Description
In this “hybridiary” of historical fiction and personal memoir, we peer inside baby incubators at Coney Island, waiting for childhood to take wing. We overhear the dying dreams of the Imperial Romanov family, and we fret the simple act of watching a child walk to class. Hope is a bright and constant thread: a tornado cuts a tender swath; a lady bides time inside a tiger’s claws; teenagers preen on screens during pandemic lockdown. Rescues are fumbled but perpetually launched—and love is a gift the way the sun is a gift: constant and consoling, but also blinding, near-obliterating. Tragic, funny, and surreal, FEATHER ROUSING nests in the spaces between caretaking and grief, secret and spectacle, recollection and imagination, global anguish and private joy.
from “Swath”
The speed. The swirl. The spread. The sound. Everywhere its roar, its width, its pull, its push, its force. All the tornado was supposed to do or be simply was. It was everything and the absence of everything. As it consumed, it learned: the yearning in rooftops shingled by men too young to grow good beards. The weariness soaked into bathtubs. The outrage bolted into door locks. The terror squeezed into teddy bears. The anxiety paced into threadbare rugs and poured into flasks wedged behind textbooks. In one gulp, the tornado swallowed all the flirtation and humiliation of the city pool. The shame of locker rooms. The sweat of bean fields. The despair chalked into concrete courts in the prison rec yard.
Yes, the tornado could do better than kittens. It could absorb anguish, remove what those on earth believed already ruined. Benevolence pulsed its vortex.
It headed northeast, towards the airport, the endless echoes of Goodbye and Please Come Back.
Suddenly, the tornado pulled south. It was two miles wide.
Nearby was a wellspring of deep, maybe endless, grief. The tornado veered towards the place. There were rows of stones etched with names, names, names, some faded, some freshly crisp. The new-mown grass was planted with flags and plastic flowers. Below the lawn, the loam itself was layered with centuries of torment. The tornado was drawn by the pain of leaving— and the anticipation of such pain.
Keep in mind: a tornado swallowing human sorrow would grow beyond all measure. How would it ever stop? It wouldn’t—unless something intervened.
© Kara Counard 
