Sticking Points, Shirley Kurtz. DreamSeeker Books (an imprint of Cascadia Publishing House), 2011. 6 x 9 trade paperback, 264 pages.
Anna is making snailpoke progress on her book. For one thing, the theological conundrums. Thou shalt not kill—right? Yet her goody two-shoes friends at church say it took a grisly crucifixion to spare us all from hell.
Then too, Anna is
hampered by her loopy state of mind. Her pages have devolved into a
hopeless hodgepodge. Every effort at lucidity only muddies the
situation.
“It’s the dumbest little things that bog me
down,” she says tonight. “I’m telling you, I’m
demented.”
“Nah,” rebuts Wade behind her in the
steamy mirror, as the shower spout drops its last dregs. “Not
demented.” He slaps his washcloth at his yawning underarms and
slick chest, the black hairs uncoiled and swollen like sidewalk worms
after a rain. “Just touchier than all get out.”
He wrings the washcloth soulless, the collected runoff drumming into the bathtub, and next swats over his shoulders. Always and always his mop-up proceeds along this same order of events: bald top, scritchy beard stubble, tautly banded trunk and arms, hangdog privates (unless Fido has risen unprovoked), and legs as hunky and stalwart as the Michelangelo David’s, swat, swat, swat, the excess on his washcloth launching to the four winds. “What is it now?” asks Wade.
Pressed
against the washbowl to meet her clouded face in the glass, Anna
resists. “Don’t make me say! It’s something else dumb, that’s
all.”
Which is crazier? People’s salvation theology—or Anna’s mental flailing, this crippled search of hers for the right
words?
