Once My Mother
put the phone in the freezer while we were talking and closed the fridge door. On my end, a white quiet came through the receiver— the moment after music stops though the swan-maidens’ feathers still lift and fall, while on her end the phone had disappeared but she couldn’t tell me because the phone had disappeared. I made the usual twenty-minute drive in twelve, found her dog-in-a-storm, wide-eyed, keening, traced the cord across the kitchenette, said “Sweetheart, sweetheart, it could happen to anyone”— heat and weight of the yoke coming down.