selected writings from oakland word
DRAFT
linger
Marc Hernandez
I didn’t believe in life after death. It almost seems amusing to acknowledge to myself that I do now. However, it is the old plot in which our home once stood that now makes me want to believe in spirits. I walk by staring through cheap glasses, with eyes too worn to see clearly, at an empty lot whose rampaging weeds have pierced concrete skin and wave in the wind with sentient life mockingly. This is our lot now, they whisper. The house was brought down in 2009, an old Victorian with a stunning ivory color that no one in the neighborhood had ever seen. A house we were proud of and cherished despite the empty silence it held for us. A child’s laughter was something you could not give me and I knew it was your one regret in our life adventure. The years rushed by like a book’s pages caught in the wind, and when your book closed, mine kept going. The house then became a tomb of complete dead silence. Shortly after, visitors became less frequent as they complained of the cold spot in and around the nursery room that we had created for our phantom baby; it was a zone of penetrating chill. In the end the silence was too unbearable and I left. It was sad to walk past our former home in those first weeks. The windows were shattered glass and two by fours, its skin tattooed with graffiti, and the once proud, unique paint had dulled away like wallpaper that was
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