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Interview with patmutyun
Girl A is telling a story to Girl B about her brother, found beaten and
tied to a tree. How she tried to wash his body in the river behind her
house.
Girl B interrupts, says she thought Girl A lived beside a wheat field and
that her brother was shot. Her father was the one beaten, tied to a tree by
the mouth of koulou.
Girl A retells a story to Girl B about her brother. How she found him shot,
tried to wash his body with the well water she transported across a wheat field.
Somewhere a father was tied to a tree and beaten to death.
Somewhere a mouth kissed the rivers shut.
Girl B redoubles the paper, licks it shut. Outside, reeds rise in rows like
lips of duduk skyscrapers. Girl B says she thought she had already been
deported from her home by the time the brother was dying.
Girl A maintains the story of Girl B about a brother, a father, a tree, and
a kiss. The story became the thirst for a story, while the river watched.
Both of the girls’ lips addressed and sealed themselves to thirst. Their
lips ran towards thirst like a river running to be unkissed. Girl B asked
thirst to bless her with a body that knows what it is to jump into a well.
In the end, thirst agrees to kiss the girls inside the costume of
orphanhood.
Girl A refuses, wondering if it was really her brother. She runs towards a
man’s body along a caravan of bodies and washes it with her hands, so
the story goes.
So the story is going and Girl B wears Girl A like well water. The next
time Girl A washes her hands, Girl B thinks of a wheat field and a man
whose body she has never touched.
Girl A interrupts Girl B, washes her clean. Thirst wears the costume of a
river and the river wears the costume of an orphan. See what you made
me witness? they say, accusing each other of making up the same story.
And so the story is going, kissing everyone on its way.
Note: Patmutyun is the Armenian word for both history and story.
By the well of koulou
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Dear [ ], whatever you are looking for it is not [ ]
![A car overburdened with grass grown its own grave rusted shut. We’ve seen it. Wondered how long it has been there before us and how long it would outlast us. How the last trace of humanity becomes hidden between fields. Wondered who would live like this. I come up to the porch. Look behind the trellis. See a family sitting. Their backs facing me. They have no faces. A girl is serving bread. Choreg. The familiar sesame seeds. The faint smell of spiced cherries. A family recipe. I realize the old woman is wearing clothing that is not hers. It fits irregularly. The younger reads my thoughts. Comes to the window. Explains how they are her dead mother’s. The woman has taken them. From her body. Washed. Sewn shut the wounds. Taken as her own. She doesn’t speak but hums. The low hum that an inanimate thing might produce when held against the wind. I look into her. She looks to have another secret but I have not thought of the right question. She returns. Serves the woman inside her dead mother. In the house next door, equally overgrown, there is a woman of a similar age watching them. She does not appear to see me until I think of going towards her. I walk to her window. With each step I take her face becomes more veiled. Once I reach her the room is completely dark. I somehow know that she is there. I can feel her. She is of my blood. I ask her if she knows me. She says yes. I ask her if she knows what I want to ask her. There is an emptiness in the room I’d not yet felt. It comes inside of me. It positions itself like an organ. This is her response. We both know why she does not sit at the table. Yet a word is one we cannot say alone. I feel our moths move at the same time. Rape. We say it together. Rape. I expect some kind of lightening in my chest. In the room. In the word. Lifting us from ourselves into the house of spiced cherries. But nothing. Nothing happens. Nothing happens at all. There are no hands remaining to shut the doors. No hands left deserted to memory.](https://therumpus.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-21-at-11.51.52 AM.png)