Life With Objects

Snow is beginning to fall, feathering the frozen ground, swirling across the weathered roofs of the small, tidy house and barn, as the child runs down the rutted road and slips into the farmyard, pausing beside a thicket of lilac bushes (their bare branches offering the illusion of a hiding place) to try and figure out if she can stop, find a place to try to get warm, rest for a while - but what if they are chasing her, what if they come to this lonely place and know she’s hiding here, what if they catch her as they did Mutti – but she is so cold and so tired, has been running since dusk, her heavy shoes and the skirt of her cotton dress wet, nearly frozen, from wading that brook – was that the border, that must have been the border – and she knows her trembling legs can’t run much further - so she glances fearfully, longingly at the lighted candle in the farmhouse window, convulsively raising her hand to cover the six-pointed star sewn to her thin coat, and then darts across to the barn and scurries inside, scraping her hand on the rough wood of the door latch in her haste; there in the darkness the familiar scents of dried clover, hay, dung and the moist, sweet breath of the herd surround her and finally, whimpering a little and sucking at her stinging hand, she curls up in a clump of straw, nestling against the short, swirled fur and knobbly spine of a resting cow, and hours later Ingrid Larsen, coming in to do the morning’s milking, finds her there, fast asleep.

You burned candles all night while the house slept. You burned candles in the empty room with the checkerboard floor. You burned candles with your cracked-out teenage girlfriend with the tour-kid bedhead and patched overalls. One night coming home from the bar, we found the front door jammed; you'd pushed all the furniture up against it. We climbed in a window instead. The checkerboard room was covered in candlewax, like the drip castles of our youth.

You mumbled when you spoke, shaking your head. Sometimes it almost made sense. "I'm straight, I'm straight, I'm straight." You only were after you weren't.

You broke glass, knicknacks and saucers. There were times when I couldn't find a plate. Goddammit, I thought, eating eggs out of a coffee mug, yet again.

You burned candles all night, every night, and that one time, lit the carpet on fire. Dave said you were a good person, deep down. Redmond spent most nights with his girlfriend. Mike was was moving out anyway. It was time for me to dig my car out of that snowdrift. Time to get back on the road.

The night before I left, you kept me up, talking to someone, but in the morning, you were alone. A living ghost, pale as a flame by day. I left you there to haunt the house.