Memoirous

The Blue hour put out a call for submissions and I responded. Ten minutes later in my inbox I got an acceptance. That was fast, I wrote. The editor simply said when we see it, we know it. Apparently it was just the right piece for that issue. Untitled by Jane Hertenstein Turning fifty is no big deal. It’s like forty-nine plus. Like size 1 is hardly different than a size 0. As if I knew. Those numbers are so far in my past as to be irrelevant. In fact I’ve never been a 1 or a 0. More to the fact, the closest I’ve ever come to a small was when I was a 11 junior—before the fashion charts got a make-over, adjusted for the new American woman, before an eleven was deemed a nine and a true eight became archaic. Fifty is a state of mind. A half-way point—if one were to live to a hundred. Current statistics proclaim women will outlive men by seven years. The average woman today will probably make seventy-eight. In that case I am more than half-way there. Three quarters. Only I might hav...

Okay, this is by all accounts crazy, like jet propulsion--or in view of the Christian calendar--the opposite of "ordinary" time, sonic time. I submitted a flash and five minutes later it was accepted and within the hour posted here . The piece was totally spun from my head. I had the idea one EARLY morning (I am a morning cook and am up before EVERYONE) while listening to the radio. I just imagined a woman, I imagined her on her birthday, then I imagined her sorry life and the tenets or cords that hold that fragile life together, the moral of the story. And coupled those thoughts with twilight, or those periods when the sun has not come out all day, like living in a fog or swimming underwater. My thoughts flitted and spun as if turning somersaults--without the heaviness of gravity. This is what I wrote about. Sort of. What came out might not at all have been what I was actually thinking, but the result of eating too much popcorn the night before. Nevertheless--a flash. I ...