fiddled and fiddled and fiddled with the formatting and cannot get it right.  I truly tried, I apologize.