Origins
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“You don’t remember your mother. Not really. The memories you have are more like impressions: gentle, gravelly pauses, sotto voce speech with secrets only for you, and a story you didn’t want to stop listening to. And sound effects, oh the sound effects. She could reproduce anything: keyboard tapping, dogs barking, the wind. Her face escapes you, but you remember a piano distorted by shadows; cats winding around your crib. No one ever bothered telling you your mother was a podcast. All those years watching you draw wobbly hopscotch rectangles on the sidewalk and whispering anecdotes into your classmates’ willing ears, and not one person even considered that you’d inherited something from her.
None of the neighbors ever encouraged your father, a wan man with eyes black as camera lenses, to tell you the truth: that your mother loved your father and had you and then left you both. None of the neighbors ever encouraged your father to tell you the truth. None of your friends’ parents told you that the urges you felt were natural. Not even just natural—predictable. You gathered your day into convenient narrative bundles, you recorded the sound of your own footsteps, you did multiple takes of your dialogue with friends. You were her child from the beginning, even if you didn’t know it.
And you would have gone on for the rest of your life in ignorance of the circumstances of your own birth were it not for the afternoon a woman you met at a filling station in Iowa recommended you listen to something she called The Organist, which she described as “indescribable.” She said it to you with the solemn gravity of a proselytizer. You turned to your car to remove the gas pump and when you looked back the woman and her dusty Subaru and herd of cat-eyed children were gone. The air smelled like diesel and manure and, inexplicably, limes, and when you dug your cell out of your purse, it was dead.
That night, as you sat down and scrolled through your phone, you found it. You started to listen. As for everything that followed—the stomach-plummet of recognition, your father’s dire warning, the fevered road-trip to New Mexico, the spells in the desert, the answers you never knew you were looking for—that’s for someone else’s mother to tell.”
HyacinthWine via Apple Podcasts ·
United States of America ·
09/16/17
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“Life is full of two things: noise and signal. Any young radio enthusiast can tell you that the ability to get a clean signal is a combination of topograpghy, proximity, and the quality of the receiver. Comparing to human anatomy, the ear is the organ most like a radio antenna. It is a structure...”Read full review »
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