Thrust: A Novel

My brilliant cousin, my obscene genius, my Adonis Frédéric,

I am in love with the drawings of your colossus, with your mind at work. If you should ever stop writing me, I will throw myself out of this window into the river, sink myself like a stone statue. The might of your imagination! Your drawings give me a world of visions — enough to palpitate a heart, to throb a cleft. What a gorgeously unholy perfect union we have made.

Of the three you sent, here are my assessments:

Too Egyptian. This is not the Suez Canal, my dove. I understand your disappointment at losing that project, but still. And she’s not really a lighthouse, not in the traditional sense, right? I think your imagination is exoticizing. Or else that trip you took with your delicious painter friend Jean-Léon Gérôme to Egypt has left you aching.

What has this majestic androgyne got in its hand? A broken chain? Those poor dimwitted god-addicted souls, still tortured by their loss in the Civil War, will consider this heresy. They’ll protest, riot, try to tear it down. This bawling, sprawling infant of a country will never get over losing its power to enslave and slaughter other humans as if they were objects. We’re built from it. They’ll fight you on it. But, oh! How I love those perfect broken shackles, held in the air for everyone to suck!

I miss her breasts. Where are they? Though I do admire the masculinity of her face. This one may be my favorite.

Now let’s discuss this book I’ve told you about, this work you must read. Yes, I understand your objection; yes, the author was merely a girl in her teens; yes, this is meaningless to me. How can you dismiss the modern Prometheus? You don’t know what girls know. I, however, do, as I think you will remember. The apple? Your own awakening? When we were children?

How precise she was, this “girl author,” as you call her. What she created was, I believe, the most perfect articulation of the drive of men — so much so that it made me gasp, left me wet, left me taken by her brain. This monster she conceived, so worthy of compassion. This girl gone mad from loving a man — for isn’t the author writing herself as well? Creating a new creation story to combat her grief? Did not her offspring die at the moment of birth? Or prematurely? Child loss induces a grief in a woman that is never overcome. A hole inside a woman is a monumental thing too.

My idea is this: We should rob all the churches of bibles and hymnbooks — like we did when we were eleven, remember, cousin? And we should honor her, the monster’s creator, by replacing them all with her work. Break the very ground. Frankenstein every pew.

Remember, I went to war at eighteen. Lost a leg before I was twenty. That’s the kind of “woman” I am. Puzzle upon that, beloved.

Love in endless waves,

Aurora