How much the colonel loved his granddaughters
you will never know.
Their laughter filled his black Mercedes
the way a flock of starlings might fill a single tree
with song.
What he’d had to do that day, he’d done
with a troubled heart,
but now their laughter overwhelmed him
with such unarticulable love
he could hardly
contain it
and neither could the empathetic little bomb
in the engine,
which chose that moment
to burst through the hood with self-obliterating joy.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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