Patrick Phillips

I can hear her through the thin wall, singing, up before the sun: two notes, a kind of hushed half-breathing, each time the baby makes that little moan— can hear her trying not to sing, then singing anyway, a thing so old it might as well be Hittite or Minoan, and so soft no one would ever guess that I myself once sang that very song: back when my son and then his brother used to cry all night or half the morning, though nothing in all the world was wrong. And now how strange: to be the man from next door, listening, as the baby cries then quiets, cries and quiets each time she sings their secret song, that would sound the same ten thousand years ago, and has no meaning but to calm.

Touched by your goodness, I am like that grand piano we found one night on Willoughby that someone had smashed and somehow heaved through an open window. And you might think by this I mean I’m broken or abandoned, or unloved.   Truth is, I don’t know exactly what I am, any more than the wreckage in the alley knows it’s a piano, filling with trash and yellow leaves. Maybe I’m all that’s left of what I was. But touching me, I know, you are the good breeze blowing across its rusted strings. What would you call that feeling when the wood, even with its cracked harp, starts to sing?

After the biopsy, after the bone scan, after the consult and the crying, for a few hours no one could find them, not even my sister, because it turns out they'd gone to the movies. Something tragic was playing, something epic, and so they went to the comedy with their popcorn and their cokes, the old wife whispering everything twice, the old husband cupping a palm to his ear, as the late sun lit up an orchard behind the strip mall, and they sat in the dark holding hands.

It came with those scratches from all their belt buckles, palm-dark with their sweat like the stock of a gun: an arc of pickmarks cut clear through the lacquer where all the players before me once strummed—once thumbed these same latches where it sleeps in green velvet. Once sang, as I sing, the old songs. There’s no end, there’s no end to this world, everlasting. We crumble to dust in its arms.

By the time we got out on the water the sun was so low, it wasn’t like water but a field of gray snow that we plowed in one endless white furrow of water as I skirted the rocks and wrecked trawlers and abandoned old jetties just under the water, while you moaned in the bow, slick with fever, whispering back to whatever the water chattered and hissed through the hull— until at last there were lights on the water and I let the old Mercury rattle and sputter its steaming gray rainbows out onto the water as we drifted, at idle, for the last time in your life, through that beloved, indifferent harbor.