I am currently reading Neal Stephensen's The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, so my head was stuck a bit in Victorian imagery. First decent piece I've written in a while, so it felt nice to do some good writing :) Comments appreciated!
"Raising Girls"
There is nothing in the world but hope
that our children will group up to better us all.
Little girls are a force unto themselves;
in groups they generate their own universal laws,
demonstrate hitherto unknown patterns of
gravitation.
We must grow them properly, create their
simply darling
little angelfish dresses and teach them
to flee,
daintily, without running
and creasing
their starched skirts,
from the cloying, pink jellyfish tentacles:
their
barbs are black and purple, spells
bursting
open like hydrogen bombs over
the
Pacific islands,
black
magic, sea ink,
a
body shape too thick to be proper,
mouths
painted red and wide with too much laughter.
“One musn’t—,” and
“it
is rude to—“
Hardest of
all is to be the mother
that teaches
them;
reminds them
that to thrive in this world
their plumage
must match the season—
but
underneath, they should wear
brightly-colored
knickers, and should
always let
their hair down once safely
in their own
domestic cocoon again.
It is hard to
be the mother
that teaches
them a debutant emergence,
the delicate
language of flowers;
so that they
might grow up to become
masters of
double entendres (with the French
skills
to know what
that means), so that with time
they might
learn the puns with which to say, secretly, to each other—
“you and me,
we know the exact speed
of the
rotation of the earth, the temperature
of the water
at the bottom of the Mariana Trench;
and we know,
the pair of us, that this fish is the kind
that breaks
lines and heartstrings.”
But the words
that pass between two friends say merely that,
“he is quite the catch…”
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