Janet Fitch

White Oleander

Silje Løvli Lorentsen

angie

All that weekend, she didn't say a thing about her date with Barry, but she wrote poems and crumpled them up, threw them at the wastebasket.

July 12. Ran into K. at Small World this afiernoon. Saw him before he saw me. Thrill at the sight of him, the slight slouch of broad shoulders, paint in his hair. That threadbare shirt, so ancient it is more an idea thana shirt. I wanted him to discover me the same way, so I turned away, browsed an Illuminati chapbook. Knowing how I looked against the light through the window, my hair on fire, my dress barely there. Waiting to stop his heart.

The little boys shivered despite the jackets over their pajamas and muddy boots, chattering and giggling in the cold and the excitement of being up so late as they gazed at the stars that started pinging like pinballs, mouths opened in case one should fall in. 

At night she began cooking things in the kitchen, things too strange to mention. She steeped oleander in boiling water, and the roots ofa vine with white trumpet flowers that glowed like faces. She soaked a plant collected in moonlight from the neighbors' fence, with little heart-shaped flowers. Then she cooked the water down; the whole kitchen smelled like green and rotting leaves. She threw out pounds of the wet spinach-green stuff into somebody else's dump- ster. She wasn't talking to me anymore. She sat on the roof and talked to the moon,

White Oleander quotes

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