‘A Decline in Natural Numbers’
— Joyce Chong
Now when she twists the knot, the hair pulls loose, slippery like dishwater.
There’s a sense of subtle foreboding interwoven with routine that signals what's to come in Arnett’s short story. ‘A Decline in Natural Numbers’ centers on the personal, interpersonal, and emotional struggles that come with loss. Brianna is drawn first and foremost by the things she loves to do, defined by the self as passion. Arnett renders the effects that her loss of words and memory recall has on her family in heartbreaking starkness.
Cards cover the table in slick piles, and m o t h e r comes and pets Brianna’s head while she looks at them and tries to remember the words. The man still wants to look at them and m o t h e r says okay, Mike, I think that’s enough for one night, don’t you? Look at her – she’s tired, she can’t do this anymore right now, and then the man says goddamnit, Maggie, why can’t you just let her try?
The world rendered through Brianna’s eyes are a series of letters and faces, things that are familiar but that you struggle to put something concrete to. The sensation of having a word on the tip of your tongue, but without that moment of recollection when you get it. The story, told from her mother’s perspective is an illustration of grief and blame, the feeling that, when it comes to matters of love and blood, one is always at fault. That there should be something to turn things back, to undo the unknowable ways time changes us.