One Page 48

The old man dropped his cigarette butt into the ashtray after grinding the stub out. There was a pile of stubs already so this one addition hardly caused any notice. I watched his fingers shaking, yellowish, with dirt under his nails. His voice was gruff and hollow and he was telling me about the war, which war I wasn’t really sure, there had been so many. He crossed his legs slowly and raised his face to meet my gaze. His eyes were a watery blue and deep creases ran along his cheeks and forehead. He was an old man. He was my grandfather, although I had only just met him. It took my father dying to bring this side of the family together, and now we sat, in poorly cushioned chairs all in a line, waiting. The flowers were pungent and brilliant, the only color in the room. The air was silent for a moment with the coincidence of everyone’s mouths shutting, no more words to be spoken. I looked out the tall windows where there was only a small plate of clear glass surrounded by stained glass images from the Bible, images I did not recognize. My mother had not allowed us to go to church, and I had hardly been inside of a church until now, besides a few weddings long ago. It felt comfortable, as if a part of me had been kept from coming home. The alter was polished and gleaming in the late afternoon sun. the air was warm with so many people breathing quietly, waiting. An old man dies and all these people, many of whom do not know each other, come together as a group, all mourning in their black suits and ties. The old man who died was not even liked by most, including my grandfather who sat here next to me. I wondered whether he had ever liked his son or if from the very beginning he had known the man would do no good in the world. I was the outcome of one sweet moment, so I was told, a moment that was never to be repeated. Now, looking at his body, I see nothing but the skin and bones of a skeletal man, ridden by sickness, and left to die nearly alone. I almost felt sorry for him, not the man, but the body, a body so unloved and untouched. A body that had, until recently, bled and festered just like any other aging body, bones cracking and hair falling out. My grandfather shook his head slightly and looked down at his lap. I could hear his rasping breath. The body before us lying in the casket, the body next to me, only barely hanging on, my own body, also aging and wearing down, were all not so different. Could it really be just the minds, three separate minds that worked in such different ways, be the only divisions between us? Our blood was made off the same stuff, our flesh the same color. Even our eyes looked nearly the same. But the differences between us, so vast.

One Page 47

As I waited at the train station I looked at the other people, looked in their faces until they looked at me and I looked away quickly, I drummed my hands against my thighs and felt the bench beneath me shake with my motion, unending, because I didn’t know how in that moment to sit still because the one person I wanted to see was nearly a million miles away, and even if it was less than that it didn’t matter because I wouldn’t see her anyhow, but I needed to do something in the meantime so drumming on my thighs seemed like the nearest thing I had to something productive to do that would, in theory, relax me. But it didn’t relax me and I couldn’t get her smile out of my mind and it was tearing my inside out until I felt like I could reach down and grab the guts that spilled out of me, throwing them against the station walls, brick and graffitied because the kids around here have nothing else but spray paint, and I would watch the blood trickled down running around the curves and crevices of the stones, already red but now much redder. A cloud passed and the skylighted ceiling tinted darker and my face was shrouded and everyone else’s face, waiting patiently looking left towards where the train would come from, and it was all dark for a moment until the cloud passed and all of our faces lit up again, shinny noses and foreheads, greasy hair, and bedraggled expressions, just waiting, and wanting, but not looking forward to. Looking forward to anything, none of us had that. We were going somewhere, who knows where, but it didn’t matter because it was probably a place we had been already, and if it happened to not be we probably weren’t excited anyhow because at this time in the late afternoon no one wants to be going where they are going because wherever that is there is nothing there, just emptiness. I could hear the train in the distance, just coming around the bend, and then it was there, screeched to a stop, green lights flashing as if we weren’t sure that the train was really there and we needed the lights to let us know. So green means go so I stood up and stopped drumming my thighs and my hands tingled with the constant motion suddenly stopped and I wondered what I would do with them once I got on the train because in close quarters it is hard to be nervous, wanting, waiting. They know you are wanting, waiting, and I don’t want them to know that so I will put my hands in my pockets and pretend that I am excited to go wherever it is that I am going, which is home, and I am not excited because it will be cold and dark and unused since it had been a while since I had been there. I thought of coffee and I thought of tongues dancing and I nearly banged my head.

One Page 46

I was disheartened and when I looked at your face I saw nothing but a blank slate and I remembered my second grade teacher, glasses slipping off her nose and slip showing, who drew diagrams on the chalkboard in chalk so faint that no one could really see what she was drawing so we looked at her, the flowers on her skirt dancing as she drew so vigorously, and we didn’t learn anything and failed all of her tests because we were more preoccupied with her lipsticked teeth than the numbers she wrote, but at the end of the year she didn’t notice, and we didn’t notice, and our third grade teacher was a tall bald man who wore blue suits every day that covered in chalk on the back when he leaned against the blackboard and we weren’t sure whether he knew he had drawings and numbers littering his back or not so we didn’t say anything because we didn’t want to embarrass him and he never seemed to notice and so we spent more time looking at the patterns on his back than they diagrams on the board and so we learned nothing and mostly failed his tests but he didn’t notice because he was preoccupied by the gym teacher who was definitely a lesbian but he didn’t know that and we didn’t tell him because we didn’t want to ruin his infatuation since it made him blush and the red of his cheeks looked dashing against his blue suit and we were sure that if the gym teacher wasn’t a lesbian she would be in love with him too, aside from his bowling ball shinny head and the diagrams and numbers imprinted on his back, but she was a lesbian and once we saw her behind the gym one afternoon after school making out with the vice principle and we almost yelled at them, laughing at their glory in love found, but we were too shy and embarrassed and so we snuck away and peered around the corned of the gym at them because we had never seen anything that made us tingle in quiet that same way and we weren’t sure whether we would ever see it again and so we had to enjoy it at that very moment and the unfortunate downpour of rain ruined the moment and the two of them laughed, covered each other helplessly with their arms and ran inside leaving us to feel the soaked through shirts stick to our skin and wonder whether the books in our back packs were getting ruined but we didn’t care because we still felt that special and unfamiliar tingle and our toes were warm and our cheeks were warm and we couldn’t look at each other without blushing and so we stared at the pavement that was filling with puddles and then we ran away, hurrying home, as if our hurry would keep us from getting wetter even though we knew better, and fifth grade was no better so we didn’t speak of it.

One Page 45

An enormous chain of mountains had formed around the small town and they hardly noticed. They were a community of ground-watchers, meaning they rarely looked at what was around them, but were more concerned with the view of the pavement, the sparkles in the cement, the cracks caused by tree roots. These people looked down. The sky was no concern; most of them couldn’t even tell you that they sky was blue. They would have said that leaves are brown because the only ones they saw were the dead ones on the ground. They didn’t even recognize reflections in windows or other people’s hair color. I walked over the mountain peaks and down into the valley because I had heard of the strange occurrence of ground-watchers. I didn’t understand, but I wanted to. The mountain walls were steep and I slipped on the pebbles that littered the path. Inside the town I walked around, and it seemed that people recognized other people by their shoes. They didn’t recognize my shoes and they knew I was an outsider. But they didn’t look at my face, or even as high as my chest. I was Adidas black stripes to them. And they stomped on them. My toes were crushed and my heart was crushed as they pounded the ground around my feet. They didn’t like outsiders apparently. They didn’t need the sky, or the window reflections. They didn’t need anything above the knees. I asked someone if they knew what it felt like to stretch the neck and look up. The person kicked me in the shin. I have no need for that he said before stomping away. I see I said to his back, but he didn’t hear. It wasn’t a conversation. It was a lifestyle, and not one I was likely to break. After several weeks of trying to make sense of their reality I realized that I had started to look down. I noticed the sparkles in the pavement and I saw the grass grow each day, and noticed when it was cut the day it grew too tall. I saw the shine on everyone’s shoes; they took care of them. They polished and bought new laces when the old ones were ragged. They folded their cuffs neatly, knowing that hundreds of people would see and notice the fold, the crease. At first I wanted to reach out and lift their chins with my palms, making them see, even if only for a moment, the blue of the sky, the shape of the cloud that passed slowly overhead. They were missing out on so much. But I put my hands in my pockets and walked on. I didn’t scuff my heels along the sidewalk any longer. My neck developed new muscles. My eyes felt relaxed, shielded from the glare of the sun. The sunny days, the rainy days, it hardly mattered now. I never left. And my shoes always shone.