The Disappearing Act
You forgot a few things around the apartment—a couple books, your toothbrush, a sweater that had fallen behind the couch. Penny watches from the window, crooning like a hound dog, her wet nose pressed upon the glass panel, waiting for your beat-up work boots to make their way up the gravel driveway. I know better than to wait, I replace. Jack Daniels, Jane Austen novels, a vibrator, and on braver days, strays from the local bar—a teacher’s assistant, a carpenter, the kind that slip home in the mornings to better things, leaving nothing to remember them by.
Photo credit: Michael Phillips
Grandfathers are always the ones, in my experience, to let go first. The atrophy begins about the hips, thus enlarging the stomach and the chest, and then climbs up the legs, weakening the joints and ligaments about the space, and continues lest there is a diet or life crisis to intervene. Now, with elapsed time and persistently poor habits, the man is a grandfather with a rotund stomach and broken aspirations and he prefers bird watching in the bathroom, residing next to the tooth brushes with his binoculars and cigarettes, rather than seeing his grandchildren. He will pass soon after.
I love “…strays from the local bar…” Volumes of emotion and imagery in so few words – kudos!
Sublime. I too, was smitten by ““I know better than to wait, I replace.” I just keep re-reading it, enjoying how it feels just right.
Nicely done–love “I know better than to wait, I replace.” And I don’t know if it was intentional but at first I read “to better things” as a verb. Hmmmm.