Fueling the Fire

The world had fallen.  Houses and buildings and whole towns were abandoned.  This girl and I went out at night to scavenge supplies from a nearby elementary school.  We climbed in through the window of one of the classrooms.  There were a number of crayon pictures hanging on the bulletin board there, draw by all the students.  The girl lingered to look at them, but I pulled her along.  We had to keep moving.

When we got back to the camp and we were sitting around the campfire, I opened up this briefcase that had all of these wadded up pieces of paper in them.  I started tossing them into the fire.  The girl snatched one away from me and opened it up.  She saw that it was one of the crayon drawings.  She lunged forward and tried to stop me from burning the rest.  With tears in her eyes she pleaded with me.  She told me that this was all that was left of them.  I understood, but we had to keep the fire going.

A Nice Place to Sleep

It was the living room at my Grandmother's old house.  All the same figurines and furniture decorated the room, the same handful of hardback mystery novels on the shelf, those same beat-up slippers discarded by the chair.  Each tick of the clock on the wall punctuated the stillness.  It was early morning and there was faint light and frost at the windows, but I came in wrapped in a blanket, carrying my own pillow, looking to sleep on the couch.  I felt exhausted, and this cozy room seemed like the nicest place on Earth to rest.

But there was someone there, a woman I used to work with, sitting off in the shadows in some corner of the room.  Just as I was about to settle in on the couch, she spoke up and told me, "You can't sleep here.  Your Grandmother's not around anymore.  There's other people that live here now.  You can't just go and sleep on other people's couches."

I waved her off.  I knew that what she said was true, but I was so tired, I didn't care.  I got comfortable on the couch, mumbling to her that they wouldn't mind, that I was just going to nap for a little while, that no one would care if I was just taking a nice innocent little nap, not bothering anyone.  And so I kept mumbling on and on like that, making every excuse I could think of until everything faded and I drifted back off to sleep.    

Young Again

We were two couples, passing along the street at night.  We were all friends.  The girls had been working on this patchwork tapestry that would be displayed on the side of a float in an upcoming parade.  The other guy and I, we'd been up ahead.  We'd seen into the future and we knew how it all turned out.  The tapestry would win all sorts of awards.  It would end up displayed on a grassy median along the town's main road.  We even foresaw the possibility that money would be won.  We saw all of us in new cars, shiny gold watches dangling from our wrists.  My friend turned to his girl with a grin, "Isn't it nice knowing in advance that it's all going to work out for the best?"

And so it went on, the money was won and there was a long string of nights drinking in the city, lights and parties and music and laughter.  As the last echoes of it trailed off, we ended up at this house in the gloamy half-light just before dawn.  We stumbled up the stairs and stomped around in the hushed rooms.  I began to comment on all this, somewhere above, somewhere outside myself and beyond all this, "This is when I was seventeen.  This is where I was.  I keep returning to this moment, drawn to it over and over.  But I've come to it now, young again, fresh as though it were the first time, wonderfully foolish, all my gathered wisdom gone."  Everyone else settled in on the floor somewhere to sleep, but I stayed at the window watching.   

Home Improvements

My brother and I both went over to do some work on my aunt’s house.  Originally we were just there to paint and patch a few things up, but a rivalry developed between us.  We started making these elaborate changes, each of us trying to top the other.  My brother built these brick arches with sloping layers and walkways and high castle ramparts.  In response, I built a huge gaming complex with a bowling alley and a maze-like pool where you could swim from room to room.
 
These constructions piled over each other, one after the another, spreading out over several acres of my aunt’s property, all of it connected by a network of underground tunnels and catacombs.  Somewhere at the far end of it all, quiet and away from everything, was the best part, my crowning touch.  A door at the dead end of a dark tunnel led unexpectedly outside to an open field where there were these two long clear tubes that stretched far up into the sky.  By regulating the pressure and the air currents in both tubes, it allowed a person to rise comfortably in one tube, and descend comfortably in the other.  The ride would take them up into the clouds, high above the world with a grand view of everything for miles around.

When my aunt came home and saw all the work that we had done, she just shook her head and said, "This is what you get when you ask Einstein to paint your house."  She said it with a grin, exasperated but affectionate, amused but amazed.  It was a good thing to hear.   

About My Son

One day I got a letter from a girl that I used to date.  She asked me to come see her, and I followed the address that she gave me to an old run down apartment building.  As I was climbing the stairs, she met me in the stairwell.  She didn't waste any time.  She came right out and told me that I had a son.  A dark-haired, dark-eyed boy peeked out shyly from behind her.

I stayed with them for the next couple of weeks, but oddly enough, all subsequent developments took place in that same stairwell.  We never made it up to the apartment.  I never took my shoes off and settled in where it was comfortable and warm.  We stayed in this cold stairwell like people locked out of their lives, that long waiting slide down the wall, gnawing tense and uncommitted.  The girl went to work and left me with the boy.  He brought a crude crayon drawing over to show me.  I realized that I felt no connection to this kid at all.

A friend of mine finally helped me to see it.  He dropped by the stairwell and told me I had to search my heart; I had to look at the boy's face and see if I saw anything of myself.  I had to accept this unsettled feeling that I had.  I stared into the boy's eyes for a long, long time.  There was nothing.  The girl had made a mistake.  This wasn't my son.  I handed him his drawing back to him, tousled his hair regretfully, and then I turned and headed back down those dank stairs and out of the building.