Donna Masini

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We start stopping when she’s afraid something bad will happen. Don’t worry, I say, all will be well. How could she know? She’s never read it, never heard of Elizabeth and Jane, never wanted Mr. Darcy. Like me she needs to know how things will end. I know Elizabeth will be fine. As I knew, last week, my sister weeping, that Elinor– sobbing, begging–wouldn’t lose Marianne. It’s Jane Austen! My sister doesn’t know that in Austen nothing really bad happens. I leave her on the couch with the last hours. How much my sister will have to endure, alone, with this new drama. Later her message. The last one in which she will sound like herself. Hi, it’s me. The movie was unbelievable. Unbelievable.

See, it’s a kind of crime scene, as if the mind were a dime novel, a scrim of need and semen, all cinder and siren, a dim prison where the miser dines on rinds of desire, and the sinner, sincere as denim, repeats Eden’s demise — that luckless toss of dice. Yet here at the rim of this demesne a mitigating mise-en-scène: a close-up of her mother stirring rice, a glass of sparkling cider, a mince pie spliced in — not to rescind or mend: what mind denies mercies mine in the end.

and you press into the dark, imagine the stranger two rows back, that fragile chance you’ll forget in the second trailer. Now it’s quiet, still this burden of being watcher and screen and what floats across it–light pouring out its time and necklines and train wrecks. What a relief to yield to the EXIT sign red “I” blinking like a candle. Soon the enormous figures moving across rooms, the emphatic narrative arcs. (There’s the thrum of the subway, its engine of extras.) Here now the beginning of trivia tests. Warning puppets with brown-bag faces and fringy hair. You’re almost here. But what you want is the after. How yourself you are now walking into the night, full moon over Houston Street, at the bright fruit stand touching the yellow mums. Here you are: Woman with Cilantro listening to the rattle of the wrap, the paper sound paper makes after you have heard movie paper. Apples are more apples. Paper more paper. Cilantro, its sweaty green self.

I hear a book being written, my sister says, or is it a poem? Her eyes are closed. It has a lot of semicolons. One sentence or two? she wants to know. Comma? Period. Well, I say, semicolons join and separate. Grammar, my sister says, is very interesting.