1 + 1 = 3

She was destined to write, for when asked the sum of one and one, she always responded three, and everyone knows that authors simply cannot calculate. She did not understand the concept of singularity, and for her, the opposite of a number was never its negative. She built her house to be asymmetrical, as she did not believe that one side could be perfectly replicated. She taught her daughter that one could divide by zero, and take the square root of a negative number, and multiply a number by one to get a result twice as large. And for her, a square peg could fit into a circular hole.

Dimensions did not matter, she said, for if one pushed hard enough, that square peg would slide right into the round hole, no matter how dry. When a family of three was presented with one conflict, expecting only three responses was ridiculous. A mirror image, no matter how perfect the reflection appeared, would still always be backwards, and therefore symmetry did not exist. Even imaginary numbers deserved to be square rooted, and the opposite of positive eight should not be predestined to a negative existence. And, she said, when one whole man and one whole woman are placed into a neutral solution for long enough, there is no way in hell that the sum of their addition will be two.

But, she mused, it is the logical who build cities and the illogical who piss in their streets, and the mathematicians who never fail to prove the equation leading to the conclusion of sanity, and the authors who fill said equation with adjectives, leading to nothing but a declaration of irreconcilable insanity. And, of course, it is the sane - the level headed, the sword bearing, the strong breasted - who write history, and the rest - the open minded, the lovers of the verb and the anecdote - who write fiction. And no matter how close fiction is to the truth, it is still, by definition, false. Oh, how she loathed the constraints of genre!

For it was not the writer of fiction who plunged herself into the strong chested historian, it was the other way around. Her subtleness was wrapped around his hard facts. And fact, according to the historian, was engorged with blood, and wars, and explosions. Fact would thrust between the pages of a novel until its sharp point was pressed against the novel’s spine. Fact could shred, fact could tear, fact could rip the soft flesh of fiction. The world would erect statues of fact, its outstretched arms groping the sky, while fiction crumpled. The writer of fiction was powerless when the writer of history opposed her. She would be subject to him, pressed into the sheets of paper, flattened there, defiled there. He was the conqueror, she was the conquered. He wrote history. She was destined to disbelieve the existence of chronology, and to write poetry.

"How can you disbelieve in the existence of chronology?" asked the historian of the author, when they were both young, and inexperienced. She was five, he was thirteen. They were playing at marbles, his large shooter driving into her own. They would spread when it hit them. He would always win when they played at marbles, for he was stronger than her, or at least that’s what he said. And though she protested and said that strength had nothing to do with winning at marbles, he would come up with some other excuse. He was older, he was a boy, she had eaten the last biscuit the morning before. Whether it was his strength, or his age, or his gender, or his feeling of entitlement, he would always win, and he would always deserve it. She stopped asking why. He was smarter than her, he said. It was only the stupid who didn’t believe in history, and who didn’t believe in chronology. She did not understand how a two-dimensional line with dates could possibly represent one's own perception of time, but she was too young to know the words to protest. He would laugh, and take his shooter and bang it against the soft glass of her own small marbles.

...She was five, and he was thirteen, and though their ages added up to the age of consent in most countries, she couldn’t remember saying yes to anything he said. It was winter, she remembered, but it was a winter like all others, and therefore could be placed in countless places on his chronology. Come make a fire with me, he asked of her, and she went. They went to the woods to make the fire, and melt away the snow around the circle with the hot red flame. Come closer, he told her, beckoning her nearer to the fire. Let it into your skin. But soon the fire grew cold, the red hot flame was replaced by an ashy ring, and she started to shiver. When they finally shoveled soiled snow on the fire to put it out, and walked back to the house, she asked why she was being trailed by a red path in the snow. He told her that it was the heat dripping off of her flesh. She thought this sounded quite poetic, and she did not ask any questions. She woke the next morning to snow between her sheets, and fire between her legs...

The writer of fiction did not believe in chronology because though the historian’s time line swore that the little girl grew up, and became a soft woman, and became a blushing bride, and became, as we so call her, a writer of fiction, this writer of fiction, this bride, this woman, remained a little girl. Each morning she would wake to snow between her sheets and fire between her legs. And each morning, as her pen hobbled across the white page, she again dragged the bloody memory of her lost innocence across the snow of her childhood, no longer white. Memory had condemned her to wallow in shallow metaphors, barely disguising that which she would never forget. She limped in circles on her page.

Historians do not deal well with circles, for circles do not fit well onto two-dimensional chronologies. How to plot her mornings, when each morning she took her tea with milk and sugar, and each morning she walked through her gardens, and each morning she wrote a line or three of poetry? How to plot her mornings when sometimes the only difference between them was the adjective she used to describe the sky, or the freshness of the air, or the clatter of the birds? No, history does not do well with adjectives. History does not care about the difference between azur and aqua, nor the difference between brisk and crisp, nor the difference between cacophonous and choral. According to history, the writer of fiction woke, ate, and wrote. According to history, the writer of fiction barely lived at all.

History tells us that the writer of fiction killed herself, and if one consults chronology, one can understand why. How could one lead an existence of nothing but waking, eating, and writing? But in fact, or in fiction, rather, it was the historian that killed the writer. The writer of fiction knew far too well that one plus one would never equal two, and she told this to her daughter, the product of said mathematical impossibility. For even a relationship with zero love, zero emotion, zero passion, could still divide two legs. Yes, a square peg would fit in a round hole.

In Learning How To Die.

Must literature necessitate a character
Asked the author of her muse,
For if she never loved another man
in her remaining languid days
She would not much complain.
She had spent her years fingering sheets
Spreading them smooth beneath her hands
Then drawing her pen across them
Remembering in so many words
the way a woman shudders
When she is made to feel.
And tremble she did - tremble at the sight
of purple mountains
Rising above her like the strong chest of a man
Or tremble she did at the sight of yellow tendrils
Stretching across the pale flesh of the dawn.
But when in the barren desert of life she stood
It was not man who caught her falling sweat,
But the open amorous lips of a red tulip
at her ankle
Sprouting form the life that spilled from her pen.
For where there is blood, there is clearly life
And she bled black like St. George’s monster
Leaving little rivers of ink behind her open veins.
And though she flirted with cancer in search of a feeling
Or danced with death in want of a verb
Or seduced the delicate sympathies of suicide
If only to produce a metaphor
even more real than its inspiration
At least in learning how to die -
or so she told Peter and his golden gates -
She had learned how to live.