Two Prose Pieces

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Lyla Levy

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Buhito (Little Owl)

 

Prose about my best friend Caleigh who is studying music is Spain right now. 

My favorite owl can see through all the muscle fat and freckles of my face and straight through to the delicate gold threads. She patternlessly knows how to weave the fiber into lace even though no grandmother ever taught her the craft. She does all this with eyes so big and green that I think I will slip right into them like a tiled bath and soak there, cradled in warmth for an hour or two. She left for Spain last month, and I was fine until sweat and a sore throat and reading existentialism started wearing down on my jagged fingernails. It’s now sinking in that she and her flute aren’t here to repeat back any melody that I hum. She’s not here to eat eggs and French toast on two separate plates and then give me the third piece of sweetness to use as my dessert when she gets full. The faulty reflection of lights off teenage skin can’t be absorbed over facetime. I miss her awfully trained dogs and their floppy ears. I miss her mom and all of her scrapbooking materials. My green eyed, Irish owl and her silky honesty have left me to face the mundane by myself, and I wish I would’ve crocheted my hair into a hat for her to wear or strung my baby teeth into a claspless necklace. The drunk English photos on my wall have the same gloss that used to finish off my lips. I want her stiletto nails to sweep over my arms right this minute. It’s greedy, I know, it’s selfish, I know- but my soul is sweatered and I miss the familiarity of a soft ribbon cutting into me and scooping the sour seeds out, without even meaning to. My favorite owl will come back in the summer but for now doves will have to do, and doves can only see in the daytime

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Excelsior (Ever Upwards)

 

Prose about my sister Miranda who I love with everything in me

Empathy crackles through her magenta flavored blood at supersonic speed. Few can comprehend the way in which a bottle breaking on a sidewalk can cause it to glitter in the light- but those who crossed the dirty rivers in tunnels and trekked sturdy bridges get it. The sparkles are reflective and temporarily blind eyes who have never seen them before, an effect so kaleidoscopic is rare and sharp and usually expensive. To drink espresso and alcohol at the same time is to be dazzled in the same way she is able to bring out the innermost parts of you while she dances. Her nose crinkles in the same way mine does when she gets excited, and we both provide an absence of cold to everything that touches us. The difference is that her heat is electric, immediately vibrational and bright white against a sleek night’s gray- while mine is a slow fever, a burning ball of gas that radiates orange and creeps up into your muscles. Things move glacially until we arrive, hand in sweaty hand, to melt down boredom into rapids that flow and bubble with chaos. There is a potential to flood–to overwhelm the bridges. Some have drowned in whirlpools spun by our fervor, sure, but all faults fall shy when compared to the goodness flung from her in a 6-foot radius. No hurt bird has been cupped up in hands more gentle. No eyes have cried more tears for young girl’s innocence. No one else takes care to put on white gloves before they polish reckless tarnishes–no one can better restore the gleam that belongs on fresh metal. No one has shined more severely than the fragmented glass embedded in Manhattan’s sidewalks, and no one ever will.

 

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