Dumping my Dead Uncle's Clothes
As I dump my dead uncle's clothes in the Goodwill box the cold crawls over me and the orange tones of shopping-center arc-lamps feel brazen and fiery on my flesh, the way the glances of mourners must have felt to my uncle as he lay face-up in a suit worn only four times in life.
Dumping clothes bagged in plastic is cruel as hefting bundled meat. Only when death exposes the bone can we see each other wholly naked, devoid of the cant of Freud and other sex-mongers, and determine if the forms we lived by were sufficient to sustain us against the grief prescribed by the sacred books we've devoutly avoided reading.
Beyond the highway, down a slope of leafless oak and hickory, the river waddles to its fate in curves as clumsy as the handwriting of a child. My uncle fished there twenty years before I was born, his big face sunburned and innocent, the war so distant no one could hear the next crop of soldiers being born.
The bags of clothes drop into the box like kittens into a pond. The silence they instantly absorb is permanent. The death of my uncle is now his dearest possession, the arc lamps brave as torches in a catacomb. The cars in the parking lot glow like the shells of extinct insects in a glass museum case.
• William Doreski says “My stuff has appeared in a bunch of magazines and several shabby books, most recently Another Ice Age (AA Publishers, 2007).”
