Name: Habilis
ISBN: 9781950539475

Alyssa Quinn

Habilis

lily lily 

Reach for them. Thread sweaty fingers together like tapestry. That space between fingers — it should have a name. For every finger, a corresponding negative space. We are like puzzle pieces, she thinks, she wants to believe. Around her, metacarpals and phalanges stretch and splay — long, loping, knobbly with knuckle. Prehensile: able to grasp or hold. But also: able to let go. Able to lose. Please hold your child’s hand. Her first girlfriend refused to hold her hand in public. They walked with fingers hanging in space, occasionally a brushed thumb. Please hold your child’s hand while entering or exiting the train. Hands are what is held, are what do the holding. A closed loop. Please. Please hold your child. Please hold your child’s hand

The chip removed is called the flake. It will leave ripples in its wake, concentric curves that form a hollow — little obsidian pocket — the shape of absence. This process is called lithic reduction and illustrates the fact that what is lost always forms the boundary of what is

Lies on her side, hand under her head, and stares at Jane’s ear. The lobe attached. Cartilage coiled in the shape of an embryo. And Lucy is thinking, not for the first time, of the baby they’ll never have, the baby that will not have Jane’s ears and her nose. She doesn’t want kids. Knows this for certain. But still she sometimes does things like stare at her girlfriend’s earlobe and think of the DNA curled up inside their cells — DNA that has come down to them across the eons, genes that have morphed and mutated and made it all the way here only to stop

Or like when she looks in the mirror for too long and becomes suddenly hyperaware of the person looking back at her, a person whose privacy she feels she is invading, a person she feels self-conscious around, a person whose face is not her face, no, surely not, and she feels half wild with anxiety upon realizing she is trapped in the skin of this person. How would your close friends describe you? A) Adventurous and outgoing or B) Sweet and thoughtful?

To point is to share a world with another. To point is to direct another’s gaze. To say Look! and believe they might see what you see. To point is to love. It is to touch what you cannot and lose what you might have held

Skin is surface — is the largest human organ. If you know my skin do you know me? Skin is where I meet the world. Humans think to see the surface of an object is to see the object. This is possibly true in the case of a soap bubble

The past must be sought out, pieced back together, deliberately, intentionally. The future will exist without her, but the past depends on her to bring it into being. People forget that the definition of history is not the past, but rather, the written record of the past. Rather, the past as it exists on paper

There is room enough for evil already. Devils are not required. Perhaps, he thinks, we should not be surprised at this behavior, but rather surprised at it not being more common. In fact, he thinks, perhaps this is the least surprising thing — that every hungry, powerful creature will kill and eat and never get its fill

habilis is a discotheque of ghosts, wilted flesh, and reminiscences of absence, a diorama dedicated to our ignorance, our sense of grandeur, the pride we take in our capacity to attribute time, name, and reason to the bones and their natural surroundings. despite being utterly chaotic, it is also utterly special, a whole cradle of sentiments that plants seeds of so many striking questions in your mind, questions you wouldn’t even think about normally. you are faced with problematics of taxonomy, the shapes our identity takes when our language capabilities shift, violence and tenderness of human hands, born to hold. this book may and will change the way you see time in history and your place in relation to it if you give it a chance. it’s painfully, lyrically beautiful and offbeat, and it could be a story about grief, but the way it treats tragedy is beyond that. habilis is filled with hollow spaces, with the holes created by loss and rot, but it’s so 

"but while you can never point at nothing, you can point to that which isn’t there."

habilis is a discotheque of ghosts, wilted flesh, and reminiscences of absence, a diorama dedicated to our ignorance, our sense of grandeur, the pride we take in our capacity to attribute time, name, and reason to the bones and their natural surroundings. despite being utterly chaotic, it is also utterly special, a whole cradle of sentiments that plants seeds of so many striking questions in your mind, questions you wouldn’t even think about normally. you are faced with problematics of taxonomy, the shapes our identity takes when our language capabilities shift, violence and tenderness of human hands, born to hold. this book may and will change the way you see time in history and your place in relation to it if you give it a chance. it’s painfully, lyrically beautiful and offbeat, and it could be a story about grief, but the way it treats tragedy is beyond that. habilis is filled with hollow spaces, with the holes created by loss and rot, but it’s so full, and i’m full of it. 

"but while you can never point at nothing, you can point to that which isn’t there."

Habilis

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