by Sophie Lefens
Jane is 37 and she worries about how she seems. Jane hears her friends and her mother and her mother’s friends talk about men and women and how they “seem different,” or “seem blue” or “seem much improved” as if charting emotional shifts like patterns in weather. Tomorrow Jane decides to go to Seattle for some ocean air. If she is in Seattle she can be away from the grass on her lawn and the black on her door. In Seattle Jane walks down every street and records the number of children she sees fall down. When Jane returns from Seattle her mother says “Jane you seem so at ease” and Jane is pleased. For years Jane has tried to seem at ease because at night she chews on sand and pours glass in her blender and wakes up with stains on her cheeks, feeling impossibly strong and never at ease.
