Irene McKinney

Maybe because I was married and felt secure and dead at once, I listened to my father’s urgings about “the future” and bought this double plot on the hillside with a view of the bare white church, the old elms, and the creek below. I plan now to use both plots, luxuriantly spreading out in the middle of a big double bed. —But no, finally, my burial has nothing to do with marriage, this lying here in these same bones will be as real as anything I can imagine for who I’ll be then, as real as anything undergone, going back and forth to “the world” out there, and here to this one spot on earth I really know. Once I came in fast and low in a little plane and when I looked down at the church, the trees I’ve felt with my hands, the neighbors’ houses and the family farm, and I saw how tiny what I loved or knew was, it was like my children going on with their plans and griefs at a distance and nothing I could do about it. But I wanted to reach down and pat it, while letting it know I wouldn’t interfere for the world, the world being everything this isn’t, this unknown buried in the known.

The straight neck held up out of the lace is bound with a black velvet band. She holds her mouth the way she chooses, the full underlip constrained by a small muscle. She doesn’t blink or look aside, although her left eye is considering a slant. She would smile if she had time, but right now there is composure to be invented. She stares at the photographer. The black crepe settles. Emerging from the sleeve, a shapely hand holds out a white, translucent blossom. “They always say things which embarrass my dog,” she tells the photographer. She is amused, but not as much as he’d like.