Now that he was dead I made a pact with myself that I would only think of him every other Wednesday. Wednesday was a box I could put him in, which was good for me, but not for him. He battered its walls with his fists although they did not weaken.
Hair brown, eyes brown, neither fat nor thin, average height. If he was unmemorable in looks, why was he so hard to forget?
He sent me a dream but it was hard to interpret. In the dream I had a dog which he had given me, even knowing about my allergies. Was he the dog? Or was I? Was the dog a messenger from an unearthly being? The dog was brown and white. His name was Jump.
Every day it seemed I met someone or heard of someone who had his same name. It leapt off the page of the book I was reading, which was about a private detective who lived in the mountains. The book was filled with snow, and the detective mused on its whiteness and how it would feel to buried in it. It was not a book he would have read.
When I least wanted to I remembered conversations we’d had. The one about his sister, who had died at 13. The one (recurring) in which he reminded me that I was older than him, ancient and doddering practically, in a mostly joking way. The one about a priest at our old parish – we’d both gone to confession with this priest, when we still did that, and it was funny to think that he was the repository of our young sins. Or maybe it wasn’t all that funny.
I looked through his papers as if there might be a message for me there in his grocery lists or the bits of paper with hasty math problems. I found a receipt from a gas station that had my name written on the back, but could make no sense of it.
I remembered how he’d looked as a baby – his long face, his pale hair. He had that look babies often have, the look that suggests they are puzzled by their circumstances. He was said to be delicate as a child, but he lived a long time even so.
It would be like him to haunt me, or someone, but he hasn’t. Still, I pause before I enter a room, testing the atmosphere, looking for the chill that a spirit is supposed to bring.
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Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection), and a number of flash pieces in places like Helen, The Citron Review, and Tiferet. Currently, she is working on a YA thriller.
© 2023, Mary Grimm
Halfway Down the Stairs 