From Princess Hemingway’s Diary
Written the Morning of March 12, 1996,
The Day of Her Death

Andrés Cruciani

Torn out by a young D’Andre Hemingway, what follows is a page from his sister’s diary—a premonitive entry written the day of her murder.

But dare we? ... Under a blue moonlight, tracing a ranger’s crunching footsteps below dark canopy—‘In the cage to your left, homo urbanus rarely found outside his concrete environs’—dare we deviate? to follow the crooked trail into the forest’s dense ribcage? hand-in-hand into the wilderness? What if—? … through shrubbery our legs scratched by endless thorns, arms rashed by sumac, a moon walled by leaves. Darkness. Palms before us, stumbling, crawling, not knowing from where we came. Our shouts return. Here only the black firecrackers of infinite bugs. What brushed our skin? Onwards, groping, chewing our hearts, wondering what have we done. Innumerable night unfurls before us. We forget day. If only we’d marked our retreat. If only we’d stayed. Here, a hopeless desolate misery. Our knees and hands cut, we lost each other long ago, we are… alone… And then a dim blue light jigsaws the thicket ahead. We race forward & in the clearing find each other. The full moon radiates maternally on an iridescent lagoon, Look. The water laps, our nakedness shimmers, perhaps we won’t return, perhaps