by Patricia Russo
And now we’ve come to the age, the stage, when the children scream at night and are suddenly terrified of all sorts of things that they never paid attention to before, leafy branches, firetrucks, seagulls. This is expected. Your mother and my mother both told us it was coming. My mother said, You’ve got to ride it out, like colic, but your mother said, It’s like teething. The pain is unavoidable, which is distressing, but that’s just the way our bodies are, whether it’s teeth pushing through or synapses getting pruned. This makes me think about teeth and fears being alike, not strictly essential, but useful, good to have, baby fears, adult fears, wisdom fears, and how we lean into replacing them, inorganically, when they wear out or fall away or are removed, the equivalent of implants and dentures, and I wonder if, if they are ever completely gone, we will miss them the way we must miss all those parts of our body that leave us before we leave the world.
Patricia Russo’s work has appeared in One Art, Acropolis Journal, The Twin Bird Review, Revolution John, and Metachrosis Literary.
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Unstamatic 