Anachronisms

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Anachronisms
• Olivia Nathan (bio)

1

The night before her history test, T’s legs turned into lightbulbs.

Hoot, the family Pomeranian, had been sitting beneath her desk, and T accidentally kicked him as she crossed her legs. In a show of defiance, he left her room and trotted downstairs. T didn’t notice. She forgot the new purplish pimple forming like a grape on her forehead; she forgot the allotted forty minutes of TV she’d been dying to watch; she even forgot to look up at her face smeared in the window beside her desk to contemplate her crush kissing it, though the ache of that longing never left her. As she slipped into bed, each flash card she’d studied after dinner was still moving behind her eyes. Her mind had been consumed by the details of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It was as if the fire itself had invaded her mind and left it razed and scorched.

Doing better in history was high on T’s list of New Year’s resolutions. It was near the top of a list her parents oversaw, regularly [End Page 71] reminding her to practice clarinet every day and to make more lists. They had thwacked the list to the fridge with a magnet that said queen of fucking everything that Queenie, T’s older sister, had left at home when she moved to college. T thought of it as the only remnant of Queenie left in the house. The pink bedroom, which sat empty across from hers, did not recall her sister’s dry and crass sense of humor, nor did the trio of Hello Kitty clocks tocking on her wall.

So T had no choice but to get a B+ or A- on the test. Her parents couldn’t understand why she wasn’t already getting B+s or A-s, given T loved the subject.

“We don’t understand why you’re not getting B+s or A-s,” they said. “You love history.”

This was true. T had spent the month of July on her laptop, watching a lecture series called The History and Mystery of Venetian Watermarks from The Great Courses. (She looked up what water-marks were and then she Googled what Italian iconography meant.) She was quickly consumed by the eight-part lecture series, given by a surprisingly handsome, long-haired professor.

Many of the Venetian watermarks looked like horse brandings or ancient family crests; but one, dated as early as 1500, looked like a lightbulb—a watery lightbulb pressed into the middle of the page, crushing the fibers of parchment to allow light to stream through. T had watched the watermark illuminated by candlelight in the reenactment; it shone through where the paper thinned down its curves. How did sixteenth-century Italians know what a lightbulb would look like? There were even undulating lines in the water-mark signifying the metal foot and both sides of the bulb were chubby-cheeked.

During some of the lectures, T daydreamed. She leaned back in her desk chair, thinking about her ninth-grade crush, who became her tenth-grade crush. She daydreamed about touching the dip in [End Page 72] his chest where the crucifix he wore rested. She daydreamed about Venice, its water, vibrant with the sun’s reflection, turning the basements and beams and plaster of the city to mush. T wondered why the sun made colors more beautiful than lightbulbs. Why fire and flame turned the world blue and opalescent while the lamp in her bedroom only made things look exactly as they were––the faded green of her rug, the black coils of her hair, the red welt of a hang-nail on her thumb. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory workers had been consumed in a fire, which may have brought out the honey in their eyes, the violet veins in their necks, and a brilliant sheen of the perpetual dew on their upper lips.

T looked up from her flash cards. Two-hundred forty-six dead. That would equal her tenth-grade class combined with the entire eleventh grade.

Certainly, no one had died pressing watermarks into paper in Venice...