Christopher Buckley

Time to give up grieving my mother’s loss, faulting my father and his Neolithic moral certitude about every detail on the evening news, his general absence hanging like the gray sheets on the line. Never mind how mismatched in the heart, I should be grateful they were there at all, for that moment that childhood stretched like fog, the beach empty and unmarked. It comes to little now who I forgive, mourn, or thank. The dust shifts and we are barely suspended in the light. I know this little thing: there’s a boy somewhere in a station where the trains still run, wearing scuffed brown shoes, gray overcoat, and cap; someone has neatly parted and combed his hair. He is waiting to be taken by the hand and told where we are going, to hear we are headed home— though I can see nothing beyond the smoke and midnight haze at the far end of the platform, where I am not even sure of the stars.