Time Invents Us by Anita Felicelli, 2020
The magic trick:
A plot that mostly exists to highlight a past and present of a marriage
This story is rooted in two portraits of a relationship – one in the present tense when the marriage is stale and stagnant and lonesome; the other in the past tense when the marriage was fresh and interested and passionate.
Those portraits are animated by the story’s immediate plot: a painter’s art show visited by a young man who looks exactly like a younger version of her husband. The plot is fine, but it’s mainly there to give us a view of that marriage’s long ago and now.
And that’s quite a trick on Felicelli’s part.
The selection:
My husband’s in a midlife crisis, but unwilling to admit it, even as all the rituals of crisis come into play. He likes to fill the bird feeder in the backyard lemon tree and watch the hummingbirds flap around it, their elusive wings holograms. He likes to take his time eating, chewing every bite of his cereal slowly, methodically, feeling the easy give of grains under milk. He goes on long strolls for the sole purpose of counting the ramshackle nests of crows, in order to estimate the growth of the crow population in our neighborhood, and he announces, upon every return, that the crows are taking over. He’s interested only in the minutiae of mortality, and it’s taken a grievous toll on our marriage, which has been constructed on an edifice of art, on the edifice of art as a real agent of change in our world. Our relationship’s built not on art, but on a shiftless artifice, I realize now, with dismay.
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