Once upon a time, there was an artist who hated to paint. In the house to the left of the artist was a writer who hated to write, and next to his house was a musician who hated playing instruments. These three lived on Avenue Street in a city called Grouping of Buildings. Every weekday the three would arise in the morning and do what they hated most. The artist would begin by laboriously cleaning her brushes from yesterday, the writer would sharpen his pencils, and the musician would tune their instruments. By 8:00 o’clock each day they would begin their work. By 12:00 o’clock they would gather for sandwiches and tea, and grumble about what each of them had completed in the morning. They spent their days as such, and by the time the weekend came, they were glad not to do their tasks and instead enjoyed each other’s company and going to the farmer’s market on Sundays.…
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The old couple have vanished from my view. Hard to believe: they were there for so long. Gone too, the snatches of their rumpus. The tiffs and bouts grew louder as the man’s mobility and faculties diminished – but, even then, they seemed to me perfect companions, he the milder one, she, the more forceful, though half his size.
Their apartment was adjacent to mine and a few floors below, and I’d catch her cleaning windows or pegging dishcloths, a diminutive demon, tackling tasks with vim. She loved leaning over the rail and flapping towels. Every morning she swept the narrow balcony, claiming it with the clatter of her broom. Her husband would often sit out there on his own, absorbed for hours in a hobby, hunched over a jigsaw, or gluing matchsticks together, plump fingers at work.…
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Many years ago, I replaced the mail slot in the front door of our family home and found a note wedged between the old frame and the door. It was a note to my little sister Kate, left there a few months before by her boyfriend Bill. She had known Bill since their high school days and they were inseparable. They went to summer camps together and then enrolled in the same college to study English Literature. They both returned home after college and took up teaching jobs in the local school.
All of us thought that they were going to get married. Months went by. I got the sense that they were somehow slowly drifting apart. They saw each other less often, and Bill lost the characteristic bounce in his gait. …
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Her life did not flash before her eyes
as she plunged off
the bascule bridge.
Rather, synapses ignited, and her mind envisaged, with unimaginable clarity, the Bridge Operator, who in those final moments had pleaded with her to come down. And his voice, like a dwindling campfire, stayed with her as she saw his life unfold.
How he returned to a threadbare apartment on 2nd and Highland. How he washed pain pills down with beer, sitting in front of an old desktop, typing the name Claire Fanning into the search engine. A doctor, an accountant, a poet laureate, a wife, a mother, names upon names, the smiling faces of young women with fathers somewhere. All Claires. But not his.
How days later, at a corner bar, he threw back a bottom-shelf bourbon and recounted the story of the young girl on the railing to the others huddled around him. …
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“Please ask him to come.”
There’s silence for a moment as I think. It isn’t true silence. Not here, where the water breaks against rock and wind rolls over the waves. Here, I can pretend away my presence and fold myself into the white air, and here, silence is a kind of heavy sleep, not begging to be filled, not noisily empty. So I do not rush to occupy it.
“I just want to see him,” Mama says. Her voice is faint against the wind and muffled from behind a scarf, but my ears are attuned to listening to her.
A few moments of searching fail to yield the proper response, so I settle for less. “You know he’ll refuse.”
“Just once,” she says. “Does it mean nothing to him?”…
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After swapping inner voices with me, all you say is, “Everything is so much softer.”
Which I take to mean quieter and gentler—the kind of change you were hoping for.
Then, all smiles and bright eyes, you thank me and head off to take care of other Saturday plans. I linger on the park bench, to get Aeterna’s take on the new arrangement.
“Thanks for helping out,” I think to her, using her voice as we agreed I would. “How does it feel so far?”
“Like I’m hearing myself or who I once was,” she answers in my mind with your inner voice. “How do I sound?”
“Firm,” I answer. “Like bark—tough and furrowed.”
“I hope it’s just bark and no bite,” she quips—though only half successfully with your inner voice dampening her usual levity to a low-key seriousness.…
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I’d left several phone messages but apparently, my godfather didn’t care to connect.
He lived in the Midwest, where he and my father had grown up and joined the service together, but after my baptism at old St. Pius, which I don’t remember, he dropped out of Dad’s life. According to Dad. Now, Dad had died. I thought Bill, my godfather, should know, and I wanted to tell him in person. And meet him for the first time.
I drove a thousand miles back to my birthplace. There I staked out the humble brick home where Bill and his wife, Frannie (who was not my godmother), had lived their entire adult lives.
It was a summer evening with cicadas roaring in the humid trees like evacuation traffic.…
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