IV.

In the evening we sat with coffee in her kitchen at either end of the rough wood table, our hands wrapped around our mugs and warm. Her father was asleep upstairs and she was tired but wouldn't sleep herself. There would be time enough to dream later she figured. So we sat and spoke. Of the past and our previous hopes for the future.

She recalled the time I wondered what she would look like older, as a mother or a grandmother. Later when we had both grown and moved on, together or not. The former had been our hope since we met in school. She figured that she had her mother's face. Her mother who had aged little physically and, if she had lived, would have still been youthful in her old age. These were her father's thoughts as well who spoke of his wife often in hopes that his daughter would grow up with the feeling of her presence if not the actuality.

I wished to change the subject, so she began to talk about her thoughts about God and eternity. How she was beginning to believe that all would reach heaven if they truly desired to please God during their life. She thought that truth was too far-removed from human understanding for God to hold man accountable for their ignorance. I don't see that as justice, she said.

I told her that I hoped she was right although I knew that there were many we knew who would disagree.

-I'll find out soon enough, she said, half smiling.

-We all will, I said, and she smiled again.

We both were quiet for a while after because each subject seemed a reminder somehwo of the short time she had left, but anything ordinary seemed inane and shallow. I was sad and picked a pomegranate from the bowl at the edge of the table. I sliced it in half with a knife, glad for the distraction and hoping that my sullenness wouldn't affect her. She reached for one of the halves and we sat for a while, silently picking out the red jeweled fruit. Stripping the soft flesh from the tiny seends and spitting them into a saucer.

There was something comforting about the shared repetition. I watched her pick a clump out of the shell and separate each seed before putting it in her mouth, one by one. Like the fruit, I felt that she too had jewels, waiting to be pried out and enjoyed. I wanted to be the one to taste them. I pushed my portion aside and watched her until she too stopped. She reached for a napkin and rubbed her stained fingers. Then she took my hand in hers from across the table and told me that things would be alright for me and not to dwell on her or the inevitable. I told her she should go to sleep because I didn't want what we had to be reduced to such cliches.

So we got up and she walked me to the door and out on the porch and we stood in the dark for a while, quiet. I felt that things were changing too fast for anybody to adjust so we could only think of gestures and words we had seen in movies. I would rather be still and silent than be dramatic even though I had no defense for this sort of thing, but before I left I kissed her on the mouth, knowing the complications it would bring.

III.

It was morning and i woke to the sound of turning pages. The shades of the window were drawn open and a hand's width of light was shining into the dark room. I lay twisted in blankets and pillows and it was still early but she was awake and sat reading in a chair by the window.

Her brown hair was pulled back and tied with a band but it was long and draped down over one soft shoulder. She wore sweatpants and a loose sweater, unzipped towards the neck and her feet were bare despite the cold.

I turned and watched her but she didn't look up. She was reading and the book was held in the path of light from the open drapes. It came through the pane and over the smooth bare skin of her shoulder where the sweater draped low and askew. From her shoulder it shone across the book and brightened the white pages, then trailed across the end of the bed.

She was reading Thomas Merton and I smiled as she frowned slightly and her brows knitted. I watched her ponder glory and love and the mysteries of contemplation, all thigns that seemed so fruitless considering that all her questions about things eternal would soon be answered in full.

II

II.

When her father called it was the first time I had spoken to him on the phone but despite our distance and differences, there was a fellowship of shared grief. He spoke to me of her doctor's visit. She had insisted on going alone. The news was bad and now she was home sleeping. Can I go see her? I asked. He said no, that tomorrow would be better and then his voice cracked and I was silent.

Finally I asked if he was alright and he said yes, that he was going to take a drive. Collect his thoughts. So I hung up and sat in my room next to my window. It was late but I couldn't sleep so I thought about the wedding and how nice she had looked. How soft the skin of her bare arms felt around my neck as we danced and watched the bride and groom. I wondered about marriage and about love and happines and all the things your hear in songs and see on screens.

There is value in fiction and if an artist can look at life and see the good that should have been and write it or paint it then perhaps one day our hopeful expressions will begin to look more like reality. Those were my hopes and I thought on them until the sun began to brighten my room and the dried flowers outside. Then I dressed and walked to her house.

She answered the door in her nightdress with her hair straight as if she hadn't moved once during her sleep. There was nothing in her face or her walk that suggested that she would be dead by spring. That deep in her bones something was spreading that even her smiles wouldn't be able to stop.

We need to find my dad, she said. So I followed her to her truck and sat behind the wheel. She sat next to me, still and quiet. The morning was gray but as we drove through the woods and over the bridge, we witnessed the rest of the world subtly awakening with short flights from limbs and shivering bushes along the road. We drove and drove. Through town and the industrial plants, until we came to the shipyard where he worked and there we found his car, parked at the end of the road, overlooking the water.

We stopped and got out. I stood by the truck and watched her walk slowly to the car, wondering what she was thinking. She tapped on the glass and I saw her dad sit up in the back seat. His thick black hair disheveled. She stepped back as he opened the door and I heard her ask what he was doing. Why he was out there. He said he had slept there. That he didn't know what else to do. She hugged him as she asked him why. He wrapped his thick arms around her and said, "because I'm so so sorry."

Fourteen Scenes About the Death of a Loved One

This is a story i've been working on based on a Sufjan Stevens song....As always, feedback will be appreciated.

I.

It was a cool fall evening, the sky gray and the air still. The goldenrod tied with a blue ribbon and held under my chin as i walked, wrapped in a coat and a scarf and just beginning to see my breath in the air. She lived six blocks away and was sleeping, but i wouldn't wait until morning. She needed something bright when she woke.

It was dark when i arrived and so was her house. I went to her window and her curtains were drawn so i laid the bright little bundle on the windowsill where it would draw all of the East's early light. The defiant yellow flowers, growing in the wild and the cold, seemed to speak good things about the end of a year when everything else was closing and falling.

I wanted to tap on the cool glass because i knew she was there, eyes closed and breathing, and i wanted to see her, but instead i pressed my palm against the pane as if i could feel the warmth of her heart or the lingering smile from her dream. Then i left.

I walked slowly for a while, in the middle of the street, following the reflectors and staring up at a sky framed by branches. I felt that, despite its infiniteness, there was a sort of intimacy to space and the heavens. That perhaps it was that feeling that caused things to grow upwards, like trees and men.

As i neared home i picked my own yellow flowers to put on my sill, hoping there was something symbolic in the same light warming different windows, but mostly i too wished to wake to something bright.

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A string of lights in the sky outside
this boy's window.
Some ordered migration to heaven.
Are you waiting
like I am?
or are you already there?
If so
what becomes of me?

I wished for a light at night,
a beacon
to where you laid your head.
I wished to follow its glow
no matter how far.

Sibelius said of his sixth,
"this reminds me of the smell
of winter,
the first snow."
How it glittered and shone
and chilled his nose but
awakened something as well,
when all else slept.
Something slumbering too most of the year
but
out of hibernation
spoke beautiful notes
and the harmony of the world
would flow through his creased fingers.

I wish you to be
the smell of the first snow
to me.
That light in the sky
that purposes my wanderings.