Fri, 21 Oct 2005 18:41:50 GMT

9.

As a rule, my sister didn't care for social gatherings,
though when she went she carried away
a palpable feeling of euphoria. This wasn't,
however, the euphoria of "a good time,"
but the accomplishment of someone who'd managed
to remain incognito under very exacting scrutiny.
When we were alone, this shyness proved self-
wounding, and I felt at times that many of the secrets
she confessed to me were things she actually
wished she'd regretted, more than things she suffered
for having done. In these and other respects,
she reminded me of those blue translucent birds
("so the hawks can't see them against the sky")
Marlon Brando describes in The Fugitive Kind.
Those legless birds that "don't belong no place
at all," and so stay on the wing until they die.

-Sherod Santos, Elegy For My Sister

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