 | A WRITER'S WIT |
Angry NIGHT WALKER
Kevin Cooley July 20, 2015, Lauren Groff, “Ghosts and Empties”: A woman in her thirties living in northern Florida takes winter evening walks, in part, to dissipate a certain anger. ¶ Groff creates the appearance that the narrator is on one long walk, but, of course, she is presenting to the reader an accumulation of walks. Through these sojourns the reader understands a bit of the woman’s ire: a world of decay from her very own mixed neighborhood to melting glaciers to the Pacific Ocean’s swirl of plastic water bottles, to the silent dying off of innocent species, to a certain unfaithfulness of a husband she truly loves, and, by way of extrapolation, probably the two sons who will grow up to be like their father.
“Soon, tomorrow, the boys will be men, then the men will leave the house, and my husband and I will look at each other crouching under the weight of all that we wouldn’t or couldn’t yell, and all those hours outside walking, my body, my shadow, and the moon. It is terribly true, even if the truth does not comfort, that if you look at the moon for long enough night after night, as I have, you will see that the old cartoons are correct, that the moon is, in fact, laughing, but not at us, we who are too small and our lives too fleeting for it to give us any notice at all.”
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