James Crews

Though the doctors said no salt, salt was all my father craved. His body bloated, skin water-logged and gray, still he wanted potato chips, honey-baked ham, greasy slabs of Polish sausage from Piekutowski's. He begged for pepperoni pizza, garlic butter, ribs slathered in sauce. But when I did the shopping, I searched only for labels that said low sodium and no preservatives, instead bringing home heads of broccoli, turkey burgers, shredded wheat. And when he died anyway, guilt gnawed me like an ulcer— how could I have denied him his few final pleasures?— until I found Big Mac wrappers stuffed under the car seat, jars of pickles in the hall closet, and hidden among wads of tissues near the night stand, his stash— a half-used canister of salt. I sat down on his sagging mattress now stripped of stained sheets and studied that blue label with the girl in the yellow dress holding her umbrella against a rain of salt still falling from the sky.

Outside in the creek that feeds the lake and never freezes, an otter slaps the water with his paw to feel the current's pulse— Slip in, lie back. Slip in, lie back. He shuts his eyes and obeys, knowing the layers of hair and underfur will warm him while he floats on a faith we wish could carry us. The sound of his splashing fades, but not his joy in being pushed, light as driftwood, back to the mouth of the den I have seen carved out beneath the roots of a fallen fir now packed with snow and lined with leaves that promise his sleep will be deep. Because no dreams wait softly for me, I open the woodstove and strike a match, hold the bloom of the flame to kindling that catches quick as my wish: To be that slick body sliding into the lake that holds the moon, bright portal to glide through without so much as a shiver, no doubt about where I'm going, how to get there.

I could almost hear their soft collisions on the cold air today, but when I came in, shed my layers and stood alone by the fire, I felt them float toward me like spores flung far from their source, having crossed miles of oceans and fields unknown to most just to keep my body fixed to its place on the earth. Call them God if you must, these messengers that bring hard evidence of what I once was and where I have been— filling me with bits of stardust, whaleskin, goosedown from the pillow where Einstein once slept, tucked in his cottage in New Jersey, dreaming of things I know I’ll never see.