In the Style of James Joyce, I Think

With every brush of her pen's ink on paper she felt empowerment creep over her, until she was suffocating on her Self. The power within her limbs thrummed unbridled, and she entertained, perhaps for the first time, the dim notion of what one unstoppable person could achieve; she became one of a race training to be heroes, and though she scarcely could give real definition to the word she felt wholeheartedly the burden and satisfactions of such a calling.

She was proud of her meagre words, the rush of perfectly formed English amidst fumbling Spanish. She sometimes felt that her unmotivated inability in Spanish gave her inspiration and determination a rocket's push, throwing her fearlessly forward into the realm of vaguely unexplored literary territory.

Between her hands and eyes a book lingered, hulked like a tiny subversive monster, quiet in its manners and always so much with itself in everything it did: A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. While wedged between its pages she knew acutely the weight of his twisting words, plainly and verbosely explaining things she guessed she had always sensed but never precisely had the thought to think before. The moments of hilarity were burnt with sparkling clarity above her eyebrows and while her jaw hung slack with laughter she wondered if her classmates understood what they read as well, or merely completed their assignments and released the smoky images from their overripe minds like seeds in the wind.

The foreign language grated on her ears. She wondered how this could be the same language that she read out loud alone at night in her room from a coveted book of poetry, stumbling over foreign sounds and half-forgetting accents. Her tongue felt uncharacteristically thick and useless in her mouth, her lips getting impatient and racing ahead of her unimpatient mind.

The shrill, impossibly fast syllables ejected from her teacher's whorish painted mouth seemed hardly equal but for mere letters and lines-- the formation was the only link. Neruda sat curled in her bag like a weightless phantom, silent save for when she released his vapor into the air, parting the Red Sea and breathing his meaning through clumsy lips.