Obviously no one had told them about the smoke. No one had told them about the fire. Or perhaps they’d been told about it, but they had failed to listen. People were always failing to listen.
“You know, for a minute there I thought you’d set the place on fire.”
Jane turned and saw Richard standing there, the smug expression on his face, his take-charge stance.
“Oh, but there is a fire. Can’t you smell it, Richard?”
He was still looking at her with that confident expression when his sleeve burst into flames. This change in circumstance had barely registered in his face when the rest of him fell forward. The fire burned itself out as quickly as it had begun, leaving a dark, warped misery lying on the smoking rug.
Several in the crowd screamed. A woman standing beside Jane began to cry. Jane turned: she was young, pleasant-looking. She felt sorry for her. “Spontaneous combustion,” Jane whispered into her delicate ear. “It’s everywhere these days. Didn’t you see the spread last month in Cosmo?”
So many are tempted to continue their escape, stroll out of the building and start a new life under an assumed name. The management would like to disavow any knowledge of, or responsibility for, the actions of this radical minority.
The young woman stared as the lady walked through the lobby and out the front door in her bare feet. Everywhere the lady stepped, a scorched teardrop appeared in the rose-colored carpet.
MINIMALIST BIOGRAPHY
He and his wife led their small life. No great adventures or newspaper photos.
Neither did anything you might remember the next morning.
Tiny bodies, tinier heads—they disappeared in the glare of one bright day.
A dozen and more owned the house after. None recalled them or their time.
Then one morning cleaning we found handprints on ceilings, footprints across walls.
My wife angrily climbed the ladder with dripping mop, overflowing pail.
Kids? Elves? Way up here?
What is that red spot? Blood?
Peering closer she found a delicate, miniature painting: an alizarin rose.
Written beneath were flyspeck words:
“Tom loves Martha. She says hello.”
SOMETIMES I GET LOST
The woman in the photograph has no name. I have no story for what she is to me. I want to say she starts her day with “A,” first in the alphabet, and that she is first in my heart. “You’re just the best,” I say to her shimmering image, as if encouragement will grow eyes that see out of that paper portrait and soft lips that speak, identifying herself, available for more.
She may be alive or she may be dead. There is no difference inside my happy skull.
The day (morning? afternoon?) is cold. I reach out to wrap my children around me. I try to be careful, but some always fall away. I can hear them tumble, even with my eyes closed and hands clamped over my ears.
It is so sad to see an unfamiliar face in the mirror. I have fallen into someone else’s life, and now I must teach him how to cry.
In the distance there is the sound of buses pulling away for home. I can hear nothing with this fellow’s ears, except the stumble-bum rhythm of my own heart. It is so sad to see the backs of people’s heads. They are like portraits without features.
Inside my skull, people rearrange themselves. They may not realize how terrifying this game is.
This woman holding my hand: a very long time ago I stayed up all night building her a house full of dolls. I decorated each room to be like a room she might one day live in. Perhaps now I can crawl into one of those tiny rooms and stay. I will make myself very smalclass="underline" they will feel me against their faces or around their ankles and believe I am a soft breeze.
For years everything will be the same. I will have memorized the positions of all the furniture. No one will have thought to rearrange things. I will have a name for every voice I hear. Their names will be like music. Said together, the sound will make the walls shake.
Finally the girl’s hand arrives. I remember it being as delicate and tentative as a new bird learning flight. It is all that and more. The hand wraps itself around and takes me high in the air with its tender embrace. Careful not to break me, but this reunion is breaking me up inside, as wife, children, and grandchildren come tumbling out of my mouth.
The child watches me for a very long time, as if examining me for surprises. I cannot change the smile painted broadly across my face. Carefully she places me back inside rooms within rooms.
Sometimes I get lost, and it takes years for the memories to find me. Someday I will wake up big. I will wake up huge.
Until then, sweetheart, tell me your name. And if I still look confused, tell it to me again.
THE CHANGING ROOM
He wakes with the door behind him. It rattles, rattles again. He hears the eager key opposed by the reluctant lock. He hears the torn breath of the key’s owner, as if even this is too much effort. He hears a familiar language whose words he still cannot understand. He hears a music of distressed syllables, low vowels, painful consonants.
He risks a constricted, claustrophobic breath: these objects in front of him so close and yet somehow unreachable: the miniature table with the picture of the young girclass="underline" the bright red necklace arranged about the neck of her black and white image: the necklace moving one segment at a time down her throat: the click of insect legs on glass as the narrow red body disappears around the edge of the stained silver frame. A few inches away the square of soiled handkerchief, its aged stains graying into a spotted lizard hide. And on that cloth square, the ruins of the young girl’s comb, metal teeth broken and handle cracked, a swatch of blonde hair caught and held for decades, the whole of it collapsed like a wolf’s decaying grin. And beyond that grin, crumpled like a life regurgitated, lie the meager remains of her last letter, paper fingered again and again almost to transparency, the blue ink of her words floating above the shadows.
And, hanging around him, the clothes he wore that day, as if he were standing in the changing room of a large swimming pool, as if the objects on the table were the things from his pockets, laid there, away from the dampness that must eventually creep, that must eventually spread everywhere, and soften everything, and dissolve us all in its path.
The back wall of the room shimmers, as if metal or glass, but he knows it’s not metal nor glass, but he knows… nothing. And leaving the realm of factual carpentry, he understands that this is the corridor outside the changing room, leading to that grand public swimming pool. The passage glitters, reflecting the pool that lies beyond the doorway, around the short hall to the left, where the water extends as far as his mind will allow, as deep, where every word he speaks has an echo, where the other swimmers repeat his awkward speech, but will not show their faces.
But he will not go there. He is not ready to go there. He hasn’t done enough, even with all these rooms to show for what can and has been done, each one holding a moment he can climb into. He hasn’t gathered enough. There’s never enough time to gather everything he needs, and never enough space to hold it all. And what is there to do when every moment he’s collected demands focus, insists upon his attention? Sometimes all he can do is leave.
He turns around and grabs the handle. He runs through all his keys, trying each in succession. The door rattles, rattles again. The reluctant lock resists the eager key. He hears his breath begin to tear in the close space of the room. He rests his hand on the interior wall and is alarmed at how leathery it has become, how brittle, how yielding. He starts to pray in a familiar language whose words he cannot understand.