MUTED

Ill.  Head aching so as to make the stomach turn.  The herbs and aspirin I take to heal dull my senses to a one-note monotone.

It reminds me of my father's monotone hum when he is preoccupied and content.  As a girl, I watched him in his workshop in the basement as he hammered and sawed and drilled, filling the air with the scent of wood.  I would sit nearby, toying with the vise--spinning the levers and sometimes squeezing my finger in the clamp to see how far I could as the tip grew fat and purple.  He would hum too as he dug up the garden plot in the spring, being careful not to disturb the red rhubarb which my mother used for her delicious “kiselis”--a kind of fruit pudding.  I picked out the fattest worms from the dark earth and put them on the sidewalk for the robins.  Of course the robins were not interested in such a stark offering--the worms would shrivel and harden to a dark red-brown by the end of the sunny afternoon.

I wish I had a vise to squeeze around my head today.

The day is dull as well--grey, lethargic raindrops seeping slowly through the fog.  The fur of a mouse corpse outside is slick and flat against its shrinking flesh.  Winter is a hard time, especially when it nears freezing.  This old, wooden Texas house has few defenses against the cold--it seeps in through the floorboards.  Freezing weather reminds me acutely of the first winter we lived in this house when there were weeks of record-low temperatures.  The water pipes froze and broke on Christmas Day.  I sat huddled under a blanket, my feet freezing, my nose cold--wretched.  The house is warmer now, but still I fear the cold so.

Muted, like a wedge of wood clamped tight on a violin's bridge or a block shoved into the throat of a horn.  Muffled.  Deadened.  Lest the vibrations overwhelm you.

I've run out of words.  A dead, dull hum remains.

1/13/2001
Ingrid Karklins