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2023 Prize in Memory of Lorabel Richardson

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Thoughts from a Fictive Young Accountant

by Beatrice Crist
 

Where could Andrea go to understand the universe? Andrea’s anxieties, prickling like sour fruit or spiteful blowfish nestled beneath metric tons of water, bristle into goosebumps on her anemia-blanched skin. She wants to smile but lying chafes like rug-burn. The trembling corners of her ink-blue eyes give her away as breezily as a coconspirator without a conscience. There’s no point in counting anymore. There’s no curiosity left in it. Andrea wears her brutality as a costume. She wishes she were a different kind of ape And could live alone, orange, and fuzzy in some other jungle, Getting drunk off rotten figs. Unfortunately, that is an unachievable ambition. Andrea disapproves of her own enlightened primate condition and believes evolution might do well to explore the snappy possibility of running backwards. She thinks devolving might be like rewinding the calamity of adulthood— That it might have the confused beauty of listening, submerged in bathwater, as a song lilts above the surface. Andrea walks to the corner store—sits down and swallows a habitual cup of coffee that tastes worse than it smells. Having a future is like that, she thinks. She loves the city except it makes her restless and lonely. It would be worse if she lived in Vermont like her ex-lover does now, surrounded by relentlessly roiling grain, its only interruption the stolidity of bored bovines. She hates cows because they didn’t do anything to warrant having lovelier eyelashes than she does. Andrea wishes she had a newspaper to read—an actual, physical newspaper with paper dry as cotton pads, chapping her fingertips and setting her teeth on edge. So big that, decadently unwieldy, it almost dips its sour-scented corners into her bitter-rimmed cup. Instead she scrolls through morbid headlines. Andrea doesn’t read the articles because she can guess what they will say— Clicking an exit arrow always reminds her of backing awkwardly out of a doorway from a private conversation. Although, online, this sensatio

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