Stuart Dybek

I once hit clothespins for the Chicago Cubs. I'd go out after supper when the wash was in and collect clothespins from under four stories of clothesline. A swing-and-a-miss was a strike-out; the garage roof, Willie Mays, pounding his mitt under a pop fly. Bushes, a double, off the fence, triple, and over, home run. The bleachers roared. I was all they ever needed for the flag. New records every game— once, 10 homers in a row! But sometimes I'd tag them so hard they'd explode, legs flying apart in midair, pieces spinning crazily in all directions. Foul Ball! What else could I call it? The bat was real.

A man steps out of sunlight, sunlight that streams like grace, still gaping at blue sky staked across the emptiness of space, into a history where shadows assume a human face. A man slips into silence that began as a cry, still trailing music although reduced to the sigh of an accordion as it folds into its case.

She mops a washcloth down his spine and scrubs until his bones glow with the inner light of porcelain and when his Haloed hair bursts forth into foam he holds his nose and dunks beneath the soapy gloom ears flooding with signals the pipes transmit like microphones. The boy can hear another city, the one below where wind coils when it isn’t howling, one can hear Purgatory boil up through the manholes, a river flushing souls into the underworld, tomorrow’s news bawled at the crossroad of subway and sewer. If he were accidentally to swallow here the water would taste like silver off a dead man’s eyes. Upstairs, the mute émigré waitress he secretly adores sings naked in the shower, the newlyweds from Mexico rage about dinero, next door a newborn wails like a Black Maria, while in a hidden room, a crazy old man won’t stop repeating “the goddamn, the goddman!” And the boy comes up for air, eyes burning, rinsed hair silky, his hands wrinkled,Busha says, as prunes. Overhead, the bare bulb fogs with steam. She jerks the plug, the drain gulps a vortex of gray bathwater. It’s time to rinse before it sucks him down, to stand calf-deep, lacquered with Ivory, smoldering before a faucet that trickles a cool stream at which Busha washes him first gently in front and then behind in a way that no one else will ever wash him. The moon, too, must be fogged above misted lamps that bleed into reflections on the marbled pane. He swipes abstractions in the sweat, finger painting night while Busha towels his hair as if reviving a drowned sailor the sea has graciously returned. Don’t worry,Busha, your grandson is clean for Saturday night: ears, navel, nails, inspected, teeth unstained, cleansed as baptism leaves the soul, pure enough to sleep— as you instruct him—with the angels, cleaner than he’ll ever be again.