Dark birds fly from my eyes. Disappear. Where do the kittens come from? We don’t have a cat. Just kittens lumped together like a single entity. A litter. In a box a blanket a bag on the passenger seat?…
The story begins with the image of birds flying from the eyes of the narrator. Personally, I’d had a complete vitreous detachment in both eyes—flashing lights, floaters at the edges of my vision. While it was healing, I still saw fleeting dark images. It set the tone for the story—to use images rather than exposition, or as exposition. And to pay attention to the edge of things.
As in much of my writing, this story is also an exploration of darkness, of loss, to see what happens to people who, as Isabel Allende says of her own characters, “stand on the edge and therefore are not sheltered.” Allende writes, “And that is when you have to bring out all the strength that you have inside and if you live sheltered you never use it, because you don’t need it.” The child in “Floaters” is on the edge of the forest late at night. It’s clear to her that what her mother is doing must be done in secret. In this unsheltered, shifting place, the child can change. Transfiguration can happen.
When the child narrator is left in the car, at the edge of the woods, she doesn’t try to make sense of her mother’s actions. While her voice is filtered through her adult self, the world of the forest is seen through her eyes. Her vision is a shift. As the truth of what she sees is unbearable, the child sees another, unseen world within the visible world. The dreamlike ship of childhood. Conveyed through imagery, a place with other possibilities beyond death. In the absence of anyone to mother those left in the woods, the child becomes a mother.
KELLE GROOM is the author of How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays (Tupelo Press); I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), a Barnes & Noble Discover selection and New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and four poetry collections, most recently Spill (Anhinga Press). A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Prose, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction, and recipient of two Florida Book Awards, Groom’s work has previously appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, New England Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, Southeast Review (as a finalist in the World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest), and is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review. “Floaters” is from her fiction manuscript in progress, The Citronaut. Find her on Twitter @KelleGroom.
