Thaisa Frank reads 

Silver



in RealAudio format.
     

   
    
       I'm always impaling myself on silver things, things my lover gives me when I'm not looking. He buys me silver rings and puts them on me when I'm asleep. He buckles my waist with a silver belt, drapes me with silver necklaces, fastens anklets under my jeans, puts six earrings in the holes of my ears. Silver and never gold, because silver is the color of the accident one longs for. It's light that slants through rice paper shades,  a face on the street that carries you through the solstice.

       You can't love someone without hurting them—that's what my brother told me once. We were home from college, washing pots in the sink,   and my brother had just gone crazy on LSD. He thought he could climb walls, when he was only scaling a chair. He thought he could see the truth, when he was staring at a shopping list. "But one thing I knew," he said. "You can't love someone without hurting them. I saw that when I looked inside my brain and all the cells were singing You can't love someone without hurting them. They were beautiful, those cells. All of them were made of  silver."
       My parents were getting divorced, just as I am now. Light was coming through the kitchen, the kind of light that makes you think you're in another century. "Is it fifth-century Greece?" I asked my brother. "No," he answered. "It's the Huang dynasty."
       I wanted to hug my brother and say everything would be okay: His brain would stop singing. He wouldn't have to hurt people he loved.  In fact, things didn't go well for him until he got a Ph.D. in physiology and discovered that those years of watching his own brain cells had paid off. Now he lives in Rome and writes papers with titles like The Neurophysiology of Indifferent,  Compatible Systems.

       Sometimes  I wake up at night, impaled by silver, and think about my brother, far away in Rome.  I think how he's found love, and hurt a lot of people in the process. I also think of my lover in a small beige room, surrounded by flowering trees. I lie in bed alone, wearing heavy silver. 
       "Why don't you take those off when you go to sleep?" my lover  asks, touching the scratch marks on my arms and neck. "For God's sake, what are you doing to yourself?" 
       I don't answer,  because then I'd have to tell him about the random silver of his face the day he stepped out to meet me. Your face was like that , I would have to say to him. Don't you remember? It  was the day before the solstice, people were racing around to buy presents and you stepped forward to meet me. A week later you gave me a silver bracelet. A week after that you gave me silver keys. But none of  this would have mattered if your face hadn't been an accident.