Literary Imagination Advance Access published online on September 17, 2009
Literary Imagination, doi:10.1093/litimag/imp075
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
A.P.
*Mary O'Donoghue, Arts and Humanities Division, Babson College, MA 02457, USA. E-mail: modonoghue@babson.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
I wake at dawn with a belly that's jawing under my ribs and squirting rudely with hunger. The curtains in my bedroom, orange and scratchy and somehow survivors of my mother's Great House Make-Over of last summer, pulse woundedly. Like Mars has just landed in the front lawn. That the sun is this audaciously bright means that the day will be a good one. Weather-wise, I mean.
The kitchen seems dank after the brazen light in my room. Its features are white and square and quiet. Last Thursday our English teacher read an essay1 to the class about what it would be like if all the furniture came to life at night, doing crazed and eerie stuff. He's doing this as some kind of relief from exam cramming. The day before it was a science piece about facial symmetry. My favorite part of the furniture essay concerned the telephone and