CCLaP Journal #5

To him, the duster looked like some gangrenous dying animal flopping erratically to death’s awaiting arms by his mother’s stiff and uncoordinated wrist action. She could and should probably have gotten a totally new one for her feather dusting. This one, worst of all, seeming to make objects dustier than they were before her meddling.

But she wasn’t lazy so much as good-heartedly oblivious, and so much as easily distracted by her daydreams and daythoughts. She didn’t see dust reapplied to certain lampshades and coffee tabletops, but dispersal of positive energy engendered by dreams and thought. (That is, if she thought about the dust at all.)

A humdinger of a daythought happening right now, something about what happened to the images accrued and stored away during her past lives? Did they remain in a celestial hard drive someplace, or were they wiped completely clean and so she’d begun fresh, with absolutely no sense of who she might previously have been?

This notion is predicated greatly on whether reincarnation is possible in the first place.

But his mother was, at least for the time, operating on the assumption that it must be.

“I’m going to be going, shortly,” the boy imperiously announced to his mother from the top of the stairs, up there at a kind of balcony overlooking the living room she’d been “sprucing up.”

“And you can’t come with,” he added purposely and with a smidgen of churlishness a short interval later, now standing at the bottom of the stairs like end-ofsentence punctuation.

She laughed, thinking it childish fun and games. But interestingly, the boy wore a 1950s-style fedora with zephyr-sundering brim and a winsome expression on his head and face respectively. Confronted with the unexpectedly impressive figure he cut, his mother was taken aback, at first, but not yet stricken with the true nightmare of the situation.

The boy was terse, curt even. He said, “I’m leaving now.” Next he revealed a suede briefcase he’d secreted behind his legs, which was no small achievement considering the disproportionately greater size of the briefcase in relation to his legs and overall slender frame. She sensed there was something to his deliberate manner. It commanded that she regard him seriously despite every other impulse directing her to dismiss his words.

“But wait, William,” his mother said, a short-lived desire to gently humor the boy came into mind, but just as quickly she decided she had better not. “Where, where will you go?” In saying this she failed to maintain her composure, betraying her dread for his impending perambulation to places as yet unknown—experiencing the same untoward sense of impotence and immutability she’d supposed is felt by an individual made to literally dig his or her own grave. How abhorrent, she thought, and wondered if she’d been made to do so herself in a past life.

“Korea, Mother.”

“But how?”

“By plane,” William said.

He had aged much these last six years, since the enchanted day of his birth. That day all trace of his mother’s melancholy had dissipated, upon seeing him. She felt the presence of birds, not hormonally or drug-induced, these birds. They were there. Their chirping had been too vivid, too ornate, for the possibility of any illusion whatever.

They were also good birds, not the annoying kind, not crows. Were crows birds? She wondered. A kind of bird, certainly, right?

She had expected his birth to be the sweaty, shouting ordeal it is often depicted as in film and on television hospital dramas. She remembered thinking it needed to be gritty and raw for the experience to be real. She needed to endure a physical trial.

46 | The CCLaP Journal