Michael Chitwood

Not for nothing are we given at least as much sense as God gave a goose, which we have no access to, sensewise. We don’t speak goose nor recognize what body language there may be in a body which is mostly neck and dollop. But down, now there is something to build dreams on. We have recourse and in the morning the feathered snow will have come and closed the roads. Linger. Leave off.

At the end of the work day you could tell exactly how far you had gotten and how much farther there was to go. Of course, it was just a ditch for a pipeline to carry the reeking slop that a neighborhood of toilets would slosh together to be drained away but it was clean, the trench, the slick walls the backhoe bucket cut and the precise grade of the bottom. My job was to sight the transit. I gave a thumbs up or thumbs down or the OK sign if the pitch was right so that some future day shit would flow just as it should, down hill, but you knew where you stood, what you had done in a day, and what more there was to do and every meaningful thing I had said I had said without a word.

He worked years on the tablet, deciphering the pictographs. He knew it was a kind of language, those images. An eye. A bird, maybe a crow. A basket of wheat. A ladder. Did the order of the images matter? He cross-referenced similar texts. He studied the history of the region and satisfied many hours in the tablet's service. In a cousin language, a ladder was the word for happiness, to rise up, to be lifted above the ordinary. After years of work, he sorted it out. It was poetry, bad poetry, adolescent: "Today, I am happy, happy all this day, today."

The ribbed black of the umbrella is an argument for the existence of God, that little shelter we carry with us and may forget beside a chair in a committee meeting we did not especially want to attend. What a beautiful word, umbrella. A shade to be opened. Like a bat’s wing, scalloped. It shivers. A drum head beaten by the silver sticks of rain and I do not have mine and so the rain showers me.

Even two years later, she still gets correspondence addressed to him. Correspondence. This like that. Mostly about his hobby. Coin collector brochures. Announcements of collector swap meets. His pastime. A way to spend an afternoon back when an afternoon needed spending. Before all the silence flooded the house. He had old currency. Nickels worth ten dollars. And heavy, the bags. Musical, too. She needs to sort through them all. That's what she should do, realize its value. But what she is thinking of is spending it, buying gum and soft drinks, maybe a chocolate bar. Just get face value for mint-condition rarities. Get them back into circulation. Circulation. The afterlife where someone else could get them as change and be joyful at the luck of finding his life's pleasure.

Two days into the flood they appear, moored against a roof eave or bobbing caught in the crowns of drowned trees. Like fancy life boats from an adventurer’s flag ship, brass plating and grips, walnut sheen, scroll work, they slip through the understory on this brief, bad river. What have they discovered and come back to account? Or is this the beginning of the marvelous voyage and they plan never to return?