With an opening that speaks of photons and neurons and borders and lives, I’m lost in the ideas, feeling inadequate and uninformed and completely in over my head. But there are words here and there, a phrase, something that drives me on beside stubborness or loyalty, and I realize it’s the very lostness that I’m experiencing that makes me want to cut deeper into this hypertext novel.
And I am rewarded by Ersinghaus’ wondrous way with words:
(Ham on walls)
I tried to penetrate fences with my shoulder, had tried before. My mother would watch me dig, rake, build, shoot in the back yard from the kitchen window, resting her elbows on the sill, slashes of pottery clay on her cheeks like another kind of alphabet. Her eyes mad with memory holes.
She remembered. "If you do that again, I’m driving you into the woods and leaving you there. Just like that. Don’t test me." For I’m fate. An amazing thing to say, but I was preoccupied with escape.
The first person narrative of Ham Sandoval starts out with a conversation, a discussion–as I said–which is something I struggled through, picking up pieces that made sense and saving them in a little bag with a drawstring. Here, he returns to a scenario that is so typical of mothers and children and yet in a twist that plays on the reader more deeply because of fears that we thought we outgrew, the threat is carried out.
And I wonder, in this ordered world of planned science and sense: can a mother do that?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology