Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
My sister explained to me the proper way to euthanize a mosquito. A flick of the wrist, just enough force, and it implodes. Precision, she said.
I was contemplating a water lily. On the mirrored surface, lilac clouds melted and formed. Inside the fragile unfolding, a face. My mother’s. It was slipping away.
I recall summer afternoons on the porch. My sister slashed angrily at the air, piercing tiny white moths with a platinum razor blade she’d stolen from the dollar store next door. Blood captured in crushed glass. I understood nothing. Her eyes boomeranged all her words at me. I absented myself.
The lily slid over the edge, a slow wave. A rattlesnake drew a knot around my ankle. Incantations of cicadas. Freezing rain at dusk.
Euphoria passed. I inhaled passionfruit. Bloodied wings. The shell of old scars was flaking away. It was possible I was kissing something dead. The water began to carry me away.
I sought my sister out to say, you taught me how to drown a mosquito. She didn’t remember.
The tides began to pound me down. I recited the alphabet to keep the undertow at bay. I’ll write a letter to my mother so she’ll recognize me in the murder of mosquitoes. I burn red, red raw. Each body stains the air.
Your skin flutters in response to the backwash of my writing. It had all opened up like a sting: punctual. When I meet her, my grandmother will say: Are these your wounds, my child?
Somewhere, an indefinite time ago: a hurricane of words. Then nothing. Then it began again. I know nothing’s impossible. Soon enough, I’ll be kissing myself. The mosquitoes have gone.
Teri is a senior at Bryn Mawr College studying Art History and Computer Science. They like making (breaking) things.