No Liability EXCERPT
They wait in line for five minutes—this is quite the crowded place, for Costa Rica—to buy their entrance tickets. She reads the large plywood sign in the meantime: This is a place of natural geologic and seismic activity. We take no responsibility and hold no liability for injury to persons or possessions in the event of seismic events/Acts of God.
She notices and points out, with delight, the use of “seismic events/Acts of God” in the sign; how they'd used both when one would do, how it must have something to do with the Catholic country they were in. Her husband, of course, ever the lawyer, immediately rejoins, pedantically, that of course they needed to cover all the bases, legally, inre how people might choose to view such an occurrence. It’s those inres that really get to her. Who else says inre in normal conversation? There’s also something she adores, though she can’t quite put her finger on it right now—she’ll meditate on it later, while in the hot water—about the use of the word “event” in that context.
She is a poet. While it’s true she’s had only one poem published in the past nine years that she’s been seriously dedicating herself to her writing in all her spare time, nevertheless it’s what she is, as one always knows in one’s bones what one was meant to do on this earth. The poem that was published, ironically, she didn’t even consider one of her best ones, but she’d submitted the requested five pieces on the same theme to the respected literary travel journal, Gulliver’s, and that’s the one they’d chosen, “Being The Wind.” She always introduces herself to people that way—“I’m a poet”—while her husband introduces her with what she does to make money—“She’s an administrative assistant, keeps track of all those after-school programs for adults, you know, oil painting, rock-climbing, ice-fishing?” And then he snorts dismissively. She feels she could live with him refusing to present her as a poet, but that snort always infuriates her.
What she can’t figure out is whether he’s lost the ability to see the world the same way she does at some point during their eleven long years together, to discern humor in the turn of a phrase, to see the wit in words; or whether he never really had it in the first place. Like that time they’d gone to the hospital in a small panic over what turned out to be just a kidney stone, and even in excruciating pain she’d had to stop and laugh for a full minute over the painted phrase they’d encountered on a locked entrance: This Is Not A Patient Door. For a while after that he’d actually suggested she might be unbalanced, might need to see a psychologist—just because she could find delight in words strung together in a particular order.