My twin brothers informed me that a grid—a series of interlocking lines, spindles of ligature across space and time—could be read as a kind of text, impenetrable in its byzantine ornamentation. The comparison relied on the ways that grids contain a dense symbolism that, much like the ostensible blandness of an unreadable passage, appears illegible until approached with the correct key or cipher which could render the grid’s monotony into a palatable image, meanings layered upon meanings. Yet the grid contains its peculiar infinities. My twin brothers informed me that a single grid holds the complexity of a library’s worth of loose papers: sheets torn from their binding and blowing about in the breeze so that one cannot help but lose sight of them individually.
The comparison is apt. I work at a library and spend my days hunched over rare manuscripts, many of which have dried and decayed with time, until their crisp and worn-out pages hold only the most tenuous similarity to the library’s rows and rows of tightly bound books. In my brothers’ eyes, these new books reveal themselves to their readers in superficial ways. The new books have no relation to the nuance, the intricacy and mystery, of a grid.
Or so my twin brothers have told me, while reclined upon matching divans in a manner that would not be out of place depicted by the careful placement of colored pebbles on a Mesopotamian mosaic. There is no flaw to my brothers’ thinking. Through sheer indolence, they allow the formlessness of each day to stretch taut as a fertile canvas for their ever-roving minds. They occupy their time drinking red wine and spending our father’s money. They have moved beyond concerns of the flesh, save eating and drinking; they have transcended the need to labor and pay others to perform the most menial tasks for them. Perhaps to them each passing day is, in its own way, also like a grid, perpetuating itself through ceaseless and banal repetition.
And my twin brothers have undertaken the habit of bathing nightly in the steamy waters of natural hot springs. I have not been invited to join this cleansing ritual. I have not been consulted about the proper method for treating incidents of cardiac arrest on the not infrequent occasion when their overworked hearts threaten to abandon healthy rhythms and utterly collapse. I have been excluded from the binary of their twinship. I have found the only recourse permitted me: my body, unlike theirs, is limber and cannot be constrained. In this way, I find that my body, too, is grid-like in its limitlessness; I can bend in ways that allow my body to take myriad forms and shapes. And so I have realized—painfully, slowly—that, having been shut out of my brothers’ small world, I must abandon them to their illnesses and begin forging my own path.
I will bend my articulable joints; I will bend my slender neck and set myself to the task of deciphering hermetic secrets scratched on tattered onionskin. I will collect sheaves of paper whose writings are so faint as to be illegible and I will begin tracing my own thoughts, half-formed and incoherent, over the ancient script. These shadings will form a grid. Sentences will flow from my pen, covering over the fading scripts of unknown languages scratched in authorless manuscripts, layering palimpsests of text upon paper scraps and fragments. I will title my book The Fraternal Matrix. And having done so, having placed the final period following the final sentence, I will abandon all thought of my brothers, leaving them to inhabit their own lives as immense, corporeal ghosts. I will open a narrow door, step into my muddiest boots, and roam the unbounded world.
Connor Fisher
Connor Fisher is the author of A Renaissance with Eyelids (Schism Press, 2024), The Isotope of I (Schism Press, 2021) and four poetry and hybrid chapbooks including The Unholy Moon (salò press, 2024). He has an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English from the University of Georgia. His writing has appeared in journals including Denver Quarterly, Random Sample Review, Tammy, the Colorado Review, and Diagram. He currently lives and teaches in northern Mississippi.