Sitting beside this ancient gray fountain, I’m thinking that you are probably alive somewhere in the world, and I don’t know how I feel about that. You’re tightening the screws of a run-down swing set in an apartment complex in Hollywood and winking at the girls who are waiting on the grass for you to finish: girls with Lisa Frank notebooks in their backpacks and macaroni and cheese in their teeth, girls who don’t even have breasts yet, girls with mothers who fishtailed their hair before school that morning and fathers who won’t let them see PG-13 films. Or maybe you’re eating a peanut butter sandwich in a prison cell, peeling away the crust like a bitter store clerk tearing the dress off a mannequin. You’re buying extra-small thongs at Victoria’s Secret. You’re sinking your nails into the skin of a peach. You’re licking your fingers. I think I need to stop thinking. I think this fountain is made of the same material as tombstones. I think that if you ever met the moon, you would grab her by the throat.
146 The Paris-American
Originally from Kishinev,
Moldova, Ruth Madievsky lives and writes in Los Angeles. She studied creative
writing and biology at the University of Southern California, where she
received the Edward W. Moses Creative Writing Prize for fiction and the Phi
Kappa Phi Student Recognition Award for her poetry chapbook-in-progress. Her
work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO
Poetry,The MacGuffin,The
Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, andAtticus
Review. She is a graduate student at USC's School of
Pharmacy.