<fairchild's "mrs. hill">
2003-10-25.2:26 p.m.
Mrs. Hill B.H. Fairchild I am so young that I am still in love with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings, submarines powered by baking soda, whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually, not even them. Nobody can hear them. Mrs. Hill from next door is hammering on our front door shouting, and my father in his black-and-gold gangster robe lets her in trembling and bunched up like a rabbit in snow, pleading, Oh, I'm so sorry, so sorry, so sorry, and clutching the neck of her gown as I if she wants to choke herself. He said he was going to shoot me. He has a shotgun and he said he was going to shoot me. I have never heard of such a thing. A man wanting to shoot his wife. His wife. I am standing in the center of a room barefoot on the cold linoleum, and a woman is crying and being held and soothed by my mother. Outside, through the open door, my father is holding a shotgun, and his shadow envelops Mr. Hill, who bows his head and sobs into his hands. A line of shadows seems to be moving across our white fence: hunched-over soldiers on a death march, or kindly old ladies in flower hats lugging grocery bags. At Roman's Salvage tire tubes are hanging from trees, where we threw them. In the corner window of Beacon Hardware there's a sign: WHO HAS 3 OR 4 ROOMS FOR ME. SPEAK NOW. For some reason Mrs. Hill is wearing mittens. Closed in a fist, they look like giant raisins. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica Junior the great pharoahs are lying in their tombs, the library of Alexandria is burning. Somewhere in Cleveland or Kansas City the Purple Heart my father refused in WWII is sitting in a Muriel cigar box, and every V-Day someone named Schwartz or Jackson gets drunk and takes it out. In the kitchen now Mrs. Hill is playing gin rummy with my mother and laughing in those long shrieks that women have that make you think they are dying. I walk into the front yard where moonlight drips from the fenders of our Buick Dynaflow. I take out my dog whistle. Nothing moves. No one can hear it. Dogs are asleep all over town.
back /& forth /& frosting
names are often sad