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This Year as a Compilation of Short Films I Can’t Decipher

June 3, 2022/ Quinn Forlini

My friend sends a video of her newborn opening and closing her mouth, testing the length of her tongue in air and then resting it back inside its wet, warm spot. Her spit and lips make soft sounds, the closest she could get to language. I want to come closer to how she must feel. It’s snowing. This baby was the piece of cloud that became a tiny frozen thing, part of her mother just a few days ago. And somewhere inside me is an egg encrypted with genes from my ancestors that’s waiting to become its own body, that someday could come out of me like snow from a winter sky.

***

I think of single-celled organisms squirming like goo, no spinal cord, no vertebrae. The clarity of their existence, like sunlight, how little they have to decide. They grow tired. They die. The newborn opens and closes her mouth. She doesn’t know her own mouth or the shapes it can make. She doesn’t know her eyes blink open and closed like her mouth. Doesn’t know that whatever she sees she is seeing with those eyes. The baby shifts her eyes, looks up and down. She can’t stand how much there is. She cries, and now her tears distort the world. But she doesn’t know that change is because of her tears, saltwater droplets made by her own body.

My mother taught me as a child that when you paint snow, you don’t use white. You use blue. If I knew how to paint, I could paint this: shadows on the snow blue as the veins tangled beneath our wrists, blue as our fingers in the cold.

***

As I cut mushrooms for dinner, I examine their undersides, little fans tightly strung together like slots in a projector slide. I stop chopping and stick my finger in to feel, soft as a velvet dress. But my finger is too large and cumbersome, and the mushroom breaks apart like a clump of dirt. I run my finger over the top and belly, texture almost like skin. Like the cheek of a lover, the way you can stroke it and something ripples inside you.

***

I have foot x-rays taken to check my bunion. The nurse puts the x-rays up on the light screen and leaves. I sit in the blue patient’s chair covered in flimsy paper like the patient I am and stare at my foot bones. The toe bones, the long bone along the side. A diagram on the wall tells me it’s a metatarsal bone. I don’t know what the x-rays are saying. That’s what the doctor is supposed to translate. I look down at my foot, my real foot, still bare. Toes wriggling like a sea anemone. I stare at the blue veins and red, protruding bunion. This foot is alive and attached to me, and inside this foot lies those bones, the ones glowing on the light board like a ghost. No, like a skeleton.

***

The baby is looking at herself in the glass of my friend’s phone screen, but the baby doesn’t know it’s her. The baby looks at her own face lit up and doesn’t know how to decipher it, the way I can’t decipher my own bones on the light board. How could she understand that she is the movement in the small glass rectangle if she is also inside herself?

***

An older man—maybe my father, but at the very least, somebody’s father—is distinguished looking in his glasses. He drinks a cup of tea every morning while he contemplates the changing color of the sky. He loves his children—he is a father, maybe even mine—and was there for them their whole childhood. I’ve known him a long time—maybe my whole life—and today I realize he is getting older, his skin less defined around his face. Then the man takes his glasses off to wipe the smudges on the bottom of his shirt. His face laid bare, I’m aware that in this moment his world is a blur, boundaries suddenly blended. And I’m aware that someone could come along and knock his glasses out of his unsuspecting hands and someone—maybe even me—could step on them and crack the lenses before he’s realized what’s happening. Just like that, the man would not be able to see. I am aware now that this man, though a father—maybe even mine—is only an imperfect body and his hands have a little shake and his eyes haven’t worked well in decades without these glasses. And now, this distinguished-looking man becomes delicate as the film on the underside of a mushroom.

***

It’s warm now, but the snow will come back. It always does. We’ll look out the glass panes of our window and see the shadows spreading across stretches of snow. My mother taught me as a child that when you paint snow, you don’t use white. You use blue. If I knew how to paint, I could paint this: shadows on the snow blue as the veins tangled beneath our wrists, blue as our fingers in the cold. By the time it snows again, who knows what the world will look like. By then, who knows what the baby will be doing with her mouth, what her eyes will see.

Quinn Forlini

Quinn Forlini earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia. Her writing has been published in Catapult, Longleaf Review, The Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. You can find her on Twitter @quinnforlini.

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Genre Archive

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Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

How to Kill a Cat, or How to Prepare for CATastrophe

March 10, 2023/in Blog / Meghan McGuire
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The Night I Want to Remember

December 16, 2022/in 2023ws-migration, Blog / Sanaz Tamjidi
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From Paper to the Page

November 18, 2022/in 2023ws-migration, Blog / Annie Bartos
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Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Point Break & Top Gun Are More Than Homoerotic Action Movies

March 3, 2023/in Midnight Snack / Michaela Emerson
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/ECD45731-BD0A-4144-9DDE-DBE45519C4A6.jpeg 2461 1882 Michaela Emerson https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Michaela Emerson2023-03-03 23:45:542023-03-04 00:06:21Point Break & Top Gun Are More Than Homoerotic Action Movies

Mending the Heart and Slowing Down: Reintroducing Myself to Mexican Cooking

October 7, 2022/in Midnight Snack / Megan Vasquez
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The Worth of a Billionaire’s Words

September 23, 2022/in Midnight Snack / Kirby Chen Mages
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Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every third Friday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

On Such a Full Sea Are We Now

March 17, 2023/in Amuse-Bouche / Jemma Leigh Roe
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/JLR.jpeg 1204 1042 Jemma Leigh Roe https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Jemma Leigh Roe2023-03-17 11:55:192023-03-20 12:27:25On Such a Full Sea Are We Now

The Russian Train

February 24, 2023/in Amuse-Bouche / Cammy Thomas
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/06BA84B9-9FF6-4D6C-97E3-9F02075E851D.jpeg 2042 1609 Cammy Thomas https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Cammy Thomas2023-02-24 14:30:592023-02-24 11:40:48The Russian Train

Still Life

October 31, 2022/in Amuse-Bouche / Daniel J. Rortvedt
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/827C31B5-92AE-4C32-9137-3B4AED885093-scaled.jpeg 2560 1920 Daniel J. Rortvedt https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Daniel J. Rortvedt2022-10-31 11:59:312022-10-30 21:59:49Still Life

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School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
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A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
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Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
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Word From the Editor

Our contributors are diverse and the topics they share through their art vary, but their work embodies this mission. They explore climate change, family, relationships, poverty, immigration, human rights, gun control, among others topics. Some of these works represent the mission by showing pain or hardship, other times humor or shock, but they all carry in them a vision for a brighter world.

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