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  • Of Prayer
  • Lia Purpura (bio)

It was a quilt such as the kind I know to be in most American hotel rooms—synthetic and scratchy on the underside where little pills gather from rubbing, and snags from rings (diamond, engagement, upright in that very impractical setting) make a constellation of lines. Time marks blankets and towels with thin spots, blinds with frayed slats, a toilet seat with a chip. Rust stains a sink, water marks a nightstand. Quilts of this kind withstand a lot—our antics and rest, much shaking and straightening, rough cleaning—all forms of the passage of time.

It was a early spring day, but likely the AC in the room was on. He’d have thought of the sound as muffling, a small calculation any mind would make.

Mine would.

I’d think of that.

Maybe he fixed on the single word “muffle” and repeated it a few, then too many times. Any word, under strain, will collapse into nonsense.

There’s a store manager in this, too, you might recognize. Imagine him at the new Crate & Barrel, a few blocks from the hotel. Just hired, proud of his clean and bright unit, a “step lively and [End Page 182] much can be yours” kind of guy, with promise, energy, smarts. Here, when you buy a knife, they wrap it securely in sturdy paper, which indicates they run a safe ship, no bows or gift wrap for the cutlery, which would be lovely (sage green, say, against a white bag) but not wise. They seal such things with a wide strip of tape and let it be your problem getting it all undone at home. How could he know, the manager-taper, that he had his hands on something terribly wrong. That another hand, a hand he touched—in showing the balance of hilt and blade, passing the pen to sign the receipt—could have acted in ways so unthinkable that he himself might feel implicated. Sometimes I touch my dollar bills, especially the fifties, and think what bribes they sealed, what drugs they scored, and run in my head DNA tests on all the microbes, stories, economies I’m passing along in the purchase of onions, sliced turkey, and cheese.

Likely the manager asked a question, a simple one—“is this a present?” And perhaps his customer said “yes, it is” very fast, as a way to throw the manager off the trail. And maybe that there was a trail, that he himself was still building it, became clear for the customer precisely then, and for the first time. It’s possible, too, that such a trail might have been shifted by the simplest statement, the way a weatherman might transform a gray morning by saying “a beautiful light rain is falling on the city …” This happened to me recently and I was, all day, grateful to have my mood reconstituted by a brief phrase. How willing I was to assent to a beautiful light rain once it was suggested. Whole strings of decisions could’ve been altered, the more instructions a chatty manager gave—at the register, if it was slow, if he was good at building “relations,” as in “be careful with this, it’s wrapped well for now, but if you intend to post it or gift it …” (the verbing alone might have startled the buyer: how weird: to gift! how archaic: to post!) And what about “to wash this knife you need not submerge it …” (the phrase “wash this knife” alone might have done it.) The more time shared at the register, where one man was working the hip/bright store, and the other had already murdered his family, the more some internal diffusion of light, a breaking of clouds, a breakthrough, a breakdown, a falling-to-knees and trembling sort of scene, a right and good rending—violence done in the name of healing, like breaking to reset a bone—might have halted things. I’d like to believe that more chat, the right words, the weight of them, would’ve shoved a wedge in and filled the hole in the air before him—emptiness in the chest, rent in...

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