Wonders

In a wide hoop of lamplight, two children— a girl and her younger brother—jump marbles on a star-shaped playboard. Beside them, in a chair near a window, their father thinks of his mother, her recent death and the grief he is trying to gather. It is late October. The hooplight spreads from the family, through the window, to the edge of a small orchard, where a sudden frost has stripped the fruit leaves and only apples hang, heavy and still on the branches. The man looks from the window, down to a scrapbook of facts he is reading. The spider is proven to have memory, he says, and his son, once again, cocks his small face to the side, speaks a guttural oh, as if this is some riddle he is slowly approaching, as if this long hour, troubled with phrases and the queer turn in his father's voice, is offered as a riddle. There is the sound of marbles in their suck-hole journeys, and the skittery jump of the girl's shoe as she waits, embarrassed, for her father to stop, to return to his known self, thick and consistent as a family bread. But still he continues, plucking scraps from his old book, old diary of wonders: the vanishing borders of mourning paper, the ghostly shape in the candled egg, beak and eye etched clearly, a pin-scratch of claw. A little sleet scrapes at the window. The man blinks, sees his hand on the page as a boy's hand, sees his children bent over the playboard, with the careful pattern of their lives dropping softly away, like leaves in a sudden frost—how the marbles have stalled, heavy and still on their fingers, and after each phrase the guttural oh, and the left shoe jumping.