Two Unrelated Questions

Which do you find most interesting?

 A pound of crow’s tail feathers
 A pound of black beach sand


Which of the following is correct?

 I fight only when threatened
 I only threaten to fight

--Mitchell Hegman

Rain and Reports of Rain

Late into the long night, new rain came to all the old places.

Long into the late night, old rain came to all the new places.

Long into the new night, old rain came to the late places.

Late into the rain night, long hours came to all the old and new places.

Old hours, late nights, long rains came to the new places.

--Mitchell Hegman

Starlings

Lifting from the grass, starlings sometimes school and shoal in the air as if fish in the ocean. Hundreds of them might spill from a tree at once, ball together in midair, and then shift about wildly against the blue sky, turning darkside-out or lightside-out with every unified change of direction. This behavior is useful in the presence of hawks or other predators. A single bird is a target.

In the autumn, this behavior intensifies as the birds flock together for migration. You might see thousands of starlings swirling up into dark clouds that swing around trees and over farmhouses and sifting right through the low clouds, flashing new colors, as if electrified, each time they change course. And always you notice a single bird outside the shoaling mass. The single bird remains far out-of-sync, dropping out the bottom when the flock arcs nearly straight-up, tumbling early into a hard turn while the others streak on. On occasion, you allow yourself to follow the solitary starling, the endangered one. Sometimes, you are that single bird.

--Mitchell Hegman

The Pill

Dear wife, I have nothing of my own to keep in the cupboard that once held your lotus tea, French onion soup, and gluten-free snacks. All of that, I swept into a paper bag and gave away a few days after you left me standing alone in this big house. I noticed, only after removing all of that, the smallish pill cornered in the back: white and oblong, with “L607” stamped on the face.

The pill might be anything. Maybe a fix for heartburn. Perhaps, if I swallow the pill, I will stop coming awake late in the night, thinking a might hear you walking in another room, the hollow report of your cane finding a sure hold on the floor. Maybe, if you had found and taken the pill, you would yet be with me today.

After examining the pill, rolling it though my fingers, I pressed the pill against my tongue for second. The pill tasted like what I imagine you would taste if you licked the surface of a willow leaf. A little bitter. Dust. Sated with these experiments, I gingerly placed the pill at the very center of the empty cupboard, closed the door.

I have taken to opening the cupboard and peering inside every few days. I study the pill. Sometimes, I take the pill into my palm. On other occasions, I merely stare at the pill, almost fearful to touch. Today, I gazed long into the cupboard. The pill sitting there, steady as a god. I have nothing better to keep in there.

--Mitchell Hegman

A Man Wakes

One morning, a man woke from his sleep convinced that he felt the turning of the earth, that he could feel the exact sensation of heaving ahead, of air licking the fine hairs on his arms, of stars tickling his chest as he whisked through them. There, in the hanged-man silence, he imagined a certain direction of travel. South, in fact. He drew in a deep breath, the stars now stinging against his cheeks like flakes of snow, but warm. The man imagined that he might exhale forcefully enough to cause the world to stop moving. But that is not what he did.

--Mitchell Hegman

In Passing Defined

Driving to work today, in that early half-light hour when red houses appear black and the surrounding mountains are dark and blue as stones in a deep pool of water, I got to thinking…since the passing of my wife, I am defined by that loss. This is how I see myself. This is how everyone else sees me. My friend Kevin, who lost his wife two years ago, and who now regularly calls me late at night when he is drunk just so that he can wake me and tell me that he loves me, once said: “You will not see some of your friends for a while because they don’t know what to say to you. They are afraid to come around.”

I don’t mind that Kevin calls me late at night.

--Mitchell Hegman

Run-On, Run On

I parked at an angle in an empty spot right next to—by coincidence—the van owned and driven by one of my best friends and no more than thirty paces from the house in which I lived from the time of my birth to about the age of five. I entered the squat, non-descript commercial building next to the house. At one time, the building housed a Laundromat, one I used as a bachelor many years back. The woman inside the door (she looked, somehow, like she belonged in the building) recognized me. “Are you ready for this?” she asked, raising her brows, appraising me.
“Yes…I guess I am,” I answered.

The woman stepped into a back room, leaving me to evaluate the place. Big, distorted mirrors—I looked quite plump in one of them. Powder-blue walls. Fake flowers swaying at the work spaces from display shelves on the walls. Heavy, floor-length curtains drawn shut at all the outside windows so that passersby on Main Street could not see inside. The woman quickly returned and extended a cardboard box towards me. “Here she is,” the woman said, not entirely committed to sounding pleasant. I took the box in both hands, held the box, felt the perfectly smooth sides, the utility and completeness.

Stop. Stop and think, Mitch! Look at the box, Mitch. The box, Mitch! The box.

The woman had just handed my wife. Scenes flashed through my mind. Uyen fishing along the sparkles of Hogum Creek. Uyen hanging an angel made of straw and red thread on the Christmas tree, smiling. The box seemed ill-sized, not even big enough to hold a toaster or salad bowl, not particularly heavy, but not light as the ashes from the woodstove at our cabin. Not a wife in there—

Stop, Mitch! Why do you always find need to compare things, explain them, expand them? What the fuck is wrong with you? Stop and recognize that you are holding your wife. This is your wife! The box had a bright white label affixed to the top. I read the label: Uyen Hegman. How implausible, that? Mitch, listen, you have—had—a wife with that name. But this is a box.

“How did you meet her?” the woman asked, seeming suddenly nervous about the obvious withdrawal taking place within me, the silence.
I glanced at the fat me in the mirror and answered, “My mother set us up. She was worried about me. She worked with Uyen and really liked her. My mother did not like many people, but she liked Uyen very much.”
We spoke a bit more. I thanked the woman, left the building.

Outside, in the shadow-cross light, I took the box to my truck. I placed the box on the seat beside me, backed out of the parking spot, and drove across Prickly Pear Creek on the very bridge where, sixteen years ago, my sister and I poured my father’s ashes into the water. I drove by the house where I lived with my mother just before she fixed-me-up with Uyen. I stopped at a stop sign on the street where my friend who drives the van lives, took a moment to study the box, lurched away. I crossed the valley and drove along Dana’s Point Drive, where, only five weeks ago, on what turned out to be her last drive, ever, Uyen admonished me for making the very arrangements for cremation that delivered her into the box. “I don’t know why you did that,” she told me. “I am not going for a while. I’m still fighting.”

I rounded another corner. Wide open country with pine and sage and rabbitbrush and juniper. Fat clouds, white as the label on the box, scurried on above me. I studied the box again. Square and plain. A box.

Once home, I placed the box in Uyen’s chair in the living room, and then drifted back into my bedroom. There, in my closet, I found one of the red articles of clothing I kept—her red velvet jacket—and I took the jacket out to the living room, gingerly draped the jacket over the box, and then turned on the television for the evening news.

--Mitchell Hegman