Risk: An Accounting
* Like a flower at first, all daisy face and fairy blossom. Or a star, if you prefer, supernova of cellular splits. Aster. Suggestion of beauty, hint of growth. The risk comes next: little aphid on the pistil, little dust mote in the cosmos, little nucleus caught in the act of dividing. It’s the ending that signals Results not typical, Side effects may include … Warning! Little caveat. Little button at the collar. Little jacket snap and tie clip.
Put them both together to form the section break: tiny raft adrift on a wide, unpunctuated sea. Asterisk. Little barnacle on a rock. Little hole in the wall, peering out, peering in. Little pip on a die. Little jewel in a shell. It’s impossible to tell what the risk will yield. Little coin toss. Is it a loss … or a win? Little eye, unblinking. Little mole on the skin. Could be malignant, could be benign. Little navel. Little nostril. Little knot in the wood of longing.
The entry is always easier than we think, not knowing what we’re getting ourselves into. It’s the exit that requires a risk. Little Tell me everything. Little Not in a million years. Little I held the door open, but she didn’t walk through. Little story hour at the library. Little champagne clink on the ship. That which reminds us nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower. We admire the aster in the English garden, and so we pluck. The risk is what follows: s/he loves me, s/he loves me not.
Brimhall, Traci
“And we want the stricken pleasure of intimacy, so we risk it.”
Business
Risky Business premiered in 1983. In the film, a youthful Tom Cruise, in one of his first big roles, plays a teenager on his own for the weekend. At first, it’s all fun and games—don’t we all remember that iconic scene: Tom Cruise in his underpants and socks, lip-synching and air-guitaring his way through the house?—but then, of course, mischievous hijinks ensue, the stakes growing larger by the minute.
I can’t remember if I saw the movie in a theater at the time, since in 1983, I had embarked on some risky business of my own out in the countryside of baby, too, somehow controverting all laws of biology. What was I thinking? Not much, not much—only following the bright, dangerous trail of the body’s desires.
