[UA] UA Flying Woman - First person

[Bruce MacMonkey McSpade]

Greetings.  I just thought I'd pass this along.  It is the opening monologue 
from a play by Ellen McLaughlin called, "Tongue of a Bird":

Maxine stands in a high place.  She looks down.

MAXINE:  There's a girl, this is me, standing at a high window, looking 
down.  She tells herself: you will remember this.  And I do.  i remember 
everything.  But I don't remember why I remember this.  It is morning and 
I'm looking down across a vast landscpe and I've lost something which I 
think I will spot from this height.  The farther up you are the more you 
see.  This is true.  I have learned this since...and it's like a flicker of 
light sometimes, perhaps the glint of a climber's goggles, the quirk, almost 
indiscernible, of the wrong color, the dropped glove, the upturned shoe.  
These things, the slight, the rare, I see them as others don't, I am gifted 
-- and here, there's something about this memory, but i can't...
      A fly, I know, is buzzing up the window, a trapped fly, going up the 
air, which it finds strangely hard and unyielding, going up when it means to 
be going out.  This is crucial but I don't know why.  Perhaps it just tells 
me the season, which must be late autumn, a time when flies are dying in 
just this way, going up when they mean to be going out.  And it seems to me 
that all nature is dying on this day.  Except me, who stands and watches.
      So there's the fly and there's the landscape, dropped like a platter 
below me.
      I see it as if I were above it, looking down over the back of my own 
blond head.  I see most of my past this way, remembered with a detachment 
which looks coolly down on a child I am, experiencing some dreadful thing, 
which I experienced but didn't, and experience again in recalling it, but 
don't.
      There is that girl, who is me, so far below me, who might have lived 
my life if I hadn't left her there and come up here to watch her.  (Smiles.) 
  I was so terribly good at that.  A trick I learned so early.
      So I became a flyer.
      But she asked me to remember this.  So I look down with her on the 
bald hills of some uncertain autumn, and we hear the fly and we wait.

Not terribly UA but it struck me.  And she is a marvelous writer.

Peace,
MacMonkey

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