Reminiscence (445 words)

May is over. The heated vapors that hovered ghostlike over our front yard (sometimes they moved, and even talked to us) are gone, leaving behind dead earth. What did the old seer say was our purpose in life? To be good? To lie in barrows of sunlit grass till we succumbed to our own goodness? Or to reach into a looking glass till we felt our soul pass through our fingers?

I wish I had not fed my novel, the one I had been writing, to the fire this past winter, which was so cold that ice had crawled in from under the door, and frozen it. The novel was about love – about a man and a woman who were lovers, and became separated by circumstances. They would have been reunited in the end; but I think the story was perfect in the incomplete form in which it perished.

May is over, and the winds from the south are picking up, those harbingers of an unbearable summer. The sun has already begun sprawling out across the empyrean, as if it were the sole denizen of that place.

Shall I risk taking a walk down the street? It’s just a mile up and down, and my legs are growing restless. I want to try out my new cane, the one made of black metal with a rounded ivory head.

But what if the neighbors see me? I am supposed to be in mourning, paralyzed with grief, or whatever it is one feels when one’s wife has left the world. I won’t lie, it is grief – grief so deep that it has wrapped around the vast circle of human emotions, and come to rest on an implacable indifference.

But – oh! My wife ended her sojourn in this world over fifty years ago. Why am I still in mourning? Children call me the “strange old man”, and throw rocks at my house when they pass. They might lapidate me, too, if I went out. And my cane would not be enough to protect myself.

The candles flicker at times in the night; and when I look at my shadow on the wall, I see two figures instead of one. Sometimes there are three; but last night there was none. Am I dreaming? Has my vision begun to fail?

Which reminds me. 

I have not seen that lad Billy, who occasionally stops by to ask after me, and fetches my medicine from the apothecary’s, in over a week. I would go myself, but I am crippled by arthritis, and confined to this infernal wheelchair.

Oh well.

I suppose I shall just sit out on this porch till I die.