Excerpt: simple sketches

you are not the kind of person who falls apart when things fall around you. you are the center of the storm, stretching to feel the electricity torch tree leaves and render paved roadways impassable. the bend of a smile at the unlucky unforeseen, like a horseshoe ringing triumphant against its metal stake, or the crunch of glass on glass, scattering little shooters of light. that is who you are.

marbles.

they lived in a little cloth bag that once held your father’s shoe polish. there were forty-five in all. he gave them to you one day when you were nine, after a stringent reorganization of the hall closet (nothing is ever thrown away) revealed the same broadsides of weathered boxes you’ve wondered about for as long as you remember wondering. each is lettered with clusters they don’t teach you in school, but when you ask your father to tell you the words, he simply shrugs and smiles. that’s what he does best.

shrugs and smiles at the customers downstairs, where he patches up their winter boots and repairs fine leather goods. shrugs and smiles upon discovering your mother is again missing. shrugs and smiles in response to your little brother asking where she went. smiles and then shrugs when, two weeks later, she returns. no explanations remitted, no questions departed, he died as he lived the autumn you turned eleven. to his funeral you brought the bright blue agate, and dropped it in the casket when all backs were turned. it made a satisfying “plunk” against the pine-bough bottom, and the thought of its rolling in perpetuity against his skeletal form gives you the courage to smile blandly as they bury him and board up the shop, as your mother disappears for nearly a month, as your brother buries his face in his hands and cries, “nicky hungry,” as if that were his first and last name.

all you know how to make is grilled cheese. days of gas and grease solidify into a permanent olfactory presence. perceptible sniffs on the playground mean no one picks you for four square or invites you to hopscotch. the girls whip their beautiful hair around like streaks of inky onyx on white marble, and giggle while the boys chant, “she smells, she smells!” you dissect the letters from the words until their voices are simply sounds ricocheting off of each other in a never ending spin, and suddenly a freak rainstorm is unleashed upon their muted mouths. the nuns usher you all back under the inner prism of their watchful eye.