What Are You Left With Once The Questions End?
Christopher Linforth
How did she know the world? Do you consider this philosophical conjecture as you sit at your roll-top desk and type away on your laptop? Or have you dispensed with digital devices? Are you one of those hipsters who only finds the purity of language in a pre-modern age? No, maybe not, but did you research the typewriter Hemingway used? Do you know the difference between the Royal Quiet de Luxe and the Corona No. 3? Maybe you should invest in a quill like Montaigne’s or Bacon’s? No, perhaps typewriters are more your style? Perhaps they can help you envisage what you want to say? But, really, how long has it been since you’ve written anything worthwhile? Is it possible that all the spaces on the page have metastasized into an invisible cancer? Perhaps metaphors are better left unsaid? You know a floating second-person can only mask a self-deflecting author for so long? So, what are you hiding? Is this about you? Or not? Is it about the production of language? Or a quest to know her? Have you scrolled through eBay for typewriters? Or met a guy from Craigslist in an oil-spackled Walmart parking lot? Perhaps, you drove to the fancy neighborhood in your town and browsed through an “All-Items-Must-Go” yard sale, then peeked through the living-room window, considering what you would do with such a large blank space? Then why do you argue with the homeowner over four dollars? Is it painful that she reminds you of someone? Why do you remember your mother in the oncology ward? Why do her words—We must fill our lives daily—matter? Now that she is gone, why do you rarely write about her? Or does something ethereal exist in the pauses between words? In the transitions between sentences? When you are not writing, but thinking about the questions of life, do you invoke a punctuation mark to grieve for her death?
Christopher Linforth is the author of three story collections, The Distortions (Orison Books, 2021), winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize, Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020), and When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (Lamar University Press, 2014).