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Show Go Love/197 as Meg's. She looks at her feet. "Will she be okay?" I kill the truck. We're outside our house now. The grass needs mowing something awful. Our garden's wild. Litter has collected along the fenceline A strange car's parked in one of our spots. The mailbox is no doubt full, the mail woman's started stuffing our letters in throught he screen door rip. Newspapers, thrown by the one-armed vet, have sailed in scores onto our front door. Phone messages have accumulated-the voices severed from space and time. Is Mama okay? The question freezes me, and it's like I'm all alone in a deformed world where four year old girls imagine life within the confines of caskets What do you say? There'll be a moment when the words must come, and the question bars all further travel or progression or movement of any sort. In fact, you can never walk through the doors of any home until you say. Is Mama happy in her casket? Is she hungry? Will she be okay? The earliest hominoids-maybe on an afternoon like this a million years ago-reached this fork in the road. The oldest graves on earth adorned with blue flowers and baby's breath, bits of food for the voyage and skeins of colorful cloth for protection in the other world. And the pharaohs, isn't what they mean in The Book of the Dead, when Osiris rises out of the egg in a hidden land-I am Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, and I have the power to be born again. I have not robbed with violence. I have not slain man or woman. I sail the great Sun Boat:-will she be okay? "Yea, sweetie. Mama'll be okay. Okay?" "How?" "I don't know. But she will. Promise." "I wanted to tell her hello in there." "Me too " |
