Smithereens. Terence Young

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      before, boats at anchor that look vaguely European, at least for the lovely five minutes my bearings are shattered, and I am

      imagining a new life, enchanted—I hope literally—about to disembark on a foreign shore, perhaps in a parallel universe,

      where every street is unknown, feeling a little like stout Cortez in Keats’s poem, when he first sees the Pacific:

       Silent, upon a peak in Darien

      though not as grand or literary, more like a kid who can’t believe his room contains a real secret passageway, almost blinking and

      rubbing my eyes to see if the mirage will disappear, which it does, immediately, when the woman next to me complains how late

      she’ll be now, thanks to this about-face, the early sailing not such a good idea after all in hindsight, unaware she has broken the most

      vivid waking dream of my life and left me as disappointed as Keats must have been when some pedant pointed out it was Balboa, not

      Cortés, who first set European eyes westward from that mountain top, a name that so spoiled the meter of his line he refused to change

      it, certain till his death that facts had little to do with truth or beauty.

      Snowfall

      They’ve been sounding out the names of the dead: friends, relatives, this year’s crop of writers, musicians,

      something to do while they are driving the long road between the last town and the next.

      So many now, and those they forget hang between them like the empty spaces in a crossword.

      Their route takes them high into snow country, where flurries descend and silence the game, wet, heavy flakes that slow the car’s wipers, narrow the view.

      Used to be they’d tell themselves the departed were old, but they’re old now too, so they no longer mention anyone’s age.

      The few who died young remain bright, as though the sun had been shining at the time, but they both know it is only their own youth that glows.

      When the roster ends, they speculate on whose name may next pass their lips, but briefly, because to do so feels reckless.

      Better to marvel at the list itself, how long it has grown, how death has worn thin, as if to be alive were the true miracle.

      Their hotel that night is The Village Green, which they booked hoping for a peaceful place, where townspeople might gather to talk with friends and forget their hard lives,

      but it is nothing like that, only a white box in a parking lot of white, and they spend the evening watching TV shows from the past, laughing again at all the actors they haven’t seen for years.

      Mixed Blessing

      For a while we called it the good fire, the best fire, the fire that saved us

      because we were insured, and the insurance paid for all the things we could never afford,

      the new wiring and plumbing and paint and sofas and stereos and computers

      and clothes and pots and pans and bicycles and carpets and curtains and state-of-the-art

      smoke detectors for the next fire, but every once in a while, an image of our

      old basement kitchen will shove its way to the front row of my thought parade

      and I will believe, as I do sometimes in dreams about things I’ve lost to disease, the years, the

      insatiable ocean, that it still exists somewhere, behind a door that I have only to open

      and walk through to find our son, seated at the makeshift bar, eating a snack after school,

      my wife down on her knees trying to clean the hopelessly stained lino, our daughter

      about to arrive with her boyfriend, and me too, fiddling with the coffee maker that started

      the whole conflagration in the first place, only this time deciding not to repair it, un-

      plugging the thing instead and carrying it wisely to my workshop where all toys and appliances

      went to die, and leaving it there, returning with a bottle of terrible homemade wine

      which I pour into a couple of glasses from the cupboard where we used to store our

      hippy goblets made from clay and the poisonous lead decanters handed down, the sorts of things

      we never replaced after they burned, like the Victrola and my father’s pewter mug, or couldn’t,

      like our youngest’s kindergarten rendering of a tugboat—blue hull, aquamarine ocean, blowing

      billows of smoke into a cloudless and benign sky.

      My Mother’s Cigarette Case

      I still have it somewhere, her initials engraved, all three, C.A.Y. in curling capitals, the surface tarnished because who polishes silver anymore?

      I’ve seen a dozen similar at Value Village, tossed out by children who are better at letting go, so few interested in relics from an age that is still too recent.

      It flips opens like an old-school cellphone, two neat halves that part, the cigarettes all in a row, tilting up.

      I used it for a while to hold my own, an affectation I liked, the formality, how I would draw it from an inner jacket pocket, select one as though I were choosing a diamond from a display case.

      But cigarettes became so long I’d have to cut them to fit, and I hadn’t the patience, dropped it in a drawer, then into a box that might be in the attic.

      On evenings they had guests, my father in grey, my mother in green silk, I’d watch her reach for it in her purse or lift it from the coffee table, the way she’d light up and breathe in, allowing some smoke to remain hanging, which she’d take in a second later through her nose, French inhaling it was called, a name that made her even more attractive.

      She would hold it flat against her palm until an errand claimed her, then set it aside discreetly.

      Once, I picked it up, still warm from her grip, a bright, lovely thing that made me want it the way I want it even now, years after I have given up the habit, if only for the sound it made when she snapped it shut.

      The Bear

      Woken from an afternoon nap, you rise only to descend your wood- butcher stairway, past the vaulted, multi-mullioned window on whose

      other side now sits a bear, Buddha-like, on his backside, head concealed in the Rubbermaid garbage can he holds aloft between two paws.

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