Awl

“Awl” is from a series titled “Words I Did Not Understand.” Through memory—“the first screen of nostalgia”—and language, a writer pieces together her story of home.

- Alina Stefanescu

1 I heard a shawl for a house, a light awning made from silk or impermanent materials. I go by the sound, what it asks of the mouth when one holds it. The awl doesn’t wiggle; it adopts the mouth’s form. This is what teachers do when they discover the marvel of vowels, I tell my daughters. The vowels attach to objects, and every time those vowels come together, the object appears.

2 We are in Birmingham, pretending to tidy the house for weekend guests. The guests are real, due for arrival, but the tidying is insincere, closer to tweaking, a tiny rearranging of details. Because I love words, I love music that manhandles them with reverence. The Gregorian monks on my mom’s playlist chant words we can’t discern from the background. I listen for vowels, or the objects they fondle; those heavy, lumbering parts that want to be repeated in chorus. This is a litany, I tell my daughters. I make a hark motion with my hand.

I know litanies often go nowhere, or get stuck inside vases where women rearrange flowers to fill a hole, which may be a god that stopped speaking in complete sentences.

The monks ah and om. I rearrange flowers around the vase’s emptiness, to make the emptiness look fuller, lusher, voluminous. This is what gods do, I tell my daughters. This is the work of saints, filling and arranging empty vessels with eye-catching significance. A god that stops speaking is senseless, or lacking senses. History is the story of how gods will do anything for attention.