Age 33

The woods around my little clearing are alive, pregnant with the sounds of late summer bugs and night-time birds. The same, I imagine, that met the ears of Civil War platoons; men in ragged wool shirts with hand-rolled cigars, of Indians resting after hunting these hills, of a triceratops and her young, for all I know. I watch a centipede crawl from a wound in one of the logs I broke for the fire. It crawls to the edge of where the heat must be too intense and starts to retreat. I push it onto the coals with a stick, watch it curl into a spiral, and become a molded-glass shell as the fire eats its insides. I remember coming home from school, when it was still cold, and finding the house empty of my children, the smell of their crayons and saliva and shampoo still hanging in the air. I remember walking from room to room expecting to find a note or a treasure map that would lead me to them, but instead finding my wife leaning back against the toilet, legs splayed out like a drunk or a girl playing jacks, weeping with her face in her hands, bloody toilet paper piled beside her smeared legs. She kept saying, "I killed it, I killed it somehow," and I kept wanting to tell her I was glad it was gone if it would have lived to hurt her, but also wanting to hold it, hold it somehow--even small and gray like a clay baby. I watch the shell of the centipede--like a snake or a parasite or some pre-historic terror--glow orange, turn to ash, and disappear. I listen to the ancient hum of late summer bugs and wonder who will hear them when I am gone.

B.R.R.sday: Age 60

As Keri and I walk behind John Mumba holding hands—her talking to a boy in striped shorts and a faded Cincinnati Bengals shirt with cut-off sleeves, named Ford—I imagine a worm with angry eyes crawling just under the skin of the girl, Eleanor, we have just met. She was lying with one elbow bent under her glassy face, the long bird-tail eye-lashes folded on her forearm. I notice her shirt, frayed where it has been ripped, and stretched over her legs stacked and curved back, on top of a woven straw mat beside the water jug outside her house. John Mumba told us, in his British-educated Zambian accent, that her stepfather used her as “a good luck piece.” I chuckled, unaware, and said “she doesn’t look like she feels very lucky,” and he shook his head with the look of a veteran or an old surgeon.

“No, I would say no. Her step-father gave her to be raped (he said the word as if it rhymed with wept) to bring his family luck for the HIV and she got it.”

“It is a bloody sickness. It moves and hides in you like a bug.”

She was so beautiful and tiny and I could see a little pile of dirt beside her mat blow like a sand dune as she exhaled. I hear Keri ask Ford “how many brothers do you have?” and he shakes his head with his eyes closed and says, slowly, “one sister,” and I look at the watch that Liv gave me for my birthday—shiny in the sun—and want to throw it down and punch my heel into its glassy face.

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B.R.R.sday : Age 36

Age 36: he has his mom's hair--muddy blonde, like the strands of a strong, wet rope--it peaks out at the neck line of a blotchy grey helmet. one sock is scrunched and a dirty smear blends pink leg and white cotton where the elastic band of his pants cinches around his soft shins. James came like a fall storm./ We have no friends here/ The air is too thin and the grass isn't blue enough to feel good between my toes/ Yes, but I'm late again/ How late do you mean/ Two months late/ ...are you happy/ So happy/ Do you love me/ So much/. he has swung twice, body twisting too much with the inertia of the aluminum bat, missing one high and one wide. the third hits his shoulder on the meat before the blade--two years ago he would have cried and come to me--he drops the bat and puts his hand over the spot for an instant, then sprints for first. turning quickly he crouches, hands on knees, and tilts the helmet, which has skittered in flight, and grins at me on the second row of the wooden bleachers. his mouth, the size of a cherry tomato, mimes "ow" and I hold up a fist. another boy leans into position, and he plants his feet: ready to run.

B.R.R.sday : Age 18

Age 18: the air around my cheeks is like a warm apple. She walks ahead of me—tanned bare feet stepping lightly, avoiding rocks and twigs, on the concrete. I watch her legs that end inside a long blue button up Oxford—too large, even, for her shorts to show except on the sides—which is not to say she isn’t modest. I’m wanting to know her: can she watch a movie at the theater without talking and still want to talk afterwards? will she realize I don’t know myself? the way she tip-toes along the sidewalk seems playful because her back hunches and she keeps looking back, as if she isn’t sure I’m with her. I am with her. she stops at my blue truck to say goodbye and I lean back against it, too aware of myself to stand confidently in front of her—a vine more than a tree, really.  the stars are bright , especially for being so close to the expressway, and I notice foggy water trickling down the back window of the car she is standing in front of. one strand of hair, not as wide as my pinky, has fallen across the bridge of her nose and her eyes are scrunched a little—as if she is trying to read the man I’ll become or the secrets I’ll hide. as if she is going to kiss me. she does and I am shocked by the warmth, as comforting and familiar as the shape of the moon over the buildings of another city. I am with her.

B.R.R.'sDay: Age 78

Age 78: “yes I would like the bold please. with a sleeve if you wouldn’t mind.” “how are you today sir?” “I’m well. thanks for asking. I’m enjoying this blue sky it seems fresher...” “I know! your coffee will be right out.” “oh. O.K.” the shop smells of stale grinds—that is to be expected—but also something like polish or oil paint. everything is surgical now. time passes like an injury to a bone or a deep bruise. each day gnaws at me if I wallow, but in retrospect, history—like a body’s broken rib—moves quickly, mending snags and setting splints. what I wouldn’t give for a fall night at O’Claire’s by the patio fountain that smelled of fish and mold, all of us acting like kids—being kids. a walk down Navajo Road each of us happy to be paired with any other for the moment, “I’m so thankful for you.” “we are always so in tune.” “live in anticipation of the dawn!” “breath of fresh air?” a fight, even, with all of the love and frustrations, graces and sacrifices wrapped into expletives that were too malicious and red-faced for either of us to take very seriously. I hope you made it to that big house you imagined, my dear, that you found my mother, that nothing reminds you of me,—you deserve a moment alone after James and Liv and my own eccentricities—that the journey has ended just as we lived for it to. the paint around the window is a standard taupe, but where the chair has rubbed, green is peeking through. I wonder if this used to be a video store, or perhaps a doughnut bakery.

B.R.R.'s Days: Age 4

Disclaimer: B.R.R.'s Days (pronounced brrrrrr'sdays to rhyme with thursdays) are basically Molly's effort to give me some reason to write things and she is sweet for indulging me. I am of the opinion that writers are some of the most arrogant wind-bags that exist in world, because they invariably assume that anyone would want to know what is in their minds, so as a disclaimer I ask that whoever reads this forgive me beforehand and realize that I am just having fun/pleasing my wife--which is also fun. 

Second Disclaimer: the following--for how many weeks I don't know yet--is part of an idea I've been tossing around that uses many sections of flash fiction (poetic, train-of-thought, flash images in prose) each representing a different year in a person's life. The main goal would be to put them all together (maybe not in order) to present an interesting and realistic, if disjointed, picture of humanity complete with the characters and characteristics of an identifiable main character's life. Bear with me, but the project was inspired by a quote from On the Road which reads "our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life." Here, I think, it would be more appropriate to argue that life is the road, and that is the sort of thinking that has inspired me to do something so weird. 

Age 4: outside the blanket Daddy pushes his hands under me like he is scooping water from a bucket and I think he has too much hair on his arms. in my dreams he has the same face as God but I know he is just him even though the Bible says he is made in God’s image so I don’t know. Daddy says he would cut off his arm for me if it would save my life but I don’t understand what he means—only that it means he loves me more.  when the covers are all tucked Daddy lays down next to me after he turns on the tape and I put my nose against his nose and try to breathe through my nose at the same time he breathes. I wonder if he is already asleep and if he is pretending so that I will fall asleep first and then I watch the fan and try to see just one wing of it instead of the whole spinning circle. i am too warm but I don’t move much because I am tucked in. i try not to but I think about what if Daddy and the whole world are robots and I am the only real kid and I can’t get married because they aren’t the same as me and I can’t have kids either I don’t think. I pretend I am only imagining because I feel his soft nose and his foot touching my foot but except for that dream about being stuck in a giant house with no doors, I dream it all the time and it scares me because I feel alone, but also like the hero of the world.