The Medium

THE MEDIUM / Mark Jartnan Perhaps solitude and loneliness, like the ether, are connectives, and the Negro on Melrose Avenue carrying a mattress rolled like a giant manuscript and whispering a story is heard in Paris. At a bar, small glass of Côte du Rhône untouched, a pale clerk raises his fixed gaze. If so, the dead must listen, too, driven mad or never bored. When the past snaps open like a paper sack and the rigid shiver of it fills you, you want to duck or justify old pain, and feel the birth of the small town mutterer, the auto-conversant of the major city. You want to speak, but don't, yet they speak all the time. Maybe here I'm speaking for myself. Alone, you talk about other things. Climbing in an Alpine train through matted fields, I sat knee to knee with a woman, breathing in her cloud of cigarettes.. As passage, she showed her state medical card, then bowed her head, burnt lips mumbling something translated as smoke. She knew a stranger and pressed her knees away. Her words were for someone else. Maybe for you, or for us. Here, now. The Missouri Review · 13 ...