Round and round, the room turned his steps ever towards its centre, as if he shuffled in an enormous bowl.

words | john ricciardi   art | patrick rocard  music | David Murphy

 

 

     The stairs loomed steep and ominous. Their wooden risers had been forbidden him after a daughter had fallen and broken her hip. The floors above no longer were within his day and night.  
     "Papa come out," his daughters called him. They had been alive more than seventy years, he hardly less than a century. The two years since his wife's death had gobbled up everything prior, crushed all other memories to non-existence with the pounding of her absence like a jack-hammer on a steel plate, day after day: time beaten flat. He aimed for the rear doorway, passed through into the yard, and squinted at cold sunlight. Brisk autumn had hardened the grass, denuded the trees, and strewn the lawn with leaves. He could walk easily; his legs were spry; but a few paces on he stopped and began to waver.  

    The dead foliage, russet, sorrel, and maize, snagged in his vision, tipped brittle into a flashing field of shifty, dry crabs with razor edges, or, where they tossed together, floated turgid and sleek like the skin of a swamp.

 

      In and out, the wind picked through the weave of his trousers. His eyes were sharp enough to allow him to shave; yet each morning he saw a proximate blear in his mirror, spectral vapours for a head. He went back into the house as quickly as he could.
      The circuit from kitchen to salon to bedroom was too soon done. Even to his musician's ears, melodies belied the promise of their initial summons to listen. All broadcasts had become garbled, indistinct droning. Tobacco smoke wreathed him, went in little clouds to nuzzle corners by the windows.
      "Stop smoking Papa; it's time to eat."
     God had constructed him for duration. He had his teeth; yet the porcelain nibs were keys to an ever-narrowing slot. He was caged in his thin bones, tethered in isolation's cell. Taste had died; cooked meals long ago had become mere preludes to masticated paste. Only the table wine, with its heavy sediment in the lees of the glass, made sustenance palatable.  
      "Wait Papa." They spread newspaper sheets on the floor before the toilet. His daughters, absolute rulers now, had less indulgence for their patriarch than would have rabble for a monarch dethroned. The old man, in his own house, wasn't permitted a dog's snap at dignity, not so much as a resentful snarl and an occasional, futile, mock bite back. His hands shook; the newsprint smudged under a few stray drops.  
     He yet could read, but subject matter only gaped round the widening spiral where his wife's soul had comforted his. 
      The stories of the day wandered by him with no more import than the blue-grey smoke staining his fingernails brownish ivory. Years before, when he still walked in the street, a band of juvenescent toughs had roughed him up, taken his watch, his wallet, and a silver pen, yet had missed his gold ring when he had turned its shiny boss around his finger to face his palm. They terrified him with a coarse brutality he never had seen in the young, returned a few small coins when he complained that he no longer had any money with which to catch the bus home, and left in his belly a burn of fearful anger when they had gone.
      On and on within the measured confines of a beating heart, he circled and smoked, circled and smoked, save for the few hours a night he lay in his bed. There the ceiling dropped to within a touch of his forehead; the bedclothes billowed huge and pale as a sea of sand. He shrank away then, lost his way, and floated as if on a shingle in a fog. His daughters ... he called his daughters for the thousandth time to fish him out, to carry him into morning. He was lost like that now, although a clicking roar like gravel rolling in a river, stones spilling on the shore, drowned his resolve to shout. The slough spun him giddy, then sliced fast and hard towards a breakwater. Here was a clean fissure across the filmy murk, through the opaque phlegm pulling apart. His daughter came into the room, listened to the death-rattle, and once it had ended, shut her father's upturned eyes.
   
 
   
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