Fountainhead - Justin Aoba
There were so few of us, just shapes behind glass-paneled doors. It was a summer of killings. We kept our faces still in contemplation and lengthened our words to coil around all the things we could not have. The effort it took. Think: arms muscling through soil. The city’s sermon drew us in, how indifference could travel in latitudes of grace. That’s where we saw her, standing by the fountain in a heap of coats. She held a flat, gray disc over her head that impressed us less than the statues breezed with bird shit, less than the chess players three moves from checkmate, less than the quadratics of sixteen cops at the park’s four entrances. How badly we wanted wonder but got only war, so we watched her slip the disc underwater and it grew—suddenly cubic, color, chromatic. Cool, a man said. The woman in coats hoisted the shimmering cube on her head, the water lashing her curls, and a voice behind us said my daughter is very sick. We nodded; it was the only response. She hasn’t left the house in days. We swiveled to see some man—not one of us—talking on the phone. He was smiling. We make do, we make do. Our humiliation conflagrated into boredom. But she saw us, spinning our words, set a-spun from the world, the centrifugal force separating out from the calamity—a few clear drops of cruelty, tasteless and odorless and senseless. She stepped out of her coats, into the water and, in the lapping parallax, grew in licks. My God, a woman next to me dug her fingers into my arm. How I wish she could stay under there forever. Later, behind steel barriers, we watched cops haul the mass of twisted limbs from the fountain. A shiver of joy ran right out of us, in our own little fearsome ways. No, said the man on the phone. We’ll be all right in the end.
Originally published by CLOVES, November 2022
Justin Aoba is a writer and editor based in NYC. He is Poetry Editor at Identity Theory and his work appears in the Oakland Review, ANMLY, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
