Atom, however, was drawn to a stack of tin sheets. Each was a square. The teacher taught Atom how to make divots in the tin without breaking through. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
His first project reminded him of a nine block quilt his mother had kept in a doll cradle she’d had from girlhood. He tried to turn each square of his creation into one of the quilt blocks he remembered. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He might have called it “Your Quilt” if he could have shown it to his mother.
I think of that teenage boy fumbling with his tin scraps and pieces of wood to frame them. I think of his effort through his emerging artistic endeavors to assuage the loss of a mother who will never see the artwork her own handiwork inspired. Sigh. Atom is a word artist, too. Under the pseudonym AT Meadows, he writes romance novels! The very ones that Zoe browsed in ‚How We Met: Her Version.‛ And one of which she purchased, ‚entitled The Love that Ended Twice,‛ which may foreshadow the fledgling couple’s fate. We are treated to a sample of Atom’s/AT’s literary efforts in ‚First Draft: Working Title: The Plantation Owner’s Daughter,‛ a prose poem featuring radon (86, Rn), depicting a classically clichéd page from this novel-in-progress, complete with dying heroine. We read through the lines and are forced to imagine Atom’s reallife romance with Zoe and what a far cry it is from the fictional couple’s passionate love. Trevor handed her tissues but he never used them himself. He let his tears flow across his tanned cheeks. He was unashamed of his grief. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He’d stand there and breathe deeply, hoping to suck in enough of that bad air so that he’d start dying.
By juxtaposing the real with the fictional, Carty subtly, skillfully generates full-throated bitterness in this reader’s mouth.
“Atom” by Megan Graustein, 2009
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