The Sound of Pages Turning
My boss yells at me, because I don't have my work done. The sheets are pale coral and cotton with a bleach stain in the center. I eat a plate of pulled pork drowning in Memphis Smokey sauce. He kisses me goodbye as I hurry to finish the work I should have started hours ago. All of these things add up, pile up and run together. Together they make up a life and me as well. Business as usual. All of these things are happening, occurring, seamlessly, sometimes together, sometimes one after the other or far far apart. No effort, no planning on my part, they are, and I am, and you are no more.
And for you, what? You lie in the ground now, in the casket we couldn't afford but I wanted you to have anyway. Aluminum-bright silver metal flake paint job with Art Deco style hardware, it was new and clean and nicer than any car you'd ever owned. It cost more as well. Cold and slow moving, the things that happen where you are now still terrify the strongest man, although they have happened since time ever was time.
One year ago our father, sick and barely able to walk, found you, lying in bed, your life so long gone away he knew immediately that a paramedic an ambulance a doctor were useless. He has never really told me the details about how you looked or how he was so certain you were gone. And I have never asked him. You lay in a mess of a bed in a mess of a room in a mess of a life and somehow someone somewhere decided-was it God, was it you?-that the credits ought to start rolling now. One year ago you went to sleep for the last time, alone.
Did the kittens and cats you loved so, the last things that gave you any joy, cluster around you then, sleeping against you as you cooled and stiffened and then relaxed again? Did they know any different this time? Flies in bowls of old cereal and take-out boxes kept eating shitting fucking on the nightstand beside you as though today were any other day. In the next room the old man listened to the radio and the whining of the dog for leftover dinner from his plate. He didn't know. None of us did. But we all really did know, didn't we? We knew for weeks for years for a lifetime and we could do nothing after all in the end.
My fantasies of opulent wealth and making love to fascinating strangers have all given way now. As I lie in my own bed and shudder the day off of me, I dream of far simpler things. It's a day long since past, days of family squabbling and home cooked pot roast. We are all together and we think nothing of that. Three TVs blare simultaneously in three rooms where no one watches them. A mother gossips into a phone. A father cusses at a failing lawnmower. A sister reads a book on the blue coverlet of the bed of her youth. And my heart has not ever really been broken yet.