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Sunday at Grandma’s. Dinner started at noon. It went on long into the night. My relatives lined up on one side of the table like in pictures of the Last Supper. Or the condemned at the gallows. Little mouse, I scurried under the table sweeping up the fallen morsels with a tiny dustpan and broom. Uncle John’s big toe poked from a hole in his boot. Feeling mischievous, I took a nibble. This is how I learn to curse in Italian. Grandmother fetched me up by the scruff of my neck and set me on her silver wedding platter. There was a basket of dinner rolls overturned in the potted fern. The snowdrifts blown up against the windows were already beginning to thaw. Grandpa burst through the door with a satchel of dead letters he’d smuggled from his job at the post office slung over his shoulder. He poured out the letters on the table for the greasy hands of my relatives to shift through, then sat down at the head with his winged hat still on, rubbing his paunch. “We saved him for you,” said Grandma, hands outspread, offering me up. “He’s all skin and gristle,” he said. “Toss him back.” Into the scrap pot I went, castaway of a gentler world.
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The room came sparingly furnished and the rent was reasonable. The landlady seemed keen on having the place occupied and said I could move in that day. She was a sociable young widow and had a flirty way of cornering me in the stairwell when I came in after hours, as I often did, insisting I stop in for coffee or a late dinner. We struck up a passing acquaintance, and I came to know her small son, whose playful bouncing around the halls at all hours had become a fixture of my new living situation. After my first month as a lodger, however, I saw him less frequently. Then not at all. I began to miss the child, who would run to greet me in the vestibule, hugging my knees and offering me his dirty red ball to throw. One afternoon, I called in on the mother to inquire after the boy. But she insisted she had inhabited the tiny downstairs apartment alone since her husband passed, had no one except for the stray boarders like myself who drifted like phantoms through the house. I understood. Denial was just a natural step in how we grieve, I told her, and quietly returned upstairs. The next morning I found the notice on my door. After the end of the month, the room would no longer be available. Soon I would have to go. Suddenly, the house had become a strange and unfamiliar presence, though I had only just recently come to think of it as home.
Untitled #3
Walking back through the park, I stopped at a bench to rest. I had only meant to briefly shut my eyes, but I must have nodded off, because I was awakened by the rat-tat of an officer’s baton. “Can’t sleep here. Isn’t safe,” he said. He took me under my arm as though to escort me out of the park, but instead I was led further off the trail into the surrounding woods. As we walked, he told me of all the things he’d like to do if he could just get some time away from the job. I understood perfectly, I told him. With my teaching responsibilities and all the other daily obligations just to get by, I was lucky to find time for a relaxing nighttime walk. But, I interjected, there’s still time. It’s never too late to make the most out of your life. By now we had come to the lake beyond the trees. The moon was shining and for the first time I could get his full measure. In his neat, button-up coat and eight-point cap, which seemed to give off a faint aura of their own, he reminded me of my aunt’s first husband, my uncle Eddie. Though he was killed in duty stopping a mugging years before I was born, so I only knew him from photos of his days as a wide-eyed recruit. Surprisingly, he took two cigars from the breast pocket of his uniform. “Smoke with me,” he said, handing me one of the cigars and leaning in to give me a light – and now I could see the dried blood from the neat bullet hole below his badge. Then I realized the cigar in my hand was a gun, a thin trail of smoke curling up from the barrel like a magician’s train of scarves.
Justin Hollis has an MFA from Hofstra University and currently teaches language and literature at Palm Beach State College. His work has appeared previously in the Querencia Press Quarterly Anthology, Action, Spectacle, Cholla Needles, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review, GAS: Poetry, Art and Music, and The Chiron Review. His debut collection, Ferrying the Stars, is published by Half Inch Press.