PARIS, April 7—I try to see how an image can be available to anybody. I don’t affiliate with any brand or company or government; my work is financed by the sales of original artworks. So whenever I have the opportunity to make my images available online and in social media or in magazines, I take it. When I saw Zoetrope: All-Story, I said, OK, maybe I can make an edition that’s cool and that people can turn into posters and keep the images. It’s a way to have a magazine not . . .
Nobody believes you when you talk about the whispering. Oh, Monny, you are funny, they say, you’ve such an imagination. There’s a lot they don’t believe. Like when you say the river has very old creatures living in it, with great, long jawbones and rainbow skin. You’ve seen them swim downstream between the weeds, not just during the fever when you had German measles, but other times. Or that one of your elbows, the one that got broken falling off the back of TJ’s bike, knows about rain: when it will start, when it will stop. Twinge-twinge . . .
Then came the summer of ladders. I don’t mean that the presence of ladders is in any way surprising, in our New England town. Every March or April, as soon as the last snow melts from the last strip of lawn, the first ladders appear. We see them leaning against the sides of houses, harbingers of spring as reliable as the unfolding petals of dogwood and forsythia. As the weather grows warmer the ladders begin to multiply, as if nourished by the sun. Stepladders spread open beside high hedges and backyard fences. All summer long you can find us standing above our . . .
Without question, the best part of taking G is the beginning. The sensation of invisibility is one of floating. You walk around with a lesser gravity, a low-helium balloon the day after a birthday party. You are neither in this world nor out of it—though you could, if you wanted to, just fly away at a moment’s whim. Just give a little jump and go rushing past rooftops, telephone wires, satellites, your ears popping, the air growing thinner and thinner, gently asphyxiating you into a soft numb. It’s a feeling that intensifies the longer you’ve been on it. It . . .
