Court Ludwick
Multiple Choice Practice Question
Which of the following best defines the phrase “out of body?” Please circle the correct answer.
A) Strange (adj.) from late 13c., straunge, "from elsewhere, not belonging to the place where found." From Old French estrange, “foreign, alien, unusual, unfamiliar, curious, distant, inhospitable, estranged, separated." From Latin extraneus, "external, from without."
B) A detachment. A split. A (reverse) possession (of sorts).
C) Once, I dreamt I was a ghost, haunting rather than haunted.
D) What if elsewhere is right here? What if place is body and body is mine? What if foreign is not alien, unusual, unfamiliar? What is curious is that distant is close. Does this make the flesh inhospitable? Estranged, I admit to feeling separated. What if I told you feeling external is from within?
E) This is not a ghost story. This is a story about ghosts.
A) Strange (adj.) from late 13c., straunge, "from elsewhere, not belonging to the place where found." From Old French estrange, “foreign, alien, unusual, unfamiliar, curious, distant, inhospitable, estranged, separated." From Latin extraneus, "external, from without."
B) A detachment. A split. A (reverse) possession (of sorts).
C) Once, I dreamt I was a ghost, haunting rather than haunted.
D) What if elsewhere is right here? What if place is body and body is mine? What if foreign is not alien, unusual, unfamiliar? What is curious is that distant is close. Does this make the flesh inhospitable? Estranged, I admit to feeling separated. What if I told you feeling external is from within?
E) This is not a ghost story. This is a story about ghosts.
Listen
And sometimes I slip my socks off even when it’s snowing and I’m outside and everyone is dead. No, not really, but I couldn’t sleep because I’ve been talking to sidewalks when I should’ve been talking to the dirt underneath. I bury my purple toes into, what, the earth? Everyone’s driving all the time, even this late, don’t ask me why though. Hey look, I get it, the snow is cold, is an obvious thing to say. Is it more or less true that you don’t need a mouth to speak? But people say obvious things all the time. Okay so once I lay on grass and told a single blade a secret even though I knew others would hear. Just past the parking lot, there is a construction site and before six inches of snow fell earlier there was so much fresh dirt and I think I can take the fence easy, only maybe this is not so easy, only the metal grabs my knee. Hey you hear that? And the quiet that falls with the cold? You’d think it’d fall fast but it doesn’t it doesn’t at all it comes slow then never leaves. Do you think an empty dumpster is like that? Sorry sometimes I forget other people aren’t in my head but seriously what if everything was fine inside until I took my skirt off that night and threw it away instead of washing it with the rest of me and do you think it holds a grudge, hey you think she knows it’s not her fault? The snow is warm now, call that hypothermia or call it a religious experience. Call it something else if you like. How many toes does someone have to lose to get it? Sand dunes cry, is this an obvious thing to say, yes or no? Wish I would’ve forgotten the key that lets me back in my building but I didn’t. The plastic is in my pocket. When I told a classmate I wanted to live in a tree, he wrote a poem about it and emailed it to me without a subject line and traced the click of my jaw too slow but that’s not why I told him that’s not what I wanted. I don’t speak when I panic but a good question people ask is, what would you say if nobody was around to hear except for the metal bin? Except people don’t say that last part. In a month, barbed wire will top the fence I climb back over. So do you think people act like everything is something to kill because we like the killing or because we don’t know different? We don’t want to be mined, furnaced, liquified, molded, made, like that, yeah? Hey someone should tell the philosophers that hell is having all of your toes and wishing they’d fall off like lemons, like that one tree you miss from that one place from that one time.
Court Ludwick is the author of These Strange Bodies and the founding editor-in-chief of Broken Antler. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best Microfiction, and can be found in EPOCH, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, Hawaii Pacific Review, Oxford Magazine, diode, and elsewhere. Court holds an MA from Texas Tech University and is a PhD candidate at the University of South Dakota. She is currently based in Minneapolis, where she is working on a novel, a poetry collection, and ongoing experiments in new media.