A SMALL SUN

by Jenny McKeel

 

 

It’s hard when things take less time than they should. Like air travel. As the plane leaves SFO I watch the Pacific Ocean below us—vast, omnipresent, blurry—shrink. Five hours later we land in a different time zone three thousand miles away. Stepping off the plane, the East Coast light hits sharp. Walking through Reagan National airport, my organs shift, warped and cramped. My body feels as though it has been squeezed through a narrow tube. My stomach roils. My skin twitches.  Standing at my luggage carousel, my scrunched-up face feels tight and oiled.

My dog, Chessie, is six years old. I brought her home at eight weeks when I was in my late 30s. She fit inside my palm. Now we’re both middle-aged. Five years ago, the white fur on her face shone bright, her pink skin smelled like warm toast. Yesterday, she walked slowly through Dimond Park, as though, like me, her muscles are prone to growing sore, joints poppy, neck tight. Under fur, her skin, like mine, looks worn like the raincloud-gray boots I wear every winter. I stomp on wet grass and pavement, on BART, marching up and down stairs, the leather stretching and pulling. Chessie’s face appears lively but molded in place, the frayed hair fanning out from her nose betrays age.

Last January my apartment was robbed. I came home to lights splashed on, drawers upside down on the carpet, clothes and towels dumped on the bed. My cheeks slick with shame, as though my ransacked apartment was a sticky mud pit I had somehow invited into my life. I felt frayed, nerves jangled, as I sat alone in my apartment inventorying the items that had been stolen, and completing a police report. Couldn’t sit still, like grasshoppers were beating wings inside my gut. The following week, a grad school acquaintance sent me a Facebook message in response to my post about the break-in. He knows, the acquaintance said, the pain because his apartment was burgled that past summer. He knows what it feels like to have your home feel not quite right a few days later. He offered to send me coffee, snacks, and good books—from his home across the country—to occupy my time and save a bit of money. He told me he was sorry. He told me not to be bashful and that he would like to help because people had been kind to him when he was robbed and he wanted to pay that kindness forward.

Generosity from someone I barely knew whiplashed. I wasn’t comfortable accepting his offer but I wanted him to know his kindness toward someone so distant felt like a small sun. Did we even have one conversation in graduate school? I could barely remember. He was a rash of energy. A professor, poet, nonfiction author, novelist, short fiction writer, translator, magazine co-founder and editor. A dizzying rage of publications. He got things done at the speed of someone fleeing a burning building. I carried his Facebook message around with me like a glowing stone. I thanked him using words like “really” and “gratitude” hoping he’d understand that his gesture created a gleam inside. A place within my mind where cool water pooled. As though someone had surprised me with roses, lilies, and daisy poms in the middle of a black desert. I wondered if I would hear from him again, if he would hear from me. If our paths would again cross. If he would emerge from the distance into closer view. I looked forward to his Facebook posts about Pope Francis, Bernie Sanders, subsidized school lunches, nonviolent political tactics, Voltaire, Tom Waits, Thai food, and Tolstoy. Their contents and the force of empathy that animated them. A roving, ranging mind with open doors that swung on their hinges. An overwhelming intellect. A sensation of reach and depth. The feeling of a breathing consciousness that, across the digital divide, I imagined, invited me in. Two months later he was dead. Died in his sleep from a heart attack. He wasn’t 40. It’s too fast. Like someone bashed me in the face with a cut of wood, tiny splinters surging inside my nose. Like a jungle napalmed out of existence. Like someone ripped something from my hand, took it to the back yard, and shot it dead. Here, gone. RIP OklaElliott.

 

 

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