Essay Response

Like everyone else who read Eric Puchner’s “Essay #3: Leda and the Swan”, I thought I had surely opened the wrong file to the essay, but as I read on, I couldn’t help but shove that idea aside because this piece was absolutely breathtaking!  I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it — the weight of the story mixed with the narrator’s, 16-year old Natalie Mudbrook, outrageous humor, it made me feel like I was watching her life spill out like a movie.  I couldn’t help but chuckle when Natalie directly addresses her teacher and tells him that instead of this essay being about the assigned topic of “Leda and the Swan”, it will be about her own life instead, specifically, “I guarantee, universally, if you asked people which they’d prefer —  a topic about LOVE or one about PERVERTED SWANS — they’d choose mine in a second”.  These subtle comedic moments are what make the story so vividly different than others about the typical depressed, sex-obsessed teenager.  Her wittiness is what makes this story float.  Some of my absolute favorite moments is when she sprinkles in some type of nasty comment about her sister’s, Jeanie, “nasally obese” nose.  Absolutely brilliant!  However, all comedy aside, this story is heavily soaked with the complexities of family dynamics from Natalie and her mother and most importantly, with her mentally-ill sister.  The delicate relationship between sisters is not one to be tampered with, especially when a boy becomes involved.  Collin, the ever so sexy lead singer of Salacious Universe and equally desired one amongst the two sisters, plays the main reason why they become so distant.  The closer Natalie and Collin become, the further and more irreparable their relationship becomes.

I can’t even begin to describe the gorgeousness that is the imagery of this essay.  My favorite is when Puchner describes Natalie and Collin’s walk outside: “The stars were like distant balls of gas”, “His hair was still sticking magically from his head, all bright and glowing, like each hair was partaking in photosynthesis from the moon”, and “Collin…wiggled his fingers and they glittered in the moonlight”.  I have always had an affinity to writing about space or glitter because it always seems so utterly romantic, as if love is so much bigger than just the two humans partaking in the relationship.  But, later on, as Natalie questions love due to her troubled sister’s “slutdom” and drunk mother’s multiple marriages, she starts to doubt if love even exists.  Her inner thoughts speak loudly to the reader as if telling him or her how the intense build up of love can so easily fail just by one misstep, but by questioning this, she shows the reader and her teacher how that intensity can translate into hope that love has somehow changed her.

A Day’s Worth

That moment when the sharp rays of the morning sun

Splash onto her smooth face.

A time to let it seep into her exhausted skin,

Wake up the sleepy freckles resting on her cheeks.

 

Every year on her birthday, her mother,

A woman of immaculate courage,

Intense like a lioness’s,

Breaks,

Shedding a single, lone tear,

Recalling the day her first child arrived into this world.

 

A frigid day in January,

She recalls, she sees her own blueness in her daughter’s wide eyes —

The relation uncanny.

The longing for her daughter to be lying in her arms, snuggling in what seemed natural.

Has anything really changed?

 

That moment when the sky becomes a painting

Filled with dark, swirling clouds, creeping up in front of the sun, dimming the brightness on her freshened face.

The grayness drips into her complexion,

Freckles slowly erased,

Revealing the reflection of a lost child.

The Rusty Trampoline

The rusty springs inhale as we plunge

into the dewy soil

of my neighbor’s trampoline.

As the exhale propels us into the muggy August air,

I wonder, gazing into the deep portals of crashing waves perched under his long lashes,

“Does he feel it too?”

We collapse into the heavy breath of the tramp,

his hand brushes against mine.