The Nameless

The Nameless On the marble porch added on after the homes waltz with Hugo—the lotion of dusk drenching us, family game night went off without a hitch. I was eight, and a real estate tycoon to boot—with my lion’s share of every house, hotel and avenue I’d ever want. My mother’s sundress matched the bruising sky, and like a conductor in 2/2 time, my father spread butter on the last of his dinner bread, hue like the cold light the chandeliers emitted within the house. “Bedtime kiddo.” I didn’t listen. I kept bargaining to be with them for just the next moment longer, and the next, and the next— until I drifted off to the baritone voice of Nat King Cole. What’s worth knowing slips between the nameless, and my fingers curling on the Boardwalk, my mother, her hair now mussed from the humid Carolina air, took me inside the house with the tenderness only parents know, and careful not to brush the porcelain salters within the house, took me upstairs and placed me in my bed. Eyes adjusting to the dark, artificial stars glowed, revealing the glass model of the human circulatory system on my night stand. In that moment, I was safe from corruption. All that before the funeral the week later. I was born for this I thought. And careful not to slip around the muddy edges where the waterlines crisscross grid would soon cover her bones, my father and I helped the pallbearers lower her casket into the ground. In shock, I ran away as fast as my young legs would carry me, past the front gate reading Let the dead bury their dead, towards something inhumane, something rotating us into the soil of everyone.