Odysseus in Woodside: A Short Story

Odysseus in Woodside
A short story by Mark Zipoli

            “Six more blocks and then you can cry.”

            Owen heard the words from his cousin Sylvester and was so startled by their bluntness that he laughed out loud.  Owen was eight years old, his cousin a year older, and he’d known from past moments within their short lives, that if he didn’t laugh hard, if he didn’t laugh loud, and if he didn’t laugh true at Sylvester, at what was funny, at what was pathetic, he would surely cry.

            “C’mon, c’mon, six more blocks,” his cousin repeated. 

            “I’m sorry,” said Owen, as they crossed Sanford Avenue, with its Victorian houses standing on parade, giving a stately grace to Flushing itself and to the borough of Queens in general. 

            “Six more blocks,” Sylvester threw out a third time, as they hurried toward the Main Street station of the elevated Number 7 train.  Owen was on his way home to Woodside, with Sylvester as his escort, but only as far as the Main Street station.

            They covered a lot more ground than Sylvester originally mapped out.  From Burling Street to Beech Avenue and on to Bowne Street--for an eight-year-old boy with sweaty delusions, bone and nerve pain, and the headache of fever--ten blocks clearly surpassed his limitations.  They would eventually be walking a mile before they would reach the Number 7.

            Sylvester’s Flushing neighborhood, rife with the colors of autumn, was crowded with trees: beech, ash, weeping willows, and small laburnums lined the street whose gutters overflowed with the fallen leaves of October.  Owen stopped to catch his breath.  He stooped with his hands on his knees before an old Dutch style house.  Its four-column front porch bulged from the power of its white pillars; the roof gagged within a laboring crust of black wooden shingles.  A breeze picked up, and two long, enticing branches of weeping beeches and cherry trees opened a pathology for Owen that only increased his fear of stumbling over his inverted feet and not getting to the train before his will gave out. 

            Owen’s ankles and knees were swollen; they were painful; they were the remnants of his three months in the hospital with acute rheumatic fever.  On the bottoms of his feet, bubble blisters kept him from walking normally.  He made concessions to his pain by walking on the outer edges of his shoes, which in turn pushed his ankles’ ligaments and tendons to corruption.

            “It’s not much farther,” said Sylvester.

            “You said that already, you liar,” Owen laughed.

            He noticed that the sound of his voice was stifled, as if it were behind a door or drowned out by the ocean.  Right away he knew that the fever was rising again, and that meant visions and voices from talking tree stumps to melting mailboxes, from self-folding gum wrappers to sarcastic caterpillars.

            In a daze, Owen got caught up watching dozens of pigeons meander about on gray dirt, and perching atop a useless gray pedestal missing the bust of a long-ago president.  Sylvester tugged on Owen’s jacket and moved him along.  As they respectfully passed the Free Synagogue of Flushing, with its majestic triad of Romanesque stained-glass windows, they both ran their hands along its ornate wrought-iron fence. 

            The sight of a low-pitched wall just a few feet away drew Owen in a rush and panic for another chance to sit and rest.  His wobbly canter was observed by a man who wore a black patch over his left eye.  The man’s clothes and unshaved face, his dirty hands resting on a wooden cane, gave him the look of a tramp or ancient bully.  When Owen looked in his direction, the man pointed at him and laughed maliciously, uncontrollably, as he watched Owen hurry to the brick wall to sit.

            “You walk like an old lady, little boy,” the man yelled.  “You waddle like a duck!”

            For Owen, his on-again off-again fever robbed him of balance, of context; so that the ugliness of the caustic, laughing man transformed him, to Owen at least, into an octopus swirling in a sea of fire.  Sylvester looked at his cousin and saw the tears well up.  The blood rushed to Sylvester’s face and, with fists clenched hard as mallets, he walked over to the one-eyed man and grabbed the cane from him.  He raised it to strike the man, who was still laughing, when Owen called out:

            “Sylvester! Don’t!  Come back.”

            Sylvester dropped the cane and returned to his cousin, unsatisfied with the unfulfilled blood oath he was prepared to execute.  Owen locked eyes with the man’s uncovered and still humiliating one, the man’s face never out of its cruel character.  There was a push and a shove, as the Q17 and Q12 buses unloaded their passengers, who then intermingled with an already waiting crowd.  Like a retreating wave, they swept the man away with them and onto the Q12.

            “I figured something out,” Owen stated, trying to change the subject and the mood as they moved along, as the buses drove away.  His was a determination not to have others notice him as he suffered: Because Owen and his cousin both knew that pain, or the exhibition of pain, was embarrassing.  Pain lacked privacy.  It reduced your stature, especially if others knew about it.  Owen and Sylvester, blood cousins closer than brothers, each in turn had their fair share of pain from accidents, illness, and punishment by this time, usually a child’s golden time. With laughter, though, they were able to protect each other from the knowledge of others’ pitying looks: It would become a life-long habit, this standing guard for each other.

            “What’d you figure out?” Sylvester asked.

            “Adam and Eve,” said Owen.  “In the Bible, you know, God, who is God after all, you know, is looking for ‘em, and he says ‘Where are you?’  But if he’s God, he already knows where they are.  He doesn’t have to ask them.  He doesn’t have to ask anybody anything.  He’s God!  But he’s asking where Adam and Eve are, Sylvester.”

            “Yeah, so?”

            “So?!  Then he says, ‘Have you been eating of the tree I forbade you to eat?’ Well, sorry God, but Eve’s got a mouthful of a Red Delicious, and Adam’s slicing one up for himself.”  Sylvester laughed out loud and shook his head, hoping that God was not listening.  “God, you know that already, ‘cause you’re God!  If I was Adam, Sylvester, if I was Adam, I’d be saying, ‘Hey, God, what kind of a game are you playing?’”

            Sylvester laughed again, uneasily, at Owen’s impiety, and nearly tripped over a raised lip in the sidewalk. 

            “So he’s playing a game,” continued Owen.  “He knew where Adam and Eve were.  He knew what they did.  You know, Sylvester? It’s just a game he’s playing.  Because he’s God.  Because he sees us, Sylvester! God sees us!  God even knew my mother was going to die and that I was going to get sick because of that strepto thing.

            “So how can God punish us for things he already knows we’re gonna do?  I think we’re a little overmatched, don’t you think, Sylvester?  But I’m only eight, what do I know?”

            Sylvester had no reply.

            “Don’t you think he’s bigger and better than us?” Owen went on.  “You know, we don’t stand a chance against him.  He’s out of our league.  Don’t you think he’s out of our league?  He is.  So why does he even bother?  Why does God bother with us at all, Sylvester?”

            “Will you stop it?!” Sylvester shouted at the top of his lungs.

            Owen stood still.  He looked at his cousin.  He glanced upward to Sylvester’s angry mouth and fierce eyes, then saw his lungs heaving up and down, galloping for air.

            Owen quietly, slowly, uttered three words:  “It’s a lie.”

            Sylvester stared at Owen, then regained himself, and brought his breathing back to normal.  He grabbed Owen’s jacket.

            “I think you’re wrong, Owen,” said Sylvester.  He started them off walking again.  “It’s in the Bible, it’s gotta be true--”

            “--Hey, don’t gimme that ‘It’s in the Bible!’  The Bible is all stories.  Job?!  The Ark?!  And those stories are thousands of years old.  Am I wrong?  Am I?”

            “No.”

            “What?”

            “No.”

            “Okay then,” said Owen, his voice cracking with the knowledge of hurting his cousin’s feelings and himself hurting all over.

            “What’re you going to do with that?” asked Sylvester.

            “With what?”
            “With Adam and Eve.”

            “Nothing,” Owen confided.  “It’s a story.  That’s enough for me.”

            “What about what the nuns and the priests say?  What about what everybody says?”

            “What can they say?  Sylvester I don’t care if President Johnson wants me to believe in it.  He can go pound sand.  I know what I know.”

            “Hasn’t helped with stopping your feet from hurting, has it?”

            “What’s that?”

            “Knowing.  Knowing hasn’t helped any,” Sylvester said.

            “Sure it has.”

            “How?”
            “I know that I don’t need nuns and priests.  I know that I don’t need Jesus, either.”

            At the entrance to the Main Street station, Owen left his cousin alone on the sidewalk and bought a Daily News from an improvised stand of magazines and newspapers at the top of the great staircase.  The paper tucked under his arm, he descended the stairs to the token booth.  He paid for his token, and walked down more stairs until he made it to a waiting train with breathing time to spare.  He sat on the bench immediately to the right of the door.  His throbbing feet and stiff, vibrating calves rested tenuously on the train’s linoleum floor.  A slow backache rose along his young spine.

            I don’t know how much more I can take of this, he thought.  Am I here because I deserve it?  Right.  Am I here because there’s nowhere else for me to go?  Am I here where no one knows to find me, he thought, and hugged the folded newspaper close to himself.

            The Number 7 train jerked Owen and his fellow passengers out of Flushing and rumbled its way across the polluted inlet from Flushing Bay toward Willets Point-Shea Stadium.  After that stop, the train rocked with a soothing buoyancy over the Grand Central Parkway and skirted the Italian neighborhoods of Corona.  Owen put his feet up onto the otherwise empty bench.  A woman motioned to his feet.

            “I don’t think they belong there, young man,” she said piously.  “Someone might want to sit.”

            “They hurt,” he said to her.  “I’m sick.  I’ve got a sickness, and I can’t walk right.”  He felt the fever coming back again, rising.

            “Oh, I’m sorry,” she frowned.

            Out from her eyes crawled a half-dozen little arms and legs bleeding like melting snow.  His eyes fluttered and they disappeared.

            “Are you seeing a doctor?” she asked him through the curtain of sound from the train’s wheels upon the tracks.

            “Yes,” Owen replied.  “I was in the hospital for three months.”

            The woman shook her head sadly.

            When the train stopped at Junction Boulevard, he looked out the window and saw that he was surrounded by Elmhurst.  Beneath him hummed the continuous line up of storefronts, each crowned by two stories of red brick or brick façade, puckered with white wooden-frame windows and draped with fire escapes.  These dwellings housed generations of New Yorkers who had become immune to the sound of squeaking brakes and the flashes of electrical sparks from the breach in the seams between the third-rail and its pickup connections, and immune, too, to the conductors’ monotone announcements, voices that through the 101 degrees of Owen’s body temperature were lacerations in the wind.

            Over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway he rode, through Jackson Heights and, finally, the train pulled into Woodside.  The neighborhood awaited him with local accents and obscure bar room loyalties.  It cloaked him in the smells of Italian and German bakeries, and the corner discussions of bent and retired gatekeepers, lamenting that the Yankees had finished in sixth place and that the Mets would never be any good.

            Up he stood with a bulldog’s brace and single-mindedness, rushing along the platform and down the stairs to 61^st Street.  At street level, he saw the marquee of the Deluxe Theater across Roosevelt Avenue.  “Jason and the Argonauts” was playing with “Masque of the Red Death.”  The Deluxe, although not an oracle, had certainly become for him a place of convenient mystery. The darkness and the giant images on the screen gave him a sampling of what the world had never really been for him and his family, for his mother and father, for Woodside.  Mostly they left him bored and irritated.  To manage the space between himself and the screen, he always brought a book with him and, inevitably, no matter what the story, no matter what the day was, once he’d got his allowance from his father or his grandfather, he’d be off to the Deluxe with a ten-cent paperback in his pocket.

            Turning away from the theater and gazing up at the cement and steel girders that lay above him in place of a blue sky, the rumble of another passing train stoked his hot face like thunderbolts from Jason’s angry gods: Sparks blasted from the tracks, emitting a sulfur smell blending with the scent of nitric oxide; a change of matter--labels to keep the gods in their place.

            He returned his attention to what was in front of him sprawled on the sidewalk: a mess of spilled vegetables, dry-food packages, and a broken bag of rice.  Sitting on the front stoop of an apartment building, a matronly woman surveyed her disbanded groceries:   Her bloodshot eyes, her hands knotted and spotted, her legs swollen, her ankles bearing the bruises of too many years doing what needed to be done as opposed to what could’ve been done, she looked at Owen.  He balanced on the edges of his shoes and looked at her.

            “You in pain?” she asked.

            “Yes.”

            “You need a doctor?”

            “Probably.”

            “And you don’t want to bother anybody.”

            “Yeah...it doesn’t make me feel any better, though,” he said, aware of her body odor.

            “I didn’t think it would,” she said vacantly.

            Owen stared at her swollen calves and her ravaged hands.  The fever was pushing sweat down from his head like a press.  His vision was blurry but he could still make out the old man he was talking to, who held a trident and a tablet of commandments.  But then he remembered it was a woman.  He squinted and she returned to her original form.

            “I’ll pick up your groceries,” he said, trying to hold his balance.

            He collected her groceries and placed them inside the wrecked paper bag beside her.  As he grabbed each vegetable, as he held each box of grain, he thought, he prayed, while his legs and hands shook:  “If I can do a dozen things, 12 good things, before I get to my street, then I’ll be cured.  If I can be a better boy in 12 ways, I’ll be fine from here on in.  Sylvester won’t have to work so hard to make me laugh.  He makes me laugh anyway.”

            When he finished reviving the woman’s spirits with his good deed, he moved along Roosevelt Avenue, dodging purposeful men, teenagers on bikes, and overturned trash bins.  Before he could cross the next street, he stood and listened as another train passed above him, bringing along its deafening wind of metal, a howl of electricity that grated his teeth and pierced his inner ear.  He felt cold just then, and thirsty.  With a smile of foresight, he walked into a shop and bought a bread pretzel and an ice cold root beer, which he drank in one draft.

            The aromas of a pizzeria and the frying oil and salt from a fish market pulled him along like an intoxicant: Homecoming had made him dizzy with delight.  The mountaintop from which he stepped down, to slide encumbered in fractured steps, brought a stutter to his sense of space, as if he were talking only in one long embarrassing hiccup.  Then, with no real understanding of what he could have said, he felt himself seated behind the great wheel of a sailing ship, and inhaled the grace of a warm wind and the hope of keeping his sanity.

            Down a side street off Roosevelt Avenue, Owen ran his fingers along the sides of apartment houses where the porous and grimy false brick allowed him a textural patois between recognition (his consciousness that he hasn’t fainted from the pain) and belonging (his comfort in the landscape of family dominion).  I know where I am, he allowed, but I could get lost at any minute.

            As he turned the corner from Woodside Avenue, still walking on his tendons, Owen lost focus.  He asked himself, What did the doctor call them? Peroneus tetius?  Peroneus longus?  Sounds like a Roman general.  And then he lost his balance and fell on top of a pile of wooden crates, wood chips, and sawdust.  His burning soles and heels were now overshadowed by a bruised hip.  Embarrassed beyond his little life, he accepted an extended hand from Lester Gones, the butcher, whose shop it was that called for the crates, the wood chips, and the sawdust.

            Lester, with a skinless hotdog in his mouth and an extra one in his other hand, pulled Owen up and led him inside the butcher shop to a wooden bench painted the color of gray matter.  Then he handed Owen the other hotdog.  “Not watching where you’re going, little boy?”

            “No, sir.  Wasn’t paying attention.”

            “Your mind in another place?”

            A goliath in a white t-shirt, white blood-stained apron, and white pants, Lester Gones swallowed what was in his mouth and went behind the counter.  He had no customers.  He was alone except for the radio, which played music with an Afro-Caribbean beat.  It was strange to Owen’s ears.

            “What kind of music is that?”

            “That’s the Duke of Iron,” Lester said.  “It’s calypso music.  Have you ever heard of calypso music?”

            “Maybe not,” Owen replied, slouching into the bench, melting within his clothes while becoming cooler from the refrigeration.

            “No,” he added, “but I like it.  It sounds nice.  Can I sit here for a while?” he asked Lester.  “Forever?” he whispered to himself. 
            “Sure,” Lester replied.

            The sound of the radio, and the smell of sawdust and dried blood, gave Owen an awareness of freshly lost lives, of cattle heads, pigs’ entrails, and lambs being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

            “You look kinda peevish,” said Lester.

            “Rheumatic fever,” Owen said aloud, almost without thinking, and felt embarrassed that he did.

            “What?” Lester mumbled as he slid out from the meat case a palm-size piece of filet mignon and inserted it into a shiny metal meat grinder.

            “I was sick, in the hospital.  My throat hurt.  My arms and knees and feet, too.  They said it was bad for my heart.”

            “Rheumatic fever,” Lester mused, rotating the meat grinder.

            “I got sick and was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Owen.  “That’s why my feet hurt.  This place makes me think of the hospital.”

            “Should be just the opposite, son.  This is where you get better.  From meat.”

            Lester dropped the ground filet mignon onto a sheet of butcher paper and tasted a couple fingers full.

            “Stay away from the hospital.  That’s my advice.”  Lester ate some more of the ground meat, was pleased by it, then offered some to Owen.

            “No thanks.”

            Lester sighed, eating the rest, and stared out through his windows.

            “Ever wonder why you’re here?” asked Lester.

            “If I hadn’t fell, I wouldn’t be here,” said Owen.

            “Yeah,” said Lester, not really paying attention to Owen’s answer.

            “I wasn’t paying attention,” Owen said, thinking better of his reply.

            “Wish I knew why I was here.”

            “Weren’t you always here, Mr. Gones?” Owen asked, looking around the quiet shop.

            “Naw, I’m from other places,” Lester laughed. “Smaller places.  This is outer space.  Too many people here in New York.  Too many obstacles.  And it’s noisy as hell.”

            He went around in back and grabbed two more hotdogs, offering one to Owen, who declined, so he put the other in his mouth and took a bite.

            “Then maybe you should move.”

            “Can’t.”

            “Why not?”

            “This is where I make my money.”

            “What about Mrs. Gones and your kids?”

            “No wife, no kids.”

            “Oh,” said Owen, trying to stand up.

            “Your balance better?” Lester asked.

            “Yeah,” Owen said as he breathed in deeply, feeling neither outwitted nor outfoxed, nor even out of place.  He turned to leave.

            “You don’t have to go, son.”

            “I know.  But I should.  I’m expected home any minute now.”
            “Just steer clear of the obstacles,” said Lester.

            “Thanks.”

            Once outside and in the sunlight, his mind was in a different place as he thought of who would be home when he got to the house, if his teenaged brothers Tom and Lucian would be down the street smoking and drinking and hanging out with girls, if his Dad would be there.  No, he’d already left for work.  Well, I hope the dog will be there at least, he thought.  With that calculation complete, Owen walked, smack, into the front of a full-bodied woman.

            “And so young,” she said, as she removed his face from her crotch.  Owen looked up and stared at her buxom chest.  Catching his eyes, the woman smiled.

            “Usually I charge for that.”

            He studied her face.  There was no softer smile than the beautiful face he gazed into.  Her tweezed and penciled brows took no thunder away from the brown eyes and the lush swoop of her lashes.  In the back shadow of the sun, Owen trembled slightly.

            “If I ever get my breath back...”

            “Don’t worry.  All men do,” she laughed.  In seconds, she skirted around him and pranced with high hopes and heels down the avenue and rounded the corner out of sight.

            Farther down the block, Owen found the fresh carcass of a squirrel.  He stooped low over the animal and noticed its eyes bulged nearly out of their sockets.

            “Haven’t I been put through enough?” Owen chirped in imitation of the agonizing rodent.  “I am God’s little creature,” he intoned.  “Little scoiattolo,” he chimed, mimicking his grandfather’s immigrant voice.  “Little scoiattolo.”

            A truck’s horn, blaring at the slow crossing of a boy or a dog on Woodside Avenue, startled Owen.  It stopped him from giving the squirrel any further abuse or desecration.  He looked up and away, out to the street, knowing that his own dog was an independent and reckless soul.  He hoped it wasn’t him in the middle of the road.

            “You don’t need your eyes,” Owen said to the rodent before standing up.

            He moved along, slipping from his Peroneus tendons onto the blisters on the soles of his feet.

            “It won’t be long,” he thought.  “I’ll be home soon, and I can see the old man.”

            His grandfather, who lived on the top floor in the finished attic, would be there with his dry, old-man’s skin and his lonely smile.  Always the opportunity for an affectionate welcome and something to eat, Owen pictured his grandfather’s face as if from a photograph bleached by too much sun.  He could forgive the sun making everything so bright.  He could forgive his grandfather for making him feel better about himself.

            In front of a junk shop posing as a pawn shop posing as an antiques shop, Owen’s gaze caught a large sweater hanging over the head and covering the shoulders of a sexless manikin which stood before a folded-up security fence.  Nothing on the sidewalk or in view of the store’s large plate glass windows would induce anyone to buy.  It was a final hold-out for debris.  Owen stopped and felt the sweater.

            “Genuine alpaca wool,” Owen recited from the handwritten label.

            “Don’t you believe it,” said a voice from under three or four wooden chairs surrounded by a chest and a box of glasses and silverware.

            “Says genuine,” replied Owen, as if nothing were overtly unusual about talking to a man lying on the ground beneath some chairs.

            “You always believe everything you read?” asked the voice.

            “This a riddle?”

            “Son, I don’t have the wherewithal to offer you riddles.”

            Owen looked down and around the spot where the man was sprawled in the shade.  A syringe lay beside him and a matchbox stood on its edge a foot away.  He wore dark sunglasses, his mouth held a burning cigarette.  In one hand there was positioned a bottle of Four Roses whiskey.

            “Riddles only have answers from somebody who’s been alone in the dark too long,” said the man.

            “Mister, why are you lying on the ground?” asked Owen.

            “It sustains my needs.”

            “Why’n’t you just lean against a tree?”
            “Legs.  Legs wouldn’t hold me.  I was falling, you see.  Usually I can tell when that’s coming.  Usually I know what the future holds when my bones turn to soup and I can’t see beyond my nose.  You’re standing kind of weird yourself.”

            “I’m sick.”

            “You oughta try lying down.”

            “I already did,” said Owen.  “In the hospital.”

            “But you’re too young.”

            “It was unexpected.”

            “Maybe you shoulda consulted me first.  I could’ve warned you,” said the man, and the words somehow stung, as if he’d said Owen had been careless.

            “Mister, nothing seems right about where you are or what you’re doing.”

            “Kid, you’re tellin’ me.  I didn’t see it coming, either.”

            The man rolled over onto his other side, giving his back to Owen while emitting a feeble humming noise.  Or was it a sob?  He set the bottle of Four Roses down on the concrete with a ping.

            “You think it’s important to know what’s coming?” asked Owen.

            “Big difference between knowing and doing something about it.”

            “But is knowing just as good?” rejoined Owen.  “You know, is it good enough?  I think knowing sometimes is good enough.”

            “You might be right.  Maybe trying to change what’s on its way will bring on other things, worse than what was meant to be.”

            “What kinda things?  Truths?  Lies?” asked Owen.

            “Hmm.  One alone can get you in trouble.  Knowing both the truth and the lie, well, you’re too young to have that cast upon you.  Who sent you here?  Did he send you?”  The man’s agitation whipped up his energy.  He swung his legs around beneath him and changed his position, much like a wrestler on a mat.

            “I don’t know who he is,” said Owen.

            “Then don’t answer.  I can give you a piece of advice, if you don’t mind listening to a blind man.”

            “I wouldn’t know if you were blind or dead if you hadn’t said something earlier.  I’ll take whatever you got.”

            The man rolled back under the chairs and stretched out prone against the concrete ground.

            “If I were you, I’d go with the lie, then you’d have more friends.”

            “Like Adam and Eve,” Owen expelled softly, thinking of Sylvester’s heated face.  He looked back again to the chairs but saw that the man had green-black fins which began to dry up, and scales flaked off of him onto the ground.  The dark sunglasses sank inwardly and became hollow recesses in his forehead.

            “Go with the lie,” the fish called out from underneath the chairs.  “The truth won’t make you alone, son.  You’ll do it yourself.”

            Owen swayed slightly and leaned against the folded security fence.

            “Hey,” the man-fish said, “I predict you’re gonna faint.”

            “No,” replied Owen, snapping out of it.  He waved to the disintegrating man-fish and walked down Woodside Avenue.

            At 56^th Street, in a private park known through which he’d often walked by himself, Owen wandered to the statue of a World War I soldier, and then sat heavily on the base rock.  His feet hurt so much that they itched.  So he scratched them, crazily, his finger nails raking his skin like a backyard garden and scratching more until he knew he’d be bleeding at any minute.  He stopped, breathed deeply, opened his brown bag, and took out his bread pretzel to eat.  The salty, soft texture of nostalgia, even for him as a little boy without so much of a Life, was an instant indication that this wasn’t going to last very long, this safe corner of the world, this park in Woodside.  He exhaled and leaned into the statue’s feet and calves.  Looking up to the soldier’s face, he closed his eyes for a moment, as they were burning from tears and a hundred-degree temperature.

            “I miss my Mom,” said the soldier.

            “I do, too,” said Owen.

            “I hear her talk to me.”

            “Me, too,” said Owen.

            “I don’t know if it’s supposed to happen like that.”

            “Me neither,” smiled Owen.

            “There’ll be no peace in my heart until I know she’s not suffering.”

            “But she’s gone,” said Owen.

            “Oh, yes, I know.  I know she’s dead.”

            “You can have all the peace you need, now,” sighed Owen.

            “Don’t be reckless with my sorrow, little boy.”

            “Of course not,” said Owen.

            “How long have you been this way?”

            “What way?”

            “Talking to things,” said the soldier.  “Walking funny.”

            “Since she died; since I was sick.  I can’t move without it hurting.”

            “Hey, I can’t move at all.”

            Feeling a wet gob on his cheek, as if he were drooled upon, Owen laughed.  He opened his eyes and stood up.  He put the half-eaten pretzel back into the brown paper bag, and walked on past the grocery, the barbershop, and the laundromat.  Passing beneath the overpass of the Long Island Railroad tracks, he stopped halfway and waited as the apparition of his dead mother traipsed toward him, a pocket book in one hand, a cigarette in the other.  This maternal vision came to him minutes after four o’clock.  It gave Owen no less trepidation about truths and lies and life and death than did the strange narcotic man, or Lester Gones, or the hardened outsides of his own feet.  The guile upon which he was forced to walk so late in the afternoon made him feel self-righteous.

            “Am I seeing things because my feet hurt?” he asked her.

            “No, Owen, they have nothing to do with it,” she replied, walking alongside him, holding his hand.  The rustle of her gray skirt, a light blue blouse tucked into it, and the sound of her gray pumps clicking on the sidewalk, kept his momentum up: It was a case of Memory as energy.

            “Then why do they hurt so bad?”

            “I told you in the hospital,” she said.  “You have to listen to me when I’m talking.  Besides,

you already know.  The fever causes inflammation in your joints and your muscles.”

            “But that’s the straight stuff.  I want to know why.”

            “Owen, don’t get carried away.  You and I don’t have the time it takes to explain all that.”

            “Pain doesn’t count?” Owen asked.

            “Not in the big picture, honey.  No, it doesn’t.”

            “What does?”

            “You’ll have to decide that for yourself.  When you’re older.  It’s just a couple more blocks.  Can you get home on your own okay?”

            “Yeah, as long as I stop seeing things, like giant fish and octopuses.”

            “What brings that on?”

            “My toes and my ankles and my knees, Mom.”

            “Just because they hurt doesn’t mean it’s not good for you.”

            “Yeah,” Owen laughed; he guffawed.

            She left him in the fading sunlight, just out from the darkened, cool moisture beneath the railroad underpass.  He made a sharp right to begin the solitary walk down the alley that would take him to 54^th Street.  Stepping carefully, shouldered on both sides by high walls covered in ivy and overgrown bushes and weeds, he felt the serene exhilaration of loneliness.  Vines twisted themselves out of dumped refrigerators and rusted truck parts, and each of the vine and weed bundles spoke to him as he walked along, hissing at him with jealous, spiteful tones.

            There will be no more telephone calls, he heard them promise.  There will be no more afternoon cages of time spent with her.  And those reassuring motherly looks that hinted at the secret of possibility, the random clue for the future?  Forget it.  He had to get used to that.

            Rheumatic fever had made it harder to accept.  But he thought that he had finally learned to do things by himself, to be alone, without her, securing his own cage without so much as a watch, or a laugh, or a moment’s nudge as a reminder of his place in the hour of the day, her hour of the day, now his.

            So he shuffled along the last hundred feet, and saw his family’s house come into view.  With that languid image came the sweet, hard knock in his head.  That knock fed him the terror that accompanied joy, because he could never feel the latter without then sensing the former.

            Feeling all around him the lack of noise from the street, making the minute of his solitary arrival a more natural one, he was quick to fall onto the living room couch as soon as the front door closed behind him.  He found none of his siblings, no radio played, no TV, no ringing telephone, no cigarette smoke, and his grandfather was asleep upstairs, snoring in between birdcalls coming from the rooftops of factories behind the alleyway.  Only the dog, whom he loved so much, was there to greet him.  The round canine eyes seemed to criticize Owen’s tardiness and to minimize his loneliness, not caring one way or the other between the truth or the lie.

(c) 2013 by Mark Zipoli.