New Year’s Day, humid and warm, drippy with a faint, indifferent rain, adding a eerie sheen to the beginning. I sat out on the back porch feeding the cats at 5 a.m., slow rollers working in from the Atlantic, freighting what’s left of the shore in heavy signature the print of a moon that can’t be seen.
The couple who are wintering in the house fifty yards down from here are grimly partying on with friends who don’t quite seem intimate, their voices hoarse, unmerry, toasting hooch to some raw goal which may end as soon as the coming of day. Someone’s playing sax on the back porch, attempting an old torch song with blunt fingers, like they hadn’t picked up an axe for ten years.
I lean back as the cats attack their food with wet mouths, my mind composed of that sound and the surf and the jackal party next door, not so much thinking as breathing a nous whose cerebrations are sensual, riffing the raw material of the moment in a jazz no more ably than that dumbass of a sax player, honking and fretting squawky notes not even to himself.
I’ve lived here for two years since my wife and child were killed in a freak accident. Jan was driving Brendan to his elementary school when a driverless garbage truck careened into an intersection. It caught our Honda Civic in its midsection on the drivers side. It took an hour just to cut through the wreckage to get to Jan and Brendan and by then they were gone. I got the call early in the afternoon. I was slogging through a layout, so deep in a tangle of color schemes and fonts that the officer’s words didn’t register, as if they were deep underwater. When I began to comprehend, the words changed altitude, they were like meteors slowly finding their marks on a long empty prairie. Fran and Brendan are buried in the same cemetery as Fran’s parents, mom-and-son-sized marble markers like opening quotes of something I have to say before adding my endquotes.
The cats finish off their meal and amble off, tails up in droll curlicues, faintly visible beyond the porch light as they lay about the yard preening themselves or disappear into the dunes. Light will soon be warming an invisible seam between black ocean and cloudy night.
The thought of that suggests there is still something left to do. Before bed last night I started some noir thriller and there was an epigraph from Irving Thalberg that went, “The end of a story should be what the beginning is about.” -- Maybe that’s what has me posting my story, inserting myself into a fiction which has a poesis but is no poem, as I am neither protagonist worth mention nor author of any note, just one cache of the world’s harrows and hallows, offering a sampling of iotas between.
The sax player next door has given up on the song; the last note wheezes into silence and then I think I hear him weeping softly. But it may just be the long grasses in the empty lot between these two houses, sighing in late night breezes. A bottle crashes inside the house and the couple are screaming profanities at each other. Still living large. Me, I’m just going to sit here and let it all decompose into the new year, letting night ebb into raw morning and feeling my way into the finalities of beginning again.
