Fighting With God
In which Jennifer takes notes on a version of one of her life dreams—on SomeOne Else’s terms, since that really can’t be helped in this situation. Fish included.
Fighting with God
1. The Fight is Fair
Draw a feeling from me or from what’s left of me, from what’s missing from me, what’s wrong with me by surplus or absence, or drawn from my reason for wishing I were strong enough to have another fight with God, or pulled like a coin from the mouth of the single fish on a line pouring a thin light-stream of water back into the sea to pay for me and thee; or drawn from all the lovely things you have that I don’t and vice versa. When the single fish is pulled from the water on a barbless hook, every mother will know that at least the fight was fair.
2. The Fight is Not Fair
Easy to vibrate at the frequency of loneliness or loss or at the frequency of the voice of the child who doesn’t need you as much, though your work is to light up in her presence forever, you never mean to be sad at her leaving it’s who she must be—the wavelength of love grown up, children grown and moved away. Now the child sleeps far from spoons and one day, you see there is nothing to tie you to the things you made together because that’s what she needed from you, and it is easy to vibrate at multiples of that frequency. You could make a stringed instrument whose intonation continually weeps at the amplitude of a child’s silence traveling through the vacuum of space, like light, though only your children’s children will make the instrument sing.
—Jennifer Woodworth, with many thanks to Citron Review for first publishing this piece and nominating it for a Best Microfiction in 2020.
Citron Review is a great publication. I read this like a prose poem, and it reminded me of J.P. Vallieres's work. He has next to no social media presence, but he is on Substack. I follow him, and you should too. You have similar feelings, I think, about the trials of finding readers.
But let me say, emphatically, about you and about J.P., your writing deserves an audience. I loved this piece, and responded emotionally to it.
And Jody, what a lovely thing to say. Thank you!