The next Weekly Rumpus features fiction from Jessica Mooney! Here’s an excerpt:
My wife would finish out her last weeks in bed, screaming the alphabet to Vanna White. I read to her about Ars Poetica, the way memories form, how to survive nuclear fallout—I told her the story of our life. Throughout our marriage we wore our love like a monk’s robe, a winter coat, and a military uniform. There was meditation. Protection from the elements. Friendly fire.
When she died, I tasted cinnamon penny candy. Applause leaked from the television. I sat beside her as she went from everywhere to nowhere. My son took my hand. Just when I thought there was nothing, there was this: Forgiveness feels like a thousand ravens taking flight from wires in your chest.
Jessica Mooney is currently a Hugo House Made Fellow in Seattle. Her fiction regularly appears in City Arts Magazine. She also works in global health and recently co-authored a peer-reviewed paper published in the February 2013 issue of Prevention Science.
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