STAFF/VOLUNTEER READER SHOWCASE PREVIEW
Next week (March 24-28) we will be showcasing the work of CommuterLit‘s editor and volunteer submission readers. Here’s a sneak preview.
BY MADI MORELLI
Copyright is held by the author.
Shivering birch trees become paint smears in the salted windows, and my father is telling me he is scared to retire because when sharks stop moving they drown.
I have always had some idea of the water that surrounds my father, what he coughs up in the middle of the night. I used to hear it from across the hall. This year is different.
It was a white Christmas. There were some accidental firecrackers, some singed hair, but no dynamite. No explosions, and no death tolls.
And my father is telling me that since he started the SSRIs he feels hazier, but that doesn’t scare him any more than the back pain, or his hearing.
I wonder how long you have to live in fear before you begin inflicting it. Before it follows you like a rain cloud you cannot see, before it soaks your children and makes them shudder.
He says he doesn’t understand how every single one of his daughters ended up in therapy. I tell him he should talk to someone about that, and thankfully, he laughs.
He says he’d rather talk to us about it because we understand. I make my next appointment on my phone from the car.
And glaciers move slowly, but they move. Carving the landscape less like knives and more like paintbrushes.
And my father is telling me about truck models, and I am scared of nothing but time, and the frozen waterfalls turn to honey fingers clambering over our mountainous progress.
In ten years I will crawl my hands over the rock and watch how far we’ve come, and be amazed that in all that time, I rarely ever felt us moving.
***
Madi Morelli (she/her) is a queer woman based out of Toronto who has been writing for just about her entire life. Her play Alcestis Is Going To Die premiered with Sunbeam Theatre Company in 2024. She can be found onstage in Toronto, on the CommuterLit website, looking after babies during the daylight hours, and in multiple online and print literary magazines. She is at this moment redecorating, editing, and singing in public. She is one of CommuterLit‘s volunteer submission readers.
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