IT’S A POSSIBILITY

The bummer is that my ultimate foe is aging amidst the world’s chaos, and I’m not witness to the worries he gestures while alone. I wonder whether he’s relented to a life of total baldness, an honest direction I’d encouraged him to follow when we still knew each other tenderly. Now he’s leaning out the second-story window to peer down at the driveway onto which he threatens to drip his saliva. Or instead: my father who is dead, but here he’s mowing the lawn with a pipe in his mouth. The grass is seven feet tall, and the path my father carves with his mower is maze-like, intricate, and I certainly can’t find him because he’s mowed false routes into the yard maze, but I won’t want to tail him and so I don’t. Too bad! And what of my little sister who might not exist, but say she does—and then what? She is on the phone with a friend. And why is she crying? What’s happened to… though I can only assume that someone else in her life has died prematurely, and she can’t make sense of it, she won’t because—how could she? There’s no sense in this or anything. She hangs up the phone and turns on the television, mutes the volume, and picks up the phone again. Then here, appeared, is the friend to whom I owe nothing, but she opines privately that most owe her plenty for all she’s weathered, and yes: she’s in her car to escape the house’s evening clutter. From habit she’s keyed the ignition, but she leaves the car in park. She’s struck by the need of something expensive, perhaps a thick, 24-karat gold necklace like a waterfall, which she’d dare not buy if she could. In turn I remember my second-grade teacher who told me I was horribly fidgety, and thus behold: she’s fidgeting under the discomfiting glow of the tech to which she’s not yet accustomed. Or else she’s died—this is probable—in which case I hope she lived with humor and grace in the years since her cruel pedagogy. And just now: my mother who sits awake at dawn as she does every morning, but on this day she’s calling for the cat she somehow lost or maybe all her cats have gone missing through the porch door, and she’s yelling for them, she’s crying too, and the cats are nowhere in the lawn, the erratically shorn lawn, but it’s still so dark that perhaps they’re just beyond the tree line, crouched and taking in the fecundity of an unfamiliar soil. I hope my mother finds her cats in my mind. I want her to be happy. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to maintain a constitution generous enough to picture her laugh and mean it.