The Morning Side

In the quiet later years of our lives, my wife and I bought a cabin at a campground out in the woods. There was a murky pond in the middle of this community, and all of the gravel roads that wound off into the different areas of the woods converged on this pond. One evening in mid-July we rambled down the gravel road with our neighbors to see a show down by the pond. There had been a flyer about it posted for weeks on the wooden bulletin board outside of the general store. Everyone had seen it. Everyone was curious and talking about it. As we came to a crossroads where the gravel was looser and the road was worn away into dry dusty ruts in places, a man waved us down as he peddled by on a bicycle with a big picnic umbrella mounted on the back of the seat. He sold us roasted peanuts in little paper sacks, and we could feel that the peanuts were still warm through the paper.

We brought our warm peanuts and our lawn chairs and we set up on the muddy bank of the pond, ready to watch the show. The trees hung dense and dark and low over the far side of the pond, and the rank water was steamy and still. A flat barge with torches lit at each of its four corners emerged from a spot where the water meandered into the trees. Along the edges of the barge there were several people on their knees rowing it out into the middle of the pond, and between each person rowing there was a person in a yellow robe with laurel leaves on their heads holding a golden trumpet to their lips. Once the barge had settled into the middle of the pond and the rowers had pulled up their oars and stood to their feet, the trumpeters let out a blast from their trumpets, as though heralding the commencement of a ceremony. The trumpeters and the rowers joined hands and took their bows, and then they dove off the edges of the barge and swam for the shores of the pond, leaving the barge floating empty.

We could see now that the barge was set up like a stage for a play, and we had a moment to contemplate it as it floated there quietly. There was a bed at the center of the stage, comfortably made with white linens and pillows and lit by the torches surrounding it. A few minutes passed with nothing happening, but just as the crowd began to stir a little, a trapdoor opened in the wooden floor of the barge just in front of the bed, and a person in a brown robe wearing a rabbit mask climbed up out of the trapdoor. It looked like they had ascended a set of stairs that was underneath the trapdoor, and I speculated that there must be a dressing room beneath the floor of the barge, submerged under the water. I pictured a cramped space with soft lights and mirrors and the daylight breaking through and the players all glancing up whenever someone opened the trapdoor.

Soon three other figures emerged. One wore the mask of a falcon, another a crocodile, and the third had the face of the lion. The masks were all made of clay covered in some sort of shiny, smooth resin that made their contours gleam in the torch light. The four figures each made their way to their appointed corners of the barge. They took the long torches from their posts and waved them aloft in the air. They cried out in unison some latin incantation, and they thumped their torch poles against the wooden floor of the barge with three hard rhythmic thumps. Then they repeated the incantation again, and then again they thumped their poles. Our neighbors and fellow residents were scratching their heads and murmuring amongst themselves, wondering what this was all about.

The four figures then turned inward towards the center of the barge. A low continuous chanting began, different words and phrases overlapping. They waved the flames of their torches over the neatly made surface of the bed. One word became more and more distinguishable among the others that they were chanting, and it grew more and more insistent each time they said it. "Rise. Rise. Rise!" And indeed, something did begin to arise from the middle of the bed. Slowly taking form under the linen, I could make out the shape of a woman lying on her back. I knew that there was stage trickery behind this, that there was probably some sort of opening in the mattress that allowed the woman to come up from the dressing room below. But the way it was all timed and done, with the intensity of the mood that had been established, it was still mesmerizing nevertheless.

The figures in the masks stepped back a single pace from the bed and made a single resounding thump with their torch poles and then fell silent. The woman under the linen sat up in bed, slow and heavy, as though the soft fog of a dream hadn't yet cleared from her mind. She sat on the edge of the bed with her head hung. The blanket was still over head, but she reached up a hand and swept an opening clear for her face. A lock of long dark hair fell free. The figures in the masks seemed to recede into the shadows beneath the torches, and she didn't seem to be aware of their presence, even though she glanced back over her shoulder a few times and looked this way and that around the stage.

With a sudden surge of vigor and resolution, she got up from the bed. The white linens had formed into a white robe around her. She took three gliding steps to the foot of the bed. She seemed to be looking for something, searching for something beyond the stage, off somewhere in the dark trees on the far side of the pond. Then she made a gesture with her hands, like she was unlatching and flinging open the shutters of her bedroom window. There was an operatic joy about this gesture, something larger than life, something beyond the mortal veil. I felt my breath catch and my pulse quicken. There was a gasp from the crowd as the light began to break through the trees, on the morning side of the sky, where we always knew the sun to be at the beginning of every day.

In the swell of light, the barge had seemed to fade away and it was gone now. Whether they had submerged it somehow or they had used this theatrical moment of distraction to slip off somewhere into the trees, I couldn't tell. There was just the light now, creeping across the milky water, showing nothing in its depths. There was a buzz of energy in the crowd along the shore. There was talk about going fishing, buying bait from the general store as soon as it opened. There was talk of picnics and barbecues and long drives up into the hills. The miracle had happened. It was six o'clock in the morning. We had the whole day ahead of us.

Songs for the Road

It was a cold grey morning, and I looked out the window and saw a blue car parked in our driveway. It was my daughter's car. She had come for a visit, and I could see her out there with my wife, already packing the car to go and tying some of her luggage to the rack on the roof. I slipped on my shoes and ran out to tell her something, but she had already pulled out of the driveway, and she was halfway down the road. As she drove off, several loose pieces of paper fell from one of her bags and scattered in the air and dropped in the road behind her. I picked up my pace, and I yelled and waved my arms, trying to get her attention, but she was already turning the corner, and then she was gone.

I stopped to pick up the papers that she had lost in the road. They all had lyrics written on them for songs that she had written. The pavement was a little wet, and I was trying to gather up the papers before they got soaked through and ruined, before the ink ran and the words were lost. The papers had fallen in front of this orange house down the road from mine, and the old man who lived there had seen what had happened, and he came out the door still slipping on his coat and he labored down his steps and he met me out on the road and started to help me pick up the papers.

I was grateful for the man's help, but he kept stopping from time to time to read the lyrics off of random pages as he picked them up. He read in a slow drawl, squinting sourly at the words, and he always began by saying, "Well, it says here." It was starting to get on my nerves. As he read, I would reach out and snatch one of the papers he was holding, so that I could add it to the stack that I had gathered in my hand. But the old man would just snatch it right back, still reading all the while, still keeping his eyes on the paper, still taking all the time in the world.

This snatching back and forth of the papers went on until suddenly I looked down and realized that my hands were empty. The old man was holding all the papers in a meaty stack in his hands. He had all of my daughter's songs. He started away towards his house, still reading the lyrics, mostly mumbling them to himself now. He went along the side of the house and around towards the back, and I followed after him calling for him to wait up. But as I came around the back corner of the house, he had suddenly vanished. There was just an empty little yard there, bordered by thistles and the tangled branches of bushes that were leafless and barren in the cold.

I couldn't find the old man anywhere. I peered in at the little window of the garage out back. I circled the house a few times, calling out for him. I knocked at the front door. I knocked at the side door. He was gone, and he had all of my daughter's song lyrics. I stood there staring at this quiet orange house. I felt eyes on me, and I looked back and saw the woman next door watching me from her window. She just rolled her eyes and shrugged, as if to say, "What are you going to do?" And then she dropped her blinds back over her window and then she was gone too.

Two Fish

I was wandering around a busy office building, and I came across a phone room where people sat around a large conference table in rolled up shirt sleeves, answering call after call and yelling urgent things across the table to one another. I slipped into the room unnoticed and slid along the wall behind them. In the far corner of the room there was a little kitchenette that they used for a break area. There was a stove there, and on the stove top there were two skillets both filled with about two inches of water. There was a fish in either skillet, and they were both happily exploring the circumference of their little pools of water.

But then I peered down under the skillets and saw a low blue flame simmering under each of them. As the water was getting warmer, I could see that the fish were darting desperately back and forth from edge to edge of either skillet, as though they were trying to escape. I turned to the room of people on the phones, and I tried to call out to get someone's attention. But there never seemed to be a break in the noise. I couldn't find the right moment to say something. I tried to catch a random glance in my direction or an ear perked to hear something beyond the constant hum of business in the room. But nothing. I struggled to even make a sound.

I looked back at the skillets. There was steam rising off the water, and both fish were floating upside down, dead. It made me so sad, the whole accidental tragedy of it. I tried to tell myself that I was in no position to judge any of them for carelessly letting the fish die, since I myself ate meat every day. But this felt different. No had meant for this to happen. The fish weren't being prepared for lunch; they were just dead because no one had been paying attention and someone had left the burners on. I turned off the burners and placed a metal lid over each skillet and left them to go cold.

A Regular Listener

Every morning we woke up and headed out to work sorting through the piles of wreckage. The city had been destroyed, and all the buildings had been leveled. There was nothing taller than the piles, and the piles went on and on, farther than anyone had the strength to walk to find out where they ended. We came out of our holes wearing whatever clothes we had salvaged from the wreckage, the soles of our shoes reinforced with folded pages of newspaper, the holes in our shirts and pants stitched with mismatched scraps from other shirts and pants of different colors, all of it bleached from the sun and blended together under the same chalky white dust that covered everything else.

My work area was set up next to the pile I was currently sorting through. It consisted of an old wooden desk and a collection of rickety shelves and bins clustered haphazardly around it on the uneven, rocky ground. The faces of the desk drawers and the edges of the shelves and the front of the bins were all inscribed with labels that I had scratched into them with the dull point of a dusty nail. There was a drawer for "bottle caps", a shelf for "water pipes" another for "curtain rods", a trio of rusted coffee cans for "nuts" and "bolts" and "screws", a deep plastic bin filled with various broken "eyeglasses", and so forth.

I worked out in the open, under the clear blue sky. The noonday sun beat down on the little bits and pieces of debris as I sifted through them in my hand, using the dried out cracks in my palm as lines to separate them. Now and then, I would stop to tilt my hand back and forth, trying to get the harsh light to catch on the occasional spots where the metal was still shiny. And everyone around me passed the day in same manner, contemplating these pitiful handfuls, and it was quiet again on the Earth. We were ants toiling in a catastrophe that was of a magnitude we could no longer even conceive of creating. So, in a sense, there was peace.

I had a radio on one the shelves next to where I worked. It still picked up a signal from somewhere. Some days, when it got to be too quiet, I would switch it on and listen to it while I worked. They were all old broadcasts from the world that was gone, somehow still bouncing around in the atmosphere. There was a wire running from the radio and it was coiled around a metal post that I had planted into the ground to try to boost the reception. Sometimes I would have to twist the pole to get something to tune in, and the static and the dry dust and grit seemed to grind together into a single noise.

One day I turned on the radio, and it came on in the middle of an interview from a morning show of some sort. There were a bunch of voices talking back and forth, talking over each other and getting excited like people used to do back before they had these vast reserves of silence and time on their hands. Suddenly one of the voices let out a string of curses and epithets, just saying every awful hateful ugly thing that was possible to say. I dropped the handful of debris that I was sorting through and I lunged for the radio, quickly jerking the dial away from the station.

I looked around, hoping maybe no one else had heard. But people from the other work stations around me were already looking over at me. One man at the pile across from me poked his head out from the tarp that covered his area. He was saying something to the woman he was working with and pointing a finger in my direction. He shook his head and looked at me with absolute contempt. I thought I heard him say something like, "I guess that's the kind of people we have to work with. Some things never do change." He glared at me and went back to his work, still shaking his head.

I kept working the knob up and down the dial, trying to find something else, anything else, trying to give the impression that I had just stumbled across the broadcast as I was scanning through the frequencies, trying to distance myself from the ugliness that had come out of the radio. I didn't want to be held responsible. I didn't want to seem like I endorsed what everyone had heard the voice saying. I didn't want them to think that I was a regular listener of the show or a fan of the person who had said it. But it was my radio. It was on my shelf. I was the one who had turned it on.

Open Casket

I was walking down a city street one night, and I came across a sign on a pedestal in front of a small storefront funeral home. The sign explained that services for a woman were going to be held there that evening, and it gave her name and the dates of her birth and death, as well as a short paragraph about her life. From some of the details, I started to wonder if this was an old girlfriend of mine. I knew that she had gotten married and she'd had a few kids, and I knew that she had served in the army for a while overseas when she was younger, and all of this was mentioned on the sign. The first name was the same, but it was a common enough name. The last name was different, but I assumed that she had changed it when she had gotten married. I couldn't remember what her husband's last name was. I couldn't be sure if it was really her, but I felt like I needed to know. I needed to know if this had been her life, if she had been happy, if it had all ended here, like this, when she was still fairly young.

There was a large bay window in the front of the funeral home that looked out onto the street. The window was close to the ground, and the curtains were drawn back, leaving the view open to anyone passing by. I crouched down and peered in, and I could see a small, cramped, candlelit room that was recessed into the ground a few feet below street level. The casket was against the far wall and there was a pulpit and three short rows of wooden chairs arranged in front of it. The chairs were all empty. The service hadn't started yet. But there was a large man with a dark beard standing alone in the shadows in the corner of the room with his hands folded at his waist. I figured that this was the husband. I looked at the casket, where most of the soft glow of the room was concentrated. I could only make out the woman's blonde curly hair where her head lay under the open lid.

I looked again over at the husband, and I thought about going in. I wasn't sure what I'd say to him, or how I'd explain who I was. I considered again the possibility that I was wrong, that this was just a complete stranger. But I needed to know. I went down the stone steps to the door of the funeral home. A somber chime played as I opened the door, and inside it was warm and there was a smell of incense and flowers in the air. But when I went over to where I had seen the casket through the window, I found nothing but a table with candles on it. Among the candles there were cards displayed on small stands that had prayers of grief and condolences written on them. What I had taken for blonde hair through the window was apparently only the guttering and flickering flames of the candles. My eyes searched through all the points of lights scattered around the table. I looked over at the husband where he stood watching me from the corner. I shook my head, perplexed. I tried to think of what to ask him, how to ask him. But I didn't know what to say. Finally, I just told him that I was sorry, very sorry, and then I shook his hand and hurried out of the room, back out into the street, back out into the night.