Thrust: A Novel

Lidia Yuknavitch Thrust

This book is for Miles Mingo, sun of my life.

~

And for every child who will cross the threshold next, every kind of body and soul, every orphan and misfit, every immigrant and refugee, every gender imaginable, every lost or found beautiful being looking for shore, home, heart. That space between child and not: imagine it as everything. Hold it open as long as you can. You are right. You are the new world.

I say I’m writing about time and water, and people open their eyes and ears and say, “Wow, what do you mean?” And I say, “In the next one hundred years, the elements of water on the planet are changing.” So the glaciers are going down. The sea level is going up. The pH, the ocean acid level, is reaching a level that we haven’t seen for fifty million years. This is happening in a single person’s lifetime.

— Andri Snær Magnason

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was.” It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

— Walter Benjamin

She felt… how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

— Virginia Woolf

It may just be that the subterranean places we, the fugitives of the present order, must now run to will not be dug out by the hard excavatory machinery of adult logic or the noble spiritualities that claim to know the way but by the gentle seeking fingers of our children caressing the soil, tickling the ground until it guffaws wide open.

— Bayo Akomolafe

Penny

Cruces 1

We dreamed we were hers.

The body of us thought that, because we built her, we belonged to her. We built her in pieces from our bodies, from the stories we held and the stories before that and the stories that might come. She arrived by boat in pieces.

When the ship Isère finally reached port, we wept. The sailors too. They had been convinced that the tempests they’d endured on board would drown them in the ocean, and the cargo with them. The deck of the ship was nearly a farmer’s field in size. The hold had been covered with huge black tarps for the journey. When the sailors pulled the tarps back, the hold looked dark and foreboding.

I was asked to jump into that dark.

Like plunging into the ocean’s deep.

Down in the hold, my eyes began to adjust. Gigantic crates the size of houses filled with pieces of the colossus: a woman in slices, crated and shipped. One by one, we found her body parts.

Hair.

Nose.

Crown.

Eyes.

Mouth.

Fingers, hand.

Foot.

Torch.

She had arrived, in pieces of herself.

Later, while discussing her reassemblage, an engineer remarked that the “embryo lighthouse,” as they called the interior skeleton of the statue, held clues to reconstructing her form. Yet many elements of her construction went unexplained, left us puzzled. We were left with our imaginations to create adaptations.