Fiction

“Don’t leave the window open. I don’t want to fall and die again,” said our son, looking out. He was three.

“Children say things like that,” said my equanimous wife, Nance, when I told her about it over wine and the boxes we were still unpacking. 

“Nonsense or proof of reincarnation?” I asked. 

Though Mom doesn’t appear in the procedural after those first two minutes, it is her death that is investigated, her murderer prosecuted. This small role was the meatiest—and the last—of her modest career.

Our marriage was in shambles. We didn’t do anything together, but it wasn’t either of our faults: there was nothing to do; the garden was so boring.

Genius and industry do not much matter to me. What matters: Does a person smell kind: like a bone, like a leash, like a ball?

​No one knows what it was like, how very dark it was in 1815. The nights were enormous; you couldn’t believe they would ever end. 

Bigger than us, and aglow with light: on the movie screen, you are like the haloed figures in medieval art who tower over the townsfolk they cure or bless, the townsfolk who bow to them or shoot arrows at them. We grew up falling in love with you, seeing every movie worth seeing. We are grown up and still catapulting our longing against the screen.

How insufferable I sound to myself, making so much of such minor complaints! I would not have wanted to be my own friend. But then, I had no friends.

 I tie back my long hair and coil it round so no one can grab it. I make the drive to Hollywood, park in the garage, strap my helmet under my chin. It’s a good helmet. Black. It grips my skull and goes with everything

I watch the red and sweaty late-night preachers wipe their brows, hoist their heavy Bibles up, wrestle invisible demons down, roll on the floor, do push-ups, kiss the carpet, leap to their feet, pound on the pulpit, raise their arms heavenward in victorious Vs. “Glory be,” “Let there be,” and, “If your heart be,” they croon in the subjunctive tense of holy possibility.

The camera glides into close-up, the ghost of it hovering very near me now, its warm electric breath daring me to move, daring me to blink. I won’t. I’m good at what I do.

 And I felt sure that if I kept driving, I would get right to Heaven with my mail. This was a long time ago.

 I’ll tell you the whole story. It has our dad in it, and our mom. And a dog. And a ghost.

We didn’t have any of them for long.

The formerly-paralyzed man did not look good.

Shanda holds it in; she hates it when people say, “Jesus Christ!” in a fed-up way, like they’re fed up with her. Like they can’t stand it, they’re so fed up with her. It’s unfair for him to be so fed up, when she asked for one little thing.

Seriously, if namedropping were nailbiting Chad Paisley’s fingers would always be bleeding. 

She’s on the brink of something, she can feel it; her life is once again about to change and become a new life.