He read from a collection of James Wright. She liked to listen. She explored the scenes he described, constructing new scenes for herself, falling backward and downward into them as wakefulness dissolved and sleep encompassed her. They awoke something hidden deep inside of her; in a place she never knew existed. And from the first time that she lowered her hands and allowed herself to drift into the scenes he described, she recognized a part of herself changing, gradually, earnestly, urgently. Until he read those words she wondered if they had ever existed— or had they waited for him to utter them, breathing life into their shapes: letters and then words and then images and ideas, poking from the soil, budding, unfolding, coming into flower. “Saint Judas” was her favorite poem. By day she thought about the image in the poem of a man at the mercy of hoodlums, the soldiers that milled around the garden stone and sang amusing songs as their victim bled. The person who came to rescue the man was and wasn’t the one reading the poem, was and was not the one who lay now beside her. She asked him to read it again—later that night—and the language took shape in her mind. Images fashioned by sound delivered to the chambers of her sleeping self. And when she opened her eyes and looked over and saw the sunlight on his arm and his chest rising slowly, she knew she loved him. It was several months before the boy realized his copy of Saint Judas was no longer on the shelf.
Jason M. Thornberry’s work appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, JMWW, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. Jason overcame a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic epilepsy. Relearning to walk and speak, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University. He lives in Seattle with his wife.