8 p.m. tonight at the Old Stone House,  Brooklyn Reading Works presents two writers,  Essayist Kim Larsen and Poet Rachel Vigier, who explore the suddeness of loss, the fragility of life. The Old Stone House is located on Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets in Park Slope. Free. Refreshments. 

From Kim Larsen’s "When the Middle is the End:"

Laurel put a meal together for my family and me a couple of weeks before she died. The main dish was a Tuscan soup — beans, pasta, tomatoes. Delicious. There was bread and a salad and wine. I saw a note she’d jotted to her husband, the word “wine” followed by an exclamation point. The apartment was littered with such notes, not all of them concise. Pen to paper was her mode of communication now that she no longer possessed a tongue — it had been surgically removed six weeks earlier in what would shortly prove a vain attempt to root out the cancer encamped at the base of the organ. Laurel’s handwriting was nearly illegible, a forward-slanting scrawl, and we all marveled to see how expertly her seven-year-old daughter Anya deciphered it. More remarkably, sometimes Anya could blithely interpret her mother’s attempts at speech. To anyone else Laurel’s words were unintelligible — guttural starts followed by featureless nasal incantation. The will to speak still drove her, but it was useless. Anya’s uncanny ability to understand her mother even occasionally represented some kind of umbilical magic. That they both took it in stride increased the dazzle of the little girl’s feat.

A poem by Rachel Vigier:

Remnants

It’s what I have left to offer you —
    the ripple of a flax field in flower
the flow of a river slipping to sea
    the weight of a whale flipping over.
Say it’s images from a life left over
    or the lust of memory
wanting its place of origin
    before the blue fades, before
the heft and swiftness disappear