A Small Story

When Mrs. McCausland comes to mind she slips through a small gap in oblivion and walks down her front steps, in her hand a small red velvet pillow she tucks under the head of Old Jim Schreiber, who is lying dead-drunk against the curb of busy Market Street. Then she turns, labors up the steps and is gone . . . A small story. Or rather, the memory of a story I heard as a boy. The witnesses are not to be found, the steps lead nowhere, the pillow has collapsed into a thread of dust . . . Do the dead come back only to remind us they, too, were once among the living, and that the story we make of our lives is a mystery of luminous, but uncertain moments, a shuffle of images we carry toward sleep— Mrs. McCausland with her velvet pillow, Old Jim at peace—a story, like a small clearing in the woods at night, seen from the windows of a passing train.