Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: Beth Ann Fennelly is a consummate wordsmith of the microessay, as readers of her 2017 memoir, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (Norton), know well. She packs in wry observations; profound subjects like mortality, loss, and major life changes; and the perfect balance of humor and pathos. I’ve long been an admirer, so I’m thrilled that we get to share her work once again, this time two pieces that feature speakers processing the slow loss of a mother to dementia. In one succinct scene and in another piece that experiments with the reaches of the craft of nonfiction, Fennelly shows us again why her work is central to contemporary enthusiasm for the form of the microessay.
Each essay below is accompanied by audio of Fennelly reading the piece:
Lori Cornelius
I call Lori Cornelius, thinking I’m calling Lori Hannah. Even though I can clearly see the name on my phone, only when Lori Cornelius answers with her chipper “Hello!” do I realize I’ve called the wrong person. “How nice to hear from you!” exclaims the very nice Lori Cornelius, whom I haven’t seen in a few years. If I were less stressed, I might pretend I’m calling to catch up. Instead I blurt that I hadn’t meant to call her. My mom moved into her assisted living yesterday, I say, and I’d been trying to reach her intake specialist. I explain how my mom is suffering dementia, and how I’m worried about her, and how, every time I do something stupid like call the wrong person, I worry about my brain too, worry that I’m experiencing the so-called “early signs.” Then Lori Cornelius, whom I never intended to phone, tells me she went through the same thing with her mother some years back, and she also began questioning whether she was losing her mind and, for that matter, is still questioning, so I might as well get used to it. We laugh and I feel better and we hang up. And now I can relax, knowing that I really don’t have dementia, because, as it turns out, I really did call the right person. Good old Lori Cornelius.
The Trespass
1
She’s picking daffodils in an abandoned lot, stepping among the tall grasses. As she gathers her bouquet, she narrates her actions in third person, a habit from a girlhood spent in books, an odd amusement. She’s not supposed to be here—the driveway is cordoned off with a “No Trespassing” sign—but this lot has sat untouched in the twenty years she’s lived down the street. The daffodils, which grow in large swaths around what must have been a grand house—now just a clearing—can’t be seen from the road, due to the overgrown driveway. So she gathers all she can, reasoning that if she were a daffodil, she would rather be picked and arranged in a vase than left to bloom and shrivel unadmired.
When she hears a noise in the woods behind her, she jolts upright, dropping her armload of flowers.
Now her narration draws up short. It began as nonfiction, realistic nonfiction, but, she suddenly sees, it is fairy-tale adjacent. Here, at the edge of the woods, that liminal space, enough conventions of the fairy tale have been met to jump genres.
She stoops to gather the flowers, pondering her fate as a fairy-tale protagonist. Condensed answer: not pretty. Hasn’t she been a little smug, relishing her secret stash of daffodils? Further, hasn’t she been greedy? After all, she grows daffodils in her own garden; she could pick them and bring them inside, but she enjoys regarding them from her window. And her biggest sin of all: hasn’t she been blithe, carelessly turning her back to the woods as she pilfers this gold?
Egads, she’s not only been blithe, she’s wearing a cute little polka-dot dress. It’s not merely that a bad thing might happen to her. It’s that a bad thing must happen, and when it does, all will feel vindicated.
How can she save herself? Think, Beth Ann!
Suddenly she sees her ticket out: her mother! She’s picking these daffodils for her mother! Her mother is elderly, in a home for the elderly: these daffodils will smear their buttery joy around that otherwise dreary room. A different fate awaits a character risking so much to cheer her ailing mother.
Phew. That was a close one. The dutiful daughter continues picking daffodils.
2
She doesn’t give her mother the daffodils. They look too good on her mantel. That night a sinkhole yawns open underneath her house and the house collapses and she smothers underground where no one can hear her screaming. The end.
Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016–2021 and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and three of prose, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (Norton, 2017), which was a Goodreaders Favorite and an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book. https://www.bethannfennelly.com/
