B19
Public Record
Excerpt from novel: with Abandon

She is with Abandon again.

i have nothing against it. not really.
it all just made me feel uneasy.
and the adjustment period from
stranger
to
Emergency Contact
was certainly fast.

i’m home watching an old movie where
this boy gets a motorcycle and rides up the south american coast
he meets a family and they take him in for a month or so,
but then he steals money from the father
and he’s kicked out of the house.
the mother is torn apart when he leaves
(he reminded her what love was, I think).
in the end he rides his motorcycle
straight into a tree.
sorry to spoil it for you, but he does;
he’s dead.
the credits roll against a shot of the bloody tree,
with bits of motorcycle scattered around.
i wrote about it for an hour and a half
and drew a landscape with mountains
and trees in the background and a lake in the foreground
and this big bloody tree with bits of machine parts;
otherwise it was your typical landscape drawing.
i wrote that I was jealous of something there,
but wasn't sure if it was the love, the freedom, or the tree.

i wrote about it until She walked back through the door.
She asked what i was writing about
and i told Her about the movie and the boy.
i told Her about the family he found,
but then She yawned unintentionally
before I could get to the part about the mother and her love,
so i cut my speech off early.

Frida Bilson