By Maya Sonenburg

Second Prize, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest
selected by Charles Baxter

Featured Art: The Eventuality of Destiny by Giorgio de Chirico

I am this heart, this brain, only these, right now—no other. This is what Susan (that’s her name now) tells herself every morning upon waking. She opens her eyes and sees the flaking ceiling above her, sees the wash of sunlight coming through leaves. She touches her chest, feels her heart beating steadily—no rush of fear—and exhales. She’s alone. She touches her head, hair just starting to gray and she’s not bothering to color it. “This can be my new disguise,” she thinks, “my new self.” One of the million selves she’s been in the last twenty-odd years. She rubs her eyes and before she can silence herself again, she remembers days when she thought more, remembered more: a million legs all running toward the Pentagon or induction center or federal courthouse. Flowers in the barrel of a gun. A Viet Cong flag. Giant puppets of Kissinger, Nixon, McNamara. Or their heads atop the bodies of gigantic hawks, perched among the blackened trees of a burned landscape. Bring the war home. A placard of a napalmed child. If people see, they will join us and this atrocity will have to stop. A million hands waving. A million arms, fists raised in salute. They were the million legs and hands of her—her legs and hands—the million-limbed body of resistance, then revolution. Why does she allow these things to come back to her today? Because it’s spring and her curtains are the color of a daffodil she handed to a child once at a demonstration? She remembers when the remembered voices were always with her, singing off-key but loudly together. She never felt alone. But then suddenly she was alone, amputated from everyone and everything she knew. Most mornings she silences these memories of memories, she manages to.

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