FICTION:
The air is alive with pine and leaf-rot. My hands are shaking. It’s damn chilly, but that isn’t it. It’s that I know—and would give anything not to. Clumsily, I find the bolt, slide it back and push. The gate creaks open; escape is imminent. Then I see them standing in the headlights’ glow at the edge of the forest, at least a dozen: antlered, steaming, still as rock formations.
I could never get comfortable around her. She allowed me into her house, but never really invited me in. When Nate introduced us for the first time, she smiled as she sized me up. It wasn’t until he told her where I lived, where I was from, that her face downturned with disapproval. My 900-square-foot house could have fit in their kitchen.
I don’t go into Barbara’s home office; Barbara doesn’t go into mine. Good boundaries make good marriages.
And just why am I here?
Because I answered the damn landline phone on Barbara’s nightstand in our bedroom.
It was Nee-Nee who told me the broken house where we live with seven other families used to belong to her and her alone. It was hard for me to understand this. I had always known and lived with the Browns, and Pridemores, and Cavars, and all the others, and their children, who, like me, roamed the rubble around us barefoot and shirtless.
This is the day he says goodbye. His uniform is faded. His boots, the same ones from the last war, are worn. He's thirty-nine years old, but they are calling up men as old as fifty. He's still handsome, his wife says. When his children say, "goodbye Daddy" and kiss him, they believe they’ll see him again.
It is the waning hours of the noctis shift, the time just before dawn shimmers gold through the bay fog. Over the public address, a female voice practiced in just-the-facts: “Code blue, ICU six-two-seven, code blue, ICU six-two-seven.”
She found herself alone with him. He was smaller now. Shrunken. With a pallor not seen outside of a vampire movie. Waxy. With a morbid fascination she sidled even closer. The tiniest of threads peeked out of the corner of his mouth where his lips had been sewn shut.
Mr. Richard Duggan died last week. There was no funeral, Danny said. The City hearse just came real early in the morning and took the body away before it could smell. Mr. Duggan had no family, and he lived alone over the Millinis in one room on the top floor. He was old and he didn’t smile or talk to anybody, and he didn’t go out, hardly ever …
NONFICTION:
Why do I even want these DVDs? I can stream most of these movies anytime I choose. Maybe it’s smarter not to spend money on plastic relics. But still… there’s something about the physical object. Is it nostalgia? A desire for ownership? For permanence? What happens if streaming services jack up prices, or quietly remove titles, or the internet goes down entirely?
I feel the tension of the psychiatric emergency room as soon as I enter. The chairs in the waiting area are full, and patients or family members are pacing in the spaces between the chairs and the registration desk. Some of those pacing stare at the staff room visible through the glass behind the desk. Others walk with downcast eyes as if memorizing the patterns on the floor.
Two particles interconnect such that the state of one instantly influences the other, even over enormous distances. We meet in high school: sweaty linebacker and geek in Harry Potter glasses. Our voltage accelerates my protons until I glow neon, vibrate from hair tips to toenails. Drool Pavlovian when the bell rings to end classes, hoping your car waits for me.
Even though my family was not considering any kind of retirement celebration I admit that I secretly hoped that they would plan some little thing, a little gathering of friends or something. I was being ridiculous though because no party has happened or will be happening. There was nothing from my family to celebrate me.
Dad’s life spanned many chapters: athlete, football coach, high school teacher, father, reader, house painter, musician/singer/songwriter, playwright, hunter, fisherman, carpenter, traveler; lover of dogs, cats, and all things wild, and the lakes and woods of Michigan. Even the final chapter wasn’t too terrible.
POETRY:
And far as I can see, her dying was for me like when it snows on winter fields …
I loved you to the
depth, breadth, and volume
of my ace-inhibited, beta-blocked…
Yes, I ’m going, but since you’re so kind and the cosmos remains unlisted,
things swooshing as they must ...
Spider lilies riot, stigmata stamen-stained give way.
I say your name, the sound you hear but do not answer.
I am piecing you together, you will not stay.
The House Poems
i. Kitchen ii Garden iii Bedroom