Mabel episode 23, Bull in the Maze, in which the saint speaks.

The Saint Speaks

The Hi, you've reached Mabel Martin. I'm not here to take your call right now, so please leave a message after the beep and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks.

Hi, this is Anna Limeone calling for Mabel Martin. I work for your grandmother as a home care assistant and I wanted to.

Here's something funny, Mabel. I've been cultivating unkindness.

I've been cultivating a lot of things.

I'm a fertile field, it turns out, but

unkindness is the most, well, interesting.

It is unkind of me to try and play a trick on you when you were there and I am here,

and I can hear the heart of you aching down through the walls and the roots and the

systems and the structures.

When I know how you struggle, when I have to, when I can hear everything warped and distorted but broadcast somehow like radio

waves down the hollow bones in my ears all rattling and drumming and I can't dig you out,

Maple, I can't reach my fingers deep enough inside my own brain inside my own brain, inside my own ribcage.

I don't believe you'll ever hear this.

Not really. I am the smallest, most distant explorer writing a message in the sand of a beach.

No one has walked on or sailed past or flown over in a hundred thousand thousand years.

So why am I doing it? Why am I whispering to the walls like the woman in the yellow

wallpaper with her terrible husband and her terrible doctor and her postpartum psychosis? Why even bother,

Mabel? Because I have to.

Because you've become somehow integral.

Without you, divorced from even the idea of you, I have no substance, no form.

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