Eleanor Paynter

Insomnia with Shells
 
She has taken to dozing in the kitchen, where she brings two eggs to boil and drifts off to their gentle rattle, the water causing the shells to tap dance, each against the other, without breaking and without being broken. Soft staccato, like a prop plane two fields over, or whales rapping out Morse code, or the distant echo of bones, like the dead crawling from their tombs and shaking off the dirt. The way they turn to one another as they realize it is noon, and they are standing. The way they tremble.
 
 

 
Eleanor Paynter has roots in Texas, Rome, and New York. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary Review, Cincinnati Review, Nimrod, and Terrain. Her chapbook Dismantling the Hive will be published in Fall 2012 by Toadlily Press. She lives in the Netherlands.
 



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