Two Women in a Barn

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It happens that a mother becomes parchment and rolls up gradually around the fictions of her children. That she becomes an almond softening in the pockets of cotton garments. Sleeps with her glasses on in her daughter's house and vanishes in the morning. That she's coerced her grown child into feeding her blind horse, watching it list oddly in the small paddock. It happens that a daughter becomes a bottle, filling with twigs and crinkled bits of leaves. That she likes to glint in the water the way a glass bottle will.

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by Idra Novey