A man sits up after sleep and places the soles of his feet on the carpet, these feet that will no longer work.
They’d carried him through South American jungles, through the streets of Lisbon, where nothing happened. They’d assisted him and Ben up mushy stairs with a piano, and with them he’d carried two sons and a daughter through the rooms of two houses. One day, when he was young, he’d escaped a hot-tempered shepherd. The resourceful animal had trapped him at the top of a Buick. The neighbor had come running with a hand up, calling, “Ho there Scrambler, that’s Walter. Friend, friend.”
Young, when men carried their wives over the threshold. And the soccer balls that had him evading here and there, and the sound of bush opening around the scouts and the thought of finally making it home and wound healing and maybe a warm bath.
He watched the mists wander across the reflections on lakes, seated, where his feet had taken him.
His mother had once asked “Why” when she’d lost her hip. “It’s an adjustment,” he’d said. “Everything will be fine.”
“No,” she said, growing angry. “Why?”
And what about the things he wanted but never could or would have: waiting for the dust to settle on Mars, making prints in the shallows of the great lakes, going all day on the palms of his hands, evading alligators in the swamp after drinking too much tequila, strolling under the pillars said to rise from Neptune’s speedy mists?
He has to look down to make sure his feet have touched the carpet. It’s not about what might of been and what was. He stands slowly and extends his arms and slowly walks for the door to the bathroom. He can feel his knees. The air under his palms is heavy. One sensation that comes is more a thought about imminent collapse because everything beneath his knees is emptiness, as if he’s slowly sinking.
