The Mercy Journals Read Online Free Page B
Author: Claudia Casper
wept because nothing had changed. My lips still did not move, and my voice remained silent. Memories pounded against the inside of my skull, increasing in violence, claustrophobic, maniacal, explosive. Against such potent antagonists, my strategy seemed silly, far-fetched, a thin, improbable thread to hang survival on. Desperate as a fish out of water, suffocating, frantically needing a solution, I had the thought— reread your original salvation. I used more rations, searched through my download of Marjan Rohani’s article, and found a glimmer of hope in the lines immediately following what I’d read before: “Plato describes Socrates as claiming that writing is inhuman in that it places outside the mind what can only in reality be in the mind. It turns living thoughts into something inanimate. It reifies, and turns inner processes into manufactured things.”
Could that be the flaw in my process? Did the act of writing have to produce a physical object, a piece of paper, a book, something that, if I died, would continue beyond me? Voicing only created digitized codes reliant both on a continuous flow of electricity and an information storage system.
Paper and pen. They haven’t been around since the late ’30s. Trees are no longer cut down, recycled cellulosebecame too degraded to use, and all farmed plant matter is used for food. With no paper there’s been no need to produce writing implements. I hurried to my bedroom and pulled out the suitcase where I keep a few mementos. Inside were two journals and a box of twenty pencils.
After my mother died, when my brother Leo and I were searching for her will, we found two old blank journals in the bottom drawer of her desk with a box of fresh pencils. We never found a will and because my mother died just as the die-off was peaking, Leo and I agreed to leave her possessions as they were for the time being and each just take one thing. I was in bad shape then, as bad as now, so I just took the first thing I thought of—the journals and the pencils. Leo annoyed me by taking a long time to choose, rifling through everything before eventually settling on our father’s hunting knife.
The journals are black, soft-covered, bound with two staples. The first page of one of them had a paragraph of writing, my mother’s writing:
Today I am seventy-eight. I have been blessed with a good life but I am afraid for the future, for my sons and for my grandchildren. Perhaps nothing really matters in the end, but I desperately want them to survive. If they die too then truly nothing will be left of me. I was born January 31, 1955, ten years after the end of World War II, and it looks like I will die before World War III ends, if that’s what people are going to call this. I’m alone. My husband died two years ago and my sons and daughters-in-law do their duty but not more. None of us have the energy.
I read with the warm rasp of my mother’s voice resonating through me, and the abrupt absence of any further words was deafening. I grinned, but it was not a grin accompanied by any feeling of pleasure. Rather it was the kind of grin that’s meant to ward off a threat or recognize a threat disguised as something else.
I tore out the page, folded it, and tucked it in the back.
Her journal will be the container, the object, external to me in which I enter what is anguished and exterminating. By giving the memories that threaten me existence outside myself, I hope to degrade their presence inside me and pry loose their death grip on my mind. Once I finish writing this document and close the cover of this journal, my story will be sealed inside, until perhaps an unknown reader in the future, with cool detachment, opens its faded black cover and reads: My name is Allen Levy Quincy. Age 58. Born May 6, 1989.
That is the only reader I can write for.
March 22 |
You might be thinking that Ruby was a bit on the easy side, promiscuous even. Definitely not fussy. Such thoughts crossed my
Could that be the flaw in my process? Did the act of writing have to produce a physical object, a piece of paper, a book, something that, if I died, would continue beyond me? Voicing only created digitized codes reliant both on a continuous flow of electricity and an information storage system.
Paper and pen. They haven’t been around since the late ’30s. Trees are no longer cut down, recycled cellulosebecame too degraded to use, and all farmed plant matter is used for food. With no paper there’s been no need to produce writing implements. I hurried to my bedroom and pulled out the suitcase where I keep a few mementos. Inside were two journals and a box of twenty pencils.
After my mother died, when my brother Leo and I were searching for her will, we found two old blank journals in the bottom drawer of her desk with a box of fresh pencils. We never found a will and because my mother died just as the die-off was peaking, Leo and I agreed to leave her possessions as they were for the time being and each just take one thing. I was in bad shape then, as bad as now, so I just took the first thing I thought of—the journals and the pencils. Leo annoyed me by taking a long time to choose, rifling through everything before eventually settling on our father’s hunting knife.
The journals are black, soft-covered, bound with two staples. The first page of one of them had a paragraph of writing, my mother’s writing:
Today I am seventy-eight. I have been blessed with a good life but I am afraid for the future, for my sons and for my grandchildren. Perhaps nothing really matters in the end, but I desperately want them to survive. If they die too then truly nothing will be left of me. I was born January 31, 1955, ten years after the end of World War II, and it looks like I will die before World War III ends, if that’s what people are going to call this. I’m alone. My husband died two years ago and my sons and daughters-in-law do their duty but not more. None of us have the energy.
I read with the warm rasp of my mother’s voice resonating through me, and the abrupt absence of any further words was deafening. I grinned, but it was not a grin accompanied by any feeling of pleasure. Rather it was the kind of grin that’s meant to ward off a threat or recognize a threat disguised as something else.
I tore out the page, folded it, and tucked it in the back.
Her journal will be the container, the object, external to me in which I enter what is anguished and exterminating. By giving the memories that threaten me existence outside myself, I hope to degrade their presence inside me and pry loose their death grip on my mind. Once I finish writing this document and close the cover of this journal, my story will be sealed inside, until perhaps an unknown reader in the future, with cool detachment, opens its faded black cover and reads: My name is Allen Levy Quincy. Age 58. Born May 6, 1989.
That is the only reader I can write for.
March 22 |
You might be thinking that Ruby was a bit on the easy side, promiscuous even. Definitely not fussy. Such thoughts crossed my
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